Finally, there are some good news from the U.S. job market for lawyers. As the National Jurist reports:

The legal job market improved for a third straight year, with 57 percent of the class of 2013 employed in long-term, full-time positions that require bar passage within 9 months of graduation. That is up from 56.2 percent for the class of 2012 and 54.9 percent for the class of 2011, according to data released by the American Bar Association.

While this improvement may seem small, the job market for law graduates will also continue to get better simply based on the declining number of law graduates, according to the same report:

The class of 2013 is the largest in the history of legal education, with 46,776 matriculants. Next year’s class is almost 4,000 students smaller, meaning that even if the number of long-term, full-time positions remains flat, employment will improve to 62 percent. The number would improve to 68 percent for the Class of 2015 and 74 percent for the Class of 2016, based on smaller class sizes.

Adding to the good news is a recent essay by Rene Reich-Graeve, a professor at Western New England University School of Law, entitled ‘Keep Calm and Carry On.’ The essay ‘examines some of the hard data available for today’s legal market and develops very basic forecasts and hypotheses about what the future will bring for the U.S. legal profession during the next decades.’

According to the author, the future looks bright for law students. As the abstract provides:

In conclusion, [the essay] it projects that recent law school graduates and current and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country — a legal market which will grow, exist for, and coincide with, their entire professional careers. Using admittedly back-of-the-envelope math based on current trends affecting the legal market (in particular, lawyer retirements, population growth, and additional demand for legal services driven by increased volume and complexity), the Essay estimates over 840,000 new employment opportunities for lawyers between 2010 and 2030 alone.

Even more strikingly:

In other words, the Essay projects that, statistically, the legal profession market is moving into the direction of close-to-guaranteed legal employment for all law school graduates over the course of the next two decades.

The full essay can be downloaded from SSRN.

 

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