Lookout For Falling Salaries

The Wall Street Journal has a short piece today on attorney salaries and the NALP Employment Report and Salary Survey on the Class of 2010.  This is the key part:

"Even so, the national median salary for newbie lawyers – at least for those with full-time work – still stands at $63,000, according to the report. That doesn’t sound so bad, except for the fact that only about 64% of law school graduates found full-time employment in a job requiring bar passage. The rest found non-legal or part-time work, and more than a quarter reported biding their time in temporary jobs."

Let that sink in:  according to NALP, only 64% of law school graduates whose employment status is known are working in a full-time job requiring bar passage.  For what it's worth, NALP says that in the graduating class of 2010, they know the employment status of 87.6% of graduates.

From the NALP press release itself:

"We have been watching this market deteriorate for several years now," Leipold offered when asked about the significance of some of these changes, "but even I was surprised to see that the percentage of graduates employed in a full-time job requiring bar passage had dropped to 64%. In this market far more graduates are stringing together several part-time or temporary jobs to approximate a full-time equivalency for themselves. Leaving clerkships aside, one in five jobs obtained were temporary. That represents a dramatic change in the entry-level market."

Run, don't walk, from law school.  It is just not worth it.