2015 Bad Year for Graduates to Find Private Practice Jobs

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Summary: Law school graduates experienced a twenty year low in the number of private practice jobs given out.

The National Association for Law Placement found that law school graduates landed fewer jobs in private practice last year compared to any class in the past twenty years. The association’s executive director James G. Leipold said, “You have to go back to 1996 to find a comparably small number of private practice jobs.” Private practice jobs include firms of any size and solo practice.

  

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Back in 2007, there were 37,123 private practice jobs but only 33,469 of those jobs available last year. Leipold suggests that this is because graduates are competing “with other junior lawyers for most jobs other than entry-level associate positions at large law firms, some judicial clerkships and some government honors programs.”

Read University of New Mexico Law School Reveals Higher Employment Rates.

He doesn’t expect this to change because all law firms will be forced to deal with smaller head counts with the advancement of efficiencies in “technology and business systems and increased competition from nontraditional legal services providers.”

The lower number of private practice jobs did not have an effect on the overall percentage of law school graduates with jobs. The percentage for 2015 was the same for 2014 as well at 86.7 percent of law school graduates finding employment with nine months of leaving school. The rate in 2007 was 91.9 percent.

See Chicago Law School Tops Employment Rate List.

The largest employers of law school graduates recently have been the law firms with 500 or more lawyers.

Do you think more law school graduates are finding other opportunities to use their law degrees or are just taking any job they can find? Tell us in the comments below.

To learn more about employment rates, read The Top 11 Northeast Law Schools in Employment Rates.

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