3L and the City: Hire me!

By Maria Vasos
Chicago-Kent College of Law

I am a recent J.D. graduate with a certificate in criminal litigation and a lot of practical litigation experience through externships and clinics. If you are looking to hire a young trial attorney at a firm or government agency, e-mail mariavasos@gmail.com.

For this, my last column, I have decided to shamelessly hawk myself to the magazine’s readers in hopes that someone will offer me a permanent position. This should come as no surprise to those in tune with the realities of the job market these days.

For example, last month Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal laid off 37 lawyers, including six partners, four of counsel, and 27 associates — mostly in the areas of real estate and litigation. These, combined with its support staff layoffs, represented 7 percent of its 1,700-person workforce, in response to a falloff in work due to the economic decline.

New graduates not only have to compete with each other for the scarce decent availabilities left open in the bad economy, but they also have to compete against experienced attorneys who also find themselves in need of employment.

This especially does not bode well for new graduates, like myself, who are interested in hard-hit fields, like litigation.

It used to be that to get into the courtroom right away and gain valuable trial experience, young attorneys could join the state’s attorney’s or public defender’s offices for at least a few years to learn the ropes. With the county budget crisis still looming overhead like a dark storm cloud, this is no longer the case. Not only is there a hiring freeze, but actual assistant state’s attorneys and assistant public defenders are struggling and barely able to hold onto their jobs.

Earlier in the year, before the sales tax increase passed, there was talk of a 13 percent cutback in the criminal justice division, which would have resulted in the layoff of almost 200 assistant state’s attorneys and over 130 assistant public defenders, along with the closing of at least two suburban courthouses.

It is not just the poor, unstable economy that is making job searching difficult, it is also the increasing number of law students flooding the market. There are more graduating law students, in part because of the enrollment of hopeful students, and in part because universities are starting up more law schools. Since 1995 alone, the number of ABA-accredited law schools has increased 11 percent to 196.

There is a great Wall Street Journal online article from September 2007 entitled, ”Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers.” It talks about how the legal market is not keeping up with general inflation and how the supply of lawyers is drowning the demand. It is a very sobering piece to those of us who are embarking on a legal career. I read and re-read this article regularly to give myself a reality check during my job search.

And graduating law students should be worried, because they have a huge burden of student-loan debt to pay that their predecessors did not have to worry about. Tuition rates at law schools have almost tripled the rate of inflation over the past 20 years.

The wsj.com story reported that, according to the ABA, 2006 graduates of public and private law schools had borrowed an average of $54,509 and $83,181, up 17 percent and 18.6 percent respectively.

Having gone to a private law school, I can say unequivocally that those numbers are low-balled compared with the actual numbers of the majority of my colleagues and myself.

Undoubtedly those figures take into account trust-fund babies who had their legal education handed to them on a silver platter, which skew the results. This also does not take into account undergraduate loan amounts that many students also have to shoulder upon graduation. Many students find themselves saddled with ”a mortgage” in student loans when the reality hits that only very few new lawyers will land a highly lucrative position.

I, too, have delusional hopes of getting my dream job, where I do exactly what makes me happy and get paid loads for doing it, but I always come to my senses shortly thereafter.

My most recent smelling-salt was the loan calculator feature during my online ”exit loan counseling” for my financial aid package. By inputting the total amount of all of your student loans, the calculator will determine how much you need to make in order to ”live comfortably.”

According to my numbers, the calculator said that I need to earn $173,000+ annually. This, of course, nauseated me to no end because that is a pipe dream if I ever saw one in my life. But I have made my peace with my studio apartment and cheap Asian-import car, which should help balance my expenses.

What stings now is being incessantly asked what job I have lined up. After giving my standard response that I’m focusing on the bar right now, for some reason people proceed to tell me about how their daughter/nephew/ neighbor was hired at [insert big firm here], but then turned it down to work at [insert other lucrative opportunity here], like somehow that bit of news would make me feel better about my own desperate situation.

So, please save me from any more exercises in self-deprecation and hire me. I am great, you’ll see.