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The Daily Tar Heel

Hiring slow for law grads

Students find, start jobs later

For years, students have believed that graduating from law school guarantees employment.

But data suggest recent law graduates are also feeling the pinch of the economic downturn after the collapse of the banking industry triggered a decline in the demand for legal services.

It’s taking students longer to find the jobs that remain, said Brian Lewis, assistant dean for career services at UNC School of Law.

And many firms are delaying new hires’ start dates by as much as a year, Lewis said.

“Many law students, including myself, have taken out student loans to pay for school, so we’ll be required to start paying those off after we graduate,” said UNC second-year law student Brooks Pope in an e-mail. “It’s scary to think about not having a job when you start getting that payoff notice in the mail.”

The national law student employment rate fell to 88.3 percent for the class of 2009 — a 3.6 decrease from the class of 2007’s all-time high and the lowest employment rate since the mid-1990s, according to the Association for Legal Career Professionals.

Deferred start dates

For UNC’s law school, which had the highest bar passage in the state this year, 96 percent of the class of 2009 found employment within nine months.

While that number is up slightly from the year before, students need more time to secure a position. In the past, most students had job offers by graduation, Lewis said.

The number of start date deferrals also increased. As many as 40 students had delayed start dates, up from three students the year before, Lewis said.

“That was unheard of,” he said.

The practice of pushing back start dates results from over-hiring in big firms prior to the recession.

“Rather than rescind offers already made, firms deferred their starting dates as a way to save money and not have attorneys milling around the water cooler with nothing to do,” he said.

The practice also helps firms to secure top students by guaranteeing them a job in the future, he said.

“Delayed start dates are definitely a trend,” said Stella Boswell, senior career counselor at Duke Law School.

“Something like 50 percent of our class had some kind of deferral (in 2009),” she said.

Better than last year

But the situation may not be as grim as the statistics suggest.

The largest law firms sometimes attach stipends to deferrals, which can be as high as $50,000 to $70,000 annually, Boswell said.

And while it might be years before employment returns to normal, the job market seems a little better this year, she said.

“There are way less deferrals this time,” Boswell said. “I do think we’ve seen the bottom of it.”

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Changes in law hiring lag behind the overall economy by a couple of years, so the job market is likely to pick up in the future, Lewis said.

“When the economy goes back up, we don’t see it right away,” he said.

Pope said she was confident more legal jobs would become available.

“All of us, whether we want to work at firms or not, are worried about the job market but are definitely optimistic that the market will improve before we graduate in two years,” she said.

Boswell said it might take more career steps for young lawyers to reach their dream jobs.

“Basically you have to hustle more.”

Contact the State & National Editor at stntdesk@unc.edu.

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