Banking Law

This post has to do with the law, not banking law, but the practice of law. Specifically, it's about what a shell game the law school racket has become for so many young people who've been sold a bill of goods. A recent article in The New York Times by David Segal very nicely set forth the essence of the scam.

To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.?s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And with corporations scrutinizing their legal expenses as never before, more entry-level legal work is now outsourced to contract temporary employees, both in the United States and in countries like India. It?s common to hear lawyers fret about the sort of tectonic shift that crushed the domestic steel industry decades ago.

But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called ?graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,? law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working ? nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy ? they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

According to a number of sources cited in the article, law schools are basically cooking the books ("Enron-type" one law school professor complains), playing "number-fudging games." Why? For the big bucks law school tuition generates for universities. The fact that kids are going into hock to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars or so doesn't make these paragons of higher learning break a sweat. It's described as "a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics." Guess the professors are trying to catch up with Wall Street bankers in a race to the moral bottom.

The article is long, detailed, and depressing. To me, the bottom line is that for anyone who wants to blow hundreds of thousands of borrowed money that he or she will be hard pressed to ever pay back, he or she would be better off pulling a Charlie Sheen, buying a parade of porn stars and a bushel of blow in Vegas, and letting it all ride on the roulette wheel. At least you'll go out with a smile on your decadent face rather than a sheepskin fit only for seeking the answer to the ultimate question of life in this pie-hole-stuffing culture of excess: "You want fries with that?"