How many jobs?

I posted earlier this week about the Bureau of Labor Statistics' sobering job projections for lawyers. You can find those posts here and here. Let's look now at the employment situation from the other side: The jobs actually found by graduating JDs in recent years.

NALP gathers information each year about the jobs law graduates take. The statistics are woefully inadequate with respect to salaries, but they offer a fairly good snapshot of jobs actually taken. LawProf has been over much of this ground before, but I thought it was worth revisiting in light of the BLS projections and other pessimistic news about the labor market. During the last 10 years, here are the number of law graduates from NALP-member schools who found jobs requiring bar admission by nine months after graduation:

Year	Jobs Requiring Bar Admission
2002	26,564
2003	26,387
2004	26,939
2005	28,932
2006	30,273
2007	31,086
2008	30,334
2009	28,901
2010	28,167
2011	27,224

The number of lawyer jobs that JDs found within nine months of graduation, it seems to me, is a pretty good measure of the number of jobs available to them. There seems to be no crisis of entry-level legal jobs searching desperately for workers; even the unpaid "work experiences" have takers.

The table shows that the number of lawyer openings--those in jobs requiring bar admission--dipped slightly in 2003 after the last recession. The numbers then increased modestly each year through 2007. These were not dramatic gains: The gain from 2003 through 2004 was only 2.1%. The following year, 2005, displayed the highest percentage gain in openings: There were 7.4% more openings for entry-level lawyers that year than the year before. Growth fell in 2006 to 4.6%; and in 2007, to 2.7%. 2007 represented the high-water mark for entry-level openings, but growth in the market had already slowed.

After 2007, the figures are stark: The number of JDs obtaining bar-admission-required jobs drops each year. The number of entry-level openings for lawyers, in other words, has been declining steadily for the last four years--despite the end of the recession, despite the economic stimulus, despite the best efforts of law schools.

But, as usual, the news gets worse--for at least three reasons.

First, at the same time that the number of "bar admission" jobs has been declining, the number of part-time jobs in that category has been increasing. In 2007, only 793 of the 31,086 bar-admission jobs were part time. That's a measly 2.6%. As this table shows, the number of part-time jobs in the bar-admission category has grown each year since 2007.

Year	Jobs Requiring Bar Admission	Full-Time Bar Admission Jobs	Part-Time Bar Admission Jobs
2007	31,086	29,978	793
2008	30,334	28,890	1,149
2009	28,901	26,625	1,845
2010	28,167	25,654	1,958
2011	27,224	24,902	2,182

By 2011, part-time jobs accounted for 8.0% of the entry-level jobs requiring bar admission. If we look just at full-time jobs requiring bar admission, those have fallen from a high of 29,978 in 2007 to 24,902 in 2011--a drop of 16.9%.

Second, the number of schools providing information to NALP has grown since 2007. Columbia Law School, for example, did not provide job data to NALP until 2010. The NALP statistics for 2007-2009, therefore, lack any jobs secured by Columbia graduates--as well as jobs secured by other schools that did not participate in NALP at the time. The figures for 2007-2009, therefore, understate the number of jobs obtained by JD graduates in those years.

Today, every ABA-accredited school belongs to NALP. With increased public focus on the job market, moreover, schools have become extra vigilant in tracking all of their graduates. The jobs reported for 2011, therefore, almost certainly offer a more complete tally of lawyering jobs than those for 2007. The addition of Columbia and a few other schools to NALP, along with more diligent reporting, masks part of the job decline from 2007 through 2011: If reporting had been as full in 2007 as it was in 2011, the 2007 peak would have been higher and the percentage decline greater.

Finally, the above figures do not reflect the changing nature of bar-admission-required jobs. We know that more of these jobs are with small firms than large ones. We also know that firms have expanded their use of staff attorneys, contract attorneys, and document reviewers--some at back office facilities in low-cost cities. I'll explore those trends further in another post. For now, note that all of these jobs require bar admission, and count in the numbers given above.

Bottom Line: The number of entry-level job openings for lawyers (i.e., positions that require bar admission) has been declining for the last four years, with a reduction of at least 16.9% since 2007. The nature of those jobs has also shifted, with more becoming part-time, limited term, and/or with restricted advancement opportunities. This is a job market undergoing profoundly negative change.

If there is any hope of weathering this storm, law schools have to look out the window and see the rain. It's time for law schools to face up to the facts of the legal job market; we're already several years behind. Denial has harmed our recent graduates and current students. It is also robbing us of any chance to find paths out of the storm. I don't know if those paths exist--or how helpful they might be--but we surely won't find them by issuing temporary umbrellas to our graduates or waiting for the front to pass on its own.

Note: A few commenters have asked whether I am circulating these statistics to other audiences. I am--and hope to do more of that. I plan to combine these posts into a brief report aimed at law professors, pre-law advisors, and others. Or maybe LawProf and I can collaborate on a series of reports. Meanwhile, the ongoing feedback here is very helpful (not to mention engaging!). Thanks for all of that, djm