[4] By comparison, the average starting salary of a 2012 college graduate was $44,000 and the median household income in the U.S. was over $51,000 that year.
[6] The BLS also predicts that more price competition over the next decade may lead law firms to rethink their project staffing to reduce costs to clients.
[7] He notes that employment and salary information provided by law schools is based on surveys of recent graduates.
Even toward the bottom of the distribution, the value of a law degree will typically exceed its costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[16] Law Professor Paul Campos criticized the study because only a very small number of lawyers surveyed graduated in the last decade.
In addition, Simkovic and McIntyre failed to address other economic indicators suggesting changes in the market for legal services.
According to Georgetown University's "2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market," 2015 saw a sixth consecutive year of largely flat demand, weakening pricing power and falling productivity.
Clients have assumed active control of the organization, staffing, scheduling and pricing of legal matters, where previously they had largely left those decisions in the hands of law firms.
Ohio State law professor Deborah Jones Meritt examined job outcomes of the Class of 2010.
About 2.5% of the population worked in non-professional jobs including tennis instruction, office management, lingerie sales, and pest control.
However, she found that some of these solo practitioners supplemented their income with jobs that did not require a law license, such as insurance sales, investment, firefighting, party planning, and substitute teaching.
[21][22][23][24] Judges dismissed the lawsuits because they determined that college graduates considering law schools are a sophisticated subset of education consumers, capable of sifting through data and weighing alternatives before making a decision regarding their postcollege options.
[26] In dismissing the lawsuit against New York Law School, Judge Melvin Schweitzer noted "it is also difficult for the court to conceive that somehow lost on these plaintiffs is the fact that goodly number of law school graduates toil — perhaps part-time — in drudgery or have less than hugely successful careers.