The Great Recession of 2007-09 has hit the legal profession particularly hard. In 2012, there were 201 ABA-accredited law schools. Only 19 of them placed 75 percent or more of their graduates in jobs that require a law degree. For the non-ABA-accredited law schools, many of which are in California, the placement is far worse. In general, more than one-third of law school graduates cannot find a position requiring bar passage. The National Association for Law Placement reported that less than two-thirds (64.4 percent) of 2013 graduates had jobs that require bar passage.For those who have jobs, the median starting salary for lawyers has fallen 15 percent from 2009 to 2012.
There is also no rosy employment outlook for lawyers already working in many large firms. In the past decade, twelve major firms with more than 1,000 partners between them have gone out of business. In June of last year, Weil Goshal, the well-known New York-based law firm, announced it was laying off 60 associates, about seven percent of its total. Several dozen of the firm’s 300 partners who will remain will see a cut in pay. The law firm’s executive partner, Barry Wolf, told a reporter, “We believe that this is not just a cycle, but that the supply-demand balance is out of whack across the industry.” If the firm thought that business would pick up substantially in 2014, “we would not be doing this.”
