No, It's Still Not a Good Time to Apply to Law School

In mid-December, the ABA Section of Legal Education publicized the number of first-year students for the fall of 2013—39,675. The decline in 1Ls since the 2012-13 academic year exceeded 10 percent—the biggest one-year drop since the early 1950s. Meanwhile, the average number of 1Ls per law school reached its lowest level since 1968.

Thanks to these developments, some writers argue, legal education is becoming a fairer deal, and savvy applicants who buck the downward trend will be rewarded. While it’s certainly true that generous merit scholarships enable prospective law students to pay less for a legal education now than they would have a few years ago, there are still many compelling reasons to believe the benefits of law school still don’t outweigh its costs—and won’t for the foreseeable future.

The ABA Journal recently reported on the most rigorous analysis of the applicant decline’s impact on potential job opportunities for future law school graduates. In the article, Appalachian School of Law professor Paula Marie Young shared a dialogue on the subject with Professor Deborah Jones Merritt of The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Using National Association of Law Placement (NALP) and ABA data, Young maintained that by 2015 or 2016, the number of ABA law school graduates will equalize with the number of lawyer job openings. Merritt asserted that Young misread the ABA’s graduate data, and the more accurate equilibrium estimate is 2021. The discussion then shifted to whether “JD Advantage” jobs should really count in these calculations and whether positions classified as “full-time” fairly represent indefinite career jobs because they only need to last one year to count.

It’s not fruitful to rehash the entire back-and-forth in detail, and while I generally agree with Merritt’s line of thinking, there are additional points worth considering that may make even 2021 an overly optimistic estimate.

First of all, bar authorities license a few thousand lawyers (some foreign) each year who do not attend ABA-accredited law schools, raising the number of lawyers looking for work.

Second, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of underemployed lawyers, out there competing for each new job opening. A target equilibrium comparing graduates to jobs effectively writes off the careers of all previous law school graduates—not something people applying to law school would want to see happen to themselves after graduation if they miscalculated.

Third, although it’s not invalid to use NALP or ABA jobs data, it should be noted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just released its own employment projection for the 2012 to 2022 period. The news is mostly bad. On the plus side, the BLS found 31,600 lawyer jobs were created between 2010 and 2012 (the total now stands at 759,800). On the minus side, the number of employed lawyers is only back to where it was in 2008.

As for the government’s projections, the news is only bad. In 2002, the BLS predicted there would be 53,200 more lawyers employed in 2012 than there actually were. Looking ahead to 2022, the bureau expects only 196,500 lawyer jobs to be created by growth and replacement. This figure divides to 19,650 lawyer jobs created per year nationwide, a reduced rate from previous years due to a decline in the rate at which lawyers exit the profession.

Here is my estimate of the cumulative number of law graduates and licensed lawyers over the previous 35 years compared to the current number of employed lawyers and active and resident attorneys.