The legal market is shrinking, with the number of people applying for law school falling by 16%

The legal market is shrinking, with the number of people applying for law school falling by 16% (Alberta News) According to the "Law School Admission Test" (Law...

(Alberta News)

According to the "Law School Admission Test") The Law School Admission Test Board, the organization behind the LSAT, reported that the number of people taking the test fell by more than 16% this year, the largest drop in more than a decade. The report said that 129,925 people took the LSAT in the 2011-12 school year, which was not only down from 155,050 people a year ago, but also far lower than the 171,514 people two years ago. Overall, the number of people taking the test has dropped by nearly 25% in the past two years. The decline reflects a troubled U.S. legal services market that will struggle to absorb the estimated 45,000 law schools that will graduate over the next three years. Many lawyers and law professors have argued in recent years that the legal services market will stagnate or shrink as technological advances allow more and more low-end legal work to be handled overseas and companies demand more cost-effective fee arrangements from their law firms. These controversies, coupled with negative news about too many new lawyers falling into huge debts, have changed how undergraduates view law school. Many believe that law school is no longer a safe choice in a recession (as has been the belief for years), and that getting good grades at an upper-middle-class school does not guarantee a six-figure law firm job after graduation. Law schools have also suffered from recessionary pressures in the past year or two. Some blogs (mostly written by unemployed or semi-unemployed graduates) have accused law schools of using shady data. Attention is focused on one key statistic: the percentage of students who are employed nine months after graduation. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against more than a dozen law schools in recent months alleging that they used massive amounts of fraudulent and inflated post-graduation employment data to defraud students. Even if the law schools win the lawsuits (and many legal experts think they can), media attention has begun to increase sharply.