As I sit back from my lawyerly vantage point, overlooking the yard from the spare bedroom in my Aunt and Uncle’s apartment, I can’t help but think that I have somehow been fooled. I got into this profession for two things: Money and Power. So, the question has become an emphatic “where the fuck is MY money at?” Answer, nowhere.

Because of the recession (if it can still be called that, in my opinion we’re printing money so fast that pretty soon It’ll be about as valuable as the paper I use to wipe my ass with) the legal job market has taken a huge downturn. BigLaw has began a round of sweeping layoffs, with majors like MoFo, DLA and Morgan Lewis giving the axe to associates and staffers. Of course, I’m not a BigLaw attorney. I have no interest in becoming one. Only the money interests me, but everything else just doesn’t appeal. So what do these layoffs have to do with me?

Well, first of all this whole thing is making for a nicely oversaturated lawyer market where I live. Tons of lawyers, no jobs. I just read that since the early 70’s, up until 2000, the number of attorneys has basically doubled. In 30 some odd years, we have multiplied like rabbits roaches. Have we lawyers become so pervasive in society that the massive lawyerboom has to stop? We aren’t the most loved of professions, and with so many (and so many BAD lawyers) of us out there, isn’t it time to put the clamp down? I think it’s time to make law schools go on birth control. Hear me out. Don’t hit the home button on your browser just yet.

If we place some harsher restrictions on the amount of students that law schools are allowed to accept into their programs, we will naturally end up producing better lawyers in the first place. They will be better trained, have a more personal education experience, and would also help bring the lawyer profession back in line with what I want it to be: Elite.

Law Schools make WAAAY too much money as is, fleecing students by charging outrageous prices for education that is generally very hit or miss. How many classes can you say were actually helpful or enjoyable? Now how many would you say were an absolute waste of your fucking loan money? Exactly. For every Sports law class, there is a property course taught by an inept tenured professor. $36 G’s a year for what? With a tighter cap on how many students law schools can accept, they would have to institute stricter admission standards, leading to higher quality graduates. And by controlling the amount of income a law school can make off of these unsuspecting, innocent kids coming straight out of undergrad, the school will become less of a business and more of a school.

Ultimately, we wound up going to law school to get educated. Meaning we placed our trust in the Law School Institution. For the wave of fresh new undergrad faces considering making the jump to law school because there just aren’t any jobs out there, the Law School Institutions around the U.S. owe a duty to these students to be truthful and ethical. What they need NOT do is give these kids early admissions, and act like law school is salvation from the recession. It’s not. It will be increasingly more difficult for a student to be able to even take out the loans needed to pay tuition, let alone having enough to cover living expenses. But I just don’t see law schools going this route. When you can churn out lawyers by the hundreds each year, why would you voluntarily cut back on your own profits? You wouldn’t. If you were a business. But are law schools institutions of education, or just another business racket that has taken on a slightly different form? Firms are laying off and shuttering up, bracing themselves to withstand the impending downturn in business. Rumors flying around the legal community include ones that firms are not looking to resume hiring until 2010 or 2011. It will be interesting to see how law schools react, knowing that they will have a really difficult time placing students in the positions that they were looking for when they first got to law school.The golden age of lawyers may be over. Firms are merging, collapsing and laying off associates in staggering numbers. Despite this, I suspect that law schools will accept as many students as they can shove into their classrooms.

-TLL