In the May issue of the California Bar Journal, California's State Bar President goes to bat for beleaguered California law grads who can't get jobs and are carrying enormous law school debt. His solution? First, the bar should step up and develop programs that help new grads striking out on their own to get the post-graduate help they need to be competent. Second, he calls for a serious study of what kind of tests will "genuinely determine" who is qualified to practice law. And finally, he calls for the California Committee of Bar Examiners to require California-accredited law schools to be more transparent about the cost and benefits of studying law.
There is notoriously unreliable self-reporting by law schools and their graduates of employment statistics. They are unreliable in only one direction, since the self-reporting by law schools of “employment” of graduates at graduation and then nine months after graduation are, together, a significant factor in the U.S. News rankings — which are obsessed over, despite denials, by law schools and their constituencies. The anecdotes are as telling as the statistics: prestigious lawyers in the state are hiring their own children to work in their firms because even with their connections they were unable to find employment elsewhere. And if things do pick up, those in the classes of 2008, 2009 and now 2010, whatever they will have been doing, are unlikely to be viewed favorably by firms as first-year entry hires.
For the record, just over 37% of the 4,226 applicants who took the California bar examination in February passed it, up slightly up from a 33.5% last year. Michigan's passage rate was 85.8%.
