mrizza

obviously that's not all big law jobs, but it's clearly suggestive.

Considering the small number of schools that biglaw pulls from, I don't think this data is indicative at all. Looking at all JDs graduating every year, most of them are not going to biglaw. What about looking at the NLJ250 placement numbers of the T14 for the last 10 years? The numbers have dropped slightly but they already began recovering last year and are no where near as drastic of a decline as 10% like the figure you cited.

Hi Noam, thanks for doing this. I was curious if you've been following the discussion regarding your last article on sites like ATL and TLS, and what you thought about people arguing you seem to be overreaching with the doomsday prophecy? It seems everyone is in agreement with your supporting data and the broader implications of it, but your claim that the biglaw model will only work for as few as 20 firms in just the next 10 years seems to be a little harder for people to accept. Do you have any more specifics to back up this claim?

For reference here is a link to the TLS discussion that you may find interesting

I agree, but I think when Weil reduces staff by 7% and claims they feel there is as much as a 10% over supply of big law lawyers, it just seems far fetched that big law could in fact be reduced to as little as a small fraction (8-20%) of its current size in just 10 years. I think 50 is also probably a fairly strong exaggeration if we are talking 10 years.

You're definitely right about prices going down. I'm starting at a T14 in the fall and I (as well as others with similar #s) received double the scholarship that people with my numbers received last year at my school, so it seems this is already happening.