More Lawyers + Fewer Crimes = Tough Times for Young Lawyers

As we know, it's hard to be a young lawyer these days, mainly because there are more lawyers chasing less work. Today I want to look at one particularly stark example of this, which is actually caused by the intersection of two separate trends:

1) The long term rise in the number of lawyers in the United States; and
2) The continuing decrease in the amount of crimes committed in the United States.

Together, these trends have drastically reduced the number of potential clients available for young criminal defense lawyers. Keep this in mind when old criminal defense lawyers who hung out their shingles during the golden age of criminal defense (1968-1992) make fun of the young lawyers trying to do the same thing in today's much harsher environment

More Lawyers

Since 1969, the per capita rate of licensed lawyers in the US has increased 150%, from 1.6 per 1,000 people to 4.0:

Fewer Crimes

For a while—and purely by coincidence I'm sure—the proliferation of lawyers was accompanied by a proliferation of crime. Crime exploded from 1960 to 1980, dropped off for a few years, and then peaked again in 1991. Since then, however, the crime rate has plummeted, and the major crime rate is now lower than it was when the lawyer-boom began in 1969. The following chart shows the rate of the FBI's "Part I" crimes (a combination of the violent crimes and the major property crimes):

Major Crimes Per Lawyer: Dropping like a Brick

Put the two trends together, and here is what you get:

Between 1968 and 1991, there were an average of 22 major crimes per licensed lawyer. In 2012, that number was down to 8, and there is every reason to believe that the bottom is still dropping out. In the 70s and 80s, criminal lawyers could afford to be choosy, and the lack of competition meant there was little need to compete on price. Times have changed.

Arrests Per Lawyer Dropping Too

One objection to the graphs above is that the crime rate is not strictly speaking relevant to the number of potential clients for lawyers; what matters is the arrest rate. The arrest data I could find only goes back to 1980, but that's far enough to tell the same story. Here are the number of arrests for major crimes per lawyer since 1980:

Between 1980 and 1991, there were an average of 3.9 arrests per lawyer. By 2012, that had dropped had dropped 56% to 1.7.  Roughly speaking, in the 80s there were twice as many arrests for major crimes per lawyer as there have been in the 21st century.

Expanding the data to look at all arrests again paints the same general picture:

In this graph you can see the effect of the drug war, which kept the overall arrest rate from dropping too steeply until 1997. Still, from peak to trough, there are twice as many lawyers per arrest than there was just a generation ago.

Obviously, it's a very good thing that there's so much less crime now than there used to be. But criminal defense has historically been one of the main practice areas available to solo practitioners and small firms, even for lawyers just graduating from law school. That opportunity likely no longer exists, as the older, established criminal defense lawyers now snap up the vast majority of the much scarcer work. 

This dynamic is exacerbated by the demographic shift in the legal profession. In 1980, a full 50% of lawyers were under 40. By 2005, only 26% of lawyers were under 40, and the median lawyer age was up to 49. There are a lot more experienced lawyers than there used to be, and given the nature of legal services older lawyers have a big competitive advantage. 

A Fiercer Market

Being a lawyer has, undoubtedly, always been difficult, and it always took hard work to succeed. But it takes more hard work and more luck than it used to, at least for young lawyers who didn't graduate from top schools or at the top of their classes.  So it's a bit ridiculous when the old-timers make fun of the recent law grads as the "slackoisie" without acknowledging the demographic and social factors that made things so much easier for them—particularly when the market for legal services used to be significantly bigger precisely because those baby boomers were so, so much more likely to be criminals. 

Judge Schiltz on Lawyers

I randomly stumbled across a very interesting and readable old (1999) article written by Judge Patrick Shiltz entitled, "On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession."

It's long, and somewhat outdated in its particulars, but it holds up rather well. It touches on some themes I've discussed here, but Judge Schiltz has perhaps a better explanation than I do for the apparently irrational profit-maximizing behavior of lawyers:

Why do you suppose sixty year old lawyers with millions of dollars in the bank still bill 2200 hours per year? Why do you suppose lawyers whose children have everything money can buy but who need the time and attention of their parents continue to spend most nights and weekends at the office--while continuing to write out checks to the best child psychologists in town? Why do you suppose one big firm partner I know flew into a rage after learning that his year-end bonus would be only--only--$ 400,000, while the bonus of one of his rivals in the firm would be $ 425,000? Why do you suppose that another lawyer I know (a lawyer making $ 1 million a year) came within a whisker of quitting his firm after losing a bitter dispute with one of his partners (a lawyer making over $ 2 million a year) over a $ 10,000 payment?

It is not because these lawyers need the money. Any of these lawyers could lose every penny of his savings and see his annual income reduced by two-thirds and still live much more comfortably than the vast majority of Americans. What's driving these lawyers is the desire to win the game. These lawyers have spent their entire lives competing against others and measuring their worth by how well they do in the competitions. And now that they are working in a law firm, money is the way they keep score. Money is what tells them if they're more successful than the lawyer in the next office--or in the next office building--or in the next town. If a lawyer's life is dominated by the game--and if his success in the game is measured by money--then his life is dominated by money. For many, many lawyers, it's that simple.

The whole thing is worth a read.

--Bart Torvik

The unhappiest job in America

Speaking of cranking out billable hours, the ABA Law Journal has a post about the unhappiest jobs in America.  Associate attorney tops the list beating out customer service representative, clerk, registered nurse, and teacher.

Woody is right about this.

Mr. Torvik asks whether I think there was a "golden age" of lawyers.  He also asks "Should we return to the lost ideal of the noble lawyer, as best personified by your former boss, Judge David Doty? Is this post just snarky ignorance?"  Read on for my answers.

Was there a Golden Age for the Legal Profession?

Yesterday I linked to an article by Professor Jim Chen about the state of the legal profession. One of Chen's arguments was that "the contemporary legal profession languishes in the memory of a golden age" even though "there had never been a golden age in the American legal profession."

Blogger-lawyer-jerk Scott Greenfield dissents, arguing that there was indeed a golden age of American lawyering, as proved by the career of his Uncle Dave:

"Lawyers in the United States today are competing against nonlawyers, against non-Americans, and against nonhumans."

Professor Jim Chen, who taught Mr. Gillette and me everything we don't know about constitutional law, has some thoughts about the future of the legal profession and legal education:

In our time, the free movement of labor, capital, and information has created a global economy that moves by the gigahertz.  In this economic milieu, education is worth what its purchaser can earn with it.  The legal profession, and most of all the educational branch of the profession, owes society a far more practical response than painful expressions of longing for a golden age that never was.  The putative prestige of the legal profession was always as arbitrary and illusory as the promise of gold as an inherent store of wealth.  Lawyers and their teachers must learn that theirs is no longer a professional guild, but a competitive trade.  Legal education is what enables students to earn a living in life, and nothing more pretentious.

Read the whole thing.