By Michael Kemp
The question of whether there are too many lawyers in Minnesota has been hotly contested for years, and around the country, the issue of legal employment has gained attention with high-profile stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. (In other news, Generalissimo Fransisco Franco is still dead). These stories always seem to center on the issue of whether there are too many law graduates (here in Minnesota), or speaking more generally, whether the number of law graduates exceeds the number of legal jobs.
These arguments entirely miss the point. As anyone in solo or small practice knows, there are always jobs out there, if you are willing to create them. Let’s talk about what we are talking about. There are more lawyers than there is money to support their employment.
Here’s some numbers to spice up the soup: 378 legal job “openings” for 888 Minnesota bar passers in 2009. Fine. But the numbers of “available” clients are staggering. The National Center for State Courts’s statistics indicate that, in states sampled, the percentage of cases where at least one party is pro se is often around 70% in family law cases, and around 90% in unlawful detainer (eviction) cases. The U.S. Courts website reports that in federal court, more than one out of three cases have at least one pro se litigant. One in ten are still pro se after removing prisoner petitions from the count. And of course, public defenders nationwide are swamped with cases of people who would otherwise be pro se. So there may be a huge number of unemployed lawyers, but there is also a huge unmet legal need.
What’s the point, you ask? Good question. I know I had a point around here somewhere. And it probably wasn’t that every person left without representation is a tragedy.
First (channeling Ronald Regan here): Competition is good. There should be more attorneys than openings. The NFL would be a poor sport to watch if any schmuck who wanted to play pro football could do so. If they did that, it would be… baseball.
More importantly, though, if there is a glut of under-represented or un-represented clients, why don’t more people simply go solo? The clients are out there. The answer, of course, is money. Not that clients don’t have any of it, but that lawyers need more of it. The price of law school – long a contentious issue in itself – is not only causing lawyers to run up too much debt, but preventing a large segment of the public from being able to afford the help it needs. If mechanics had to go through the expense lawyers do, no one would ever get their car fixed.
These two problems – too many lawyers and too many unrepresented parties – are only held back from solving each other by the cost of law school. Let’s be clear. Focusing the issue on whether there are too many lawyers encourages solutions like closing law schools, increasing admissions standards, or ratcheting up the difficulty of the bar. These solutions will create less unemployed lawyers only because they will create less lawyers period. It won’t solve the root of the problem. The problem is not that there are too many lawyers in the state. It is that there is too much debt.
July 15th, 2011 at 11:54 am
Well said!
October 10th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
———QUOTE—————
“in states sampled, the percentage of cases where at least one party is pro se is often around 70% in family law cases, and around 90% in unlawful detainer (eviction) cases. The U.S. Courts website reports that in federal court, more than one out of three cases have at least one pro se litigant. One in ten are still pro se after removing prisoner petitions from the count. And of course, public defenders nationwide are swamped with cases of people who would otherwise be pro se. So there may be a huge number of unemployed lawyers, but there is also a huge unmet legal need.”
———END QUOTE—————
That sounds good, but how many of those people can actually afford to pay their lawyers enough money so that their lawyers are earning $1000/week gross at a minimum? How many of those people would be willing to do that? People’s having a need for legal services is NOT sufficient to employ attorneys. They also need to have a willingness and the ability to pay their lawyers.
To hear you tell it, all anyone needs to do is to hang out a shingle and market themselves properly, and the paying clients will start rolling in. Obviously, it’s not that easy.
The problem in the legal profession is not merely the economy, but also mass JD overproduction. JD overproduction is nothing new; lawyers have been struggling for decades but it wasn’t well-publicized until the Internet allowed law school scambuster blogs to begin reporting about it a few years ago.
In fact, right now the lawyer-to-population ratio in the United States (of lawyers who graduated in the past 40 years and who are thus of working age) is about 1 lawyer for every 215 Americans. In fact, if our nation’s population remained static, the law schools would be producing enough new lawyers such that the lawyer-to-population ratio would be 1 lawyer for every 174.4 people in 40 years (based on 2009 numbers). JD overproduction is nothing new; it’s been going on for decades. That number was 1 lawyer for every 161 people based on 1983′s production, and it hasn’t been lower than 1 lawyer for every 191 people since 1973. See:
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/40-years-of-lawyer-overproduction-data.html
As a result, using Bureau of Labor Statistics and ABA data, it’s very possible that fewer than 53.8% of all JDs produced over the past 40 years are employed as lawyers, and presumably many of those jobs are for low pay and/or of low quality. See:
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/statistics-suggest-that-only-538-of-all.html
Consequently, if certain assumptions are made, it’s very possible that fewer than 30% of all new JDs today are able to find work in the legal profession (and much of that work may be for low pay and of low quality):
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/07/statistics-may-suggest-less-than-30-of.html
The problem in the legal field is not merely the economy. It’s also very much JD overproduction. The great tragedy is that tens of thousands of bright ambitious young people’s lives have been absolutely destroyed by the law school scam. The amount of mental anguish unemployed lawyers suffer must be unimaginable. Imagine having spent 7 years in college, having racked up over $150,000-$200,000 worth of student loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and being overqualified and unemployable for non-legal jobs. Imagine feeling that your life is over at age 25 or age 30. It’s too bad that the number of young JD suicides is never reported.
What we need to do is to band together and lobby for 75% of the law schools to close (so that the backlog of unemployed and underemployed-out-of-field lawyers can enter the profession). It’s not merely a humanitarian measure, but it also makes economic sense. Our nation’s economy suffers when people invest 3 years of their lives and take on gigantic amounts of student loan debt for education that does not have economic value.
Sadly, the ABA is continuing to accredit new law schools, and more and more colleges and universities are greedily considering opening up law schools because they are profitable cash cows. It’s very possible that we might have over 2 million JDs (who will have graduated in the past 40 years) in a few decades. See:
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/10/2-million-attorneys.html
http://flustercucked.blogspot.com/2010/10/2-million-attorneys-not-as-far-fetched.html
November 10th, 2011 at 11:51 am
A law professor (Paul Campos I think) who runs the blog “Inside the Law School Scam” recently published a great post addressing Michael Kemp’s suggestion that the solution to lawyer unemployment is for lawyers to open solo practices. I also recommend reading the comments to that post, some of them are heartbreaking.
http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2011/11/youll-never-fail-like-common-people.html#comments