Article. (h/t: The Faculty Lounge, where a conversation about the article is happening) I agree with Burk that something is different about the new normal. I've analyzed the key change as the "disaggregation" of the legal work that had been sent to biglaw firms for a long time. Large organizational clients have learned how to send to big firm only the work that only big firms can do. So, even when the business cycle inevitably picks back up, and even when big firms eventually scramble to beef up staffing on the transactional side, the process and the financial rewards will be different, I believe. The prior 16 year cycle, exhaustively analyzed in the recent paper Simkovic and McIntyre, won't be mirrored in the next 16 year cycle. (In fact, we already know that the first 4 years since the 16-year cycle they analyzed are well off the mark of the prior period.) Burk has a lot of support for his conclusions. Abstract:
Everyone
agrees that job prospects for many new law graduates have been poor for
the last several years; there is rather less consensus on whether,
when, how or why that may change. This article analyzes historical and
current trends in the job market for new lawyers in an effort to predict
how that market may evolve.
The article derives quantitative
measurements of the proportion of law graduates over the last thirty
years who have obtained initial employment for which law school serves
as rational substantive preparation (“Law Jobs”). In comparing
entry-level hiring patterns since 2008 with those in earlier periods, a
significant development emerges: While other sectors of the market for
new lawyers have changed only modestly during the Great Recession, one
sector — the larger private law firms colloquially known as “BigLaw” —
has contracted six times as much as all the others. Though BigLaw
hiring has historically accounted for only 10%-20% of each graduating
class, it is responsible for over half the entry-level Law Jobs lost
since 2008.
While some observers predict a return to business
as usual as the economy recovers, this article is skeptical of that
account. The article identifies significant structural changes in the
way that the services traditionally provided by BigLaw are being
produced, staffed and priced that diminish BigLaw’s need for junior
lawyers both immediately and in the longer term. These observations
suggest that entry-level BigLaw hiring, and thus the market for new
lawyers overall, will remain depressed below pre-recession levels well
after demand for the services BigLaw has traditionally provided
recovers. At the same time, new lawyers’ job prospects may nevertheless
improve as the contraction in the legal academy now underway reduces
the number of new graduates competing for work.