Recent Law Related Articles

Greetings All,

The following is a number of articles recent published on the state of the legal profession. While these articles are not all together encouraging, especially for such young guns as ourselves, it is useful and important to know what we are all getting our selves into, and to make sure we are confident in our choice to pursue law. Enjoy the read, and remember not to freak out.

optimistically,

Alexander Sand


***************************
The Falling-Down Professions
Harry Campbell
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: January 6, 2008

YOU can’t say law firms aren’t trying.

ANY OBJECTIONS? The careers of real-life lawyers are often less
glamorous and satisfying than those portrayed by their television
counterparts in shows like “L.A. Law.” "Ally McBeal" "Boston Legal"

At the Chicago office of Perkins Coie, partners recently unveiled a
“happiness committee,” offering candy apples and milkshakes to
brighten the long and wearying days of its lawyers. Perhaps this will
serve as an example to other firms, which studies show lose, on average,
nearly a fifth of their associates in any given year, in an industry in
which about 20 percent of lawyers over all will suffer depression at
some point in their careers.

Last year, Cravath, Swaine & Moore tried a more direct approach,
offering associates an added bonus of as much as $50,000, on top of
regular annual bonuses that range from $35,000 to $60,000.

At the august Sullivan & Cromwell, partners in 2006 began a program,
groundbreaking in white-shoe firms, encouraging the uttering of “thank
you” and “good work” to harried underlings, as reported in The
Wall Street Journal.

Probably not a bad move at a firm that had been hemorrhaging associates
at a rate of about 30 percent a year. (The rate dipped below 25 percent
in the year after the program was started, although Fred Rich, a
partner, said better etiquette was simply an element in a “very broad
agenda” focused on more open communication.)

So now who’s going to cheer up the doctors?

As of 2006, nearly 60 percent of doctors polled by the American College
of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine
because of low morale, and nearly 70 percent knew someone who already
had.

In a typical complaint, Dr. Yul Ejnes, 47, a general internist in
Cranston, R.I., said he was recently forced by Medicare to fill out
requisition forms for a wheelchair-bound patient who needed to replace
balding tires. “I’m a doctor,” he said, “not Mr. Goodwrench.”

Make no mistake, law and medicine - the most elite of the traditional
professions - have always been demanding. But they were also
unquestionably prestigious. Sure, bankers made big money and professors
held impressive degrees.

But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of
tacitly recognized pillars - outsize pay, long-term security, impressive
schooling and authority over grave matters - doctors and lawyers were
perched atop them all.

Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” said
Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And
How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life”
(Basic Books, 2003). “But they’ve lost their allure, their status.
And it isn’t about money.”

OR at least, it is not all about money. The pay is still good
(sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining.
Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career
experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center
of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward - where professional
heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites - some doctors
and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting
toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not
just because the professions have changed, but also because the
standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in
definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars.
Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably
linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to
seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home
self,” he said. “Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost
as if they’re interviewing places to see if they fit them.”

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined
from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants
dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004-representing a 6.7 percent
drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous
year, according to the Law School Admission Council.

(Maybe they’ve been talking to actual lawyers. Forty-four percent of
lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they
would not recommend the profession to a young person.)

The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to
42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of
33,000 in 2003.

Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own
start-up businesses, said Trudy Steinfeld, the executive director of the
Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University.

“There’s a sexiness to starting something cool,” she said. “Now
we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be
working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re
going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use
all over the world.”

Unquestionably, many doctors and lawyers still find the higher calling
of their profession - helping people - as well as the prestige and
money, worth the hard work. And the stars in either field are still
that: commanding the handsome compensation and social cachet. But to
others, the daily trudge serves as a constant reminder that the
entrepreneur’s autonomy simply can’t be found in law or medicine.

“We’d all seen the visions, watching ‘L.A. Law,’ or ‘Ally
McBeal,’” said Catherine Kersh, 32, a former litigator at a large
firm in Los Angeles. “It did seem glamorous.”

Reality, she quickly learned, was different. Ms. Kersh recalled a
two-week stretch in which she and a team of associates were holed up in
a conference room with 50 boxes of documents. Every day, for 12 hours,
they fastened Post-it notes to legal briefs.

“You look around at the other associates, trying to remind ourselves,
why did we go to law school?” said Ms. Kersh, who now works for a
nonprofit group that administers scholarships.

Many young associates, she added, spent their lunch hours making lavish
purchases on NeimanMarcus.com, just to remind themselves that what they
did counted for something.

Life, in fact, was less like “Ally” and more like “The
Practice,” where lawyers work like dogs in a thoroughly unglamorous
setting.

Nor does hard work guarantee success. “With law firms merging, fewer
people are making partner,” said Carolyn Elefant, a lawyer in
Washington who writes for Law.com, a legal news and information Web
site.

In 2005, the number of equity partners at law firms grew by 2.5
percent, compared with 4.5 percent five years earlier, according to a
study by Citi Private Bank. And even if you make partner, the work
doesn’t lessen.

“Partners now are often billing as many hours as the associates,
because of the enormous growth of law firms,” Ms. Elefant said.
“There’s a huge overhead. The demand for global practice means
many partners having to be available to clients around the clock.”

As firms demand ever more billable hours, said Lawrence J. Fox, a
partner in the Philadelphia office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, lawyers
find less time for pro bono work - the very thing that once gave them a
sense of higher calling. Increased competitive pressures also mean that
young associates are often locked into arcane sub-specialties, like
pharmaceutical product liability.

Doctors face similar pressure. Complaints about managed care crimping
doctors’ income and authority over medical decisions are nothing new,
but the problems are only getting worse, several doctors said.

“Remember the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory?”
said Dr. Ejnes in Rhode Island. “That’s what a medical practice is
now like. They keep turning up the speed on the conveyer belt, and
before you know it, you’re stuffing chocolates in your pockets.”

One doctor responding to the American College of Physician Executives
survey wrote: “I find it necessary about once every month or two to
stay in bed for 24 to 48 hours. I do this on short notice when I get the
feeling I might punch somebody.”

Increasing workloads and paperwork might be tolerable if the old
feeling of authority were still the same, doctors said. But patients who
once might have revered them for their knowledge and skill often arrive
at the office armed with a sense of personal expertise, gleaned from a
few hours on www.WebMD.com, doctors said, not to mention a disdain for
the medical system in general.

“If the topic comes up in cocktail party talk, you’ll hear
nightmare stories from people as they’ve gone through the system -
‘they gave me the wrong pill,’ et cetera,” said Dr. Gregg
Broffman, 57, a former pediatrician who is now a medical director of a
primary care group in Buffalo. “In terms of my own self-esteem, it
feels like a personal attack.”

EVEN the language of contemporary medicine has eroded the physician’s
sense of majesty.

“What irritates me the most is the use of the term ‘provider,’”
said Dr. Brian A. Meltzer, an internist in Pennington, N.J., who now
practices pro bono on the side, but works full time for Johnson &
Johnson’s venture capital division. “We didn’t go to provider
school.”

Making the erosion of cachet more acute is the fact that unlike law
schools or medical schools, flashier industries recruit heavily on top
college campuses, said Lauren A. Rivera, a sociology graduate student
and an instructor at Harvard who studies career choice among students.

“Investment banking and consulting firms have a huge presence;
they’re barging in from before first day of classes,” Ms. Rivera
said. “The messages they convey appeals to every undergraduate
fantasy: this is a continuation of prestige education, this is the only
valuable way to finish your education. You’ll work with the smartest
people and the most exciting, high-profile clients.”

And then there is, yes, the money issue. Or rather, money envy.
Associates at major New York firms often start at $150,000 to $180,000,
said Bill Coleman, the chief compensation officer at Salary.com, a
company that tracks income statistics. Partners at the country’s
biggest 100 firms took home an average of $1.2 million in 2006,
according to American Lawyer.

Hardly small sums, but for many senior investment bankers, bonuses and
salaries this year will average $2.25 million to $2.75 million,
according to Options Group, an executive search and consulting firm.

Doctors rarely approach such heights. While income varies widely, a
typical physician might earn $150,00 to $300,000, according to
Salary.com data. A surgeon might make $250,000 to $400,000; hot-shot
surgeons can earn $750,000 a year, and superstars over a million
dollars.

But absolute numbers are not the only issue, Mr. Coleman said.

The professions still largely award income in the traditional sense - a
set, orderly progression, over the course of decades. Careers in more
entrepreneurial industries like hedge funds and private equity firms
follow the sky-is-the-limit model of the entertainment industry, the Web
or professional sports.

Kevin J. Delaney, a sociology professor at Temple University who has
studied the culture of hedge funds and private equity firms, said
executives there “love the idea of being responsible for their own
fate.”

They’re going to make a million or lose a million based on the trades
they make,” he said.

Many firms are so small, he added, that “you go there, it’s one
floor, and 10 people sitting around the room, six of them making
millions of dollars.”

This star-system mentality is particularly attractive to college
students, many of whom were reared with the ’80s philosophy that every
child was a potential superstar, Mr. Coleman said. And they want
immediate rewards - not exactly the mentality that will fuel a student
through years of medical school, a residency and additional training for
a specialty.

“Their attention span, everything, is instant feedback: quick, quick,
quick,” Mr. Coleman said. “Apprenticeship, these kids don’t want
to do it.”

**********************************************

Job Market Wanes for US Lawyers
PAGE ONE

Hard Case: Job Market
Wanes for U.S. Lawyers
Growth of Legal Sector
Lags Broader Economy;
Law Schools Proliferate
By AMIR EFRATI
September 24, 2007; Page A1

A law degree isn't necessarily a license to print money these days.

For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better.
Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as
$160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a
supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The
result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are
struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts
that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work,
reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And
many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the
dark side of the job market.
[See More Data on Law School]

The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall
University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class --
is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning
considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year
Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To
boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.
[Scott Bullock]

"Unfortunately, some find the practice of law is not for them," Seton
Hall's associate dean, Kathleen Boozang, said through a spokeswoman.
"However, it is our experience that a legal education is a tremendous
asset for a variety of professional paths."

A slack in demand appears to be part of the problem. The legal sector,
after more than tripling in inflation-adjusted growth between 1970 and
1987, has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2%
since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according
to Commerce Department data.

Some practice areas have declined in recent years: Personal-injury and
medical-malpractice cases have been undercut by state laws limiting
class-action suits, out-of-state plaintiffs and payouts on damages.
Securities class-action litigation has declined in part because of a
buoyant stock market.

On the supply end, more lawyers are entering the work force, thanks in
part to the accreditation of new law schools and an influx of applicants
after the dot-com implosion earlier this decade. In the 2005-06 academic
year, 43,883 Juris Doctor degrees were awarded, up from 37,909 for
2001-02, according to the American Bar Association. Universities are
starting up more law schools in part for prestige but also because they
are money makers. Costs are low compared with other graduate schools and
classrooms can be large. Since 1995, the number of ABA-accredited
schools increased by 11%, to 196.

Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in
the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing.
A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book "Urban
Lawyers" found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average
income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by
22% -- while income for the other 75% actually dropped.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, the inflation-adjusted
average income of sole practitioners has been flat since the mid-1980s.
A recent survey showed that out of nearly 600 lawyers at firms of 10
lawyers or fewer in Indiana, wages for the majority only kept pace with
inflation or dropped in real terms over the past five years.
[Slow Motion]

The news isn't any better for the 14% of new lawyers who go into
government or join public-interest firms. Inflation-adjusted starting
salaries for graduates who go to work for public-interest firms or the
government rose 4% and 8.6%, respectively, between 1994 and 2006,
according to the National Association for Law Placement, which
aggregates graduate surveys from law schools. That compares with at
least an 11% jump in the median family income during the same period,
according to the Census Bureau. Graduates who become in-house company
lawyers, about 9%, have fared better: Their salaries rose by nearly 14%
during the same period.

Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to
support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York
Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a
golden era for law schools."

Meanwhile, the prospects for big-firm lawyers are growing richer. While
offering robust minimum salaries, those firms are paying astronomical
amounts to their stars.

Now, debate is intensifying among law-school academics over the
integrity of law schools' marketing campaigns. Defenders argue that the
legal profession always has been openly and proudly a meritocracy: Top
entrance-exam scores help win admittance to top schools where top
students win jobs at top firms. Even the system that is used to issue
law-school grades -- a curve that pits student against student --
reflects the law profession's competitiveness.

David Burcham, dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, considered
second-tier, says the school makes no guarantees to students that they
will obtain jobs. He says it is problematic that big firms only
interview the top of the class, "but that's the nature of the employment
market; it's never been different."

For the majority of students and alumni, he says, Loyola "turned out to
be a good investment."

Yet economic data suggest that prospects have grown bleaker for all but
the top students, and now a number of law-school professors are calling
for the distribution of more-accurate employment information. Incoming
students are "mesmerized by what's happening in big firms, but clueless
about what's going on in the bottom half of the profession," says
Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California-Los
Angeles who has studied the legal job market.

"Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment
outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data," adds Andrew
Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied
the market for new lawyers.

Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job
market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective
students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a
far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University,
for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which
publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school
graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of
$135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's
graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of
the class, a Tulane official concedes.

On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting
salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn't include
what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.
[Debtors' Prison]

"It's within most individuals' nature to keep that information private,
unless it's a high amount," says Carlos Dávila-Caballero, assistant dean
for career development at Tulane, who adds that his office tells
prospective students to use the median figure as a guide because
starting salaries vary widely.

Academics who have studied new-lawyer salaries say that the graduate
surveys of many law schools are skewed by higher response rates from the
most successful students. The National Association for Law Placement,
which aggregates and publishes national data based on those surveys,
concedes that it can't vouch for their accuracy. "We can't validate the
figures; we have to rely on schools to report to us accurately," says
Judy Collins, NALP's director of research.

A prospective student studying NALP data might conclude that the study
of law is a sure path to financial security. For 2006 graduates who
entered private practice, or nearly 60%, NALP shows a national median
salary of $95,000, a rise of 40%, adjusted for inflation, from 1994
graduates.

The NALP data also show that the percentage of graduates employed in
private practice has been steady, fluctuating between 55% and 58% for
more than a decade. But in law schools' self-published employment data,
"private practice" doesn't necessarily mean jobs that improve long-term
career prospects, for that category can include lawyers working under
contract without benefits, such as Israel Meth. A 2005 graduate of
Brooklyn Law School, he earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney
reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his
paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of
$100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia
University.

A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered
second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms
of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of
graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to
the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the
school reports that 41% of last year's graduates work for firms of more
than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes
temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits,
Joan King, director of the school's career center, concedes.

Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately
represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract
attorneys is "minimal" but declined to give a number.

The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years
started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks
out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006
graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract
employees nine months after graduation. Schools "should be sharing more
information than they are now," says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for
career services who put the changes in place. "Most people graduating
from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."

Adding to the burden for young lawyers: Tuition growth at law schools
has almost tripled the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, leading
to higher debt for students and making starting salaries for most
graduates less manageable, especially in expensive cities. Graduates in
2006 of public and private law schools had borrowed an average of
$54,509 and $83,181, up 17% and 18.6%, respectively, from the amount
borrowed by 2002 graduates, according to the American Bar Association.

Students taking on such debt may feel reassured by incessant press
reports of big firms scrambling to hire and keep associates. Making
headlines this year was a bump up in big-firm starting salaries to
$160,000 from $145,000 in many cities.

And indeed, some law graduates of lower-tier schools do find
high-paying private-practice law jobs. In recent years big firms have
boomed thanks in part to the globalization of business and Wall Street
deal making; firms have been casting a wider net for new lawyers, though
they still generally restrict their recruiting at lower-tier schools to
students at the very top of the class or on the law review. Some
students have leads on a job at a family member's or friend's practice.

But just as common -- and much less publicized -- are experiences such
as that of Sue Clark, who this year received her degree from second-tier
Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area.
Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable
to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she
says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack
of jobs," she says.

Harold Krent, Chicago-Kent's dean, said it's not uncommon for new
lawyers to wait a few months to more than a year to find a job that's a
good fit. He added that there is a "small spike" in employment after his
school's grads receive their bar-exam results, several months after
graduation, because some firms wait until then before hiring.

The market is particularly tough in big cities that boast numerous law
schools. Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to
Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt
and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one
offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a
contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for
around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying
work since.

Some un- or underemployed grads are seeking consolation online, where
blogs and discussion boards have created venues for shared commiseration
that didn't exist before. An anonymous writer called Loyola 2L,
purportedly a student at Loyola Law School, who claims the school wasn't
straight about employment prospects, has been beating a drum of
discontent around the Web in the past year that's sparked thousands of
responses, and a fan base. ("2L" stands for second-year law student.)
Some thank "L2L" for articulating their plight; others claim L2L should
complain less and work more. Loyola's Dean Burcham says he wishes he
knew who the student was so he could help the person. "It's expensive to
go to law school, and there are times when you second-guess yourself as
a student," he says.

Some new lawyers try to hang their own shingle. Matthew Fox Curl
graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom
quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job
working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the
Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that
tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers
and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private
practice.

He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about
moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd
be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me
$500."

--Mark Whitehouse contributed to this article.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com

Happy Holidays

Happy holidays everyone!! Enjoy your break.

Also, keep in mind that if you are looking for summer employment or internships, now is the time to apply. So work those networking skills!!