Law & (the New) Order

The Age

Monday April 16, 2007

Kenneth Nguyen and Alexandra Roginski

Law degrees have never been so popular yet increasingly graduates don't want to be lawyers. Kenneth Nguyen and Alexandra Roginski investigate.

JESSICA MUDDITT made it all the way through six years of study for a degree in law. She learned arcane principles and precedents established long ago. She threw herself into intensive study of the Constitution, of Mabo, of criminal procedure, of contracts and much more. And yet she realised early on she had no interest in being a lawyer.

"I never actually got a visual of me as a solicitor," says Ms Mudditt, a recent graduate in arts and law, "and then halfway through semester one of first year, I knew that I never would. I lacked the genuine interest and motivation that I could see in other students."

One might ask why Ms Mudditt - now travelling the world - did not simply drop the studies in law and concentrate on her arts degree; the latter is, after all, the degree long considered a safe choice for those uncertain about their career direction. Ms Mudditt reflects the view of many law students, however, when she argues that a law degree remains a valuable credential for those entering the job market, even for those not chasing an articled clerkship.

"I still believe that many of the skills acquired are transferable, and having a law degree demonstrates a certain intellectual capacity as well as a fair degree of endurance," she says.

Ms Mudditt is far from alone. Demand from students for positions in law schools is growing. Deakin University and La Trobe University started offering law degrees in 1992, and Victoria University followed in 2000, adding to the courses long offered by Melbourne University and Monash University. In the past 30 years the number of law schools nationally has soared, from 12 to 30.

But where once a law degree might have been seen purely as a vocational funnel towards a career as a solicitor or barrister, nowadays thousands of law students take on the course without any firm idea that they want to be lawyers. Indeed many have explicitly decided not to become lawyers. A Graduate Careers Australia survey released in August 2005 found that less than half (47.5 per cent) of law graduates were working as lawyers. About a quarter were working in fields clearly unrelated to law.

Acknowledging this reality, law schools increasingly promote qualifications on the basis of the broad utility they offer outside the legal field. Careers literature from Melbourne University law school, for example, reports that law graduates are finding careers in areas as diverse as diplomacy, public policy making, the media and editing and publishing. The dean of the Monash University law school himself, Professor Arie Freiberg, owes his renown not to his practice of law but rather to his work as a criminologist.

"I did articles because my mother wanted to make sure I'd one day have a proper job . . . and (then) I went off to Canberra to the Australian Institute of Criminology, so I'm not uncomfortable about it (a degree in law) being both a qualification for practice and a foundation for other things that people do," he says. "I don't think people who are not practising law are in some way letting the team down."

The phenomenon of law students choosing careers unrelated to the law appears to be driven by two main factors.

The first is the demand from non-law employers for law graduates, who provide some evidence of a strong work ethic and worthy intellect just by getting into law school, let alone completing their legal studies. One indicator of this demand is the 2007 Careers Guidebook produced by the Melbourne University Law Students Society. This contains "consider our industry" exhortations to law students not just from the expected law firms, but also from former law students now working at:

- Top-tier management consulting firms (including Boston Consulting Group);

- Investment banks (including UBS and Goldman Sachs JB Were);

- Accounting firms;

- Human resources management firms;

- The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade;

- The Australian Tax Office; and

- Amnesty International.

"A degree in law offers versatility and is highly transferable to any number of industries, particularly those requiring communication, analysis and research, and negotiation skills," says the dean of the Melbourne University law school, Professor Michael Crommelin.

His words are echoed by David Chow, a former law student now working as an associate at Boston Consulting Group. "There are a number of similarities and differences between consulting and law," Mr Chow says. "Both professions are client-focused, demand strong analytical skills and require you to communicate information and ideas effectively."

The second main factor driving the phenomenon is concern among many law students about the attractiveness of law as a career path.

To be sure, articled clerkships - the 12-month period that law graduates customarily complete in order to qualify to practise as a lawyer - remain the holy grail for many law students. The top-tier corporate law firms offer the opportunity to work with major corporations such as Telstra, BHP Billiton and Qantas on often intellectually complex, multimillion-dollar deals and cases.

The money for lawyers can become as serious as the amounts involved in the deals, too. In Australia, articled clerks at the leading corporate firms can expect to earn between $47,000 and $60,000 a year, with their salary rising by about $10,000 a year. Australian-qualified lawyers can ply their trade in London, where starting salaries of #55,000 ($133,000) are common among the "Magic Circle" firms, and New York, where salaries for first-year lawyers have reached $US160,000 ($196,000). Then there is the carrot of partnership at a law firm: partners at the top firms can earn upwards of $1 million a year.

But a career in law is not for everyone. On one hand, some law students see the financial rewards of being a junior lawyer as unsatisfactory compared with the rewards they might receive from working at an investment bank or in management consultancy. "If we're working the long hours, we may as well get paid for it," goes this line of thinking.

Many law students baulk at the often long hours and "dryness" involved in legal practice.

Concerns commonly cited by articled clerks and junior lawyers include the weeks often spent performing tasks such as "due diligence" (for those involved in mergers and acquisitions) or "discovery" (for those involved in litigation) - processes that basically require the clerk or lawyer to trawl through hundreds or thousands of documents. Then there is what NSW Chief Justice James Spiegelman has termed the "tyranny of the billable unit": the need for lawyers to document every six-minute slice of their day, hoping that they make their budgeted six or seven hours of "billable" time each day.

These concerns have become so widespread that one law firm, Gadens, recently made a joke of them. Asked what they were looking for from prospective employees, it answered: "A law degree; willingness to work till it hurts, then keep working; and the personality and personal values of a federal cabinet minister."

Asked how many graduates it will hire this year, Gadens replied: "We prefer to hire in bulk to account for natural attrition and burnout. This year we are taking 150 graduates in the hope of there being six or seven of them left standing by February 2008. This is more than previously because we've been losing them faster than anticipated. Young people today just seem to be soft."

The jokes can be funny, but they reflect a real human toll as well. A survey by Beaton Consulting released last year revealed lawyers to be more unhappy than the members of any other profession in Australia except patent attorneys. (The survey found the happiest professionals to be those working in public relations and advertising.)

The public service can promote a work-life balance, and an ability to shape the law at its inception, rather than applying existing laws as practising lawyers tend to do.

Deakin environmental science/law graduate Sarah McPhee works in the Environment Protection Authority's legal policy unit, and has no plans to pursue an articled clerkship.

"It was good to get (an understanding of) the law, even if I wasn't sure it would be applicable to my career in the future. You never know what sort of area you want to get into," she says.

Still, there is one problem for students who use a law degree as a quasi arts degree. Under the HECS system, law degrees are far more expensive, priced at $8333 a year, compared with $4996 a year for an arts degree.

Education Minister Julie Bishop justifies the high price for law degrees on the basis of the "high private benefits available to graduates". That is, the high salaries law graduates attract.

But law graduates who choose the public service or legal aid clearly will not obtain the same "high private benefits" given to those who become commercial lawyers. For example, a community lawyer's salary might top out at about $60,000 a year.

Professor Philip Clarke, dean of business and law at Deakin University, is critical of the funding for, and pricing of, law degrees. "A lot of lawyers don't earn a lot of money," he says. "I simply don't agree that it's fair to impose that burden on law graduates when it's not imposed, say, on commerce graduates who go into accountancy and merchant banking."

CASE STUDIES

WHY I TOOK THE DEGREE - AND RAN

LARISSA DUBECKI

AGE JOURNALIST

It took six years, many hours spent committing Latin terms to memory in the Melbourne University law library and the accumulation of an awe-inspiring HECS debt to receive my law degree. The piece of paper into which those years of misadventure were distilled was promptly shoved into a drawer and forgotten while I got on with the rest of my life.

A life which, to the best of my ability, does not involve the law.

If some students enter law school filled with an idealistic belief that they will one day change the world for the better - and others with the sound of cash registers trilling in their ears - a significant number do it for no other reason than that they can.

From a pop cultural point of view, at least, the legal profession is personified by The Simpsons' shady attorney Lionel Hutz and his wonderfully named practice, "I Can't Believe it's a Law Firm!".

But the letters LLB remain one of the most potent in a world of graduates clamouring for jobs.

And the symbiosis of supply and demand means that the high marks required to enrol in a law degree increases the number of students wanting to get into law.

The result? When my healthy mark in year 12 was combined with little real vocational direction, the question "why not?" carried real weight. Call it localised inertia: while I was busy rebelling against other parental decrees, their suggestion that law would be more valuable than an arts degree seemed sound.

It's a screaming understatement that the study of the law never fired my imagination. The thought of applying for a summer internship filled me with horror, and almost a decade after leaving the law library for the final time all I remember are esoteric snippets such as Lord Wilberforce's "but for" test, the objective measure of "the man on the Clapham omnibus" - kind of the lawyers' version of "what would Jesus do?".

But while the detail has receded, the study of law taught other important skills that have grounded my life as a journalist. How to think analytically and write clearly, for one. How to pose an argument.

Am I glad I completed a law degree even though I will never directly use it? Yes.

Is it fair to take the place of students who desperately want to be lawyers? I can live with that.

Is posing questions for myself a byproduct of six years in law school? You betcha.

CHARLIE PICKERING

COMEDIAN

Pickering once entertained notions of dabbling in commercial law, an ambition that came unstuck on the first day of one especially memorable spell in a lawyer's office.

"The partner I was going to be working for took me out for coffee and explained the 'bus' principle: 'You're to keep your desk tidy and your files in order so that if, on the way to work tomorrow, you get hit by a bus, we can pick up where you left off and finish the job for the client.'

"I remember thinking that if I get hit by a bus on the way to work tomorrow, I don't really care about the client."

The idea of practising trailed behind Pickering throughout his Monash jaunt, as he completed his law subjects while carousing at barbecues and serving as president of the Law Students' Society. After deferring his articles for two years after graduation, the truth finally caught up with him.

"I was in a hire car driving to Adelaide to my first ever interstate gig (as a comedian)," he says. "I got a call on my mobile from the human resources manager, who gave me an ultimatum. Either I started work in two weeks or I would lose my place. I literally looked at the infinite road stretched out before me, took a deep breath and said 'thanks, but no thanks'."

When confronted with the varied career paths of his lawyer friends, Pickering wonders if he would have enjoyed the law as much as he once thought. He says that the course can build an almost limitless foundation for professional choices.

With a few exceptions.

"A good understanding of taxation legislation does not entitle you to perform open-heart surgery. Not even in an emergency."