State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds advised the McLean County Board’s Justice Committee of the difficulty she is having hiring attorneys at a meeting on Tuesday.
“Right now there is just not a lot of attorneys out there,” Reynolds said. “The amount of people going into law school is down. The amount of people graduating from law school is down and most importantly the amount of people passing the bar exam is significantly lower than it has been in the past. The most recent bar passage rate was 43 percent across the board which is way down. ”
According to a December story published by Reuters, The American Bar Association reported on Dec. 19, 2022 that there were 38,020 first-year law students at the law schools it accredits, down from 42,718 in 2021. Among the 196 accredited schools, 150 saw a decrease in the size of their first-year classes. This drop was largely a natural response to a surge of students entering law school in 2021 after the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020.
Reynolds believes the drop may be a result of increasing costs to attend law school and the recent increases in interest for school loans. She is aware of people that simply consider the school loan payment to be akin to say a cable bill that they will always have to pay.
A story from Above The Law from August 2022 supports Reynolds saying that while potential high wage earners are going to work for the big law sector, those whose potential would limit them to a lower wage are, “opting out of the law altogether in higher numbers because law school debt has outstripped salaries for jobs serving the most pressing legal needs.”
Statista published a July 2022 story that said, “The number of law graduates in the United States steadily declined between 2013 and 2021.”
Reynolds thinks remote learning replacing classroom learning during Covid may be having a negative impact on graduates failure to pass the bar exam.
“Lecture in law school is different than lecture in other types of courses. Lecture in law school, they follow what is called the Socratic method. And it is a question answer. So the law school professors ask a question of the students and the students feed that information back to the professors. So the professor isn’t really telling you anything. They are teaching you how to learn. I can’t imagine how difficult that would be over Zoom to really engage an entirety of people like that.”
An October 2022 story in Market Watch confirms Reynolds’ thinking. “Legal-industry experts say there’s an obvious culprit for the declines — namely, the COVID-19 pandemic,” the story said.
In previous markets law students were not offered jobs until after they passed the bar exam. In today’s seller’s market students are receiving job offers before they take the bar. That makes it tougher for government to hire attorneys that they can keep. Students who are at least sophomores or graduated can obtain temporary licenses to practice law. But if they fail the bar they can not continue practicing.
McLean County is currently looking to see if they can offer anything differently regarding compensation. Recently Reynolds was trying to make a hire and a neighboring county was able to offer the person $11,000 more a year than she was able to. Reynolds lost the potential hire to that county.
Meanwhile Reynolds is forced to participate in a game where she is poaching employees from other states attorney offices and the private sector just to get them in the door.
