
Law school applications are collapsing - blatherard
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/12/law-school-applications-are-collapsing
======
rayiner
Surprised to see this make the front page...

The basic fact is that only half of the 45,000 or so law graduates each year
will even get jobs as lawyers. I disagree with many that the ABA should clamp
down on accreditation. The AMA did that in the last few decades, and while
that guaranteed solid employment prospects for medical school graduates, it
also led to skyrocketing salaries and medical costs. I think the medical
profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the public in this regard
than the legal profession, and any such move would be a very bad idea.

However, I do support measures to increase transparency and make educational
loans harder to get. In-state tuition at the University of Michigan in 1990
was $6,830 per year (about $11,700 in today's dollars). It is now over
$48,000/year.

Now, the teaching of law has not changed since Harvard Law School was founded
in 1817. You get a bunch of students in a room. You make them read cases from
a casebook. You grill them in front of the class on their comprehension of the
cases. It's not a high-tech process, but it works, and can be extremely cheap.
There is no reason tuitions need to be 4x higher than they were just 20 years
ago. The soaring cost of legal education is really the perfect example of how
incredibly dysfunctional our higher education system has become. At least with
engineering or medical school tuitions you can point to the expense of lab
equipment, etc. Not so with a segment of academia where students are taught
the same way they have been for two centuries.

~~~
henrikschroder
> I think the medical profession has more goodwill capital to spend with the
> public in this regard than the legal profession, and any such move would be
> a very bad idea.

There's also the fact that our demand for healthcare is enormous, because we
all get sick, it's a fact of life that's not gonna change very soon.

But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural. Where I am, the amount of
lawyers per capita is _one tenth_ of what it is in the US, there's no innate
demand for lawyers, so if they start to price themselves too high, demand will
fall as people and communities and businesses figure out ways to accomplish
the same things as before, but without lawyers.

~~~
rayiner
> But the demand for lawyers is completely cultural.

I don't think that's the case. People think that the U.S. has a lot of lawyers
because we're a "litigious society" but I've never seen evidence suggesting
that Americans are more likely to sue than other sorts of people.

I think the demand for lawyers is more structural than anything else, and
there are a lot of dimensions to this. First, the amount of conflict rises
proportionally with the number of interactions between people. This means
larger societies have more (superlinearly more) conflict than smaller ones,
more active economies have more conflict than less active ones, and
heterogenous societies have more conflict than homogenous ones.

Second, different countries use different mechanisms to accomplish the same
tasks. The U.S. is at one extreme--we use private litigation to handle things
like employer/employee disputes that might in other countries be handled by a
complaint to some sort of board. Litigation is, by design, the way to
challenge most government action. In the regulatory regime, we skimp on
government enforcement of things like financial or enviromental laws, and
write in "citizen suit provisions" to allow private enforcement.

Third, the demand for lawyers depends on the structure of the economy. An
economy based on financial services, which can result in expensive and complex
disputes, needs many more lawyers than one based on agriculture.

Fourth, the number of lawyers in a country isn't directly proportional to the
amount of conflict within the country itself. A country that hosts numerous
multi-national corporations will have many lawyers working on disputes that
actually arise in other countries. Moreover, a country with a sophisticated
legal system will be asked to resolve disputes that only have a tenuous
connection to the country. The U.S. is also a net exporter of legal services,
in conjunction with its export of financial services. American firms do work
for Brazilian companies doing IPOs in Brazilian markets. The reverse is never
true.

An example of an (industrialized) country that has 1/10 as many lawyers per
capita as the US is Finland. Can you compare the US with Finland? The US has
133 Fortune Global 500 companies, Finland has 1. The US has 9 cities as large
or larger than Finland. The U.S. is extremely heterogenous. Finland is
extremely homogenous. The US has to alter its laws to limit the number of
foreign cases coming into New York City's courts (a city 4x as large as
Finland). An American (or sometimes UK) firm is involved in some way in nearly
every major IPO that happens in one of the world's large financial markets.
How many Finnish firms are involved in American IPO's? Etc.

~~~
robbiep
_> >I don't think that's the case. People think that the U.S. has a lot of
lawyers because we're a "litigious society" but I've never seen evidence
suggesting that Americans are more likely to sue than other sorts of people._

USA: 5805 Suits per 100k people (cf. next highest - UK/England @ 3681 per
100k) - [1]

[1]
[http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/Ramseyer_681.pdf)

~~~
rayiner
That by itself doesn't mean much. E.g. two multi-national companies have a
dispute, it'll almost certainly get filed in the U.S. instead of somewhere
else. That doesn't mean Americans are more likely to sue.

~~~
robbiep
you could spin it whatever way you want until the cows come home, but the data
does show that on face value Entities in the US are more prolific with
litigation than Entities in other nations.

Saying that 2 multi-nationals are going to duke it out in the States over the
rest of the world may or may not be true - (Are a major percentage of multi-
nationals headquartered in the US? If they are lodging action in the US, is it
because it is easier?)

But I would tend to think that _300 Million americans_ and their individual
actions are going to be greatly more influential on the total case load and
per capita case load in the US than the approximately _70,000 multinational
companies_ \- which would be like a drop in the ocean against the individual
litigations.

~~~
rayiner
You make a very good point about the relative volume, you're right that
individual actions are going to overwhelm the number of international business
disputes (multi-nationals tend to file in the US if they can, even if they are
not headquartered here, because it's has the most well-developed legal
system).

That said, number of cases still does not mean that people are litigious in
the sense of resorting to lawsuits instead of other available means of dispute
resolution. E.g., car collisions are a huge source of litigation. The US has
3.4x as many motor vehicle deaths per capita per year as the U.K. (and
presumably, many more collisions too) because of our highly suburban
structure. So if we have more motor vehicle/insurance lawsuits, it doesn't
necessarily mean it's because we're quicker to rely on litigation. Employment
litigation is another big one for regular people. Here in the US, if you think
you were fired unfairly, there is no administrative agency that'll handle the
dispute. If you think you were fired because of race you can complain to the
EEOC, but either way the dispute will end up in court.

------
jseliger
There's a good reason for this: law school is a terrible deal for the vast
majority of applicants and potential applicants. Paul Campos's book _Don't Go
To Law School (Unless)_ (which I wrote about here:
[https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-
sch...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/dont-go-to-law-school-
unless-paul-campos/)) is one of the more comprehensive examples I've seen,
although I'm sure the book mentioned is good too.

The really bizarre thing is that 60K people are still deluded enough to apply.

~~~
bunderbunder
For a lot of people I know who've gone to law school, I'm not sure it's
entirely a delusion. I think the situation is that they find themselves a
couple years out of college and still unable to put their BAs in a Humanities
field (another area for which supply has greatly outpaced demand) to use. So
they're already saddled with a debt they can't really service, and they've
already got the B word in their heads. And along comes a really attractive
proposition: If you double down on it by going back to school, you catch an
immediate break because you get to immediately stop paying your student loans,
and wont have to start again until after you've graduated. And sure, after
that you'll have even more debt, but there's also a decent (maybe not great,
but decent) chance that your new degree will let you land a sweet job that
lets you pay them off much more easily and have plenty of money to spare. And
even if you only land an OK job, hopefully it'll still be enough to keep your
loans covered. . . and if it isn't, hey, no harm no foul. You're already
thinking about the B word right now, so even if it turns out you can't handle
all the new debt you've taken on it's not like you'll be any worse off than
you are now.

Posed that way, I'm not sure what the students are doing is terribly
irrational or delusional. What's crazy is the irrational credit system that
enables/encourages this kind of thing to happen.

~~~
arjunnarayan
Sidenote: The B word is irrelevant here as you can't bankrupt your way out of
student debt. You're stuck with it forever.

But otherwise I find your arguments compelling, and an accurate model of how
my humanities friends were thinking when they applied/got into law schools.

~~~
bunderbunder
It's difficult - more difficult than for other kinds of debt - but not
impossible.

[http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/what-is-the-brunner-
test...](http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/what-is-the-brunner-test-for-
dischargeability-of-student-loans/)

------
_delirium
Not too surprising: university enrollments tend to crash following job-market
crashes in a sector, with a lag of a few years. Look at what happened to CS
enrollments after the dot-com crash, for another example [1]: by the time the
lowest point was reached, they were down ~50% from the peak, and some schools
saw a >75% decline in CS majors, leading the department to be eliminated at
some smaller schools. (It's picked up again lately, though enrollments are
still not back up to the peak years.)

[1] Chart from the CRA, though note that this is charting number of degrees
_awarded_ rather than freshman enrollment, so has about a 4-year pipeline lag.
Hence, the downturn starts in 2004-05 rather than 2000-01:
[http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/0...](http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/2009-10_undergrad-CS-production.png)

------
joonix
As a recent law graduate: Finally. I had no idea what people who started in
law school in 2011+ were thinking. They went to law school at a time when
almost every month a major publication wrote an article about terrible job
prospects and rising tuition. Law school is by and large a scam.

------
jburwell
And this is a problem? Hopefully these potential law school candidates have
found more productive avenues to devote their professional lives.

------
001sky
_Now comes word that applications in this admissions cycle appear to be in
something like free fall. As of December 7th, they are down 24.6% from the
same time last year, while the total number of applicants has declined by
22.4% year over year. These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total
of somewhere between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this
cycle, i.e., slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188
ABA accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on
“at the moment”).

To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD
students two years ago_

\-- The Key Data

------
afterburner
Finally! I was wondering when it would sink in how unrewarding this path could
be.

~~~
timwiseman
It depends on what you mean. I am a law student now, and while my perspective
may shift when I graduate, I have had some tangential involvement in projects
that that help people, that is extremely rewarding.

Financially, the market as a whole looks less secure and perhaps less
lucrative than it was in the past, but that matters less for people not driven
mostly be finances and the compensation for some of those graduating ahead of
me is not unlivable.

~~~
afterburner
It's the not getting a law job at all part that blows. In Ontario, it's a 4
year Bachelors plus 3 years of law school... that's a heavy price to pay,
mainly in money but also in time. The job better be financially rewarding to
some extent.

No I'm not talking about spiritually or intangibly rewarding. I'm talking
about whether the huge investment ends up being wasteful and an unnecessary
burden.

------
mburshteyn
Original article on Professor Paul Campos' blog:

[http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applicati...](http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/12/applications-
to-law-school-are.html)

------
jivatmanx
Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through
discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.

It's a profession dealing with text/knowledge. Easy to digitize.

~~~
rayiner
> Technology that simplifies looking up case-law, and that combs through
> discovery, has greatly reduced the number of lawyers needed.

[Citation needed]

It's not really the case that demand for lawyers is lower (recession aside).
It's that the growth in demand for lawyers is lower than it has been.
Remember, we're dealing with derivatives here: the number of new jobs
available for new graduates is the derivative of overall legal demand.

I don't think technology has had much to do with it, except within certain
segments (mainly document review). As technology has evolved, expectations
have risen. Yes, you can get on Lexis and quickly look up the case law on an
issue, instead of heading over to the library and poring through books, but
countering that is the fact that now you're expected to be on top of the
absolute latest precedent. It's not enough to give the definition of some
element out of a legal encyclopedia. Gotta make sure you review all the cases
that touch on the topic to make sure nothing adds a wrinkle that your opponent
might bring up.

Similarly with document review. Yes, predictive coding will blow through
thousands of documents a second, but back in the day you could just interview
some people to get the story of what happened. Now you're expected to review
every e-mail everyone sent within the relevant time period. Even with
technology, someone has to piece those e-mails together into a coherent
narrative.

What really happened is that during the 1970's and 1980's, the corporatization
and financialization of America caused demand for legal services to explode
relative to GDP. We seem to have hit a plateau in that process in the late
1990's and 2000's, which has caused the growth in demand to stagnate, and
indeed dip in the recent recession.

~~~
EwanToo
I don't have a great citation to hand, but one of the key offerings of
Autonomy is software which does exactly that - combs through discovery
documents, reducing the number of lawyers needed.

[http://www.autonomy.com/content/Customers/verticals/legal/in...](http://www.autonomy.com/content/Customers/verticals/legal/index.en.html)

~~~
rayiner
Autonomy makes predictive coding software, which uses Bayesian algorithms to
identify potentially relevant documents in a corpus. But the situation doesn't
quite fit the usual "technology eliminating the need for people" narrative.
Yes, now you don't need as many document review attorneys, but 15 years ago,
you didn't need those people anyway, because there weren't huge amounts of
e-mail to review. Technology created a huge temporary spike in the volume of
documents and thus the need for document review attorneys in the late 1990's
and 2000's, and technology has now eliminated a substantial amount of that
demand (but not all), but that doesn't really explain longer-term (20-30+
year) trends within the profession.

Also, prediction: when everyone has Google Glass, the discovery demands will
explode again until someone invents software that figures out what is
happening in a video.

------
GnarfGnarf
My Anti-virus software flagged this link as a malicious URL.

~~~
loungin
It is about lawyers, guns and money. I would flag it malicious as well!

