Law Schools

Will There Be More Lawyer Jobs Than Grads In 2016?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates job openings in the legal profession and claims we'll have more jobs than law grads by 2016.

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The job market for recent graduates is bleak. We all understand this. And while firms are gradually upping their headcount, we’re talking about drops in the bucket compared to the number of lawyers pumped out of the nation’s law schools every year. Which is why a language like this from the ABA Journal is so galling:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates job openings in the legal profession, producing a rosy outlook for law grads in 2016.

No, that’s really not how this works. The “outlook” hasn’t changed just because the BLS made up a new way of counting lawyers. The market is going to be what it’s going to be. But does the new BLS method produce a more accurate picture of that market?

Professor Theodore P. Seto of Loyola Law School in L.A. describes the new method at TaxProf Blog:

On May 16, 2014, the BLS issued a notice proposing a new method for measuring what it calls “occupational separations” – that is, workers leaving a particular occupation who need to be replaced. The BLS explains that the current method indirectly measures leavers by measuring employment change by age group, relying on an assumption that workers enter at a young age, work in their field until they are old, and then retire, creating opportunities for the next generation of young workers. In this framework, occupation is fixed throughout a worker’s career. The BLS notes: “However true this may have been in the past, it does not apply to many workers today.”

So this whole change is predicated on no longer assuming that jobs only open up because lawyers retire from practice when they’re old. Sure. The law firm pyramid scheme ensures that a lot of people are forced out of their jobs between 6-8 years in, and some of them never find their way back to law. But that hardly recommends the profession to a new student. Entry-level legal jobs with a short shelf-life are not reasons to be happy about the market. It also adopts the premise that the legal industry needs to replace outgoing lawyers 1 for 1, as opposed to shifting tasks to non-lawyers or advancing technology. Without actually considering the trends in the market, these numbers don’t mean much.

But we don’t even have to get to that depth. The new numbers don’t even pass the smell test.

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Under the current method, BLS projects an average of 19,650 job openings per year, while the new method projects 41,460 openings per year. Again, no direct comparison between the ABA number and the BLS numbers is possible due to conceptual differences, but the results under the current method are significantly below the actual number of new graduates finding work in the occupation. (emphasis supplied) The new method projects a higher number of openings, which allows for additional entrants not immediately after completion of a law degree.

Based on 2012 and 2013 matriculation rates and historical drop-out rates, we should expect 40,082 ABA-accredited law school graduates in 2015 and 35,954 in 2016. If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016. (These estimates only take into account JD-required jobs. Demand from JD-advantage employers is not included.)

OK, when 2016 rolls around, if every law school in the country is reporting 100 percent employment, I’ll get behind these numbers. If, as I expect, there’s still a glut of law school grads out there, we’ll all know exactly how useless these numbers are.

Well, useless to everyone but law school deans trying to lure in unsuspecting students.

Are 2016 law grads in luck? New stats say lawyer jobs will exceed graduates that year [ABA Journal]
Seto: New BLS Data Project More Lawyer Jobs Than Law Grads in 2016 [TaxProf Blog]

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