DailyDirt: So You Want To Be A Lawyer..?

Legal Issues

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Aug 19th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Lawyers often get a bad rap -- sometimes rightfully so. But does the entire profession really deserve endless lawyer jokes and derision? Despite the hate, thousands of people still study to become lawyers, racking up a pretty hefty amount of student debt in the process. Here are just a few interesting links for those of you who might be considering (or going through) this educational process.

Some big law firms haven't held up well during the recession, and 12 major firms with over 1,000 partners have disappeared over the last decade. There are still about 150-250 firms that belong to the Big Law club, but it's not entirely clear if the business cycle will continue to support the traditional business models of large law firms. [url]
Roughly, about 44,000 new law school students graduated in the last year, but only about 21,800 new jobs for them exist. And it's not unusual for students to have over $150,000 worth of student debts for their education. [url]
Maybe it's not all bad news for lawyers: a recent study concludes that the average lawyer will earn about $1 million more than the average college grad over the course of their career. Ahem, past performance is not indicative of future results -- but you can read the study yourself to see if you agree with its assessment of the economic value of a law degree. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: career, economic value, education, law degree, law school, lawyers, profession, student debt

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Anonymous Coward, 19 Aug 2013 @ 5:15pm

As to the last, the data does not separate practicing lawyers from non-practicing lawyers who have law degrees, but make money from other sources such as many in congress, the president, etc.
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/americas_richest_lawyers_dont_practice_law/
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Aug 2013 @ 5:15pm

ahem. my answer, as always...
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
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JoeCool (profile), 19 Aug 2013 @ 8:25pm

Well DUH!
Roughly, about 44,000 new law school students graduated in the last year, but only about 21,800 new jobs for them exist. And it's not unusual for students to have over $150,000 worth of student debts for their education.

So we have about 20,000 new "lawyers" without a job trying to find a way to pay off $150K worth of debt... is it really so surprising why there's so much abuse of the legal system?
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Aug 2013 @ 3:28am

Re: Well DUH!
I wonder what John Steel did to pay his college debt.
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Wolfy, 20 Aug 2013 @ 5:51am

This is why politics has gotten so rotten... too many lawyers looking to game the system.
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Anonymous Coward, 20 Aug 2013 @ 9:44am

Or maybe it is people do not like lying scum bags whose whole benefit is society is nothing more than a typical Prenda Law scam
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