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Is the Law Economy that bad?
I don't know how I missed this before, but A Mad Tea-Party links to a story at law.com that says:
Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison is offering to pay some first-year associates as much as $3,000 per month not to show up for work until January 2004.
Is it that bad everywhere? Or maybe that's not so bad. If a firm is liquid enough to pay people that much not to go to work, the firm must still be getting quite a lot of business, it would seem. Still, it's kind of sobering little anecdote. I suppose this means that law grads in 2002-2004 will face tougher-than-ever job searches? I wonder what it will be like in 2005. (Keeping in mind, of course, that I'm not planning to work for a big firm, but still...)
Posted September 2, 2002 09:36 AM | law school
A friend of mine had been offered and accepted a job at a Palo Alto, CA firm and got a letter detailing a plan somewhat like Brobeck's just three weeks before graduation. If I recall, the deal was that they'd pay monthly "salary" for your availability, but if you ended up going elsewhere, you had to pay them back.
She said, 'to heck with that,' and started looking elsewhere.
The firms are probably in no real danger of immediate insolvency, but they do want to try to preserve their profit margins. The hiring process involves a lot of gambles. Large firms have summer programs and make job offers to people over a year before the people will begin working. It's a gamble whether there will be enough work to keep those people busy and keep it worthwhile to train them. There's risk built into those 15 months. Similarly, there's risk involved in just cutting people loose. When you've gone to the trouble to get to know potential associates through a complex recruitment program, you don't want to completely cut them loose. So, you pay them an availability fee (if I recall correctly, at Brobeck, $3,000/mo is less than 1/3 of the salary they would have gotten on the job), and gamble on being able to take them on later and save yourself the trouble of having to recruit all over again if prospects improve.
I'm looking for work in the Denver area right now, having just moved here after graduating from the University of Minnesota with my JD in May. I came here following my girlfriend, who is in grad school here, and I did not know two years ago that I would be coming to Denver. For that and other reasons, summer after my 2L year was not spent at a firm, let alone one in the Denver area. I'm looking for work now, starting from scratch. It's hard stepping into an area like this that's already pretty saturated, when I don't know anyone and there will be about 600 newly licensed Colorado attorneys in about a month. That's a lot of competition!
I've got a feeling that firms of all kinds are trying to cut their training costs. Lots of firms are posting job openings for associates with 2-6 years of experience, which don't have the training overhead cost that, say, I would. I at least have a bit of clinical training for me, but I don't plan to practice in the same areas that I did as a clinical student attorney.
Ah, well. We shall see. I'm just getting started with this process.
Posted by: TPH at September 6, 2002 12:38 AM
