Right Plan - Wrong Profession?
The description of the profession used in Northwestern’s Strategic Plan is based on data which describes a profession that very likely has undergone some radical permanent changes since the data describing the legal profession was collected. The Plan presumes a profession that existed through 2006 and is designed to address the requirements of that profession. For example in the opening pages of the Plan it notes that starting salaries for top law school graduates were “now $160,000 plus bonuses” for the top graduates of Northwestern Law School. In my blog I describe how many formerly highly paid law school graduates are now unemployed or employed for modest salaries.
The Plan also describes the growth in the demand for legal services, based on law firm revenues from 2000 to 2006 which show legal services overall slightly outpacing GDP and the revenue of the Top 200 US law firms dramatically exceeding GDP with an annualized growth rate of 9.8%.
2007 has brought dramatic changes to the global as well as the US economy. Similar impacts have been felt by the legal profession. The reduction in the demand for legal services as well as the incomes of lawyers has been widely publicized. Perhaps even more importantly, the role that the law might have played in the US and other cultures may well be changing. Most notably, the central feature of at least the US legal system, lawsuits, appears to be disappearing. As I suggest in this series of blogs, this change may not be a mere function of the economic climate, but a cultural shift in which the role played by law is being replaced by other factors in the culture to order and control behavior.
Northwestern’s plan explicitly describes itself as not being a new effort, but describes itself as “refreshing portions of its 1998 Strategic Plan and “fine tun[ing]” the school’s response to the continuing challenges for legal education. Its biggest problem may be that it does just that and in doing so may have fallen into the trap that has plagued legal education—its uncanny ability to train lawyers for the profession of the past.
