The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial.
Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive).
It's no surprise to me that law school grads are out of work these days.
I interned in a law firm my entire senior year and now hold a BA with majors in Government and Philosophy. These experiences would leave me well primed to go to law school which was my original intention after graduation. After spending time in the firm however it is really eye opening to see how the business is rapidly changing. There is an over supply of young lawyers these days for a number of reason.
First, there are too many low quality law schools churning out people who can barely pass the bar. Those schools take home the tuition money and the young graduates have a mountain of non-dischargable debt with nowhere to turn. The rate of unemployed young graduates is actually probably even higher than figures show because schools will pay a small stipend to recent graduates so that they can say they are "employed" when the yearly figures for former students employed 6mo out are released. It's all about taking home the tuition for these schools and they shamefully advertise how demand for lawyers will increase and job prospects will remain high.
Second, the business has become vastly more efficient as firms begin to adopt digital case management systems and can now conduct research online instead of having to sort through volumes of old books. You know when you see the generic shelves of law books in offices? Yeah those just sit there collecting dust now. They are for show because all of that information has now moved onto the computer. The legal industry has been slow and late to adopt technology but it has made lawyers vastly more efficient than they could have been before. Even things like being able to email scans of documents can speed up the process astronomically. As older lawyers who cannot use computers begin to exit the workforce and younger ones who can move up in the ranks, firms just do not need as many people working as they did before. The vast majority of legal work is not what you see on TV or in the Ellen Pao case where it is a battle of the brains in real time for a court room. It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.
A lot of this stuff can even be done at home by your average person with products like turbo tax that enable the average person to not need representation for basic needs legal needs anymore.
I no longer plan on going to law school and have been taking online courses in programming/reading a ton of programming books since I graduated in hopes of turning what has been a long term hobby of mine into a career, hopefully combined with politics or law. (I am thinking campaign research/advertising online or legal software on the law side.)
> It is mundane routine paperwork that can be automated or done by assistants.
In my experience, this is 100% true. I spent a few years working in "legal technology", which is just industry parlance for categorizing documents into "databases" (really just proprietary applications that compete over how best to read data from a flat file).
At the time (2009 - 2011), a ton of work was being done by teams of contract review attorneys. Entire rooms would be filled to the brim with these guys, paid anywhere between $20-$40 an hour to tab through page after page of document metadata and images.
The entire industry was on the verge of being completely upended, and this is in fact starting to have effect. The article on topic modelling and LDA that's also on the front page today is particularly germane, as there are in fact implementations of topic modelling and LDA for the legal technology world.
This is my experience as well. If you look at just the "e-Discovery" product space, corporations are saving literally millions of dollars by implementing digital tools instead of retaining outside council to trawl through files looking for discoverable data. This alone is costing a lot of lawyers and paralegals their jobs.
Yeah, doc review attorneys, who hardly make $30 per hr in Manhattan, but are subcontracted to a big law firm, which charges its client $350 per hour. Now clients have realized it, and started to offshore doc review work.
I have degrees in software and law (non US), and while I did the law degree for fun on the side, I thought for a long time there would be a profitable niche on the crossroads of the two. Turns out there isn't though - the combination is so rare that there are no jobs there, all is set up to work with multiple people. Even in patent work I'd make less than in the very specialized software consulting niche I work in now.
I've always suspected it was an artifact of the legal infrastructure failing to scale with demand. This chokes the courts and forces disputes to be settled outside of it (perhaps with a minimal final-stage "blessing" from a judge).
The "demand" (number of disputes) increases with the number of interactions, which is roughly the square of the number of people (each pair is another potential dispute). So if
- population is increasing, and
- supply (courts and lawyers) does not increase as fast as the square, and
- legal technology does not increase output per person[1],
then the backlog steadily increases and people have to work around it.
[1] Many economists insist that law inherently experiences Baumol's cost disease of resistance to technological improvements due to high human component of output, but I think that's more an artifact of the constrains we place on courts.
> The "demand" (number of disputes) increases with the number of interactions, which is roughly the square of the number of people (each pair is another potential dispute).
It wouldn't actually be a square of the population. There's a fairly low number of interactions a single person can have in a day. Plus most disputes that I can have with a person I don't know are criminal instead of civil.
Criminal or civil wouldn't matter; both require use of legal infrastructure, though criminal trials are even harder to "opt out of", which makes the process even more choked. (Lock you up for a year just in case you're guilty...)
And you have potential interactions with anyone within a given jurisdiction, the same one over which the infrastructure exists. Sure, you don't interact with them all, but you interact with a fraction of them, so the scaling properties are the same.
The profession was much more of a bloodsport. Less cases settled, far less went to arbitration, and more money was spent when a case did go to trial.
Nowadays the culture has shifted almost completely to keeping costs down and settling things outside of court -- either settling outright or through a mediated arbitration (much less expensive).
It's no surprise to me that law school grads are out of work these days.