The Original Plan; the Revised Plan

As a lawyer, you may discover that the tough, competitive nature of your work can affect the very values and goals that took you into law school in the first place. Like one of those brilliant college term paper ideas that begin to look increasingly stupid as the clock approaches 3 a.m. on your deadline all-nighter, you may find that your life contains some noticeable contradictions as your legal career develops. I say this to you now because it's a risk you should be aware of from the outset, even though years may pass before it takes hold.

A Plan? On to a Professional Career! The Reality? They Drop Like Flies!


There are few good statistics on attrition - that is, on dropout rates - in the process of becoming a lawyer. And, of course, we can't know in advance what will happen to you. But we can estimate what goes on.

To begin with, how many people consider going to law school? We don't know. But we do know that the LSAS prints up about 700,000 copies of the LS AT application booklet each year. Some copies probably go to ambitious college sophomores who just want to fondle them. Other copies collect dust on the shelves of deans' offices. Still, with 13 million people going to college in the U.S. each year, it seems safe to guess that at least 350,000 copies must get into the hands of people who are trying to decide, at that time, whether to take the test and go to law school.

Next, to get a nice average, let's consider the people who actually did take the LSAT during the ten-year period between June 1976 and May 1986. On average, about 112,000 exams were given during each of those years. The LSAS says that about 20 percent of those exams were repeat tries, which means mat, on average, approximately 90,000 people took the exam each year.

So what has happened to those people? Let's consider a representative sample of one-ninetieth of that group, or 1,000 of the people who took the exam sometime during that ten-year period.

On average, a year after taking the exam, 575 of those 1,000 people had applied to ABA-approved law schools, but only 460 had actually gotten in. Of the remaining 540 out of our original 1,000, some gambled on non-ABA-approved schools; some may have decided to get an honest job after graduation; and some probably went to med school. One little wrinkle: Note that the 460 who I say had "gotten in" to ABA schools had actually gotten in and had survived the hair first month of law school. I can guarantee, from watching my own classmates that others do drop out during that month, and therefore do not show up in the ABA's data, which is not compiled until Oct. 1 of each year.

The next step was to make it through law school. Combining both full- and part-time groups, the first-year survival rate at ABA-approved schools was about 91.5 percent. So for every 460 people who were enrolled on Oct. 1 of their first year, only 421 were still there a year later. And then, in turn, for every 421 second-year students, another 15 (3.5 percent) dropped out during their second years, and another five (about 1 percent) in the third year,350 leaving 401 ABA-approved law school graduates out of the original 1,000 applicants in this typical group.

At this point, their peers who had gone to non-ABA schools rejoined our ABA-approved law school graduates. It is difficult to say exactly how many people have graduated from non-ABA schools. Using 1990 data, however, we might estimate that, for every 10 people graduating from an ABA school, one person graduates from a non-ABA school. On this basis, our beginning group of 1,000 typical law school applicants would turn into a group of 441 law school graduates (with 401 from ABA schools and 40 from non-ABA schools).

The next step for these people was to take the bar exam. Not all of them did. I've known JD/MBAs and others who've decided, after graduating, that they would rather do something else. I have no idea how many people decide not to take the bar exam, but let's just suppose it's a nationwide average of 3 percent of law school graduates, which means that 428 of our original 1,000 did take the exam.

The next big question, then, is this: How many pass the bar exam? The statistics at this point are really screwed up, but it is possible to estimate that 77 percent of the people who took the bar exam for their first time passed it. That means 330 of our group passed on their initial attempt.

How about the 23 percent (98 people) whose first stab at the exam missed? Despite the lack of useful data, one can estimate that another 41 out of our original 1,000 LSAT-takers returned to the land of the living by passing the bar exam after taking it multiple times.356 Thus, a total of 371 were ready, at some point, to go on to the next step, of gaining admission to the practice of law in one or more jurisdictions.

Despite the lack of accurate and complete statistics directly from the bar examiners, two recent studies support the general picture I have painted. I will refer to those studies as the "Georgetown study" and "NALP Survey." Both are skewed in favour of people who liked, or excelled at, law school and/or the bar exam. Even so, they suggest that as many as 15 percent of law school graduates never pass.

There are no statistics on how many people are admitted to practice. As with the bar exam, the state bar admissions committees tell only how many admissions there were, and that double-counts the many attorneys who obtain admission to two or more jurisdictions