Restoring Dignity to the Law: clerkships

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Hiring Bottleneck for Lower-Level New Jersey State Courts

This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it's a message that should be shared since there are apparently people still under the delusion that the tip-top law school grads still have it hunky-dory and that you have to do something "wrong" to not get a good job.

Competition for jobs as a law clerk making $48,000 in Passaic County, New Jersey has skyrocketed.

State Superior Court judges in New Jersey have seen a substantial jump in law-clerk applicants — many from Ivy League schools all over the country — as big law firms cut back on hiring attorneys fresh out of law school.

“Over the last two years, I would say I’ve had four times as many applicants. And of those applicants, they’re all with superior grade averages of over 3.5 from law schools all over the country,” said McVeigh. “I normally get excellent r[e]sum[e]s. But the volume of excellent r[e]sum[e]s — even the quality — far surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. These are the kinds of applicants that would normally have gone to [state] Supreme Court, or one of the large-starting-salary firms.”

There are no Ivy League law schools in New Jersey, so if he strictly means "Ivy League," that means there are Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Harvard, or Yale grads applying to this place. If "Ivy League" was a misstatement for "top schools," that probably means there are U. of Chicago and Cal-Berkeley kids sending their resumes to the New Jersey State Supreme Court.

And tell me, exactly, how even lower-tier schools can continue to claim 100k+ median starting salaries if their 3.5+ kids are applying en masse for $48k jobs? At most law schools, a 3.5 is a pretty high GPA given the harsh curve. I'd estimate a 3.5 translates to being in the top 15-20% anywhere, and that's with a loose curve (with a tight curve - say, where the 1L median is a 2.5 - maybe only 5% of the 1L class would have a 3.5 or higher).

Out of all law students in the country, kids applying for these jobs are easily in the top 10%. The job pays $48,000 and is not that prestigious. How can anyone at this point believe the other 90% made a sound investment?

About RDTTL

I am a current law student who dreads the end of the conveyor belt and wishes to see positive change in the legal community.

To me, a dignified profession is one that is respected, one whose members serve as ambassadors for its social value, one that lets its practitioners lead healthy, productive, and active civic lives, and one where the members of the profession take active steps to protect the profession's honor.

It is self-evident that the legal profession has problems on that front (or all of those fronts, if you want to break it down). Lawyers are twice as likely to kill themselves as the average person. They are significantly more likely to become depressed or alcoholic. Along with other factors, an oversupply of labor has led to smaller salaries for most - putting the ability to have families or manage debt at risk - while making attorney work an impossibility for others. Last year roughly 1/3 of recent juris doctor recipients did not have jobs. Legal process outsourcing makes it far less likely that they'll ever get them.

These issues existed before the recession and extend beyond its effects. This blog explores these issues and seeks to provide helpful information and commentary, especially with regards to legal education, the reform of which I believe would aid many the other issues that prevent the law from being a fully-dignified profession.

I have chosen to use pseudonymous speech for roughly the same reasons outlined by zerohedge, even though I don't think the risk of retaliation is that high in my case (of all the professors I've had, I can only think of one who would "retaliate").

If you wish to contact me, please leave a comment. In the interest of simplifying my life, I am cutting my email addresses down, including the one that used to appear here, which has become unmanageable due to spam.