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Too many lawyers? Interesting article with lots of stats ....

Sat, 12/04/2004 - 5:17pm — JudgeJones

You hear all the time that there are too many lawyers.  As we know, that varies from place to place, but overall could this be? Here is an article  from the University of Illinois -  Urbana/Champaign asking Are There Too Many Lawyers?, which was presented by the Pre-Law and Law School Admissions office. While many stats are presented I can't figure out what the real point was of the article.

But that's not what caught my eye (or that of David Giacalone).  Rather, there were two pieces in the article discussing what recruiters thought important. First, 

Quote:

When asked what skills they expected law school graduates to bring to a firm, hiring coordinators listed in order:

  1. oral communication skills
  2. written communication skills
  3. legal analytic ability
  4. library and computer skills
  5. sensitivity for ethical skills.

(emphasis added). Excuse me? Does this explain some problems that both bench and bar encounter every day? Inquiring minds want to know. It is no secret that I value highly the practice of the highest ethical standards before the court. Since taking the bench in 1997 I've become increasingly concerned about the decline of civility among lawyers out here in the Hill Country where we used to pride ourselves on being more civil to one another than those "brutes" from the city. If the stats in this article are accurate then it would appear that law firm recruiters either don't care about the 'sensitivity for ethical skills' (which I take to be the level of the new lawyer's concern for ethics), or, hopefully, they hope to engender in the new lawyer the necessary ethical concerns. Let us hope the latter is the case.

If anyone feels they need some resources on ethics, try the ethics resources page at haikuEsq (which is an interesting site with a byline of " one-breath poetry & punditry with haikuEsq __ f/k/a ethicalEsq").

There was another interesting piece of knowledge about why lawyers get the boot:

Quote:

The qualities most often cited as reasons for not keeping a person with a firm are as follows:

  1. poor writing skills
  2. poor oral communication skills
  3. not being a "team player" or having poor organizational skills
  4. lack of enthusiasm
  5. lack of creativity
  6. "laziness" (i.e. only working during working hours --- that is, the expectation is that one will work much more than forty hours per week)
  7. not being a "people oriented" person.

Ignore at your own risk!

"JJ"