University law clinic takes on mediation
By Tasha Kates

It was a bad night on the nursing home wing for incontinence.

Understaffed and underpaid, Nurse Phoebe was trying to clean up all 10 of her patients without any help. Allie, a resident’s daughter, arrived to find her mother in a mess and approached Phoebe about it.

Allie’s comments were the last straw for Phoebe, who was frustrated by Allie’s constant complaining. The women met again Friday in mock mediation, where two mediators-in-training helped the characters sort out their issues.

The role-play was part of a three-day basic mediation training session through the Mediation Center of Charlottesville. The latest session was held at the University of Virginia’s law school, where students received training as part of the new Family Alternative Dispute Resolution Clinic.

Patrice Kyger, the center’s acting director, said the 20-hour basic mediation course the clinic participants underwent will provide them with mediation basics and positive and reflective listening skills. The course prepares people to co-mediate cases referred from juvenile and domestic relations courts.

Read the whole article at LawJobs.com…

Reality’s Knocking as Law Schools Provide More Practical Training
by Karen Sloan

Washington and Lee University School of Law has thrown out its traditional third-year curriculum and replaced it with a series of legal simulations meant to prepare students to practice law in the real world.

First-year students at Duke Law School and the new University of California, Irvine School of Law will take a yearlong course examining different legal careers and the ethical and professional issues associated with those career tracks.

A new LL.M. program at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law is designed to give recent law school graduates the skills their predecessors would have developed as starting law firm associates.

The movement to incorporate practical skills into legal education isn’t new, but legal educators and researchers report that the floundering economy is increasing incentives for law schools to revamp their curricula to prepare students for the realities of the legal profession.

“A lot of the changes are in response to the marketplace,” said David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University School of Law. “Students are concerned about getting jobs, and everybody wants to be relevant.”

Graduates face stiff competition for law firm positions, and clients are balking at footing the bill to train new attorneys. Consequently, law school leaders consider it more important than ever to send students into the profession armed with practical skills, not just extensive knowledge of case law and legal theory. More law schools are modifying coursework and adding practical classes to help students develop the skills past graduates have had the luxury of learning on the job. In that vein, a growing number of law schools are emphasizing teamwork, leadership, professional judgment and the ability to view issues from the clients’ perspective.

“I think we are at a moment of historical change across the landscape of legal education,” said Washington and Lee Dean Rodney A. Smolla. “When we look back at this period in five to 10 years, we will mark it as the time when the whole mission of law schools made a fundamental turn.”

Read the rest at LawJobs.com…

Law schools in Silicon Valley add practical skills to help students compete

Let’s face it — it’s not the most advantageous time to be a second- or third-year law student. Big law firms are shedding associates, deferring recruits and shrinking the number of interns as they adjust to the mercurial economy.

Local law schools are responding to marketplace realities by developing curriculum better suited to law firm needs. Universities are retooling their curriculum and incorporating management, leadership and specialized disciplines.

“We realized that graduating students are going to have a hard time finding jobs, principally because of the restructuring of large law firms but because of the cascading affect,” said Fred Gonzalez, a Santa Clara University School of Law alum who now serves as general counsel at SonicWall Inc. “We’re trying to figure out how to make our students more attractive.”

Berkeley Law Expands Loan Program

UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law announced this week that it’s expanding its loan repayment assistance program for alumni who pursue public interest or government work.

UC Berkeley’s Loan Repayment Assistance Program has been helping graduates repay their student loans for the past decade. It will expand in January to offer unlimited help to alumni who earn up to $65,000 a year. Previously the amount had been capped at $100,000 for alumni who make less than $58,000 per year.

“The law school provides the graduates who meet the income and employment requirements with a forgivable loan. Every six months, they’re required to make their student loan payments,” explained Berkeley Law Assistant Dean of Financial Aid Dennis Tominaga. He said those loans are forgiven if the students maintain the income and job requirements and uses the money make student loan payments.

Read this entire blog entry at The Wall Street Journal…

Study: The Better the School, the Less Happy the Associate

The economy of the last 16 months has forced law firms to rethink a lot of their old ways of doing things vis-a-vis their associates. Firms have reconsidered salary structures, embraced new training techniques and reshaped evaluation processes. They’ve also, of course, taken the axe to hundreds upon hundreds of the equity-less masses.

But one thing they haven’t changed: whom they hire. Firms have tinkered with the formula at the margins, but they still largely flock to the top national schools and top schools in their area, and look to snatch up the students on law review and with the best grades — categories which often share a lot of overlap. If anything, given a reduction in hiring needs, the firms have become even more discerning with their hiring over the months.

But is this strategy — going for the best and brightest at the most gilded institutions — a mistake? The authors of a recent study think so.

Ronit Dinovitzer, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, and Bryan Garth, the dean of the Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, tracked the careers of a sample of 5,000 lawyers who began practice in 2000.

Their findings were two-fold. First, as described in the September issue of the American Lawyer, they found that “new lawyers working for firms of more than 250 lawyers are less satisfied with their jobs than their counterparts in smaller firms.” Um, okay. Frankly, were this all they found, we wouldn’t be writing about their study at all.

But they also found this: “that graduates of the most selective schools are the less satisfied with their jobs at large firms, while graduates of less selective schools are relatively more satisfied.”

The rationale behind the finding is interesting. Write the authors:

Why are elite graduates dissatisfied with these jobs? Part of the answer is that graduates of elite law schools are groomed to expect success . . . . [The] data shows that the graduates of elite law schools come to the job market with different career expectations than graduates of nonelite schools. Among other things, they are more likely to have considered careers in business consulting or investment banking. . . . Interviews with lawyers in this group reveal that they do not want to work the long hours generally required at law firms, and they especially do not want to put in those hours patiently for ten years to compete for the partnership prize. This is a relatively privileged group that expects to do well in life. For them, the corporate law firm apprenticeship is something to put on a resume and move on.

On the other hand, write Dinovitzer and Garth:

Students from less selective schools have a different disposition. They know they had to work harder simply to attain those positions, and they realize that their options are more limited. . . . Thus, for a segment of students from the lower echelons of the law school heirarchy, the large corporate law firm job is a coveted reward for hard work and is not to be squandered. . . .

The conclusion to all this, write the authors, isn’t one that too many law firms are likely to run out and adopt: hire more lawyers from nonelite schools.

The obvious point is to hire more law graduates from outside the elite law schools. Because of their backgrounds, they will be hungrier and more willing to make the sacrifices necessary to gain access to partnerships. . . . [L]aw firms are always going to need driven young lawyers who are committed to doing what it takes to make partner. We suggest that they are most likely to find these sorts of lawyers outside the elite law schools.”

New Law School Ranking: Judicial Clerkship Jobs
by Robert Morse

Behind every great judge is his or her law clerk. Judicial clerkships are considered very prestigious. However, they are very difficult to obtain because they are highly coveted by law school graduates. Federal clerkships are considered the most prestigious, making them that much harder to get.

With this in mind U.S. News has just published our first-ever ranking of which law schools are sending the largest proportions of their graduates on to judicial clerkships for federal judges. The ranking is sorted by the percentage of the 2007 J.D. graduating class that was employed as clerks by federal judges. Yale, not surprisingly, came out No. 1.

Since they give clerks considerable knowledge of the law and court system, clerkships can provide a significant edge in today’s very competitive legal job market. In addition, some clerks are more highly prized by potential employers because of the valuable contacts that they develop during their clerkships.

What do clerks do? According the Indiana University Guide to Judicial Clerkships:

“The judicial clerk is a full-time assistant to the judge and usually performs a wide range of tasks including, legal research, drafting of memoranda and court opinions, proofreading and cite checking. A judicial clerk is often responsible for various administrative tasks such as maintenance of the docket and library, assembling documents or other administrative tasks necessary to meet the many obligations of the judge.”

Check out the chart of the new rankings here.

It seems that some think that it’s not that there aren’t enough legal jobs, but rather, there are just too many lawyers.  Read more at The New York Times…

Another View: Lock the Law School Doors
by Dan Slater

This summer, in the staid world of legal education, where curriculum is uniform and scholars are trained in the art of like-mindedness, one dean hatched a contrary plan.

In a memo to incoming students, Patricia D. White, the dean of University of Miami School of Law, surmised: “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm.” She then urged them to “think hard” about their plans and offered incentives for those willing to defer for one year.

“The nature of the legal profession is in great flux,” Dean White observed. “It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

…

The American Bar Association, which continues to approve law schools with impunity and with no end in sight, bears complicity in creating this mess. Yet a spokeswoman, citing antitrust concerns, says the A.B.A. takes no position on the optimal number of lawyers or law schools. So then how about the schools? Can they save future generations of students from themselves?

If it means shrinking classes, don’t count on it. Limiting education is un-American, not to mention anticapitalist, even if many law schools appear to profit from what may charitably be called an inefficient distribution of market information.

Take, for instance, the employment statistics posted on the Web sites of three low-ranked law schools in New York City, the country’s biggest market for legal employment. All three advertise that 45 to 60 percent of their 2008 graduates who reported salary information are making a median salary of $150,000 to $160,000.

Now, of course there must be some way of slicing and dicing the numbers to yield that magic result. But what happens, in practice, is that prospective degree-purchasers enroll in these $43,000-a-year programs believing their chances of landing that Big Law job are about one in two. Tempting odds.

Other schools market their degrees without six-figure promises. “If you counted on starting at $160,000 per year, then you’re in for a huge disappointment,” said Bryant Garth, the dean at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, where enrollment is up 11 percent. He disagrees with Miami’s approach and believes that trying to shrink class size amounts to panicking. “I insist law is still a good career,” he said. “Students may just have to make it in a more entrepreneurial fashion.”

Be sure and read this article and the advice within at Law.com…

No Job Offer in Hand?  Then You Need a Plan
by Suzanne Dupree Howe

In the past, most summer associates working at large firms felt that if they showed up at a decent hour, acted respectably and did a reasonably good job on their assignments, they were all but guaranteed an offer of permanent employment. Barring any major gaffes, summer associates were likely to snag an offer or two by the end of their second summer in law school.

That probably won’t be the case as this summer winds to a close. Summer associates likely have been walking on eggshells, trying to provide the best possible work product and to make themselves indispensable. The days of almost automatic entitlement to a permanent offer surely are over.

Given the economy and state of the legal market, many third-year law students may find themselves without an offer at the end of this summer. Firms have fewer positions to offer, and they will have to be more discriminating in their choices than in years past.

Unfortunately, 3Ls left without an offer at the end of the summer may find that additional job prospects are bleak in this down economy in which firms are laying off attorneys. If a summer associate does not receive an offer, one can only assume he will have a steep uphill battle ahead of him this coming school year. Without a significant upturn in the economy, 3Ls without offers will compete with a large mass of laid-off junior and midlevel associates, and they will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, since new graduates will lack the practical skills that these associates have had time to cultivate.

So, what is a 3L without an offer to do?

• Participate in OCIs: Third-year law students should participate in on-campus interviews this fall through their law school career services office; there always are a few firms looking to hire 3L students for permanent positions through the fall interview program.

• Consider small and midsized firms: Law students who had their hearts set on big-firm jobs after graduation but failed to net an offer would be well-served to consider alternative firms, namely smaller or midsize law firms. Due to competitive billing rates, many of these firms are seeing an increase in business and need warm bodies to do the work. And an associate could lateral to a large firm later once she gained practical experience.

• Look into different practice areas: Reflecting current trends, students should consider applying for positions in practice areas that are countercyclical and in higher demand. These practices include litigation, bankruptcy, white-collar crime, and labor and employment.

• Clerk for a judge: In this economy, 3Ls without offers should put a lot of time and effort into trying to secure a judicial clerkship after graduation. Not only will it give a new graduate time to ride out the storm and gain another year to find a job (hopefully in an improved legal job market), but a clerkship is an optimal way for new lawyers to enhance their resumes, regardless of their intended practice areas.

• Apply for a government job: Law students should consider applying for federal and state government positions in practice areas expected to be in demand in the coming years under the new administration, such as securities litigation, environmental law, and labor and employment. Consider seeking environmental attorney positions at the state and local level, positions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and positions at the U.S. Department of Labor, among others. Firms often cherry-pick lawyers out of these agencies for associate positions due to the expertise they gain inside.

Read more at Law.com.

From what I hear from my highly paced secret sources in some of the more elite firms out there, it’s going to get worse.

Read more at The Chicago Tribune…

Big firms cut back on law school recruiting
By Ameet Sachdev

The recession has made big law firms in Chicago even pickier when it comes to recruiting at law schools.

Firms have slashed the number of on-campus visits this year, as recruiting and hiring budgets have been cut. Seyfarth Shaw canceled its 2010 summer program. Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, which has a large Chicago presence, has said it expects to hire nationally about 100 interns — also known as summer associates — next year, down from 225 in this year’s summer class.Other law firms also have downsized their summer programs but are not publicly talking about their plans. Mayer Brown and Winston & Strawn declined to comment Monday and Jenner & Block did not return a request for comment.

Law schools of every ilk are feeling the effects, from elite private institutions such as Northwestern to state schools such as the University of Illinois.

“Many law firms still are finalizing their overall hiring needs,” Don Rebstock, Northwestern’s associate dean of enrollment, career strategy, and marketing, said in an e-mail response. “Because of this, we may offer a second on-campus interviewing program sometime in the spring.”

Northwestern students have somewhat brighter job prospects than their peers at lower-ranked schools because big law firms remain prestige-conscious.

“We’ve had large national firms tell us they can only go to three or four law schools,” said Tony Waller, assistant dean for career planning and professional development at the University of Illinois College of Law. “For Chicago firms, that means [University of] Chicago, Northwestern and Michigan.”

JAG corps announces law school programs
By Capt. Eric W. Adams

Applications for the Funded Legal Education Program and Excess Leave Program are being accepted from January 1 through March 1, 2010. Interested officers are encouraged to compete.

“Our Air Force missions are constantly changing and commanders deserve to have access to legal advisors with a broad background of military experiences,” said Lt. Col. Todd Wold, 1st Fighter Wing staff judge advocate. The FLEP and ELP will ensure that we can continue to maintain a corps of officers whose military experience complements their legal training, providing commanders with the highest caliber of legal support.”

According to Colonel Wold, Air Force judge advocate generals do more than just provide legal assistance. In addition to prosecuting and defending clients brought before courts-martial, JAG officers routinely participate in nearly every facet of the Air Force mission, including developing and acquiring weapons systems, ensuring availability of airspace and ranges where those systems are tested and operated, consulting with commanders about how those systems are employed in armed conflict and assisting commanders in the day-to-day running of military installations around the world.

“Every facet of every Air Force mission is bound by elements of the law,” said Colonel Wold.

The FLEP is a paid legal studies program for active-duty Air Force commissioned officers. The FLEP is an assignment action, and participants receive full pay, allowances, and tuition. FLEP applicants must have between two and six years active duty service (enlisted or commissioned) and must be in the pay grade O-3 or below as of the day they begin law school. The FLEP is subject to tuition limitations, and positions may be limited due to overall funding availability. The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) establishes the tuition limit, and the academic year 2010 is set at approximately $16,000 per year. This amount may change year to year.

Tough Job Market for Law School Students
by Jessica Calefati

The recession might be easing, but that doesn’t mean law students will have an easier time finding jobs at top firms this fall, the New York Times reports.

Law students are competing for about half as many openings at the country’s most prominent firms as their classmates were last year. For the first time in decades, the promise of a lucrative corporate law career for top students is uncertain, and in response, growing numbers of students are considering firms in smaller markets, opportunities in government, and jobs with public interest groups.

How bad is it?

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the juggernaut of New York, has slashed its hiring by more than half. For the first time in 136 years, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a respected Philadelphia firm, has canceled its recruiting entirely. Global firms like DLA Piper and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe have postponed recruiting for several months to see if the market improves.

At Yale, students accustomed to being wooed by Big Law’s glittering names—like Baker & McKenzie; Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy; and White & Case—were stunned when those firms canceled interviews in New Haven this month.

New York, Georgetown, and Northwestern universities all confirm that the number of interviews they are hosting on campus has dropped by one third to one half compared with a year ago, and less prestigious law schools are suffering even more.

Fulfilling Jobs for Lawyers

To the Editor:

Re “Downturn Dims Prospects Even at Top Law Schools” (Business Day, Aug. 26):

By taking away the possibility of easy employment in high-paying jobs, the economic downturn may end up helping the current crop of law students.

Very few law students at elite schools make meaningful explorations of the broad array of career choices available to law school graduates. Instead, lured by prestige and a high salary, they march through on-campus interviews to large urban law firms, where a great many end up leading unfulfilled lives.

As the jobs with large salaries disappear, law students will draw on the thoughtfulness, intelligence and perseverance that got them into law school in the first place in order to find employment that they actually find rewarding. They will also find creative ways to pay their loans and other expenses.

Most law graduates already do not expect a starting salary of $160,000 and yet are able to make ends meet. Graduates of elite schools will adjust to the new financial realities and come out better for it.

Michael F. Melcher
New York, Aug. 26, 2009

The writer, a graduate of Stanford Law School, is the author of “The Creative Lawyer: A Practical Guide to Authentic Professional Satisfaction.”

Can Attending a Cheaper Law School Lead to a Big Firm Job?
by Brian Baxter

Times are tough for today’s law students. Big law firms are reducing the size of their summer classes and even graduates of top-ranked law schools are having a tough time finding a job.

Given the state of the economy, it seems an appropriate time to compare two recent surveys to consider whether attending a cheaper, less prestigious law school can still land students lucrative jobs at Am Law firms.

The National Jurist this week released its list of Best Value Law Schools, the 65 schools that offer law students the “best bang for their buck” based on the cost of attending those schools and on the percentage of those schools’ graduates who passed the bar and got jobs.

To determine what makes a law school a “best value,” the magazine considered only public schools with in-state tuition of less than $25,000 and private schools with annual tuition of less than $30,000. The magazine for law students then narrowed its list to schools with an employment rate of at least 85 percent and a bar passage rate higher than the state average. It then ranked the schools, giving the greatest weight to tuition, followed by employment statistics.

So the students passed the bar and landed jobs. But what types of jobs? Are these grads, we wondered, going on to work as associates at Am Law 200 firms? To find out, we compared the top 25 schools from the magazine’s ranking against The National Law Journal’s 2008 survey of the 20 schools that send the most graduates to the country’s largest 250 firms (the survey appeared in the NLJ’s annual Law Schools Report, published every spring).

The results weren’t surprising.

None of the firms in the National Jurist’s top 25 were among the 20 law schools with the highest-percentage of graduates landing jobs in The NLJ 250. (Predictably, law schools like Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, NYU, and Northwestern topped The NLJ’s list with more than 65 percent of graduates landing jobs at large firms.)

Law School Graduates Facing Grueling Job Market

Law students are being forced to shelve their plans of joining large law firms and are instead seeking opportunities in government or public interest groups.

The New York Times reports that some of the nation’s top firms have cut back significantly on hiring, including the Philadelphia-based Morgan, Lewis & Bockius–which cancelled recruiting entirely for the first time in 136 years. Similarly, Bloomberg reports that Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the top-grossing U.S. law firm, trimmed the number of law students it plans to hire next summer by about half.

“Our expectation, and we have been upfront and honest about this, is that our summer program will be less than half of what it was this year,” said Skadden recruiting partner Howard Ellin in an interview with Bloomberg. “It reflects lower demand in the industry.”

The Times notes that top universities such as New York University, Georgetown and Northwestern have all confirmed that interviews have decreased by about a third to a half of what it was a year ago.

Which Law School Grads Have It the Worst?

How bad is the job market for graduates of top law schools? Worst in 50 years, reports the New York Times. Job fairs at top schools like Yale and Harvard are getting stood up by cash-strapped firms. The story at top East Coast law names is a slew of slashed hirings, delayed starts, and canceled recruiting. The twilight of the recession still means dark days for even the nation’s most illustrious firms and it all boils down to thousands of law school grads getting crushed with nowhere to start chipping away at six-figure debt. But what really surprised me about this article was who has it the worst…

It’s not the 2009 grads, or even the 2010 grads — it’s the current second-years, says the author. Here’s the reasoning:

The timing is worst for the class of 2011, the second-years now looking to get into firms, because of a unique logjam created last year. After the September financial crisis, firms chose to defer their new hires at the price of steeply cutting recruiting this year.

Economic Woes Hitting Recent Law School Grads Hard
by Ian Bush

These are tough times for a lot of folks looking for work — even for those who want to be lawyers. Law schools across the country say fewer firms are recruiting, and that’s leaving students worried — and in piles of debt.

It’s supposed to be a nice payoff — after amassing hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, the salary law grads get should make most of those zeroes vanish.

But as big firms buckle under economic pressure, they’re taking on fewer hires:

“There’s a bit of malaise settling in among the student body.”

Amy Montemarano, the assistant dean of career and professional development at Drexel’s Earle Mack School of Law, says there’s a deafening silence from a third of the firms that used to recruit.

Students Fret as Big Law Jobs Vanish

This fall, law students are competing for half as many openings at big firms as they were last year in what is shaping up to be the most wrenching job search season in over 50 years, The New York Times’s Gerry Shih reports.

For students now, the promise of the big law firm career — and its paychecks — is slipping through their fingers, forcing them to look at lesser firms in smaller markets as well as opportunities in government or with public interest groups, law school faculty and students say.

The frenzy has even pushed the nation’s top firms, a tradition-bound coterie, into discussing how to reform the recruitment process with an earnestness that would have been unthinkable just years ago.

Even if the economy is beginning to pick up, the legal profession has been pummeled over the last year, with some firms closing and survivors often asking associates to take leaves of absence.

How bad is it? Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the juggernaut of New York, has slashed its hiring by more than half. For the first time in 136 years, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a respected Philadelphia firm, has canceled its recruiting entirely. Global firms like DLA Piper and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe have postponed recruiting for several months to see if the market improves.

At Yale, students accustomed to being wooed by Big Law’s glittering names — like Baker & McKenzie; Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy; and White & Case — were stunned when those firms canceled interviews in New Haven this month.

New York University, Georgetown, Northwestern and other top universities confirm that interviews are down by a third to a half compared with a year ago, while lower-ranked schools are suffering more. What is more, when interviews finish in a few weeks, even fewer offers will be extended, said Howard L. Ellin, the chairman of global hiring at Skadden, Arps, because many firms are interviewing students for slots they may not fill.

Some other avice he offers may be less helpful – like ‘accept your offer quickly.’  I frankly think it’s wisest to not accept job offers quickly and be in a position to evaluate numerous offers.  Think things through, don’t ‘accept your offer quickly.’

Be sure to read the entire article at Law.com…

Commentary: Law Students Should Take Long View

by William A. Chamberlain

This is indeed a tough time to be a 2L. One has to keep reminding one’s self that this down economy, like all others, will pass. Despite all of the uncertainty, today’s law students can be certain that in the long run, they can have long and happy legal careers.

In the meanwhile, this on-campus interview (OCI) season has been far different than any other in recent memory. The current OCI season now seems like the culmination of a process that began with layoffs in late 2008 and early 2009, deferrals for the Class of 2009 until sometime in 2010, and greater competition among summer associates this summer for permanent offers.

The students in the Class of 2011 were able to have a relatively relaxed and educational, if not particularly remunerative, summer, gaining legal experience with judges, professors, public interest agencies and small firms. Meanwhile, we in career offices watched with increasing unease as several firms cancelled their OCI visits, their visits for 3L students, and, in some cases, their 2010 summer programs altogether. Other firms decided to postpone hiring decisions for next summer until later in the fall or the spring.

While we at Northwestern are firm believers in the free market, we also reached out to each firm that cancelled to try to persuade them to attend or to at least do a request for resumes. We hope that an upturn in the economy by the end of the year will encourage some firms to explore Spring hiring for second-years.

Still, this initial phase of the hiring season brings a hopefulness, not unlike the first semester of law school before grades come out. But as word of callbacks spreads, student unease is likely to grow — as will the uncertainty. While we all know that summer associate classes for 2010 will be much smaller, by and large, than this past summer, we do not know how small nor do we know when firms will start limiting the process — with the number of callback offers or with the number of summer offers.

Our message to students about how to handle offers has been straightforward — accept your offer quickly. The key is to get a job for next summer. Smart students will not rely on NALP’s 45-day guideline but rather accept their offers as soon as humanly possible. From the school side, we have dealt with all sorts of reactions by firms to the economy and are urging our students to be risk-averse. Any sense of entitlement will be fatal this fall.

Read more at Bloomberg…

Skadden Arps Slashes Law School Hires for Summer of 2010
By Cynthia Cotts and Carlyn Kolker

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the top-grossing U.S. law firm, cut the number of law school students it plans to hire next summer by about half.

The firm hired 225 law school students this summer and expects to hire less than half of that for summer 2010, Skadden recruiting partner Howard Ellin said yesterday in an interview.

“Our expectation, and we have been upfront and honest about this, is that our summer program will be less than half of what it was this year,” Ellin said in a telephone interview from Harvard Law School, where he was conducting on-campus interviews. “It reflects lower demand in the industry.”

Early this year, the largest U.S. law firms began firing junior lawyers, delaying the start dates of first-year associates and revamping compensation models. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP have said they won’t hire students for summer jobs in 2010.

Read more at Philly.com…

Law grads headed for public-interest work
By Chris Mondics

Legal-services groups that represent Philadelphia’s poorest citizens are readying themselves for an unexpected windfall – the arrival of newly minted law school graduates whose start dates at big law firms have been pushed back and who will spend a year practicing public-interest law.

Leaders of these organizations say the arrival of the new lawyers could not have come at a better time. Foundations have reduced their grants, as have other supporters, in response to the nation’s economic downturn, so legal groups have been scrambling to staff cases.

During the next several weeks, a half-dozen or more new law-school graduates will be joining their staffs.

Effectively, they will be compensated by the law firms that hired them and then pushed back their starting dates. But their paychecks will be far less than what they would have earned had they started on schedule at the firms.

The firms are seeking to trim their costs in response to a decline in revenue after last fall’s economic collapse, and that has been a boon to public-interest legal groups.

Read more at KCRG.com…

Discrimination Suit Filed Against UI Law School

A Michigan man has filed a lawsuit against the University of Iowa and its College of Law claiming he was the victim of age discrimination.

Donald Dobkin, 56, filed his lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Davenport earlier this week. The veteran attorney claims he was denied a position on the school’s faculty because of his age.

Court records show he applied for a law professor position at the school in 2008. In 2009, Dobkin was told he had been rejected despite an “impressive academic and professional record.” The positions were filled by people under 40 years old.

Read the whole article at MSNBC.com…

For class of 2009, degree doesn’t mean a job
Fewer than a fifth of graduating seniors even have offers, research finds
By Alex Johnson

Matt Dumont has been looking for work since May.

“I’ve had a couple times that I was told that I was one of the top applicants, went in for an interview, and then I just never heard back from them,” said Dumont, who graduated last spring from Abilene Christian University in Texas with a degree in English and minors in Spanish and the Bible.

Dumont was haunting the college’s Career Center last week, looking for leads and advice. But the prospects are not promising for him and thousands of other new college graduates: Employment counselors and job placement specialists say the class of 2009 faces a daunting task finding work in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Labor statistics for July showed that 15.3 percent of Americans ages 20 to 24 were unemployed, up a tenth of a percentage point from June. That’s compared to the overall jobless rate of 9.4 percent.

Those figures don’t indicate how many were recent college graduates, but surveys by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a professional organization of career counselors at more than 2,000 U.S. colleges and universities, show that the recession has been particularly tough on those entering the job market with a college degree.

More than half of graduates in the class of 2007 had job offers in hand when they finished school, the association said. That figure dropped to one-quarter of 2008 graduates — after the recession began in December 2007 — and for the class of 2009, it was fewer than one-fifth.

…

Some seniors cling to alma mater

Others are postponing their careers in another way, choosing to extend the security of college life until bad times blow over.

In a survey of college students by The Associated Press and the college TV network mtvU, nearly 1 in 5 said in May that they had changed their plans this year and expected to attend graduate or professional school because they feared that an undergraduate degree wouldn’t be enough to secure a job.

Final data aren’t yet available, but the Council of Graduate Schools reported that applications for graduate schools were noticeably up this year, by as much as 20 percent at some institutions.

Meanwhile, Kaplan Inc., which helps students study for graduate school admissions exams, found that 40 percent of students who took the Law School Admissions Test in February said the recession was a factor in their decisions to apply to law school.

“Recessions often inspire people to look to law school to ride out the storm, transition into a new field or broaden their education to make themselves a more attractive candidate,” said Jeff Thomas, the company’s director of pre-law programs.

Then again, with a law degree, you can do ‘anything,’ or so I have been told.  The ABA Journal reports…

New Lawyer Says Waitress Job Pays More than Small Law Firms
By Debra Cassens Weiss

Recent law school graduate Bobbi-Sue Doyle-Hazard has discovered a sad reality as she works as a waitress at a Boston steak restaurant and goes on interviews for jobs at small law firms—her pay will likely drop when she finds legal work.

She told the Boston Business Journal about one recent job interview. “When asked what I’d like for a salary I said $50,000, and I was told that was high,” Doyle-Hazard said. Still, she is thrilled about the interviews and eager to find work in civil litigation.

Read more at Bloomberg…

Fordham Law School Bans Reed Smith From Recruiting on Campus
By Cynthia Cotts

Fordham Law School, one of the 15 most-selective U.S. law schools, banned international law firm Reed Smith LLP from recruiting on the New York campus for five years.

Reed Smith canceled fall interviews at Fordham at the last minute, after announcing its intention to conduct the interviews and receiving an interview schedule, Fordham Dean William Treanor wrote in an e-mail yesterday to students.

“In my seven years as dean, no other firm has canceled its interviews after the schedule was released,” Treanor wrote. “At Fordham Law, we require our students to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism, and we expect employers to demonstrate the same high standards.”

Early this year, the largest U.S. law firms began firing junior lawyers, delaying the start dates of first-year associates and revamping compensation models. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP have said they won’t hire students for summer jobs in 2010.

Develop a Specialty Now, Alum Urges Law Students
By Martha Neil

Dennis Brown, the managing partner of the Littler Mendelson office in San Jose, notes:

“When I graduated from law school, hiring decisions were primarily based on GPA and getting a broad survey of general law courses so you could run, ride, rope and shoot—like a cowboy,” says Brown. “What we have seen, especially with a dwindling job market, is the firms no longer have the capacity or inclination to take the raw clay and to shape it completely into something they would like the associate to be.”