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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Law - "Annual Survey Shows the New Reality of Associate Life" [Updated]

The American Lawyer has an article today on "the state of associate life." The article begins with some findings:

# Associates aren't miserable, except perhaps in certain high-pressure New York precincts. The average satisfaction score hit a record high this year: 3.81 on a five-point scale.

# Associates don't plan on staying. Despite the high level of job satisfaction, only 44.9 percent of the respondents predicted that they would be at their firms in five years, and only 11.7 percent expected that they would become equity partners at their current firm.

# Despite all the hand-wringing over associate retention, law firms report that in nearly half the associate departures -- 49 percent -- the firms were either neutral about the departures or happy to have the associates leave. (This statistic comes from the latest survey by the National Association for Law Placement.)

# There may not be enough lawyers to feed the hiring appetite. According to our survey of summer associate hires, Am Law 200 firms expect to bring on roughly 10,000 associates next fall. That astonishing number equals about one-quarter of all the students who will graduate from U.S. law schools next year. To put it another way, the top 20 law schools will only produce about 6,500 graduates.

[Updated] For more, see today's posting in the WSJ Law Blog.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 1, 2007 07:21 AM
Posted to General Law Related