Georgetown Law Students on the Legal Job Market

NPR invited five Georgetown law students to discuss where they will be working after they graduate. They all applied to hundreds of law jobs, but only two have found bona fide positions. One will be working for a small government agency and another will be working for a firm. The one working for a firm will not be able to start work for about a year after graduation, though; in the meantime, she will be working with a volunteer legal services program.

The other three? Two will be hanging out their own shingles (one of them claims he will be joining a friend who already has her own small practice, but in reality, that's hanging out your own shingle). One will run for state legislature in his home state of Maine.

What struck me about this panel is that these are all Georgetown graduates. Georgetown is consistently ranked in the top 10-15 law schools. If these people are having trouble finding work, imagine all the poor suckers who took out six-figure loans to go to tier 2, 3, and 4 schools.

I wonder what would happen if all of the law graduates who failed to find what their school promised stopped paying their loans? I guess they'd probably all get judgments and garnishments against them, but what if they all lobbied Congress? There might not be a whole lot of sympathy, considering there was a lot of criticism toward the sub prime mortgage bunch. But at least Congress got behind the sub prime mortgage crisis and developed programs to help them out. Maybe student loans could get restructured as well. Perhaps interest rates could be cut to 1% or the balance could be spread out over a longer term.

There is a loan forgiveness program for those who find work in the public sector, but this only benefits people who have actually found work. What about the unemployed or underemployed J.D.'s out there?

For all you lawyers and law graduates out there, how did your job search go? And do you think there is anything to be done about the law student loan crisis?