Nelson P. Miller (Associate Dean, Thomas M. Cooley Law School) responds to last week’s post on the new paper by Tax Prof Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt), Is a Law Degree a Good Investment Today?:
Professor Herwig Schlunk’s paper assumes some things that make inaccurate its conclusion that a law degree is a “very risky” investment. His assertion is untrue by any reasonable measure of employment risk. At most law schools, around 90% of students graduate and find jobs, most of them in the law field where overall employment is about 98%. Try making it as an artist, author, entertainer, athlete, musician, designer, decorator, restaurateur, entrepreneur, or even public administrator, software engineer, or day laborer, where employment rates are significantly lower and the risks far greater. Statistically, the bigger risks are that one does not get an education.
Professor Schlunk’s first inaccurate assumption is that Biglaw (a job at one of the top 250 law firms) is the primary indication of investment return—that if a graduate does not find a job with a Biglaw firm, then hope is lost and the return is poor. In fact, Biglaw represents only a relatively small and highly specialized segment of overall lawyer employment. According to ABA statistics on Lawyer Demographics, in year 2000 (the most-recent year for which the ABA has these statistics), only 14% of private practitioners were in firms of more than 100 lawyers. By contrast, 70% practiced in firms of 10 or fewer lawyers, and nearly half (48%) of all lawyers in private practice were solo practitioners. Biglaw is not where many law students want to practice or where most lawyers do practice. Lawyers want the responsibility, autonomy, choice, meaning, and individual reward of small-firm and solo practice.
Professor Schlunk’s second inaccurate assumption is that law schools should be placing more than 5%, 8%, or 25% of their graduates at Biglaw firms (the three figures he uses for the schools attended by “Also Ran,” “Solid Performer,” and “Hot Prospect”). My law school, which is not a US News top-tier law school, places graduates at Biglaw firms. Yet doing so is not its primary mission, which instead is to prepare law students for practice. That mission is why it hires lawyers with substantial practice experience to teach its law students. I practiced for 16 years and some of my colleagues for 20 or 25 years before coming here to teach. We know the skills that students need to learn to be successful lawyers.
Professor Schlunk’s characterization of his three hypothetical students as “Also Ran,” “Solid Performer,” and “Hot Prospect” based on the relative US News ranking of their law schools also perpetuates a false myth. Lawyers succeed because of skill, not school. I attended a top-tier (alright, a top-five) law school. Yet no client ever asked me where I went to law school. To clients, the difference is what you learn at law school. My school also made no difference to the small-firm partnership I sought and received, and which rewarded me handsomely throughout my years of practice.
And by the way, as a small-firm lawyer, I loved beating Biglaw lawyers in my civil-litigation practice. If “Also Ran” could only “claw his way into a third-tier private law school,” as Professor Schlunk hypothesizes, then once he gets his law license from a school that focuses on practice preparation, he might be the lawyer I would want to hire.
Professor Schlunk properly qualifies his opinions, recognizing that there are many other variables. Many students work throughout law school (as I did), lowering the cost of foregone earnings and reducing borrowing costs. Productivity is not finite. The economy does not need more people sitting on the sidelines because they think investing in improving their own productive capacity is too risky. Professionals use law degrees in other fields including business, corporate governance (CEOs), finance, risk management, accounting, public administration, education, and medicine, precisely because they so acutely increase human capital and potential.
