February 22, 2013 - Oregon State Bar

Law School Applications Are Collapsing (As They Should Be) - Business...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/print/2013/01/law-school-applicatio...
2 of 4 1/31/2013 2:49 PM
ABA-approved law schools, 19 more than there were in 2000, and seven more than in 2007, when the
legal industry suffered a recession-induced aneurysm from which it hasn't recovered.
Just how crippled is the legal job market? Utterly. Here's the graph of total employment in legal
services since 1990. It includes everyone from attorneys to paralegals to secretaries, but it gives you a
sense of the industry's much deteriorated health. There are 50,000 fewer jobs today than five years
ago. In meantime, schools have been graduating more than 40,000 students a year.
Many of them been eaten alive on the job market. According to the National Association of Legal
Placement, just 85 percent of the class of 2011 had a job 9 months after graduation, down about 6
percentage points, according to the National Association of Legal Placement. But fewer than two-thirds
had a job that required bar passage,* and not even half were at law firms. At the largest law school in
the country, Thomas M. Cooley, only 37 percent of new graduates are getting full-time jobs that
require their JD.
With jobs few and far between, salaries have tumbled. Median pay for new grads in private practice
has fallen 18 percent since since 2010 to $85,000. The only reason this particular combination of debt