April 22, 2009

"Job Anxiety Grips Graduating Law School Students."

Harrowing.

32 comments:

DaLawGiver said...

The poor dears, maybe they should consider joining the military.

chickelit said...

What happens when the students stop showing up at third and second tier law schools?

rhhardin said...

It's an anxiety story.

Farmers used to have annual anxiety and nobody noticed.

The commercial audience possibilities had not yet been uncovered.

David said...

Blogger chickenlittle said...

"What happens when the students stop showing up at third and second tier law schools?"

Some law schools merge or go out of business.

People who thought they were going to be lawyers do something else.

Supply of lawyers goes down, eventually demand goes back up and people get jobs again.

Life goes on.

rhhardin said...

The most popular anxieties as of 1997, from Wm. Kerrigan.

``environmental anxiety (the main subsets being clean air, clean water, clean sunlight); food anxiety; trash anxiety; hatred anxiety; dirt anxiety; dating anxiety; consumer anxiety; parenting anxiety (some of the subsets being toy, spanking, lessons, college, and money anxiety); academic anxiety; television anxiety; political anxiety (subsets too numerous to mention); fashion anxiety; hair anxiety; wealth anxiety; job anxiety; speech anxiety; endangered species anxiety; crime anxiety; medical anxiety; alcohol anxiety; smoking anxiety...''

There's job anxiety, still.

rhhardin said...

Unemployed law student esteem tip:

If you're not working, you're an unemployed whatever-you-want-to-say.

Hoosier Daddy said...

Well to quote Alec Baldwin in The Departed; "World needs plenty of bartenders."

traditionalguy said...

The amount of need for Lawyers is the same as the amount of need for someone's property rights to be protected. When the free market is functioning there are transactions to be Papered for the participants protection. When the economy quits, the need for lawyers goes back down to the need to hide assets from creditors.Divorces do go up since the wealth contraction is also the Cash Out signal for all the Golddigger wives. The Government agencies start to adjust by slowing down their output to fill in their slow days with unnecessary work, but no new personnel/lawyers are hired. Good old Personal Injury lawyers ads will start to take over the highway Billboards left vacant by other failing businesses. The graduating lawyer's student loans are now their enslavement. And the new Energy Taxes caused by the crisis of Global Warming have not even started finishing off what is left of economic activity.

I'm Full of Soup said...

I think Trad Guy nailed it. You should be advising Obama & Americans on how the economy works.

In a single short paragraph, you just described the best damn flow chart including cause and effect.

El Presidente said...

"The world needs ditch diggers, too."

--Judge Smails

Bissage said...

Things are tough all over.

Some genuinely talented, ambitious people can do no better than to get a job cobbling together one of those tedious articles about how tough the job market is for recent law grads.

Bender said...

They should worry.

I graduated during the white-collar recession of the Clinton years, when law firms were laying people off, not hiring. When hiring did start picking up a couple of years later, firms preferred fresh graduates over those who had struggled to find work the couple of years before, even if they had finally found work in some tiny firm and had gained great actual, real-world legal experience.

KCFleming said...

Cue the world's tiniest violin.

I'm Full of Soup said...

The taxeaters we elect to office will soon miss the big incomes they are destroying cause they provide most of the tax money for the taxeaters to waste.

save_the_rustbelt said...

We need to close 1/3 of the law schools in the country, many lawyers are having a trouble making a living (even when the economy is good).

Then open an equivalent number of nursing schools.

A victory for honest work.

Laura(southernxyl) said...

I imagine a lot of the anxiety is due to student loans that now cannot be paid off.

Michael Haz said...

How long will it be before some eager young JD files a class action lawsuit against his or her law school for failing to disclose on the law school's admission application, in the proper font size and in bold, that admission to XZY School of Law does not constitute promise of a high paying job upon graduation.

Nah. Probably will demand of Obama that law school tuition be forgiven, since the debt was incurred during the immoral Bush administration.

mariner said...

"What happens when the students stop showing up at third and second tier law schools?"

Some law schools merge or go out of business.

People who thought they were going to be lawyers do something else.

Supply of lawyers goes down, eventually demand goes back up and people get jobs again.

Come now, David. What kind of a society do you think we have? Certainly not a rational market-based one.

Government expansion continues apace, even as the rest of the economy contracts.

The government will bail them out.

Jim Howard said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
chickelit said...

Rustbelt, you sound like you're over 40 there-too much common sense.

You really should consider twittering. :)

David said...

A lot of law schools have been opened/expanded because they can be set up and run at a profit. When the profit goes, the schools will have to retrench.

Maxine Weiss said...

Here's one dissatisfed Attorney trapped in the public sector, doing 'make-work' at the New York Court of Appeals:

__________________

"I'm working here till August 2010"

"I draft reports for judges, mostly advising them on whether to exercise their discretion to hear appeals, and sometimes recommending case dispositions on the merits."

(Clearly, the work isn't as exciting, dynamic, compelling, substantive as he would've liked.)

srfwotb said...

I'm curious if this translates primarily into less contracts being made, less reasons to sue, or less payoff for suing? Or is the same workload being distributed over less people?

Environmental Law employment has always been on the difficult side unless you were defending the corps. I would think the outlook for that would be vastly improving over the next few years as the Obama policies get through the pipeline.

hdhouse said...

so find a lawyer and sue.

Maxine Weiss said...

Lawyers who go to work in the public sector, and work for the courts, do so because they failed to land a job with a suitable private firm.

Somebody's gotta staff the Court System I suppose. All I'm saying is it's highly awkward for an attorney who went to a Top-10 school ---to be dithering in a Government job.

---If only he'd have taken my advice regarding appearance and sports !

Love,
Maxine

Big Mike said...

They can always get jobs cleaning septic tanks. $20 an hour and all you can eat.

A lot less crap to deal with, too.

How do I know lawyers will do that job? Heck, there's nothing a lawyer won't do.

(Offering up lawyer jokes on a LawProf blog -- I must be nuts. The squirrels will get me any day now.)

dick said...

Guess he will have to do what the little people do when there are no jobs available in their line of work. They find other things to do until the job market opens up. The blue collar people have been doing this for generations. So have the other white collar people. What is so different about the law school grads. You do what you have to do to get by and keep studying your books so you don't get rusty. Do some volunteer work at the storefront law offices that help people out. This is really no different from machinists when the factories close.

Pastafarian said...

Don't worry, law students -- the Obama administration will soon pass laws that will make it possible for anyone to sue any person, company, or government entity for harm that they suffered from Global Warming created by the target of the suit.

Have you lost 6 inches of shoreline at your beach house to the encroaching oceans? Sue a coal-burning power plant.

Not enough rain for your tomato plants to grow this year? Sue your neighbor for driving an Escalade.

They call it the "Lawyer Full Employment Act of 2009".

Speaking of tomato plants -- what's the difference between a lawyer and an aphid?

It's not a lawyer joke -- I really want to know. If I put one of those little bastards under a microscope, will I see a little UW diploma in his wee pincer?

Penny said...

Major law firms and major accounting firms will always hire new college grads. Someone needs to do the real work while the partners are out pounding flesh.

Eric said...

How long will it be before some eager young JD files a class action lawsuit against his or her law school for failing to disclose on the law school's admission application, in the proper font size and in bold, that admission to XZY School of Law does not constitute promise of a high paying job upon graduation.

If he wins, won't that undercut his claim on appeal?

veni vidi vici said...

"will I see a little UW diploma in his wee pincer?"

Watch it, buddy! Some lawyers are fairly well hung, and we certainly don't all have the clap. With that in mind, whether you meant to say "wee pincer" or "pee wincer", you were wrong to overgeneralize in such fashion!

kentuckyliz said...

They can always join the Obamajugend Corps to have something to do and get their loans rapid. Might take a decade or three but they can be the cutting edge in the New Slave Class.