What Work Should Young Lawyers Do, And How Much Should They Be Paid?

They call them the Lost Generation – the classes of 2008 and 2009, who entered law school expecting Bush-era big bucks and graduated into the worst legal hiring market in decades. In 2010, there are too many recent law school graduates and too few entry-level legal jobs. How should firms best make use of all of these desperate would-be associates? Kaye Scholer is struggling with this question in a very public fashion.

Above the Law reported last fall that Kaye Scholer had split its class of 2009 associates into two groups. The first received the expected work and six-figure first-year salary. The second was asked to work solely on the firm’s pro bono matters for a significantly reduced salary. Now the New York Times reports that some of the “pro bono” attorneys have been given an hourly salary bump and reassigned to document review projects. In other words, at present, they are now somewhat more than merely make-work attorneys, but somewhat less than “real associates.”

The issue at hand: what work should big firms assign to entry-level associates and what should they be paid? Under pressure from clients, firms are looking for ways to reduce entry-level salaries, including separating out so-called “partner-track” associates before they even start work, an idea which strikes me as fundamentally misguided. If big firm partners could reliably identify partner-track candidates without seeing a single line of work from them, wouldn’t they have capitalized on that ability already? Doesn’t the profession already place too high an emphasis on pedigree rather than impressing one’s superiors with actual work product?

My observation: young attorneys would provide more value to firms if provided with substantial practical training, the earlier the better… and they’re not getting it from many firms and and many law schools. In the past decade, many big firms and many law schools have been skimping on actually training young attorneys. Training is time-consuming, and time is money. The firms increasingly needed the associates to focus on document review work, which is lucrative and not skills-intensive. Substantive training was thus reserved only for those who somehow clawed their way out of the document review room. Many schools focused narrowly on spending top dollar to hire high-profile professors of the sort who prefer to make names for themselves through scholarship and seminars rather than teaching less prestigious lawyering skills classes or overseeing clinics. It’s time for things to change on both fronts.