Could the legions of under-employed law school grads be efficient profit centers for small firms?
CNN recently profiled law school grad “Shannon”, who racked up 60 grand in student loans after 4 years of college and 3 years of law school. She’s now makes $7.50 an hour plus tips at a coffee shop, and managed to land a part-time gig as a law clerk at $12 an hour.
Shannon earned experience while in school at the DA’s office and graduated in the top half of her class. The report cites data from a 2009 NACE survey saying 60% of all college graduates did not receive an offer when they finished school, double the pre-recession numbers.
It seems to me there’s a win-win for the legions of struggling, newly-minted lawyers and small firms.
Small and solo firms, by contracting with these young attorneys, could scale their operations inexpensively, and the recent law school grads would gain experience and some additional pocket change to help pay down their debts.
My advice to the young, under-employed law school grads: you may not obtain the ideal situation. But keep in mind with the Internet, everything’s local. You can work remote if you need.
And to the small and solo firms: take a look at your operations and see if they could be made more profitable by locating an hiring young, eager talent that may or may not be in your geographic area.
What do you think: wishful thinking or good idea?
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The other option, not discussed, is going into business for oneself. There’s a fallacy that is spread around, which suggests that you have to wait for someone to hire your, or for a specific job, to be employable.
As much as anyone, lawyers who have passed the bar have a minted license to practice in that state. The only thing that’s missing, in the large sense, is clients. You can work just as hard at getting those as you do at getting a job, and in the end, you’ll be better for it because the clients, and the practice, are yours to keep. The job can always be taken away.
Victor
Hard to do when there is so much competition. Also, when you are trying to cut costs, you have to start doing a lot more for yourself.
It is a simple economic problem as I see it. Supply and demand. There is too much supply and not enough demand. Alabama has almost 15,000 attorneys and only 4,000,000 people. That’s approximately 1 attorney for every 266 man, woman and child.
Graduate a few more law students, and you are really going to see problems. This is a major issue in the legal field, and if it’s not addressed, there will be a lot more unemployed lawyers.
In my experience it is more productive to hire a trained paralegal than a recent graduate from law school. There is also an increase among unemployment among paralegals because of the contraction of the legal profession. A trained paralegal, at a reasonable rate, is worth their weight in gold.
The problem with recent law school graduates is that they don’t know anything about the practice of law and this forces the solo practitioner to spend extra time in training, time which they don’t have. More importantly, as soon as the law school graduate finds a full time job they are gone.
Our law schools have done a sorry job of training their students in how to actually practice law. They are good at training law students to be supreme court clerks or law professors, but this training is irrelevant to the general practice of solos and small law firms. We have too many law schools, and too many law school graduates who were not very good students to begin with, and will not make very good lawyers when they pass the bar.
Give me a good paralegal to work with, and let the law school graduates fend for themselves.