Law, Meet Malthus

Dan Slater, who had done a killer job at the Wall Street Journal Law Blog after taking over for Peter Latman and before being disappeared, has re-emerged at the New York Times in this scathing blast at the legal profession.  The thrust is clear: We’re churning out way too many lawyers.


As firms begin an industrywide overhaul, which has entailed slashing jobs and reconsidering hidebound inefficiencies like the lockstep salary, students will compete for half as many $160,000-a-year jobs this year as they did last. According to the National Association for Legal Career Professionals, the 2008 recruiting season marked “what is likely to be the beginning of a weaker legal employment market that may last for a number of years.”

Meanwhile, as job opportunities abate, law school matriculation rates rise unchecked. Each year, the number of students who enroll at one of 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association inches closer to 50,000.

No one, but no one, seem to either care or take responsibility that we are drowning in lawyers.  The law schools won’t voluntarily cut their numbers, particularly since students are profit centers to cover the cost of scholarship, the dirty little secret of the Academy.  Little Johnny’s big tuition bill has nothing to do with the cost, or value, of his legal education, but subsidizing the cost of professors busily writing articles and books to attain tenure or prove they’re the next Cardozo.

The ABA, charged with validating the worthiness of law schools, continues to put its imprimatur on buildings with cancerous libraries without limit.


The American Bar Association, which continues to approve law schools with impunity and with no end in sight, bears complicity in creating this mess. Yet a spokeswoman, citing antitrust concerns, says the A.B.A. takes no position on the optimal number of lawyers or law schools.
So the numbers go up, up, up, with no end in sight.  Schools won’t do it.  The ABA won’t do it.  And who wants to tell Mom that her baby is butt ugly, or that her apple pie tastes just awful.  After all, we’re talking about education, the soul of the American dream.  There is no greater promise promoted than that an education assures us of a bright future, a successful future, a winning future.  Who doesn’t want to be a winner, or for their children to be winners? 

Sadly, it’s a lie.  The promise of hard work and a guaranteed job starting at $160,000 is an anachronism.  Besides, the work is miserable and you won’t have time to wheel around in the Ferrari anyway, since you will be spending every waking hour in the library, or holding some arrogant partner’s briefcase, or fetching a mocha frapucino (Grande, Vente is for losers).

But more importantly, we can’t use you.  Supply and demand is still a viable concept, and we are way oversupplied.  It’s had some nasty effects on both the profession and society, and it’s time to stop making excuses for it and start recognizing it, and the problems it has caused. 

Sure, we’ve produced a generation of Slackoisie carrying a boatload of debt, barely capable of practicing law and complaining bitterly that the profession needs to change its evil ways to make their lives funner. But they had a choice in the matter.  They could have studied math or science, rather than philosophy, political science or dead romance languages, and found themselves a useful career.  That they couldn’t stand the sight of blood isn’t a justification for allowing anybody who breathed admission to law school.

In fairness, I am sympathetic that no one explained to you what the law is, or what lawyers do, before you took the LSATs, giving you the opportunity to run away before making the biggest mistake of your life.  The law is not for sensitive poets, or quick buck artists, or people who want to make happy hour.  Every day.  The law is a profession.  Well. it was once a profession.  

Lawyers carry an enormous responsibility.  We have these thingies called “clients”, who are real people or businesses that expect us to be honorable, fair, reliable.  These real people or businesses rely on lawyers to perform this thingy called work, and to do so on their behalf, expecting us to be diligent and careful, to appreciate that their existence and lives and livelihood depends to some extent on our performing that work thingy they expect of us.  Even when they aren’t sitting in front of us, they expect us to hold their interests dear and to labor on their behalf, with their interests coming before our own.  These are the duties of a professional. 

But when there are either too many lawyers running around, or too many lawyers culled from people poorly suited to handling the responsibility of a lawyer, a mess ensues.  Lawyers start taking on cases that lack merit, in the off chance that they can glom some quick money out of it.  Lawyers start raiding the escrow fund to keep up appearances because the phone hasn’t rung in a while.  Lawyers make promises they can’t keep to separate a client from his money, lest anyone with cash in his pocket walk out the door.

This was once an honorable profession.   There was an appreciation of the trust that people, businesses, society placed in our hands.  We served others because that was our responsibility, our duty.  Sure, there were always some bad apples in the bunch, but the vast majority of lawyers conducted themselves with the utmost integrity because it meant something to be a professional, to be handed the keys to the candy store knowing that we could be trusted not to eat any more than we deserved.  It was a matter of personal honor.

Today, lawyers sneer at honor, as if it’s some relic that only old men still talk about.  The law has changed into a business driven by self-promotion and self-deceit, where we rationalize scamming and spamming as necessary in this dog eat dog environment.  Lawyers have no choice, they say, but to wrestle in the gutter to pay off those student loans, to pay the lease on the BMW, to make feed the kids, to make mommy proud.  No one wants to be the lawyer who starves, and so they do whatever they have to do to survive.

Supply and demand.  Had supply been not been cancerous, demand would be more than adequate to assure that everyone worthy of the title lawyer was well cared for.  There would be no need for a cottage industry of legal marketers, pigs in lipstick urging us to ignore the slimy feelings and get into the selling game, like new, improved laundry detergent.  I’ve been told many times that this is how the game is played today, both by the buyers and sellers of iniquity, assuaging their conscience for disgracing their profession.  Spare me.

Our failure to mind our own profession has raised Malthus from the dead.  There are dead bodies lying outside the offices of Biglaw.  There are lawyers wearing hotpants walking the streets in search of business.  There are miserable clients wondering why their smiling lawyer sold them down the river.  And there are honorable men and women wondering why they are in the company of these others.

It’s not too late to change this.  The first step is close the supply valve to a trickle.  And point sensitive poets elsewhere.

6 thoughts on “Law, Meet Malthus

  1. Mike

    There are a lot of smart recent law grads who’d be lucky to find a job in L.A. that pays 40 grand. Unless you’re brilliant, you’re not getting much of a job.

    Of course, EVERY law student thinks he’s brilliant. Thus, they’d all say, “I won’t have any problem finding a job.” There’s no way to talk people out of going to law school.

    There’s a solution to this that doesn’t involve the Nanny State protecting deluded would-be law student from themselves. There is no need to set quotas for law students. There is a free-market solution.

    Abolish government student lending and government guarantees of student loans.

    Without this easy money injected into the market, students will need to pay their own way (or establish the credit and work history necessary to borrow from a private lender). Tuition will decrease, as law schools won’t have an army of customers spending Uncle Sam’s money. Law professors might actually start teaching, since students who pay their own way tend to feel entitled to the attention of their employees.

    Who knows, maybe after finding work in another career while saving up for law school, people will give up on the idea of law school. There are a lot of cool jobs out there.

    Most of my closest friends are not lawyers. They are sales guys. While I like (and sometimes love) what I do….They work a 8-to-5, never work weekends, and make nice coin.

    Now, money and reasonable working hours aren’t everything. With most people, though, they go to law school not with a vision or direction, but simply because they couldn’t think of another job. Sales, baby.

  2. SHG

    The problem with allowing market forces to dictate is we would end up with only kids from wealthy families.  Would you really want that to be the universe of lawyers?

  3. Mike

    The richies would go to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. Regional schools would offer better deals and serve the rest of us. Given that HYS don’t do much to educate lawyers, anyway, would keeping students out of there be a travesty?

    Instead, you’d end up with regional law schools that would educate lawyers how to be lawyers.

    Imagine what would happen to wages if law professors were required to teach class longer than 6 hours each week? Wagers would change. Cost of tuition would be much more reasonable.

    Or there’d be more night schools. I know a lot of good lawyers who went to law school after a full day’s work. Probably not coincidentally, they are all dedicated and hard-working.

    When you’re paying your own way to attend law school after a full day’s work…You tend to reflect on whether you really made the right decision by going to law school. When tuition is lower, you don’t fall into the fallacy of sunk costs as easily, either.

    Easy money makes it so that people aren’t required to *think* before acting. Just give a 22-year-old “free” money, and let the good times roll.

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