Senior partners are laid off, associates are overworked and underpaid, and law students are graduating with $100,000 in debt, on average.
That’s the grim reality of the legal market in the United States, where 1.5 million people have a JD and only 64 percent of law graduates find legal employment.
And according to a feature by The New Republic, the nation’s top 150 to 250 firms are not exempt from the struggling legal market. In fact, as businesses of all types cut costs any way they can, white shoe firms are losing money just like their smaller counterparts.
While legal software and the wonky economy are somewhat at fault, writer Noam Scheiber blames the highrollers. “The biggest problem is that there are simply many, many more high-priced lawyers today than there is high-priced legal work,” he writes.
As a result, partners at the same firms have been hoarding work and stealing clients from their colleagues and associates just to keep busy. The shortage of high-priced legal work has turned an already competitive career into a free-for-all, and the future doesn’t look any brighter. One theory suggests that the current business model will only be able to sustain 20 to 25 Big Law firms over the next decade or so.
“In fact, the more you talk to partners and associates at major law firms these days, the more it feels like some grand psychological experiment involving rats in a cage with too few crumbs.”
Although the vast majority of lawyers in the United States don’t work in Big Law, an article in The Atlantic explains how the demise of the top firms affects the rest of the legal market. While these firms only employ about one percent of all lawyers in the country, “the top 50 law firms by revenue were responsible for almost 23 percent of the industry’s job growth between 1997 and 2002.” As Big Law firms cut back, the number of law grads that find jobs decreases every year.
Want to read more? Click here for The New Republic, and here for The Atlantic.
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