Legal News

Don?t Want to Deal With the Recession? Go to Law School!

By Ashby Jones

UCLA or Virginia Commonwealth? LSU or Butler? Oklahoma State or Tennessee? We know that these are the pressing questions of the morning, LB readers. But once you’re done filling out your brackets (we’ll help speed you through it: UCLA, Butler, OSU; Duke and Memphis in the finals), let us give you another ponderable to chew on. Why, with law firms dumping bodies by the hundreds, are law-school applications through the roof?

It’s a question tackled today by the WSJ’s Nathan Koppel. He frames the issue this way:

The job market for lawyers, hit hard by the recession, seems to reach new lows every day. But that has not done much to discourage the thousands who are lining up to become the next generation of attorneys.

In seeming defiance of logic, many law schools are surging in popularity. At Washington and Lee University in Virginia, for example, law-school applications are up 29% this year over 2008, while Yale Law School and the University of Texas School of Law both enjoyed an 8% increase in applications.

The bottom line: college grads are taking refuge from the economy by going back to school, hoping that the job market will kick back up by the time they graduate.

That’s not a sure thing, though. “Law school is not as safe a bet” as it once was, says William Henderson, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, where applications so far are up 8%.

Some large corporate firms may never rebound to their prior size, due partly to contraction in the investment-banking industry, says Henderson. “There are very few schools that can guarantee students that they’ll find a high-paying corporate job,” he says. Those considering law school who don’t consider law a calling, he adds, need to ask: “Is it really worth going $120,000 or $140,000 more into debt?”

Still, law school may be a decent place to hide out. Going forward, say some school administrators, lawyers, they say, will play a central role in navigating a variety of issues, such as the use of natural resources, cross-border trade and government stimulus spending, which likely will play a central role in the economy for years to come.

“As compared to other graduate programs, [law school] is more analytically rigorous and touches more areas of society,” says Paul Berman, dean of Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, where applications this year are down.

For those hellbent on the paper chase, Koppel provides a couple nuggets of advice: try hard to go to an elite school. Once you’re there, focus on a specialty well-poised for growth, like intellectual-property.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).