The job market, as you may well imagine, is pretty piss-poor. I pick up the Wall Street Journal on any given day and read about big firms that are trimming the chaff by letting a few partners go, so god help the secretaries. The point, of course, is that the job market is tight. The dot com bust made it pretty tight before the lunatics crashed some planes into buildings, but now that we're in a full fledged recession, well, it's just a bit more worrisome for those without firm commitments for employment.
And the legal profession in the United States has very highly inflated salaries for new lawyers, at least the ones in the private sector. Here's the deal, it is just not true that a first year attorney is worth a hundred grand. We just aren't. Yes, we have a good deal of law school inspired debt, and we need to invest in the snazzy lawyer wardrobe, and we just can't show up at the courthouse in an economy car, and all of that, but we also are released on the legal profession with virtually no idea what we're doing. Law school doesn't teach you how to practice law. It teaches you how to approach a legal question, and the two are very different things.
The first couple of years in practice have replaced the apprenticeship system of the past. Before the ABA started accrediting law schools, those who wanted to enter the profession were apprenticed to practicing mentors and they learned how to practice law by, surprisingly enough, observing and assisting with the practice of law. Now, we spend countless hours in class learning how to be judges. How to approach a legal problem, work out what the arguments on both sides are, and decide which argument is more persuasive given the state of the law. And it's great fun, but not really very practical when a new member of the bar has to file her first brief, or argue his first motion.
So law firms are in a really tough position. There are loads of people released from law schools and bar exams with the credentials necessary to practice, but no idea where to begin. And these new legal professionals are in a position to require an ever increasing starting salary. It makes the prospect of hiring a young lawyer in a time of economic downturn seem a little, well, risky. And it makes looking for a job as a young lawyer a bit more difficult than the classes that graduated before me. I missed the Clinton years by the smallest of margins.
But then I remind myself about how much I don't want to be a lawyer, and how little effort I'm actually putting into the search for a legal job compared to a non-legal job, and how hopelessly horrid actually practicing law would be. And I realize I'm probably not the right person for him to interview.
And for those of you who may have noticed the distinct change in tone this entry represents, it is important to note that finals will be over soon and I have always returned to normal once they were behind me. I have no reason to believe this will not be the case this time as well.
Posted at 1:15 p.m.
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