How did law schools survive a decade of "statistically zero jobs" for their graduates?

The first in an occasional series I call “dire predictions.”

In 2012, the Washington Post published a dire indictment of legal education. Under the headline, Will law school students have jobs after they graduate?, the piece included ominous projections for the future:

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 73,600 new lawyer jobs from 2010 to 2020. But just three years into that decade, about 132,757 new lawyers have hit the job market.

While not every new JD seeks employment as a lawyer, it is safe to say that planning to work as an attorney is not rare among law students. But perhaps it should be. Data from the National Association of Legal Career Professionals indicate that since 2010, about 75,000 new law grads have found full-time jobs a lawyers.

So, in theory, all of the BLS-forecasted job openings through 2020 have already been filled, and 59,157 new lawyers are still looking for “real” law jobs.

… But the scale of the imbalance over a decade gives some indication of just how tough it is — and will be — as armies of newly minted JDs rise every year. By 2020, about 300,000 additional grads will join those 59,157 in a hunt for jobs that, statistically, are not to be found.

…

In [the] Law School Tuition Bubble blog, [the author] estimates that 2010 law school graduates took on $3.6 billion in loans, and that students over the next decade (for whom there are statistically zero jobs) will borrow $53 billion.

So how did legal education survive between 2012 and 2020 when there were “statistically zero jobs” for graduates?

Part of this is basic reporting error at the time. There may have been “statistically zero” new jobs, but it assume zero retirements or deaths among existing attorneys—that is, filling in existing jobs. Despite the fact that law school graduates did yield around 270,000 between the graduates of the Classes of 2013 through 2019 (and will likely cross 300,000 by 2020), total “resident active attorneys” increased just 106,822 between from 2012 to 2019.

(The piece also acknowledges that some law school graduates do not end up practicing law, but such “J.D. advantage” positions are a decidedly mixed bag.)

Another is that the BLS projections were wrong. In 2010, there were 728,200 lawyer jobs, projected to rise by 73,600 by 2020 for a total of 801,800 jobs in 2020. But projections are just projections. Total lawyer jobs were up to 823,900 in 2018 alone, 22,000 more than the projections estimated, even before 2020.

And law school graduates ultimately did okay (!). The Classes of 2013 to 2019 landed about 170,000 full-time, long-term, bar passage-required positions—despite “statistically zero” positions open to them, as reported.

Law schools could still do better. But the market rightly responded in a few respects—virtually all schools got smaller, and a higher percentage of graduates ended up in “high quality” legal positions, from 58% of the Class of 2012 to 69% of the Class of 2018. Debt loads have decreased for the bulk of law school graduates. But the dire predictions in this 2012 piece concerning “statistically zero jobs” just never panned out.