The Red Velvet Lawyer

The Bell Curve  and  The Spike First, forgive the look of this blog posting.  I have reproduced the chart from the NALP website , and this blogging platform makes me keep the original formatting (in this instance). Now, I saw this chart for the first time at the conference of the Midwest Association of Pre-Law Advisors (MAPLA).  LSAC General Counsel, Joan Van Tol, included it in her slides along with data on applications to law school.  She explained that the chart showed two salary patterns.  The bell curve on the left hand side of the chart shows the starting salary for most (reportng) law school graduates 9-months after graduation.  Most of the jobs held by new grads pay $40,000 to $65,000.   The second pattern appears on the right side of the chart and reflects starting salaries of graduates who land jobs with BigLaw.  Van Toll called this part of the chart "the spike."  The spike moved away from the bell curve during the dot.com era

Law School Success Stories Elie Mystal, of Above the Law , which I would characterize as one of the leading "scambloggers,"  made a posting  yesterday entitled:   The Lack of Law School Transparency Claims Another Victim . Here is the lead in paragraph: Some guy on Twitter was complaining that Above the Law focuses too much on the negative side of going to law school. Apparently this person mistakes us for a law school admissions office — people who ignore facts when they don’t fit their happy-clappy narrative. We do bring you some law school success stories when we hear of good ones. Do you know why those stories are “news”? Because law schools are so effective at leading people down a path of career frustration and financial ruin that when somebody beats the odds, it’s mildly noteworthy. This blog tends to focus on graduates from top-ranked schools who had expected to join BigLaw. They routinely paid $40,000-$50,000 per year in tuition at the top school

Who Should Go to Law School Today? At the MAPLA conference in late October, which I have covered in several postings , Washington University School of Law Dean Kent Syverud described three things: Who should go to law school today; Who should not go to law school today; and Which school a student should pick.  Who Should go to Law School Today? You should still go to law school, despite the debt-to-annual income ratio , if you: Care passionately about obtaining the skills needed to change the world; Will make sacrifices to earn the J.D. degree; Will be astute at figuring out how to get an affordable education; Will be flexible and adaptable to the changing career landscape; and,  Will be adaptable to obtaining new skills as that landscape changes. Who Should not Go to Law School Today? Dean Syverud also advised that you should not go to law school if: You don't know what else to do; It only helps college or university care

I've enjoyed the blog-based debate about the new report -- The Economic Value of a Law Degree -- which I summarized here .  Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre, its authors, have explained their methodology, which to my untrained eye, appears robust.  They have successfully responded over the last several weeks to the points made by Brian Tamanaha, author of Failing Law Schools . Simkovic's last blog post appears  here .  It goes into further detail about the methodology used to compare the two populations -- first, law school grads and second, bachelor degree earners most like law school grads. I am curious why this report has generated this type of debate.  Are we so accustomed to hearing bad news about law school that some good news seems automatically suspect?  Have the scambloggers so occupied the field for so long that we cannot easily make a shift in how we view the value of a law degree in today's market? Yes, getting a legal education continues to be a hug

This past week, a number of news outlets and bloggers reported on a new economic analysis of the value of a law degree.  The authors make a persuasive, well-researched argument that a law degree confers measurable life-time advantages on law graduates compared to persons who get only a bachelor’s degree. The report:  Micahel Simkovic and Frank McIntyre, The Economic Value of a Law Degree (unpublished manuscript 2013) is found here .     Simkovic, an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, and McIntyre, an Associate Professor of Finance and Economic at Rutgers Business School answered the following questions:  Does a law degree typically increase the earnings of law graduates compared to what such individuals would likely have earned with only a bachelor’s degree? How does the law school earnings premium vary by gender and at different points in the distribution of outcomes? How much of the increase in earnings is higher hourly wages, and how

Yesterday, I posted about the supply and demand for legal services some time in the future as more Baby Boomers retire.  Today, I want to explore the supply-demand gap existing today. Just recently, the ABA released data on employment rates for law school grads nine months after graduation for all ABA-approved law schools.  On average, for 2012 grads, 56.2 percent of grads found long-term, full-time positions that required bar passage.  These jobs include solo practitioners, law firm positions, business and industry positions, government jobs, public interest jobs, clerkships, and jobs in legal education. In 2011, fewer grads found that type of employment -- just 54.9 percent.  Grads who reported they still sought employment increased a bit from 9.2 percent in 2011 to 10.6 percent in 2012.  ABA 2012 Law Graduate Employment Data -- All Schools This measure of employment success is narrow, but admittedly reflects the aspirations of most students seeking a law degree.  It does not