The US legal job market still sucks
The Wall Street Journal reports on just how shit the legal job market is for grads in the US. Still.
The situation is so bleak that some students and industry experts are rethinking the value of a law degree, long considered a ticket to financial security. If students performed well, particularly at top-tier law schools, they could count on jobs at corporate firms where annual pay starts as high as $160,000 …
Students take on average law-school debt of about $100,000 and, given the job market, many “have no foreseeable way to pay that back,” he said.
Thomas Reddy, a second-year student at Brooklyn Law School, hasn’t landed a summer internship yet after sending resumes to more than 50 law firms. He is taking on about $70,000 of debt each year of the three-year program to earn his degree, but said he may be fortunate to make $80,000 a year in a lawyer job after graduating. “That is less than what I was making before I went to law school,” he said.
Ouch. The market was terrible last year when I was in school, but it doesn’t seem to have improved this year. It turns out that getting a law degree in the US can be a terrible investment. If you don’t get a job, it’s not even something you can sell. JDs from schools in the lower tiers are comparable in cost to T-14 JDs, yet the probability of employment at graduation is substantially less. Is it really worth it?
7:32pm 
