BLS Updates Its 2020 Employment Projections: For Law Students, It’s Very Bad

It turns out the Bureau of Labor Statistics updated its Employment Projections in February, though the Occupational Outlook Handbook will have to wait until later this month. Data for 2010-2020 are now available. For lawyers, the 2010-2020 projection is even worse than 2008-2018, when the BLS predicted that the legal profession would add 98,500 new [...]

Law Graduate Overproduction by State (aka “The Holy Grail”)

[****THIS IS THE ORIGINAL POST ON LAW GRADUATE OVERPRODUCTION. THE PERMANENT VERSION OF THIS POST CAN BE FOUND ON THIS PAGE. PLEASE LINK TO THAT INSTEAD.****] This week’s breakthrough—discovering the national lawyer replacement projection data from 2008 to 2018 (240,400 gross jobs)—led to an even bigger breakthrough: lawyer replacement data by state over the same [...]

Legal Profession 1994-2008: 103,200 lawyer jobs for 561,220 ABA grads

“That the current employment rate is not lower [than 88.3%] is further evidence of the resilience and remarkably steady employment market for U.S. law school graduates, even in times of relative economic weakness.” – Selected Findings for the Class of 2009 (NALP) Reading statements like these, Annie Lowery’s Slate article attributing the law school application [...]

Legal Sector 2018: 500,000 Law Grads vs. 100,000 Lawyer Jobs

[****THIS RESEARCH IN THIS POST HAS BEEN CONSOLIDATED ON THIS PAGE. PLEASE LINK TO THAT INSTEAD.****] [UPDATE: Through more recent research, I discovered that the BLS does calculate job growth due to replacement needs, projecting that 141,900 lawyers will retire or pass away. Adding that to the net growth figure cited below gives us a [...]

Law School Foundation & Accreditation over Time

Every time I go to the Wikipedia’s “List of Law Schools in the United States,” (despite its inaccuracies) my eyes move towards the “Year Founded” field. I did this recently and then thought, “Hey, what’s the relationship b’ween foundation and accreditation?” Fortunately, the ABA keeps track of this, and it’s also in the mountain of [...]