Why the law’s no safe haven
The law: more popular than banking. Our report that the number of applications to law schools has rocketed since the credit crunch is an illustration of the entirely human instinct for self-preservation.
As students see it, the law may not earn you quite the same bucks as investment banks, but it’s safe. Right?
You, dear reader, know different. The past decade has been the legal profession’s baby boom. Firms aren’t yet cutting back on trainee recruitment, but if the pessimism of managing partners is anything to go by, opportunities for those entering the profession now look rather more limited.
In 2007 The Lawyer, in association with YouGov, polled more than 3,000 lawyers in one of our regular research projects. Then, some 31 per cent of associates wanted to leave the profession. It was at the height of the boom, when there were jobs aplenty. Our next survey is being sent out soon. It will be interesting to see how many people want to leave the law now.
Considerably fewer, I suspect.
Taking the temperature of the sector, from students to senior partners, is a fascinating process. Our colleagues Husnara Begum and Corinne McPartland of our sister title Lawyer 2B have been spending gruelling days at law fairs around the country. They’ve been talking to undergraduates and LPC students, finding that, unremarkably enough, students are utterly oblivious to the credit crunch.
Now most 20-year-olds probably have other, more primal things on their minds than macroeconomics. However, for a generation that has been raised on tales of riches, it will take a while for reality to sink in. Indeed, plenty of graduate recruitment heads are privately frustrated at Generation Y, which has been used to having everything on a plate, and hope the credit crunch could be the making of its members.
The students Lawyer 2B have met have yet to develop that awful sense of entitlement that plagues a minority of commercial lawyers. As you can see from their blogs on the revamped Lawyer2B.com, their enthusiasm and energy is invigorating.
Law isn’t the only profession to have seen applications soar, by the way. The other is teaching. Now, doesn’t that give you a warm glow?
Readers' comments (4)
Philip Hutchinson | 29-Oct-2008 10:44 pm
'Generation Y'
This meaningless phrase really makes me reach for the sick bucket.
I seriously doubt that this generation is different in any significant manner to the generations that preceded it, despite what these terribly frustrated 'graduate recruitment heads' might think.
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Anon. | 30-Oct-2008 9:27 am
T-t-talking about their gen-eration
“I don't agree about the generations being the same, Mr Hutchinson - I'm only 29 and the trainees here all talk like Yanks ('tux' 'apartment' 'I figure' 'adorable', etc); have really annoying haircuts and like rubbish guitar bands whose names start with 'the'.
“Any post-1960s ideological inheritance that my lot seemed to have has also gone out of the window: the trainees all seem overly impressed with appearance and with wealth, and the girls are quite happy to act as giggling dolly birds in a way that no self-respecting woman of my age would have done (what with feminism and all that).
That seems like really quite a big difference - and I'm only old enough to be their older sibling, not their dad.”
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Michael Jacobs | 30-Oct-2008 12:52 pm
Student Utopia
Apart from the few bright students who, in preparation for training contract interviews, are swatting up on the current economic downturn, most students are indeed relatively oblivious to it. But not without reason.
At undergraduate level, it's simply the norm these days to borrow thousands every year from the Student Loan Company. For postgraduate law students (on the GDL and LPC), banks such as [major high street bank] offer professional trainee loans of up to £25,000!
This lifestyle is not only one of easy credit, but also one where there is an expectation – from fellow peers to government ministers – that students will finish their studies with a large amount of debt.
It’s not so much a case of tales of riches with which today’s students have been brought up; if anything, the unavailability of cheap credit is a concept which simply reverberates off the exterior walls of student unions and their digs.
Rightly or wrongly, the realities of financial struggle in company boardrooms, family homes and managing partners' offices are a million miles away from most if not all students.
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Anonymous | 5-Nov-2008 10:33 am
Partner profits
Totally agree - the legal profession should not be viewed as a safe haven but it takes time for perceptions to change.
The overriding priority for large commercial firms is to preserve or increase partner profits and if this means wholesale redundancies so be it. We are not yet officially in recession, turnover at many firms is still increasing and has been throughout the credit crunch and yet we are witnessing large numbers of redundancies. Partner profits will continue to increase at the largest firms irrespective.
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