Preparing for Practice Page 4: Nuts and Bolts

Realistic Expectations

Yet, Wausau attorney Christina Plum, also a past-president of the State Bar Young Lawyers Division, says she understands many legal employers' viewpoints on mentoring. She notes, "A reasonable response from employers is, 'Let me get this straight. There's a 60 percent chance you're going to leave here within five years. And you want me to set up a mentoring program and help you with your professional development, so you can leave to become an in-house lawyer or go work for my competitor?'" In fact, the attrition rate for associates by the end of the third year of employment is 38.3 percent, according to Beyond the Bidding Wars, a recent study of the classes of 1991-1998 by the National Association for Law Placement. By the end of five years, attrition climbs to 59.6 percent among associates.

Why do they leave? Lack of mentoring is only one of many reasons. Some law graduates jump at the $130,000 starting salaries now offered by big firms - whether they're simply lured by the big bucks or forced to go in that direction because of law school debts of $50,000 or more - only to discover they hate the harried pace of big firms, where they cope with minimums of 2,000 billable hours per year. So they leave. Others become disillusioned with the law profession and the ways lawyers behave. They question whether they want to be part of it. After graduates enter practice, "sometimes they see things in their experience that we would prefer they not learn," says Marquette's Dean Eisenberg. "They come back and tell us they're bothered by something they've seen because it may be either ethically or morally questionable."

Or, perhaps, some new graduates simply lack patience to see where a job may take them. "We're the MTV generation," Plum says, "that wants it hot, fast, and now. If we don't get that, we're ready to bounce around until we do. So maybe we need to let it ride a little longer, and not worry about having the perfect job six months out of law school." On the other hand, this is also a generation that wants a life outside of work - a message that merits their elders' attention. New lawyers look around their law offices at people who have no time for anything but lawyering, and decide that's no way to live.

Or chalk it up to the career mobility of our times, when people in all professions are more inclined to explore multiple career opportunities. The list of reasons why associates leave and job-hop could go on and on. Meanwhile, employers wonder: Why aren't associates more committed to the profession? Why don't they comprehend what it takes to make a practice economically viable? Why don't they understand the realities of law practice? Often the blame circles back to the law schools, which are viewed as not doing enough to prepare young lawyers for practice - with all the multiple meanings of what being prepared means.

Eisenberg is convinced that law schools are doing much more now to address the needs of the profession and society than they did when he was a law student. But, the expectations have become much greater in that period.

"From my perspective," Eisenberg says, "there's been a troubling change in the expectations of both the profession and our students. In addition to providing substantive knowledge, they also want us to provide all the skills training, the ethical training, the values training, and increasingly we're seeing pressure to provide the business and office management training. But we have a finite amount of time. The pressures on us to do more and more are quite extraordinary. We hear we should be teaching additional courses, and yet no one says what we should not be teaching."

To U.W.'s Dean Davis, one of the most troubling current trends is the level of dissatisfaction among new lawyers once they're in practice. "What should we as law schools be doing to better equip them for practice? I think it goes beyond getting across the point that law is a business," Davis says. "It's getting young lawyers to focus on their choices and the implications of their choices. That's something we struggle with, and we haven't solved it yet."

Nor can law schools alone solve the dilemmas surrounding young lawyers' preparedness for the profession. "The law schools can play a role," Davis says, "but it's unrealistic to say we need to be the sole purveyor of the message. This is a challenge for the profession as a whole."

Endnotes

1 Sources of quotes, in order: first two from ABA Journal, Nov. 1952 at 907, 909; Journal of Legal Education, 1954 at 308; Journal of Legal Education, 1953 at 443.

2 See, e.g., ABA Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Section, Legal Education and Professional Development - An Educational Continuum, Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap (Chicago, August 1992), better known as the MacCrate Report. See also State Bar of Wisconsin Commission on Legal Education, Final Report and Recommendations (1996).