Tag Archives: now is a great time to go to law school

Cooley’s President and Dean, Don LeDuc, is publishing commentaries on the Law School, legal education, and related topics.  In this commentary, President LeDuc takes on a variety of misstatements about legal education that abound across the Internet.

The Internet abounds with misstatements about law schools and lawyer employment.  Uninformed commentators and bloggers make the statements, and the media republish them without support, analysis or context, creating the impression that they are true.   Here are some of those assertions.

1. MYTH:  Unemployment among lawyers is widespread and severe.

False.  According to U.S.  Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics data, legal occupations have the lowest unemployment rate among the ten recognized professional and management occupations.  Employment of lawyers is nearly the best among all individual professional and management occupations.

2. MYTH:  Law schools continue to admit increasing numbers of students.

False.  Nationally, first-year enrollment fell by 4,000 in 2011 and again in 2012, and will likely fall by at least that much again in 2013.  First-year law school enrollment at Michigan’s five law schools is down over 30% over the past three years (2010, 2011, 2012), and will likely decline significantly again in 2013.

3. MYTH:  Law schools will drop their standards to keep their enrollment up.

False.  Michigan’s law schools kept their entering class profiles relatively stable over the past five years, reducing class size rather than lowering their admission standards.

4. MYTH:  Law schools are charging exorbitant tuition.

False. Law school tuition is comparable to tuition charges for other professional schools and for doctoral programs.  For At Cooley, a typical May 2012 non-scholarship graduate would have paid about $97,000 in tuition for his or her legal education.  The typical scholarship student at Cooley would have paid about $75,000.  Approximately 57% of Cooley students receive scholarships.

5. MYTH:  Law school graduates are experiencing alarming default rates because of the student loan debt.

False.  Default rates among law school graduates are quite low, about one-third of the national average

6. MYTH:  The current admissions practices among law schools have led to a glut of lawyers.

False.  Admissions to practice in Michigan have decreased in each of the past three decades and by 10% since 1973.

1973 to 1982:  average annual admission to practice = 1,178

1983 to 1992:  average annual admission to practice = 1,137

1993 to 2002:  average annual admission to practice = 1,095

2003 to 2012:  average annual admission to practice = 1,061.

7. MYTH:  Young lawyers, burdened by debt, are forced to take on cases that they are incompetent to handle, causing them to behave unethically.

False.  State Bar of Michigan data suggest that recent law school graduates contribute relatively little to the work of the lawyer disciplinary bodies.  And the annual report of the Lawyer Discipline Board shows comparatively few competency-based disciplinary actions overall.

8.  MYTH: The law schools do a poor job at training students to be lawyers.

False.  The quality of legal education, from the substantive, doctrinal courses to the practical, clinical courses, has never been better.  Teaching is outstanding, facilities are the best in history, libraries are more comprehensive than ever, and technology has been employed in all parts of legal education.  Focus on practice preparation by the nation’s law schools has never been more intense.

9.  MYTH: Big Law – made up of the ultra large international and national law firms, is the core of the legal profession.

False.  Almost two-thirds of all lawyers in private practice work in solo practice or in law firms of from two to ten lawyers in size.  “Big Law” has no relationship to the real world faced by almost all of our nation’s lawyers.

10.  MYTH:  We don’t need more lawyers. 

False.  Maybe there are plenty of lawyers charging $600 an hour and up to represent the largest corporations, but there clearly are not enough lawyers to serve the interests of the middle class, much less the indigent in society.  Many rural counties in particular are severely lacking lawyers.

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Cooley’s President and Dean, Don LeDuc, is publishing commentaries on the Law School, legal education, and related topics.  In this commentary, President LeDuc shows that now is a great time to enter law school.

If you have dreamed of going to law school, now is the time to act.  Your odds of admission have never been better, whether you aspire to get into an elite school, into the school of your choice, or just hope to get into a law school.

About 74% of 2013 law school applicants will enroll in law school, based on current 2013 application numbers and the law school admissions practices of the past two years.  In 2003, about 49% of law school applicants enrolled in law school, and that rate has been climbing steadily each year since 2004 to a high of 65% in 2012.  This enrollment trend is likely to continue in light of declining applications.  Over the past couple of years, most schools were making hard decisions between cutting entering class size and reducing minimum admissions standards.  Those who have reduced class size will find it more difficult to continue to do so in 2013.  Based on past performance, the schools are unlikely to reduce entering class size in proportion to their decline in applications.

So, the odds now strongly favor admission and ultimate enrollment.  But why go to law school now, given the current labor market?  Three answers.

First, the current labor market is irrelevant.  The employment market today will not be the same in three or four years, the time it takes for most students to get admitted, start classes, graduate, pass the bar, and go to work.  All indications are that the economy will slowly improve over the next few years, leading to more employment in business and government and more jobs for lawyers.  You should make your decision based on what is likely to happen by the time you graduate, not what is happening today.  Beginning with 2014, law school graduation numbers will drop considerably, resulting from the drop in first-year enrollment in 2011.  Competition for jobs among law school graduates will be less.

Second, the popular assessment of the current legal employment market is woefully inaccurate.  Over the past few years, employment of lawyers has been stronger than for nearly all other professions and occupations, and in 2012 was even stronger.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual average unemployment of lawyers was 1.4% in 2012, and the number of unemployed lawyers was the lowest since 2007.  While there has been much media and blog stress on unemployment among law school graduates in their first year after law school, employment among those graduates far exceeds unemployment among them.  You should not be swayed by the critics, but make your own evaluation of the actual current situation.

Third, this decision should focus on the long term, not today.  If the first two reasons are not enough, think “reverse” Social Security.  Our nation confronts a retirement boom created by those who constituted the baby boom.  While we worry about how to cover the social security cost of the increasing boomer retirements, we lose track of how many jobs these retirements will create, including the likely surge from those who have delayed retirement during the recession.  And guess what?  Those retirees will include an increasing number of lawyers among them.  You should regard your decision in the context of law as a long-term career.

Want the details?  Read this commentary in full.       

Click here for all of President LeDuc’s commentaries.

Scroll below to comment on President LeDuc’s commentary.

See Cooley on the web at cooley.edu.