
An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It - SmallBets
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html
======
hkmurakami
It seems that the story is a that a once upwards spiral is now spiraling
downwards, and people and institutions must adjust.

At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers.
Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify
the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off.

Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the
profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should
have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily
adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number
of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having
transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were
duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants
numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national
headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated
fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were
caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.

~~~
sverige
And this is what's wrong with the law profession generally. It's seen as
"lucrative" instead of as "a calling." No modern law school will ever create
an Oliver Wendell Holmes or inspire a fictional Atticus Finch.

~~~
havetocharge
I see where you're coming from, but most people work for a paycheck rather out
of higher level motives (like "I was meant to be doing this"). By the same
measure, all professions would be "wrong".

~~~
sverige
Some professions (lawyer, doctor, law enforcement, clergy) should have as a
fundamental motive the desire to help people rather than profit, since they
have by their very nature the power to help or harm others.

~~~
evoloution
In US it is becoming increasingly difficult to dedicate yourself to a cause.
Since no one has your back you have to fend for yourself and your family. Good
affordable healthcare, education, daycare, e.t.c. is not a given and they
dedicate their lives to tend to their families and service their debts. PS: I
assume you are comparing with Sweden

------
MichaelBurge
Why are lawsuits so expensive if there are so many broke lawyers aching for a
job? It seems like a company could pay them a middling salary of $70k/year to
handle ongoing lawsuits, rather than the $300-$700/hour that other lawyers
demand.

Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire
company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every
public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or
acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because
it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just
need someone to do the paperwork.

It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls,
and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of
hours.

I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an
actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option
in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.

~~~
wp1
This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their
baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff
(litigation, big transactions).

In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you
don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an
associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.

~~~
gumby
> In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm

Just to expand: in house counsel gets a salary and doesn't have to do the
business-building that a partner at a law firm has to.

Also for tech companies, in house counsel can get stock options. In the 2000
boom this caused mass defections of gold-digging lawyers from traditional law
firms, which screwed them up too (boo hoo).

Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!

~~~
tluyben2
> Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!

This is not meant as a flaming comment as I do not know enough about it but in
the US it seems you do? I have read and heard a lot of silly lawsuit cases
against startups over there which killed the startup because of (feared) legal
costs. I have been through a bunch of legal cases in the Netherlands and here
no party wins usually in business cases. Even if you win you do not really win
money so most cases just settle for a few bucks or win for the same few bucks
at more legal cost. You get nominal expense back if you win aka if you pay
E300 per hr for your lawyer then if could be you get E70/hr back. I do not
know the exact numbers but it's basically mostly a loss for all which is why
it happens very little and no one is really afraid of it.

~~~
gumby
>> Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!

> [...] in the US it seems you do? I have read and heard a lot of silly
> lawsuit cases against startups over there which killed the startup because
> of (feared) legal costs.

Don't worry, it's not as bad as it looks. I do see a lot of lawyers running up
the bills at the expense of inexperienced entrepreneurs. That really ticks me
off.

In the first few years of a startup my legal bills are typically under
$15K/year -- well under. Setting up the company doesn't cost much, and apart
from some minor routine stuff (the odd employee termination mainly, plus a few
contracts and the like) there just isn't much legal stuff to do. An A or B
round financing shouldn't cost more than $20K even in the valley. In fact
legal bills can be _lower_ in the valley because the firms are used to doing
the kinds of thing you need.

Patent stuff is more expensive but again, most companies have no need to bring
that in house. If you hire some overseas people you'll need some legal help
but you wouldn't bring that in house.

Some businesses do have an explicit legal needs (e.g. Uber) if they are going
after a regulated industry. But, for example, one of my startups developed a
drug and got it into clinical trials -- even though it's a highly regulated
field there was no need for in house counsel, and actually the legal part of
that was not huge.

If you get sued you'll hire an outside firm that specializes in litigation.

------
sandworm101
Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame
the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad
degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But
today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully
honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so
everything else, everything useful, was skipped.

(Hint: Good law schools don't care about GPA. Do well on the LSAT and all is
forgiven.)

Want to get a job? Law is all about selling knowledge. You have to show that
you actually know something beyond the bar. Sit down and become an expert on
something. Publish a few papers. Get your name out. That's what worked for me.
Becoming a recognized expert in a very narrow law+technology field opened
doors that were firmly shut to bare-bones law grads.

And.. learn to speak properly. Too many law schools are letting grads slide
through with poor grammar. It might sound trivial but is really important when
you are claiming to actually know something.

~~~
tnecniv
What do you define as useful? Is a philosophy degree useful? They score among
the highest on the LSAT.

~~~
sandworm101
The LSAT is a reading test. Philosophy majors do well because they are good
readers, not because of any knowledge they picked up. You can be a good reader
with other degrees too. The LSAT maps well onto law school performance because
law school is also much about reading.

Want to get a job as a lawyer, start with a compsci, biotech or engineering-
related degree. But having some professional life experience also counts.
Nobody wants to get legal advice from someone who doesn't have any realworld
experience.

------
mevile
Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they
were growing up that's how you made it.

That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all
these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure
it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to
live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth.

I think there are actually good opportunities in vocational schools.
Marketable skills that you can use to find a good job. Law, liberal arts and
communication degrees maybe not as marketable.

~~~
hkmurakami
_> That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all
these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure
it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to
live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth._

To be fair, the other pillar of "expensive degree leading to lucrative, high
prestige career", medicine, is still doing well. As the population ages, there
will be an even higher need for medical professionals. Of course, part of this
seems to be a result of residency programs being restricted in the number of
seats available.

~~~
davnn
Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?

~~~
gumby
> Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?

People have been hoping so since the 70s and haven't made any progress. Having
worked in both fields I realize that 1. Medicine _as a discipline_ is still
poorly understood so isn't really amenable to that many automated tasks and 2.
Medicine, _as a social phenomenon_ is structured such that automation won't
itself reduce costs.

~~~
chii
lately, a lot of GP seems to be relying on an expert system to help
diagnose/work out treatments for things. AI, as populeraized in hollywood pop
culture, seems to only include things like human intelligence, where as in
reality, AI encompasses things like expert systems, which is already very
common.

------
mcguire
The author has buried the lead:

" _“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee,
executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of
Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar
passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”_ "

Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything
else is good, why would anyone recruit there?

~~~
Pxtl
Lede. Yeah, it's one of those words.

~~~
rev_bird
It's intentionally misspelled, ostensibly to avoid old-school newsroom
confusion with "lead," the linotype separators that sat between lines on a
printing press. It's debated whether it's a word that was actually used back
then, though.

~~~
mcguire
Thanks, both of you.

------
guelo
That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote
hoping to find out _why_ the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used
to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?

~~~
yourapostasy
Software automation is purely responsible for the automation of a legal sub-
industry: discovery. The most common interchange format for paperwork is TIFF
scans and actual paper. A significant cost in litigation work was paying a
small army of associate lawyers to manually read through this mountain of
paperwork to find information relevant to the case.

OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-
industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a
fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough
fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring
on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the
remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification.

This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning
amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of
industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets,
increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each
passing decade.

I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either.
We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and
continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging,
ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration).
From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated,
consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the
scene.

I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening
is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work
to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while
expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost
structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level
work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they
are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, _etc._ ), but the
volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to
working wage levels.

~~~
rhino369
Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place.
There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge.
Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to
review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after
email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even
millions of files to search. Digital offices great many many many more files
than pre digital offices.

OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any
email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient
right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges
would never make you read through every email in a company.

Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking
some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the
program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's
incredibly useful but only on huge projects.

The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas.
Indian document reviewers are cheap.

I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.

~~~
e15ctr0n
Here is a series of older New York Times articles detailing the offshoring of
legal work to India:

Corporate America Sending More Legal Work to Bombay | MARCH 14, 2004
[http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/jobs/corporate-america-
sen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/jobs/corporate-america-sending-more-
legal-work-to-bombay.html)

Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers | AUG. 4, 2010
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.htmll?pagewanted=all)

Keeping Legal Work From Moving to India | August 6, 2010
[http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/keeping-
legal-w...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/keeping-legal-work-
from-moving-to-india/)

Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers | JUNE 2, 2011
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03reverse.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03reverse.html)

------
gumby
The supply/demand inflation phenomenon described in the article (and also
referred to as having happened in Dentistry) is a good warning for coding
bootcamps.

In fact bootcamps seem to _already_ been in full bubble even though they're
only a few years old. You see so many hiring their own grads or using faux
graduate-employment metrics, which unfortunately the 3rd and 4th tier law
schools are doing too.

------
OliverJones
This is an unintended consequence of the 2005 US bankruptcy "reform" act. That
act made it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.

Because those loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, it's less risky to make
student loans. Therefore, lenders don't have the same incentive as before to
underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure
their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money.

So, it's easier to get a student loan. And, it's easier to borrow more money.
So, it's easier for educational institutions to increase tuition and fees, and
still fill up their classes. This turns into a vicious cycle increasing
tuition and student debt.

I don't want to pick on Valpo. I don't know anything about their law school.

If the lenders were taking a close look at the Massachusetts College of Law
(MCL, local to me, and struggling a bit) and asking whether their grads were
getting decent jobs, they might make it harder to borrow so much money. That
would put downward pressure on MCL's tuition and fees. But the lenders are not
doing that.

But why should the lenders bother? It's a hassle to underwrite an educational
institution. Student borrowers can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under
those loans, even if the education bought with that money turns out to be
worthless to them. So the lenders risk little.

It's time to repeal that part of the bankruptcy "reform."

Until then people who sign student loan papers should realize they are
literally signing away their lives. Student lenders are clever and dangerous
predators, and student borrowers are their lawful prey.

~~~
paulddraper
> lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans.
> That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a
> decent shot at repaying the money.

But the _students '_ incentive to make sure they can pay back the money is
much higher.

If you're looking to underwriters to keep debt levels reasonable, you are
looking in the wrong place. In any industry (school, real estate, etc.), their
max is far higher than you should actually take.

------
gozur88
The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know
better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes
sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.

~~~
bbcbasic
What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by
paralegal? Fewer court cases?

~~~
danieltillett
Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior
lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up
with the supply growth of lawyers.

~~~
gozur88
Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth
would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law
schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so
they were expanded as quickly as possible.

~~~
danieltillett
Law is relatively cheap to teach compared to the hard sciences and
engineering. You can charge students a lot so it is not surprising that
universities want to keep the lawyer production pipeline open and gushing.

------
andy
I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS,
Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947
hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not
how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.

~~~
leaveyou
1947 hours ?!? 1947/8 = 243,3 days or 48,6 weeks ..

What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere
else with some adaptations ?

~~~
andy
OMG, I haven't paid him that much. I mean his lifetime earnings on upwork. I
paid him for a total of a few hours. That's all I needed.

------
sbardle
I still think certain professional careers will always exist for the most
passionate and high quality candidates (or, alas, the best connected).

~~~
hkmurakami
Regarding the best connected category -- lawyers eventually move up to become
partners, who are rainmakers. Their job is to bring in deals and manage the
client relationship, rather than drafting the paperwork. The work is _very_
different from that of the associate level.

WSGR takes a mix of top 5 law school grads as well as Santa Clara law school
grads. The latter is seen as having a better local network through their
family and upbringing (and have a better retention track record compared to
their higher academically ranked counterparts), and are seen as effective
future rainmakers even if their legal abilities are inferior to their peers.

~~~
pdshrader
I believe it's a misattribution to automatically equate lower-ranked law
schools with "inferior legal abilities". Especially considering that law
school coursework (1) is largely the same at various law schools, and (2)
rarely covers the same subject matter as actual practice. The prestige is
different, sure, but that is more an amalgamation of undergraduate GPA and
LSAT scores than representative of actual legal ability.

Disclaimer: SCU law grad

~~~
hkmurakami
Yeah this is just second hand information from those who went to the toppest
of law schools, who are naturally rather insecure about themselves and are
surprisingly condescending.

------
dctoedt
Lawyer and part-time adjunct law professor [0] here. In terms of root-cause
analysis, some of the comments to the NY Times article are thought-provoking
--- they suggest that perhaps _the urge for prestige and income, on the part
of both students and schools_ , resulted in an upward ratchet for law-faculty
salaries and thus for law-school costs, resulting eventually in a mismatch
with market realities.

For example _(all italics are mine)_ :

"The question many have asked is why is law school so expensive .... _[O]ther
than books and space to sit in lectures and small sessions, what is there?_
Medical schools need labs, cadavers, hospitals, and other expensive equipment.
Physicists need telescopes, rockets into space and expensive equipped labs.
... But law school? Every time I hear that graduates are hundreds of thousands
in debt, I wonder where the money went." \--- from "Dale,"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872201)

"The schools have little in expenses ... physical plant, library and
professors. Students buy the only 'equipment': texts and laptops." \--- from
"Billy Bobby," [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873149)

"As to the commenter who asked why law school is so expensive, try taking a
look at the professor and dean salaries. [1] I was shocked when I learned what
some of the professors and deans made at the third tier law school I attended.
And, in my view, the school routinely admitted students who had no business
being there, likely to pay the bloated salaries of the professors and deans."
\--- from "JJ," [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873540)

"But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, _the school put an increasing
emphasis on legal scholarship_ .... Across the country, many law schools were
undergoing a similar evolution. It’s no coincidence that the average law
school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: _Each professor was
teaching fewer courses to make time for research. ... Every law school seemed
to want to emulate Harvard and Yale. "_ \--- from the article itself, not the
comments

"I heard a lawyer say recently that in law school there were many students for
whom the 'choice' to do law was more the result of a process of elimination.
They are _not able or interested in stem fields, but want the prestige and
income of a white collar profession which the soft sciences don 't necessarily
provide,_ i.e. Sociology, social work, psychology. ... [T]his is why the field
is saturated." \---from "Johanna,"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872847)

"Make no mistake, the American Bar Association created this mess. The ABA has
certified too many law schools and has placed ridiculous standards on these
school thus driving up tuition to back-braking _[sic]_ levels. Now law schools
are admitting unqualified students to keep their numbers up. It is scary to
observe many of these recent graduates. They are poorly read, lack critical
thinking skills and are loosely educated." \--- from "Peter,"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18872663)

"There are crushing unmet legal needs in communities across the country.
Survivors of gender based violence lack representation. Police violence is
uninvestgated. Predatory lenders prey on retirees." \--- from "monte,"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18873909)

"There is a genuine need for lawyers in this society. First, _let 's all get
beyond the popular fantasy that they should all be upper middle-class._ Yes, a
minority can become well-paid attorneys. For the reset _[sic]_ , lower
tuition, train them at public universities, and shut down the lawyer -mill
expensive private places. _Teach most to expect social worker-type salaries
and conditions._ Allow some loan forgiveness for those who work with the
indigent. If nothing else, _such an approach to legal training would attract
people who would otherwise go into social work. "_ \--- from "Oceanviewer,"
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-
expen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-
law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html#permid=18876177)

[0] Adjunct law professors are paid a pittance, so we're not part of the
problem of escalating law-school costs --- we all have day jobs as lawyers or
judges, and teach because we enjoy it and find it rewarding.

[1] I looked up the faculty salaries at my alma mater law school, at UT
Austin, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Supposedly, the dean makes $466K; 64
full professors get a median salary $212K; one assistant professor gets $172K;
one associate professor gets $122K; 18 lecturers get a median salary of $91K.
[https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-
aus...](https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-
austin/departments/school-of-law/)

~~~
sbardle
The prestige angle is really important as a factor in why people go to law
school.

I know parents who have worked every hour God gives so their son or daughter
can be a lawyer - they see it as a route for their kids into the middle class.
It's a shame, I feel the legal education system is benefiting from their
ignorance of how bad it is out there for graduating lawyers.

------
wallflower
My friends who went to law school said that the terms 1L/2L/3L are fixed in
stone. It is impossible to take courses in an accelerated manner to graduate
in 2 years instead of 3 years. Why? Because the law school and bar association
make it that way. Milk the most tuition money out of the students.

------
cm3
In Germany the consensus is that there are so many underutilized lawyers that
they resort to shady business tactics like cease and desist as a model of
income, looking for opportunities to threaten website operators or trick users
with traps and later c&d. And then we have pedagogically incapable and
unqualified teachers who only are equipped with field knowledge (math,
history, etc.) but are in no way able to teach humans anything, making one
wonder if more of the smart enough population should consider education,
though that would require reasonable wages. I can't help but think there are
not many societies that favor education as importantly as it should, if we
consider what teachers and public researchers can make.

------
programLyrique
Is it possible to go to Europe, where law is usually taught at undergraduate
level, in public universities, and in some countries, with very cheap tuition
fees, and then pass the bar exam back in the US?

~~~
roel_v
Just passing the bar won't get you hired at a white shoe firm though; yes
there are Loyola grads who actually, you know, practice law, but most likely
at 'barely scraping by' rates.

------
lifeisstillgood
When I went to university (sometime in the 18th Century) the idea was not
vocational training but "learning to think" \- at least that's what I was
told. Most of my courses had underlying principles that if had attended
lectures or worked hard I probably would have picked up. And I would assume
the same is true of a top law degree - you may not be a lawyer, but fast
thinking hard working articulate graduates are valuable whatever.

~~~
lenkite
'When I went to university sometime in the 18th Century'\- what ?? Did you
discover the holy grail ?

------
Pxtl
I once read that 70% of the world's lawyers live in the US. It was only a
matter of time before something broke.

------
bruceb
Its hard to feel sorry for people graduating now. The lack lawyer jobs has
been known for 5+ years, well before these students enrolled.

I wonder if there are any stats on the wages of law professors? Seems they
would trend down? Do recent grads teach first year law classes?

~~~
sandworm101
>> Do recent grads teach first year law classes?

No. Not at any reputable school. Getting a job as a law prof usually requires
a degree above the normal law degree. And you better have gone to a top-tier
law school. It's a real commitment.

~~~
richardfontana
While some US law schools offer what are termed masters (LLM) and doctoral
(often 'SJD' or 'JSD' or the like) advanced degrees in law, few law professors
(other than those with a first law degree from outside the US) have such
degrees. (Edit: It's somewhat more common to see law professors with a JD and
a PhD in some other field such as economics or history, but this is still not
the typical profile of a law professor at any tier of US law school.)

At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be
hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious
federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top
law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical
characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire
very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to
less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from
experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star
credentials new hires at the elite schools have.

First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or
fairly junior ones.

------
cm3
Do movies and tv shows give the wrong impression and lure the wrong people to
law degrees?

~~~
internaut
This is a great question.

My guess is that police, doctors, nurses, lawyers and crime scene forensics
are over subscribed to because of television serials.

If television didn't exist then those jobs would have higher rates of pay or
at least less competition per job opening.

I think the intersection between jobs which are not easy to outsource + not
easy to televise is an interesting one.

It reminds me of Warren Buffet's ideas about growth and value corporations.
Growth jobs are obviously photogenic but may not pay as much in the long term
as 'value' jobs.

------
ezequiel-garzon
Here's hoping for a grellas comment on the matter, as in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas).

------
mdasen
I feel like the NYTimes missed that their data point is a school that simply
isn't that good. They call it well-established to give you a sense that it's a
mid-tier school. It isn't. The median student has scored at the 40th
percentile on the LSAT, the 25th percentile student at the school has scored
at the 33rd percentile on the LSAT. In 1600-point SAT terms, that means the
median student is around a 933 out of 1600 on the SAT.

The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and
Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are
80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart
the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those
states.

Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just
has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for
law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores?

Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For
example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer
Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good
(they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer
force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a
support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart
enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are
mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the
900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions
where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the
work? Are they taking IT-related jobs?

It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't
magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that
mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech
area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging
students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and
come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-
figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt.
[http://report.turing.io/](http://report.turing.io/) \- Turing has reported
that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but
if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of
students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation -
they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to
be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking
that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat
mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and
might be earning a reasonable bit more than before.

And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have
done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who
just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a
specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm
getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might
be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know
programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great
SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average.

A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools
provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be
successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving
outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve
student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have
historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and
those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in
marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way
more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much
schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite
schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use
education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not
others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a
NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means
that no one is hiring lawyers.

