If you thought becoming a lawyer was an instant ticket to a great paying career, you might want to take a second look. From college to law school to the bar, things have changed. Mostly due to the economic windstorm that has overtaken the country, but many of the Long Island Lawyers we spoke with have different opinion about what the new job outlook is all about.
If you ever saw law school as being right up there with medical school for how tough it could be there to perform well, there’s reason to take a second look at it. For every student at any of a dozen highly regarded universities, NYU, Loyola, Georgetown and many others, law school GPA levels have been rising across the board by a third of a point over the last two years. That’s for every single student, and not just the ones who are suddenly working harder. These law schools have forever been ferociously tightfisted about the grades they give; why would they suddenly want to loosen up? It’s just that they recognize that graduates live in a somewhat different economic environment now. Getting a job isn’t easy these days and the smallest differences in proof of performance can spell the difference between a job as a respectable lawyer, and one as a coffee-getting research assistant.
At one time, a law degree practically guaranteed you excellent well-paid employment – even when there were tens of thousands of lawyers joining the ranks each year fresh out of law school. These days, all that the law schools are able to guarantee is a bunch of complaints from their former students – complaints that the skills that they paid $150,000 to learn, are worthless in today’s job market, and they need to labor at low-paying jobs to pay off their student loan debts. These days, campus interviews at some law schools are being called earlier than ever – in August, for instance; they just want to make sure that their students get a foot in the door before all the good jobs are taken in the regular interviews, come fall. The bumped-up law school GPA schools are giving out to all their students is just one more little tricks they have, trying to help their graduates get somewhere in life.
Apart from the bumped-up law school GPA, these universities are getting extra creative with their strategies to help their students in other ways too. At Duke University, the law school pays each student a monthly stipend to accept free internships at NGOs. Other universities like the Goodman School of Law will actually bribe commercial law firms to give their students a chance.
Students who have really competent grades but who are not law school GPA superstars have few other choices. The typical payment made to a commercial law firm to try on a law graduate ranges at about $5000. For that kind of money, they’ll give students a chance for about three months. It’s a great way to show some experience on your resume, and it’s pretty safe for the law firm too.
It isn’t just the non-Ivy League colleges that face this kind of pressure either. At Harvard, Stanford and Yale, they’ve eliminated the ABC grading system altogether. You just get a kind of Pass/Fail grading as a student; and at an employment interview, you get a pretty good shot, for not having the millstone of an average law school GPA around your neck. When an employer can’t get a real law school GPA to look at, he’ll go and look for other clues to a potential employee’s competence – debate honors, law school journal credits and so on. It all comes down to some way to judge an interview subject’s record. And it’s turned into a delicate dance – the law schools and law firms trying to outwit one another.
