Law Students

Help Wanted

By Andrea

The recession's hitting the legal market as hard as any other sector, and from inside my organization, I'm seeing it in all different ways. Our 3L interns looking for public interest jobs still haven't found any. Our former intern who had a large law firm gig got her start date pushed back. My office mate, who was on a one-year fellowship and scheduled to start at a big firm in the fall, also had her start date pushed back and is looking for an international NGO placement for a year. Large firms who are deferring incoming associates in droves started calling our executive director trying to send us people on one-year placements since they don't have work for them.

Mostly, though, we're flooded with volunteers. We always had a stream of law student resumes, but now we get them from unemployed law grads and a few recently fired lawyers. 2Ls who thought they'd be at firms but didn't get a job are now back looking for summer public interest work. And recently, we acquired our first refugee who was fired from a big, prestigious firm and wants to help us while looking for new work. I'm partly supervising someone with several years more legal experience and who probably made five times what I do right now. It's not weird on an interpersonal level, but it's weird when I think how certain it seemed during law school that biglaw jobs were the golden ring and guaranteed you stability and fortune.

Of course, nonprofits are losing people, too - just not ours, because we're so small the core staff are all essential and the rest of us luckily brought our own funding with us. Less in grants and donations and more unemployed volunteers - welcome to the world of nonprofits during a recession. We'll make it work.

No guarantees for anyone, it seems. I remember my 1L year when I was working on the newspaper and we wrote about biglaw firms raising the entry-level base salary from $125,000 to $140,000...and then the very next year, raising again to $160,000. And anyone at Harvard, even if they had below-average grades and were kind of jerky, could get one of those jobs, pretty much entirely on the strength of the name on our transcripts. And I definitely thought, along with plenty of other people, well, that doesn't seem sustainable. But I didn't really think people I went to school with would be getting laid off or pushed into deferrals that smell like possible layoffs yet to come. I would NOT want to be working in law school career services right now.

I'm happy to have the help of the volunteers, since it's going to be a busy summer and my caseload's nut right now. But it's unfortunate to think about the reasons there's such a line at our door right now.

Full post as published by Peanut Butter Burrito on April 13, 2009 (boomark / email).