Growing Number of Blogs Critical of Law Schools
With the legal job market in shambles, there is a growing number of blogs devoted to criticizing law schools for not doing more to educate potential students about the difficulties in finding a job after law school. Examples include:
Third Tier Reality– My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school. DO NOT ATTEND UNLESS: (1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.
Exposing the Law School Scam– This blog is written by a coalition of lawyers dedicated to exposing the "law school scam." In particular, we are interested in exposing the dramatic oversupply of lawyers, and how that oversupply has been caused by bogus employment and income/salary statistics used by most law schools to induce applicants to apply to law school. Also, we are concerned with how the legal establishment is complicit in this "law school scam."
Esq. Never– One law school graduate's attempt to find a fulfilling career in spite of his legal education.
These blogs also provide links to other blogs devoted to slamming law schools and the legal profession.
Mississippi’s law schools need to educate applicants about the realities of the difficult job market. My non-scientific polling of current law students indicates that law schools do not warn students about the weak job market until after students are enrolled and are finding it difficult to find clerkships and permanent jobs. Of course, by that point the train has left the station.
I agree with the comments by William Henderson, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law. Harrison states that “all [students] believe they are going to be in the top 10% of their class, and they have this vision of the profession that doesn’t exist. And law schools don’t try to dispel those myths to potential applicants.”
The realities are different. Everyone who gets into law school is intelligent—at least on some level. [I concede that many are idiots on other levels, but that is a discussion for another day.] But over 90% of those who start law school will not finish in the top 10% of their class. The reason that it’s over 90% is that people will quit along the way. For instance, if you start with a class of 200 and 50 quit before graduation, there are 15 people who finish in the top 10%—not 20.
A handful of students starting Mississippi law schools will get a job at a big firm with a starting salary north of $80,000. And some people who don’t measure happiness by the amount of their salary consider the big-firm grads the losers in the class, due to the difficulties in having a balanced happy life in big law. Other grads will be scrambling for jobs making less—sometimes far less. Often these individuals end up bitter because they are not making more money, which means that they are unhappy and do a bad job at work.
At the end of the day, most legal industry jobs end up like most jobs. As in other industries, the profession is filled with people who are unhappy and feel like they are underpaid. But that is not what people expect to happen when they decide to go to law school.
