This is mostly a message for 0Ls thinking about going to law school. Unemployment is off the charts and a lot of people are probably sitting contemplating getting another degree. Picking up a new marketable skill if you have the time and resources is an excellent thing to do right now. And law school might work out for a small contingent of people with full scholarships going to good schools. But going to law school because you think in 3 years the storm will pass and you can practice law is, generally, a bad plan.

I graduated from undergrad in 2008. Finding a job during the recession was a tall order. When I matriculated into law school I met a lot of people who decided to take out massive loans and figured since jobs were scarce anyway they may as well shoot for a more lucrative career in law and wait out the storm in school. This is bad thinking for recession/depression economies because 1) the job market for attorneys is already saturated, 2) the legal market recovery from 2008 was slow, and 3) law schools didn’t learn any lessons from 2008 and this new depression will probably force systemic changes that aren’t conducive to new grads coming out of an already obsolete system of legal education.

First, even after the market “recovered” for legal services last decade the market is still at a saturation point for attorneys. A law degree doesn’t have a lot of pull in other industries. You should only go to law school with the mindset that it’s a gateway to a particular trade and mostly consists of an economic barrier to entry. That economic barrier is typically north of 6 figures. There are plenty of other degrees and skills you can learn that are free or cost a fraction of the cost in terms of time, lost opportunities, and dollars. There’s a lot of ways to achieve a stable financial life that are better than practicing law.

Second, the market for legal services was slow to recover after 2008 and never really went back to the way it existed before the recession. (Producer prices in the legal services industry after the Great Recession) This is partly because companies changed the way they handle their legal spend. When there’s economic pressures on business large and small they react and change the way their systems work. The legal services industry is a complementary industry to those businesses and has to adapt around whatever they decide to do to stay alive. This economic calamity will probably follow a similar track of contraction in legal spend and then systemic changes that reduce the need for legal services or look for ‘legalish’ vehicles for legal advice like legalzoom.

Law schools didn’t change much to reflect new legal industry realities. They have no incentive to, and the value of the education you receive is a pile of smoking hot garbage as a result. Law schools are dinosaurs, accredited by the ABA, and their only purpose is to receive money in the form of federally backed student loans so they can pay faculty and administrators absurd sums of money while most their students will struggle. As institutions, they do not give one iota of a fuck about your welfare or ability to practice or pay down your student debt. Law schools will not change until the ABA either stops accrediting them or the federal government wises up and turns off the student loan money faucet. They simply do not feel the economic conditions necessary to change in the same way businesses and practicing lawyers do.

For the majority of students it’s incumbent on them to seek out mentors and practicing attorneys to teach them how to practice law or run a law firm. Most those opportunities for professional growth are about to get wiped out.

The education you receive in law school is largely inadequate to learning how to practice and that’s even within the industry it’s supposed to prepare you to thrive in. Law school is mostly an incredibly expensive networking event. Don’t take out massive student debt and matriculate into law school without carefully considering these factors. It’s not a place to avoid financial ruin. For most people it is financial ruin.