Indiana Wants Me

I've gotten three emails in the past week from people who sounded positively suicidal, so I'm not getting the mordant amusement from this exchange on TLS than I might otherwise be inclined to extract from it.  Under the subject heading "Indiana Tech Law School," someone asks:

Anyone know anything about this school[?] They emailed me a good luck email for the lsat today but, I cant find out anything about them on LSAC, or access the application. Anyone know what GPA/ LSAT's they are looking for?

After a few appropriately cynical responses from the TLS crowd, no less a personage than the dean of this institution makes an appearance:

For those of you who are wondering about Indiana Tech Law School, I am the Founding Dean. Perhaps I can answer some of your questions. We are located in Fort Wayne and we open next August. We are enrolling only 100 students in our Charter Class.

We intend to be a new and different kind of law school, one that intentionally blends theory and practice and one that focuses on ethics from the very start of school.

We will require all students to complete a professionalism course in the first-year curriculum and two ethics courses, one of which will also be taught in the very first year of law school. This is an innovation that sorely needed in legal education although very few law schools offer an ethics course until much later in a law student’s career. We will also require students to perform 30 hours of pro bono volunteer hours, as an additional condition of graduation, to benefit the public and to instill in the students the inherent value in the legal profession helping those members of society who are in need. A wide variety of opportunities will be developed so that students will be able to complete the 30-hour requirement from the very beginning of their law school careers.

In addition to the curricular innovations, we will give students the option to specialize their education by concentrating their upper-level electives in a particular area. Concentrations are much like undergraduate “majors” and, at Indiana Tech, students will be able to receive a notation on their transcripts that they concentrated their studies in one of four areas if they choose: Advocacy/Dispute Resolution, Intellectual Property/Technology Law, Transactional Law, and Global Law and Leadership. In order to complete the requirements to receive a concentration, students must not only enroll in a certain number of hours of coursework, they must also actually practice law either in a law school clinic or in a full-time, 40-hours-per-week “semester-in-practice” internship with a member of the profession whose expertise is in that same area.

In at least half of our courses, and all of our first-year courses, students will also be given opportunities to hone their lawyering skills by engaging in “experiential learning exercises.” Professors will give up some class hours so that a judge or lawyer from our area can take over the class and bring in real life examples of the theory and history that the students will have been studying. The students will write client letters, draft wills, prepare court documents, etc. and the hope is that our graduates will be viewed as more “practice-ready” than other law school grads when they interview for jobs. We firmly believe that the intentional blending of theory and practice skills will make them better professionals.

Regarding GPA and LSAT medians, we don't have any history so we can't set them; however, we would like to open in third place among the five Indiana law schools so that would place our medians at approximately 156 for the LSAT and 3.5 for the GPA. Our tuition is $29,500 per year and we have academic scholarships available.

For more information, please visit our web-site at http://www.indianatech.edu/law or email me at PCAlexander@indianatech.edu.

Peter Alexander
Dean and Professor of Law

Indiana, which contains 2% of the US population, already has four ABA-accredited law schools, including two "top 30" institutions, both of which feature legal unemployment rates for their grads of around 40%, and which are currently placing only 20% to 25% of their graduates in firms of more than ten attorneys.

Chutzpah has been defined as murdering your parents and then pleading for mercy because you're an orphan.  How about setting up another legal diploma mill in a hyper-saturated market, while claiming that what will set your school apart is its emphasis on "ethics" and "professionalism?"

Of course none of this is going to keep the ABA Section of Legal Education from accrediting this absurdity after the requisite site visits and other bureaucratic hoop-jumping. And until something changes nothing is going to stop the school from trolling the internet for victims future lawyers paying customers, who will fund this latest foray into professional school carnival barking via a combination of the generosity of the U.S. taxpayer and their endlessly naive willingness to believe people like Peter Alexander, Dean and Professor of Law.

IBR

LawProf and commenters have noted many downsides of the Income Based Repayment (IBR) program for educational loans. IBR is the only way for many graduates to meet their loan repayments, but the program greatly increases total interest, hampers attempts to secure a mortgage, and burdens graduates for as long as 25 years. (A shorter, 20-year version of IBR may be available soon, but some older loans won't qualify for that reduced term.) Graduates who do not work in public service will also owe income tax on any debt forgiven at the end of the IBR period.

From a public policy perspective, IBR raises other troubling issues. Taxpayers foot the bill for forgiven debt, and those sums may exceed original forecasts. The program further distorts the market for higher education, giving schools the freedom to raise tuition still higher while students take on still more debt.

But there are two other problems with IBR that have received less discussion. The first is a moral issue: IBR has helped change education from an investment that we all make in the future to one that new adults (our future) have to make in themselves. IBR, like several other government programs, represents an enormous shift in economic resources from new workers to middle aged and older ones.

I'm not talking just about the loss in tax money to support higher education. Those losses have hurt, and they have required students to invest more in their own education, but the decline in tax support hasn't fueled the full rise in tuition or student debt. Public law schools are fond of saying things like "state support now accounts for only 25% of our budget, while it used to provide 70%." Those statements are like ones that politicians make: They distort reality by omitting key facts.

Here's a hypothetical to explain the more complicated relationship among tuition, state support, and school budgets: Suppose that a small public law school was operating on $10 million per year in 2000, with $7 million coming from state support. The taxpayers, therefore, paid 70% of the school's budget. Inflation then pushed the school's overall budget to $13.4 million in 2012. Keeping pace with inflation would have required state support to increase to about $9.4 million, but the state increased its support only to $7.5 million. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that's a loss of about 20% in state funding  --a serious concern to the school, but not nearly the drop that "70% to 25%" suggests.

What accounts for the much greater drop in state support as a percentage of the budget? Like most schools, both public and private, this representative school increased its overall budget. Suppose this school hired more faculty and staff, raised faculty salaries, lowered teaching loads, awarded more merit-based scholarships, and did all of the other costly things that schools have done during the last twenty years. As a result, the overall 2012 budget reached $30 million. State funds weren't available for the school's enhancements, so the school engaged in aggressive fund raising (something few public law schools did thirty years ago) and tuition increases. As a result, the school's 2012 budget might be $30 million, and state support might account for only 25% of that budget, but most of the "loss" in state support really stems from the massive new expenditures that the state declined to support.

This brings us back to IBR. Both public and private institutions spend much more today to fulfill the basic functions (teaching, research, and service) that they performed twenty years ago. Some of that money has come from alumni giving back to the institutions they attended. These alumni recognize that the school, previous graduates, and society at large invested in them; they have been willing to "pay that debt forward" by making charitable gifts to their alma maters.

But much of that new money has come from tuition. That's where government-backed loans and IBR come in. Government loans have greatly facilitated the rise in tuition, together with the accompanying expansion of loans for living expenses. Without those loans, many fewer students could have paid our tuition or taken the opportunity to stay out of the full-time workforce for 4-7 years.

Think for a moment where that loan money goes. A lot goes into the pockets of professors and deans; their money flows out again to pay for daycare (if the profs are young) and vacation homes (if the profs are older). That money also buys theater tickets, books, ipads, restaurant meals, and all of the other things that professors like to buy. Another portion of student loan money pays the salaries for new staff at universities. Still other parts of the student loan dollar go to campus bars, pizza delivery services, apartment landlords, textbook sellers, and everyone else who sells to students.

Higher education, in other words, stimulates a lot of economic activity--and that's a good thing. But here's the moral point: We're paying for much of that activity out of the future income of students, not out of current resources. Today's pizza shops, textbook publishers, and professors are all very happy, but they're not being paid by today's economic resources; they're living off students' future income. We're using the future to finance the present, and we're concentrating those future costs on the youngest members of the workforce--those who benefited least from the economic growth of the last sixty years.

This transfer, by the way, occurs within the tax system as well. The pizza sellers, textbook publishers, and professors pay more income and payroll taxes on their higher earnings, but that money doesn't go toward reducing the loan burden on students. Most of the payroll taxes go toward Social Security and Medicare, which benefit older citizens. And the general tax revenues support everything else government does, programs that may benefit students (everyone likes a good highway), but give those younger citizens no special benefit.

IBR extends the life of this intergenerational transfer. An increasing number of students can't pay back, under their original loan terms, the high tuition and other payments we extracted from them. Rather than recognize that the cost was too high--that we paid for current economic activity with the future income of students--we are extending the terms of repayment. That does nothing to ease the moral unfairness of building prosperity for established workers on the future income of new workers. IBR has obscured that unpleasant reality, not only by postponing the day of economic reckoning but by promoting rhetoric that graduates should be responsible, that they have invested in their futures, and that they will benefit eventually from that investment.

Graduates, of course, should be responsible; most of them are. It's also true that they have invested in their futures, which is admirable. And it's likely that some graduates will benefit eventually from their investment--although we know with near certainty that others won't. But those facts don't matter; they were also true for previous generations. The key moral facts are that: (a) universities asked prior generations of students to invest far less of their future income in their education; (b) the economic future for today's graduates is far more uncertain than the future was for last generation's graduates, not only because of changes in the legal market, but because of broader economic weaknesses (for just one example, think Medicare); and (c) we have been funding current prosperity--all of that economic activity you see on and around campuses--with the future income of new workers. That's not fair.

As I'll show in my next post, this is also economically foolish. Student loans and IBR are digging a trench under the U.S. economy. This isn't a bubble like the housing one; it won't burst suddenly. Instead, student loans and IBR are digging a long, horizontal ditch under the future economy; they will depress spending by a key portion of our future wage earners. Stay tuned for IBR: point two.

Wu-less

 Updated

Frank Wu, Chancellor and Dean of UC Hastings Law School, has written a column urging law schools to reduce class size. Dean Wu, admirably, acknowledges that "[o]nly about half of recent graduates       . . . are securing permanent, full-time employment in the legal profession," and "[t]here are simply too many lawyers and too many law students in the United States nowadays." Both excellent points that too many law deans and professors continue to deny.

But in the end, Wu and his colleagues are as clueless as deans and faculty elsewhere. Hastings cut its class size by 20% but, as Paul Caron and LawProf have pointed out, it increased tuition to support the reduction in class size. Tuition and fees for in-state residents jumped 15% in a single year, to $48,806. And that's on top of more than a decade of hefty tuition increases: Just eight years ago, in-state tuition at Hastings was $20,900.   

Update (LP):  Ten years ago annual in-state tuition at Hastings was $11,409. Twenty years ago it was $3,161.  Twenty-five years ago it was $1,222.  Here are these figures in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars:  2004: $25,489; 2002: $14,610; 1992: $5,910; 1987: $2,478.

So what has Hastings accomplished for its graduates and the job market? In 2011, when Hastings graduated 411 JDs, only 238 of them had found full-time work of any kind nine months after graduation.  The other 173 were working part-time on Hastings money (39 grads); working part-time for other employers (43 graduates); obtaining another degree (2 graduates); unemployed and desperately seeking work (74 graduates); unemployed but not seeking (5 graduates); or lost somewhere on the streets of San Francisco (aka "unknown," 10 graduates).

By reducing its entering class to 317, Hastings is avoiding workplace misery for 94 would-have-been students. But reducing class size won't increase jobs. The marketplace seems to support only 238 full-time jobs for Hastings grads. That will leave 79 graduates of the class of 2015--or one quarter of the class--without any full-time work nine months after graduation. And those graduates will have paid significantly more for their un- and underemployment than the 2011 class did.

Speaking of underemployment, lots of those 238 full-time jobs for Hastings graduates were short-term and/or didn't require bar-admission. Only 191 members of the class of 2011 found full-time, "long-term" (lasting for a year or more) jobs that required bar admission. If we apply that figure to the newly admitted, svelte class of 2015, only 60% of them will end up with jobs in the full-time, long-term lawyer category. The other 126--two-fifths of the class--will be just as underemployed as the class of 2011, but with much higher debtloads.

And what about the lucky three-fifths, the ones who may get full-time jobs that require bar admission? Dean Wu is remarkably candid in describing those jobs as "document review and legal research in an environment that is an exquisite combination of the very boring and very stressful." But he doesn't mention the fact that, for many of Hastings' graduates, this boring, stressful environment will carry low wages and few benefits.

Where are Hastings graduates doing their document review and legal research? Not at large law firms: Only 29 graduates of the class of 2011 went to firms of more than 500 lawyers; another 7 went to firms of 251-500 lawyers. That's a total of just 36 BigLaw jobs--enough for 8.8% of the class of 2011 and, potentially, for 11.4% of the slimmed down class of 2015. Prosecutors, public defenders, and small firm lawyers don't do all that much document review or legal research. Dean Wu may be out of touch with what his graduates actually do in the workplace but, if they're doing lots of document review or legal research, I suspect they're doing it for document review companies, research staffing firms, and other out-sourcing companies. 

For this students should pay $46,806 per year? The chance to be unemployed, under-employed, or a contract worker? Class size is a problem, but tuition is an even bigger issue. Hiking tuition to cut class size is like raising taxes on the middle class: the elite (top 10% of the class) keep what they've always had, the poor (bottom of the class) are just as poor, and the middle (most of the class) are paying more for the same bad outcomes.

Denial

A commenter asked yesterday:

Law prof, in your experience are most law faculty evil opportunists, frightened cogs, or just clueless navel gazers? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say:

1. Evil Opportunists: approximately 20%, mostly at the administration level.

2. Frightened Cogs: approximately 10%, these are the faculty who recognize the problem but don't want to rock the boat too much.

3. Clueless Navel Gazers: approximately 98%, I know this double counts, but it approximates my experience in law school.

This generated a bunch of good comments.  It was pointed out that the fact that the large majority of law faculty, and the overwhelming majority of more recent hires, come from a few elite schools, and in particular HYS.  In addition most law faculty these days spent little or (increasingly) no time in the practice of law.

Both these factors naturally make it harder for law faculty to appreciate the depth of the employment crisis faced by their graduates, especially if they teach at any of the 198 ABA law schools not named Yale, Harvard, or Stanford.

Another commenter pointed out that the employment crisis has been around for quite a long time outside the T-14, and that what has changed the most in the last few years is that significant percentages of the classes at even top ten schools are struggling. Indeed I suspect that the HYS/No real practice experience distortion factor is much higher at elite and sub-elite schools, because these faculties in particular are now so dominated by people of this type, and because faculty at these schools are still semi-understandably surprised to discover how many of their students and graduates are getting into dire straits.

By contrast, anybody who teaches outside the top dozen schools or so would have to be willfully blind not to see by this point that a whole lot of the school's recent graduates are having severe difficulties.  But unfortunately a lot of people are quite capable of being willfully blind when it's in their self-interest to be so, and it's certainly in the short-term self-interest of legal academics to close their eyes to the severity of the situation.

Here are what in my view are likely to be the most powerful factors, beyond their own increasingly narrow educational and professional pedigrees, that keep law faculty outside of HYS from understanding the extent of the problem:

(1) The cemetery effect.  Law faculty are far more likely to have contact with successful students and graduates than unsuccessful ones.  This is a powerful source of cognitive distortion: people are very prone to base their reasoning on personal anecdotal experience, especially when doing so bolsters rather than threatens their sense of professional and personal identity.

(2)  Pure wishful thinking.  Law school employment and salary statistics are still vague enough to create endless opportunities for rationalization.  We can pretend that lots of our graduates are getting good non-legal job which their law degrees helped them get. We can pretend that bad outcomes nine months after graduation mean relatively little in the context of -- increasingly fictional -- multi-decade legal careers.  We can and do fail to understand basic statistical concepts such as the difference between correlation and causation, and basic economic concepts such as net present value.

(3) Class bias. This is different from, though obviously related to, narrow academic and professional experiences.  As American society gets more economically and educationally stratified, new law faculty hires tend increasingly to be people from highly privileged backgrounds.  It's inevitable that such people are going to have more difficulty grasping concepts such as "not being able to pay your bills" as anything other than pure abstractions.  This, I believe, is having a real effect on the ability of legal academics, especially younger legal academics, to genuinely understand what it means to have $200,000 in non-dischargeable educational debt, no decent job prospects, and no bail out option in the form of one call to Dad, who could stop it all.


All of which is to say that, while plunging enrollment and declining revenues are slowly doing their work as the most effective forms of reality therapy, it's not surprising that plenty of law faculty remain in various stages of denial.

The tuition's too damn high

An American University law school 3L has pointed me toward the following proposed bit of empire-building:

Given its growing prestige and national reputation, WCL has outgrown its current facility at 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW, where it has been since 1996 (in 195,000 square feet). The instructional spaces are undersized, library areas inadequate, faculty and administrative offices inferior, and student areas undersized and over utilized.  Needing more space to accommodate current programs, the law school has been renting space (16,000 square feet) in three additional locations in the adjacent commercial and retail area.

To fulfill its needs, the proposal seeks approval of a fully integrated law school facility with some 310,000 square feet and parking for approximately 450 vehicles (including 400 below ground).  The project has been designed and configured to support a possible student population of 2,000 and supporting resources for 500 faculty and staff.  Currently, the law school enrolls approximately 1,770 students. 

This text is a year old, so it's possible that in the interim somebody in the university or governmental hierarchy has noticed that two thirds of the school's graduates aren't getting legal jobs, and that the large majority of those who do get such jobs aren't acquiring employment which comes close to paying enough to justify the school's current, and rapidly rising, $70,000 per year cost of attendance (A debt financed law degree from AU will produce a $250,000 loan balance for current students. "And from there it will go up," as Virgil Sollonzo would say).  Update: A commenter points out that as of May the building project was moving into the design phase, with construction expected to begin next summer.  There's a curious lack of publicity regarding all this on the school's current web site.

Note that AU's "growing prestige and national reputation" is likely to be affected negatively by the administration's decision this past admissions season to toss existing admissions standards out the window in order to fill the school's coffers with another $20 million in 1L tuition revenue (the entering class's median LSAT fell from the 86th to the 77th percentile).

Note also the transparent weakness of the justifications for expanding the school's physical plant by more than 50%, while increasing the size of its already far-too large student body:

"Instructional spaces are undersized."   I bet everybody has a chair, and in any case your classrooms would have one third as many students in them if they only featured people who were going to get a job.

"Library areas are inadequate."   Empires rise and fall, continents merge and separate, the great globe itself spins inexorably toward thermodynamic dissolution, but one thing in legal academia never changes: library areas are always inadequate, at least according to law library directors, who are remarkably adept at not noticing that no licensed attorney in the United States has consulted an actual legal book since November 17, 2004.

"Faculty and administrative offices [are] inferior."  For some reason this reminds me of the passage in Anna Karenina where Oblonsky goes on a trip to Moscow to perform what Tolstoy describes as "the most important task a government official can undertake, that is, to remind his superiors of his existence."

"Student areas undersized and  over utilized."   It's costing these soon to be unemployed people $50K per year to enjoy these areas.  How much will more luxurious accommodations cost them?  This is a classic example of how absurdly negative sum -- for students and their families, of course, for faculty and administrators it's working out great -- the amenities arms race in higher education has become.

Paul Caron links to his own two-page summation of the problem in legal education here, of which AU's preposterous expansion proposal is a perfect illustration. (Caron's post also includes a link to a useful list of news stories and blog posts on the law school crisis).

Slaves of DC

“Your great-grandfather was a former governor of this state,” she said.

“Your grandfather was a prosperous land-owner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.”

“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing darkness at least made less dingy.

“You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”

“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.

                  --  Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge --

I was talking to a journalist yesterday about the law school mess, and she mentioned interviewing a couple of people in front of American University's law school, which according to the school's virtual tour of its facilities is in one of DC's more desirable areas:

Located on tree-lined Massachusetts Avenue in the District, WCL is minutes from downtown D.C. yet close to parks, trails, neighborhood restaurants, shopping, and some of the nicest residential neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C. area.

I quoted her the school's graduating class of 2011's appalling employment statistics -- 300 of 467 graduates didn't have a legal job, loosely defined, nine months after graduation -- and described how the average member of that class had around $200,000 in educational debt (officially the class averaged $151,000 in law school debt, but with accrued interest this gets kicked to around $175K, plus undergraduate debt isn't counted in that total).

But of course even those grim numbers are probably fluffed by things like this, sent along to me yesterday by a helpful reader:

District of Columbia Court of Appeals

Senior Judicial Internship Description

                      Judge Blackburne-Rigsby sits on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. 

Congress established the District of Columbia Court of Appeals as the highest court of the District of Columbia in 1970, and the court is the equivalent of a state supreme court.

            As the highest court for the District of Columbia, the Court of Appeals is authorized to review all final orders, judgments, and specified interlocutory orders of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.  To learn more about the Court of Appeals, please visit:

http://www.dcappeals.gov/dccourts/appeals/index.jsp

            The Judicial internship provides an excellent opportunity to learn first-hand about the court, and hone your legal writing and research skills.  Judge Blackburne-Rigsby has two full-time Judicial Law Clerks, with whom the senior judicial intern will work closely.  The intern’s major responsibilities will be divided between substantive legal research and writing at the appellate level and record review.  Please note that this is a non-paid position.  The start date will be mid October 2012.

Qualifications:             Recent graduate with excellent legal research and writing skills as well as the ability to multi-task.

Time Commitment:     Must be available to work a minimum of 30 hours per week.

Interested graduates should send a cover letter, resume, transcript, writing sample and references to:

LaVerne Atiba

Judicial Administrative Assistant to

The Honorable Anna Blackburne-Rigsby

District of Columbia Court of Appeals

430 E Street, N.W., Suite 208

Washington, D.C. 20001

Phone: 202-879-2731

Email:  Latiba@dcappeals.gov

 

I would very much like to know how The Honorable Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, who is already provided by the District of Columbia with two full-time assistants who perform most if not all of the less pleasant tasks associated with her sinecure, believes it's honorable to take advantage of the desperation of new law school graduates in this fashion.

Does it occur to her Honor that this sort of thing just creates one more barrier to entry to the legal profession to everyone but the children of privilege?  Most people, after all, can't afford to work for free while plugging a resume gap with a phony "judicial clerkship" that is likely to swell the employment stats collected by some lucky law school's office of career services (what do you want to bet that this "internship" ends up getting counted as a full-time "long-term" position requiring bar admission?).

At least if a Georgetown or GW grad snaps it up, he or she will get kicked $15 per hour from the school. American, despite its enormous class and its $50,149 annual tuition, is apparently sufficiently penurious that it could only afford to pay for "part-time short-term" positions for 21 of the 27 of its 2011 graduates it was employing in February of this year.  Thus a 2012 graduate of the school is consequently less likely to provide Judge Blackburne-Rigsby with a year's worth of free labor than is an unemployed alum of one of the school's more prosperous legal academic neighbors.

McJobs

Hi Professor,

I have been reading your blog since it's inception.  Thank you so much for shedding light on this terrible situation which is ruining lives of so many of our brightest, best, and most ambitious.  Honestly, morbid as this sounds, I cannot believe that more people aren't jumping off of buildings.  I think the only thing allowing many whose lives have been ruined from doing so is their own cognitive dissonance about their situation, which I will explain further below and will tie into the title of this email.  First, a little bit about me...

I am a 2008 graduate of [middling public law school], middle of the pack class rank, who wound up with a job in a 2 person firm in smallish town/city (population about 150k) salary in the 35-50 k range.  My lower than average debt load from a public school, coupled with a low COL, has allowed me to service my loans as well as contribute a modest amount to retirement savings.  So, all things considered, I feel extremely fortunate about my situation.  Knock on wood, I will make it out of this and be okay while so many others will be ruined for life.  Although your blog mainly focuses on Biglaw, a majority of the students who actually get jobs as lawyers get jobs like mine. And it finally dawned on me what these jobs really are:

Most people enter the law with the idea of law as a career.  And, to most people, a career means this:  start out entry level, gain skill sets, get promoted with proportional increase in pay, broaden skill sets.  Repeat.  This is how the corporate world works, and almost every other vocation works, even the trades (start out as an apprentice, learn trade, become tradesmen, move up to foreman, etc.).  Although I have no first hand experience, this appears to be the track in BigLaw as well, assuming you can hang on and notwithstanding the up or out nature of the business.

So, what about these small 2-10 attorney jobs that pay in the 35-50k range?  Recent grads understand how to the job market is and many are grateful just to have paid legal employment.  However, suffice it to say that many graduates had higher aspirations and had to settle for these jobs, and the pay is nowhere near what was expected or what it needs to be for a graduate to service their loans.  In fact, these salaries only provide enough income to pay rent and utilities, eat, put gas in the car, make your minimum student loan payments, and have a few dollars left over for beer money/fun.  Basically, holders of these jobs are treading water.

And I think that recent grads, aware of the bad legal job market, are content to tread water at this point because they see law as a career.  The belief is that the legal job market is bad, and that these jobs are a "foot in the door" and a way to "gain experience" to move on to bigger and better opportunities.  Basically, they see these as entry level jobs as described above, and believe that, once the appropriate amount of experience is gained, greater opportunities will open up with appropriate increases in pay, etc., like in the corporate world.  If the small law associate can just tread water for a few years and get over the entry level hump, eventually they will move up and  have the income to pay down their loans, purchase a home, begin saving for retirement, and overall living the middle class lifestyle they envisioned.

That may have been true in the past, and it will probably still hold true for a few graduates.  After all, someone has to become judges, state's attorney, the (fill in the blank type of small law) king of a particular community.  But, for the majority of small law associates, the experience in their small law area of practice just means that they have a skill set in that small law area of practice.  Your 3 years experience as a consumer bk attorney is not going to give you a leg up when a mid-sized commercial litigation firm is hiring.  If you are currently making 40-50k litigating custody battles and baby daddy cases, and have your Friday afternoons blocked off for collection calls to beg these people for money, if we fast forward 10 years, guess what you will still be doing?  And guess how much that service will be worth to potential employers?

From www.wikipedia.com :

McJob is slang for a low-paying, low-prestige dead end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement

Unfortunately, there is no pot of middle class lifestyle at the end of the small law rainbow for the vast majority of associates. 

Law school is a scam, and I am (thankfully) on my way out of this "career".

 From the TLS employment forum, Sept 22 (emphasis added):

I feel really sad writing this... but I've been trying to find "real" legal work for a long time now, and have turned to applying for document review positions, and am not getting any responses there. My resume isn't that bad (graduated top 1/3 from a T30, with exec position on LR), so I am not sure if I am not going about getting contract/temp work the right way? Should I be calling to follow up after sending in my resume, or just waiting until they get in touch with me?

Does anyone have any experience getting doc review work, and how can I get an interview with a doc review company? I need cash to start paying off my nearly $150K in loans in about two months here, and to pay rent, and to eat...

I don't know how things ended up this way. I didn't realize until spring of 2L that the legal market was as unhealthy as it was. I have only gotten one interview this entire last year. I'm tired of sitting at home; I just want to be doing something legal, so I don't feel like such a waste of space, even if it involves running doc review software 40 hours a week. At least I'm touching a case that way, and making some money.

Any advice on how to obtain such work would really be appreciated. I'm at wit's end, and don't know what to do from here.

 Updated last night:

OP Update - Got an interview with a small firm in Dallas. They said that "if the work is there," then I will have a job! It's far from an offer, but it feels really, really good to know that someone out there saw my resume, thought it was decent enough to want to speak with me, and liked me enough to tell me that I could work for them if they have enough work. I'm just going to hope and hope that this firm somehow has enough work. Expecting a final decision from them in the next week or two!

In the meantime, I did join the local bar association, and recently spoke with someone who was at a doc review agency here about a year ago, so I may have a way to get my resume looked at there now.

Thanks everyone for the advice!