Almost 85 percent of law school graduates of the class of 2012 will take 9 months to find employment, according to the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP). For five straight years the employment rate has dropped for legal professionals. It has seen a steady decline since its all time high of 91.9 percent in 2007. Was this a law school bubble? The general state of the economy and the local and regional demands for this particular line will grow or shrink the industry respectively. Of course this will immediately impact the prospects and the time that graduates will take to find a job. A situation like this can seem counterintuitive. According to the Dayton Business Journal, James Leipold, NALP executive director found some positives in the statistics, noting the total number of jobs filled was greater than in recent years.

“It is important to understand that the job picture is improving, if only slightly. This class found more jobs in private practice than the previous class. But because the national graduating class was so much bigger, the overall employment rate continued to fall.”

At the University of Dayton School of Law the 9-month employment rate for the class of 2012 was 81.5 percent, while for positions that prefer law degrees the employment rate was 70 percent.

An industry that had been growing in these past few years when most industries were drying up, receiving bailouts, or shipping jobs overseas, law seemed to be a life buoy for prospective students who wanted to make their current crushing debt load of student loans translate into future potential earnings. In other words they wanted a high return on investment. I can’t blame them. US News ran an article recently that listed the best and worst ROI by college major. In these times with an ‘official ‘ unemployment rate of around 8 percent it completely makes sense that students who will spend $200,000 or more for schooling want a decent return for their investment of time and money. Gone are the days where $40,000 will cover the costs of your undergraduate education. That is almost a paltry sum and it can be written off and depreciated as a debt over time in one’s mind.

Students nowadays are taking on a debt load as much as $200,000 or more. Someone in my circle of friends is taking on twice that much. No one would blink at such a sum as it’s all too common. But now we aren’t talking tuition fees, we are discussing investments. Prospective law students would do well to consider their situation from every possible angle, including industry assessment, personality assessment, and return on investment.

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Law school graduates can expect better returns, better job opportunities, and overall more hiring by larger firms. Hiring freezes that have been the norm as the economy waded in the doldrums are no more. According to the National Law Journal, there has been a 27 percent increase in hiring recent law school graduates from last year, culminating in a total of 3600 hires from members of the J.D. class of 2012. The National Association for Law Placement confirms that graduates from the 50 law schools that send the most alumni into large-firm jobs experienced a 13.3 percent increase in landing such jobs.

The growth in jobs is a heartening sight in today’s economy. According to Marcia Shannon, assistant dean for career services at Georgetown University Law Center,

“There was a definite improvement in the number of people who went into large law firms in 2012 compared to 2011. We had a six percent increase in the percentage of graduates getting those jobs. We expected an increase, but not quite that much. We felt like 2011 was really the bottom of the market.”

With recent equity market downslides, notwithstanding QE, and almost 10 percent unemployment, it is a beautiful thing to see jobs growing in this sector, especially relative to the investment and the opportunity cost. The housing market has seen a turnaround, and perhaps there is a generally positive correlation with these themes. There is no harm in hoping for a strong comeback.

According to law.com, we are quite far from the hiring benchmark of 2009, where large firms hired 5,100 graduates. Relative to the new models of hourly lawyers, and legal-process outsourcing, experts are skeptical whether hiring will hit that benchmark high in the short term. Yet there is good news in the mix. According to NALP executive director James Leipold, the class of 2012 saw the rebounding of private sector practice, particularly at large firms, and with that we see some rebounding salary numbers. So there is hope, as the number of jobs obtained by graduates as well as the median starting salary increases.

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A proposal to push back the reporting of law school graduate employment rates by a month was deferred to August by the American Bar Association, according to a report by The ABA Journal. The change was advocated by a number of law school deans, who feel that differences between each state bar association’s reporting of bar exam results is creating unfair advantages in the law school graduate employment rates. The proposal was to be voted on by the governing council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar at their most recent meeting, but it was decided to table the proposal until the summer.

The council met on Friday in St. Louis and determined that there was no rush to act on the change, as it would not affect ABA procedures until later this year. The delay in the vote will also provide for those who feel passionately about the proposal ample opportunity to provide the council with their comments.

The proposal was put forward by the council’s data policy and collection committee, which heard from deans of law schools in states like New York and California, whose bar exam takers do not receive their results until much later than takers in other states. Because the results in these states are released later, many feel that recent graduates have a more extended time table when it comes to finding full time employment. Changes in the legal job market have made it so that students are much less likely to be hired while still in law school, and admission to a state bar is now a more common requirement for full time employment. As such, graduates in states where bar results are released later are finding employment later.

Some law school deans say that because their students are finding jobs later than students in other states, the ABA should adjust their reporting of law school graduate employment in order to level the playing field between states that release bar exam results earlier and states that release results later.

Critics of the proposal say that there is no evidence that a later release of bar exam results has any effect on employment or law school graduate employment rates.

Currently, the ABA measures employment data on February 15 of each year, and the proposal would push that date back to March 15, from nine months after graduation to ten months.

The ABA Journal reports that, at the meeting, the council did approve a number of changes in the standard governing of what types of consumer information law schools are required to disclose.

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Each year, Albany Law School’s Career Center coordinates more than 1,000 job interviews on campus, as well as many more off campus; processes more than 7,000 job applications; and organizes more than a dozen job fairs.

One third of Albany Law’s 2008 class is employed in New York City, while an additional one third is employed in the greater Capital Region.

Of the 2008 grads, 49% went to law firms; 16% into government; 9% got judicial clerkships; 19% into business and industry. Six percent went into public interest law, and 2% are in academia.

Albany Law School is an ABA accredited law school based in Albany, New York. Founded in 1851 by Robert H. Pruyn and others, Albany Law School is the oldest independent law school in the United States.

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