While the starting pay of young attorneys at the largest firms is going up...
Geoff Mearns: The median salary for most law school graduates. The vast majority of others has stayed relatively flat for five or six years.
And that's got some cautioning potential law students to be realistic in their expectations. Geoff Mearns is Dean of the Cleveland Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. He says while the young associates at many of Cleveland's most prestigious firms are starting at salaries as high as $125,000 a year, most recent grads are making much less than that.
Geoff Mearns: For a significant portion of the law school population it is much more of a challenge to find a financially rewarding job. There are a lot of opportunities out there but they don't fall into their lap like they do for a small segment at the top of the class.
To understand why some law graduates are making six figures while other make as little as 30,000 a year, you have to look back a bit and realize for most of the 20th century the number of lawyers per capita stayed relatively constant. But starting in the 1960's and over the next 30 years the number of lawyers per capita nearly tripled. Rich Sander studies trends in the legal profession. He's a law professor at UCLA.
Rich Sander: Essentially the market peaked in 1990, and then set off in two different directions. The big firm market continued to grow. But that now makes up about a quarter of the profession. And most of the rest of the profession has been in stagnation or decline.
Sander says the law students who get these big firm jobs either graduate from a top program or -- if they attend a less prestigious school -- finish at the top of their class. Scott Perlmuter graduated from the law school at Case Western Reserve University this past spring. Nearly six months later, he's still looking for work.
Scott Perlmuter: You know, I graduated in the top third of my class. But if you're not at a top law school that doesn't mean you're going to find a job right away.
Perlmuter's story is far from unique. Across the country it's getting tougher for recent graduates to find work. Consider this statistic: the number of schools accredited by the American Bar Assocation has jumped 11% since 1995. There are more law schools, more graduates, but not more jobs.
Scott Perlmuter: When I was in law school, I had plenty of interviews and even a job offer after graduation. So I turned down the job offer. It wasn't what I wanted to do and I thought I'd have at least one other opportunity. One thing that's difficult is no one wants to answer a phone call now. Making phone calls day in and day out and not getting calls returned. That's kind of difficult to deal with.
Rick Sander: I'm a big believer that law schools are not giving prospective students nearly enough information about what they're getting themselves into.
Rick Sander of UCLA says students should be skeptical of the information law schools give them. For example, a school may say that its graduates' median starting salary is 70,000 a year. But that number is usually based on a voluntary survey.
Rick Sander: Undoubtedly there's a large amount of self selection. Students might exaggerate their income if it's below a certain level. Whereas students who are at big firms making six figure salaries are very likely to respond to the survey. I think any social scientist who's doing a study like that would try to adjust for what the sample actually looked like. I don't think law schools are doing that.
Sara Polly is Associate Dean of student and career services at Case's law school and she says it's tough to get accurate information when students don't respond to the survey. Case reports on its web site that the median starting salary of its graduates in 2005 was 72,000 a year -- a figure Polly says was actually revised downward.
Sara Polly: When it's been close to the time to report our employment stats including the median salary we felt the median salary was a little high. And we went and contacted some grads whose salary info we didn't have because we knew it would be lower than the large firms and it would help bring down the median figure. And we believe it's important for students to have a realistic sense of what those salaries are going to be.
Dean Mearns of Cleveland State acknowledges the difficulty schools have gathering accurate salary information, and says prospective students should look at any figures they're given carefully.
Geoff Mearns: it's not that anyone's trying to provide misleading information. But until you get below the data sometimes those reports or what law schools may advertise on a web site may be a bit misleading.
These salary challenges may be met with little sympathy outside of the law profession. But consider this: young lawyers are getting paid less than they'd imagined at a time when law school costs are increasing. Statistics from the American Bar Association show graduates from private law schools are borrowing on average a little over $80,000 and that number is trending upwards. Luckily for Scott Perlmuter, he graduated from Case debt free. But the job search continues. Perlmuter just got word that he passed the bar -- something he believes will make the job search easier.
Scott Perlmuter: I sort of knew that until my bar results came back I might have trouble searching. People before me have gotten jobs and people after me have gotten jobs. I'm assuming if I keep putting in the effort something will come up.
Eric Wellman, 90.3.