Prologue

The manuscript for this book was first written by Charles in 2009 and 2010, when the grip of the Great Recession was in full squeeze. The legal services industry was shedding jobs like never before, and the future for new lawyers was worse than uncertain. The original draft was, to put it mildly, negative about the prospects for new lawyers; its title, Con Law, hinted at its theme, namely that the legal education system had turned into one enormous fraud.

The book was then put aside, as he did not believe the depths to which the legal profession had sunk during those dark years would last. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that he hoped things would get better—that they simply had to get better—and thus this book, after a few short years, would look like a reactionary and premature warning that the sky was falling. He believed that law firms would begin hiring again; that law schools would adjust to the crisis by cutting class sizes and tuition (ha!); and that those in charge of shaping the profession—the all-powerful ABA, law school deans, and senior practitioners—would do the right thing and make changes to ensure that the profession remained viable, prestigious, and profitable for everyone—or nearly everyone—including future entrants.

This did not happen.

He waited, and waited, and waited some more. Astoundingly, law schools took none of those steps, and indeed seemed intent to continue their empire building, their selfish rush to bigness and ever more numerous endowed chairs. They continued to increase tuition to unprecedented and unsustainable levels, and to increase class sizes. More, more, more! If anything they stepped up efforts to recruit new students—many of whom would stand absolutely no chance of becoming gainfully employed (let alone profitably employed) as lawyers. The math just didn’t add up: counting only ABA-accredited institutions, law schools have flooded the market with twice as many graduates as the profession can absorb, leaving tens of thousands of disappointed, debt-laden, un- and underemployed law graduates all wondering what on Earth happened to all those promises, explicit and implicit, given to them over the course of their young lives. Tens of thousands each year! Where were the jobs with decent (much less, stellar) incomes law schools claimed, in their official annual statistics, that upwards of 90% of their graduates obtained? That law graduates would be caught in a recessionary trap is bad enough, but that law schools would be active agents of on-going harm for new entering classes is more than disturbing.

Law firms also failed to react appropriately, and instead of taking a step back towards a conservative, sustainable business model that preserved the prestige of the profession, many doubled down on a new business model that relied on exploiting recent law graduates by offering temporary assignments over permanent positions, pitiful compensation for those at the bottom while those at the top reaped ever-greater profits, and a lack of job security for junior lawyers that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, embodying wholeheartedly this economy’s “I’ve got mine!” attitude.

Government, the other major employer of law graduates, has suffered budget-crisis downsizing at every level, and is likely to see increased pressure on the downside, possibly severe. Politicians continue, of course, to argue various abstract ideological points, while new graduates suffer first and hardest. While it’s possible to criticize as misguided hard-line ideological policies towards austerity (or, for that matter, free-spending increases towards bankrupt oblivion), the reality is that the future looks increasingly scary for any future law graduate.