"...and won’t be particularly psyched to suddenly start subsidizing them. Meanwhile, qualified applicants are now harder to find for schools with some semblance of standards, because the biggest application declines have occurred among students who scored in the middle-to-high range on the LSAT. Or, as [University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Jerry] Organ writes, 'For law schools, 2014 looks a lot like 1985 did for dental schools.'"
Writes Slate's Jordan Weissmann in "Get Ready for Some Law Schools to Close."
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18 comments:
Crushed to learn that Oral Roberts had a dental school but closed it.
daughter is in 8th grade and may be a natural attorney...sounds like the job market for attorneys in 10 years or so may be much more favorable
You mean we wont have so many parasitic muckrakers running around? Damn.
You can't watch a football game anymore without 2 or 3 "have you had a metal hip replacement have you taken X drug and had internal bleeding" YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION advertisements anymore. Have you been hurt on the job? Were you injured in a car accident?
I wouldn't hope those lawyers were hurt on the job. That would be wrong.
This is a very necessary correction in a very sluggish market, many of the main actors in which refuse to even acknowledge that they're in a marketplace.
@ Francis Strazzulla: Speaking as one who last week celebrated (with one beer) his 34th year in the practice of law:
All of my four children have the capacity to be superb lawyers, but so far I've succeeded in deterring all but one from attending law school.
The same qualities which make a "natural attorney" — and I agree that there are some! — can also serve well in many another profession or occupation.
All the old lawyers should retire, to free up lawyer slots in firms nationwide.
"At Northwestern University School of Law, one of the top ranked institutions in the country, “74 percent of first-year students this academic year received financial aid, compared with only 30 percent in 2009,” the paper notes. "
Maybe they should consider cutting Bernardine Dohrn's salary.
From 1991 to 2013 she was a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law.
Too late. Bigger things became more important.
Dohrn now serves on the board of numerous human rights committees. Since 2002, she has served as Visiting Law Faculty at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her legal work has focused on reforming the much criticized juvenile court system in Chicago and on advocating for human rights at the international level.
No doubt fighting Islamophobia in Holland.
MadisonMan said...
All the old lawyers should retire, to free up lawyer slots in firms nationwide.
12/2/14, 1:38 PM
It has been my experience that the younger a lawyer is the more they tend to go the activist/shakedown route. Seems like the older attorneys do things like help with corporate filings and defend you from shakedowns.
Maybe it is just all job security.
MadisonMan said...
All the old lawyers should retire, to free up lawyer slots in firms nationwide.
And stop eating to free up food for the hungry.
Two things the legal industry has going for it are:
1. Lawyers have stronger regulatory/guild protection than just about anyone else, and
2. Positive feedback, lawyers create demand for lawyers (i.e., you wouldn't need a lawyer if someone hadn't hired a lawyer to sue you).
Nonetheless, U.S. taxpayers might same some money on the federal student loan program if applicants to bottom-tier law schools were required to sign a form stating, "I acknowledge that any degree I may earn here is for amusement/entertainment/personal enrichment purposes only" if they wished to apply for financial aid.
Cut the federal loans for law school. There is no shortage of lawyers.
The new war on men in colleges should help with new jobs for lawyers.
Corporate legal billing rates are still declining. Intermediary billing clearing houses are now the norm. Large corporations and insurance companies require law firms to sign up and agree to specified billing terms. Billings are entered via web pages with codes, hours and service descriptions. Any deviation from terms is rejected. The intermediaries promise a 10% decrease in legal fees which includes their cut.
Oh, I remember the DSC (Dental School Crash) of '85. That was brutal. Back then, we thought nothing could be worse than the ATL (Arborist Trade Lull) of the 1970s, but boy, we were we wrong.
Misaligned development is evidence of inorganic growth and an artificially distorted market. Gross misalignment is characteristic of centralized or monopolistic regimes.
Gee, the laws of economics trumpted the school for laws. If something becomes a better than average return on investment (i.e. cash cow), then others will enter the market. Once the market is saturated, the rate of return normalizes. If demand slackens, then returns go south and some may close.
It's like commercial real estate in that there is a time lag to develop the inventory. In good times, everyone starts building as fast as possible to get the returns while they are there. This ends up causing a big glut if a downturn happens before everything is complete.
So, economics is not for the blind. Meh. Surely this isn't worth it of my long-term attention.
Why should any of this be surprising? There are way too many newly minted lawyers chasing after an ever-diminishing number of decent paying legal jobs. It's become clear that the schools gamed their stats (counting even a job at Starbucks as "employed after six months") to trick students into thinking they'd get good paying legal jobs when they graduated. Meanwhile, tuition has soared to reflect the artificially induced demand. Now that prospective students are beginning to see what a raw deal it is, the numbers are tanking. Only students with a strong desire to practice law or with stellar prospects (top of their class, going into top rated programs, have family who are partners in firms) will remain in the pool.
This is a good thing for society. The last thing we need are more lawyers who are so desperate for work they'll take the weakest cases and jam up the courts and milk the insurance companies.
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