A serious and growing mismatch between the number of legal jobs and the number of law students isn't just a U.S. problem. In an op-ed piece in The Lawyer, Dr. Alexis Massey, the managing director of an English law firm, calls his country's "oversupply" of law grads "unethical."
The numbers are alarming. In 2009-10 around 20,000 students were accepted on courses to study law as a first degree combined with more than 15,000 LPC places. At the same time there were fewer than 4,900 new traineeships, a number that declined by 16.1 per cent compared with the previous year.
A rough calculation demonstrates that the chances of an undergraduate law student getting a training contact are around one in four and a postgraduate LPC student around one in three.
The cost of a legal education in England isn't cheap, either -- the minimum cost is more than $83,000, not including living expenses. The piece points out that new English laws designed to restructure legal services are likely to compound the problems for new grads.
