Too Many Law Students, and Not Enough Jobs?

What this episode covers

It’s one of the most common discussion points that comes up – are there simply too many law students, and not enough jobs? But in reality, that’s not the main issue. Most people don’t care how saturated the profession is as some fascinating intellectual discussion. Rather, they care about one question: how can they get a job? In this podcast I discuss: how many law students are there in Aus? what can you do to distinguish yourself from the pack? how to give yourself a warm introduction and maximise your job prospects in the legal profession. Happy Lawyering! Transcript – Are there Too Many Law Students, and Not Enough Lawyers? Welcome to the Tips for Lawyers Podcast. This is Chris Hargreaves from tipsforlawyers.com, and this is the podcast Episode 56, I think. I haven’t done a podcast in a while, so if you’ve been hanging out for a new one, welcome to this one. I’ve been in a lot of other activities around the site and around the place recently, so I haven’t had too much of a chance to sit down and actually do some more recording. We left off in our real lawyers episode, and I might continue on that in the future, but for the moment, in this particular episode, I just wanted to have a quick chat about the job market and this perception of the job glut. I was speaking recently at a particular function, and there were a number of unemployed, soon to graduate law students there, and they were all, fairly understandably, concerned about their prospects of securing a job in this particular market. What I wanted to highlight is that although the glut of law students does exist, and we’re looking at numbers in Australia, at least, of around 14,000 law students graduating in a given year and around 66 to 70,000 lawyers across the country, so if you have a look at those percentages, and bearing in mind that you’ll be a lawyer for maybe anywhere between 20 to 40 years, and if that number is at about the 70,000 mark, and there might be around 14,000 law students, then you’ve got a pretty decent percentage potentially being added to the profession every year. Now, within that, of course, not all of those particular law students will go on to do law. Last I saw any sort of numbers, it was about 11% who don’t actually want to go into law. I expect the numbers who don’t go into law despite originally wanting to are a little bit higher than that, but at the end of the day, what we have is a situation where there are a lot of law students, and not necessarily that many positions. This is rightly worrying to a lot of people who want to find jobs, but I think there’s a lot of negative rhetoric around there, and in particular where you’ve applied for clerkships, and you’ve not been accepted into a clerkship for one of the bigger firms, then you really don’t quite know what to do next. It would be easier to go, “Well, I’m just not going to get a job. What am I going to do? Do I have to look on SEEK every day? Do I have to go to the Job Network? Careers days? What am I supposed to do to actually secure a job?” What I really wanted to say today, and it’s not going to take that long, is, firstly, pick yourself up out of the dirt and dust yourself off, because the fact that a couple of firms have not gotten to your résumé or decided, for whatever reason, that you are not a good fit for them, is not a personal affront on you. It is not a judgment that you are not going to be good enough to be a lawyer, and it is not, in the overall scheme of things, an indication that you are unemployable. I want to put this into perspective for you. In Queensland, for example, some of the biggest firms, maybe 25 or so of them, actually participate in a process where you all agree to advertise and select graduate positions at the same time. Within the context of that, obviously, a lot, if not all, of the law students apply for those

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