Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school cited in the article: http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/

The school has a total unemployment rate of 12.3%, and an underemployment

Yes, that unemployment rate is worse than the national average for all workers. This is typical of law school grads.

Brooklyn's Median LSAT score has dropped 7 points in four years. It's 25th percentile LSAT score has dropped 9 points in four years, from 162 to 153.

Those are massive drops. I work in the LSAT field. At 162, students will avoid making mistakes in formal logic. E.g. "All cats have tails" can be drawn as C --> T. You can also say "not T" --> "not C".

At 162, students will almost always get this right, even with harder sentences. At 153, students will repeatedly make logical mistakes and come up with things like Tail --> Cat.

(They wouldn't make that error on a simple sentence, but they would with different subject matter)

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Post-2008, legal employment went south, and law school tuition costs soared. To study law now you're looking at $200,000 in debt.

So most smart students avoid law school unless they get a full ride scholarship to a T14 school.

Meaning that a larger and larger portion of remaining students are....less analytically capable, to put it gently.

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People ask: if there's a glut of lawyers, why are legal services not getting cheaper. But there's a certain minimum standard you need in a lawyer.

A bad lawyer can do a LOT of damage, and the damage won't show up for years down the road.

My (now) ex-wife was a law student graduating in 2002. IIRC, that year had far more students than jobs, and the rumors from 2003 (from other friends in the school) were even worse, so I think the job situation predates the 2008 wall street issues.

I've often wondered about the disconnect: How do we have too many lawyers, and yet legal services are still too expensive? To a degree, there IS a correction underway - prepaid legal services are far more common than they were. In another way, the burden new grads face (massive debt, limited job market, basically no employment during law school) means that many people choose NOT to pursue employment as actual lawyers, so the supply of law school students !== supply of lawyers.

An actual drop in average scores is probably attributable to a different phenomenon in law schools. Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for taking the bar exams (which ironically has very little to do with the actual practice of law) and there has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching for a more practical approach so instead of teaching how to pass the bar they teach how to practice law.

Additionally, the actual score to pass both the State Bars and Multi-State Bar has generally increased state by state in order to keep the number of licensed lawyers artificially low. Example, in Florida the passing score is 136 but 10 years ago would have been 131. Those 5 points are not arbitrary they keep a lot of people out and/or force them to retake the bar at a substantial cost. Some failure can be attributable to the historical increases in the passing score, but not in significant drops in average score.

(spoiler/answer warning for those who haven't yet taken the test at the end)

HN-pertintent question on #8 -

The test question describes a scenario in which a businessman's location is broadcast on TV against his wishes. The possible answers for why he doesn't have a claim are "because he did not suffer harm" and "because it was newsworthy".

Meanwhile, given the current trends of (face recognition, phone cameras, wifi tracking, license plate readers, and even credit bureaus themselves) I would have expected the actual answer to be closer to "because the TV station can record and broadcast whatever the fuck they want" (phrased more appropriately for a bar exam, of course). At least this seems to be the general principle referenced whenever private sector mass surveillance is discussed.

Each of these activities does have its own confounding factors (commercial/non, business relationships, governmental support, public/private broadcast), but essentially creates a similar situation where an individual is broadcast against their wishes, and whether their activities are newsworthy is questionable. And the only goal of much private surveillance is to cause financial harm to the surveilled.

What exactly gives? The only plausible resolution I've thought of is that since the case law is not settled, these two opposing concepts are actually fighting and it's not as cut and dry as we think (which would imply that stating it as settled is supporting anti-privacy). But I'm interested in any other explanation.

Average LSAT scores took a dive for class of '14 too. The schools lowered standards circa 2011 as fewer students applied. Three years later they graduate and, yeah, their scores are lower on average.

There are plenty of dumb lawyers out there that passed the Bar just fine. What it sound like is that the law schools have lowered their standards to keep admissions high to compensate for the lower applicant numbers, with pretty much the results you'd expect. And that we could see this coming by examining admission rates and last scores three years previous.

Statistically speaking the ones who didn't pass the exam disn't pass so you'd need to rerun the whole article and compare the average scoring of those who pass with the average score of those who are in the profession now.

If you average the score with those that don't pass, you get incomparable results because you are counting both lawyers and dropouts.

Law school tuition fees rise constantly, without any respect to the market. Sounds like a recipe for failure. Of course less students enroll, when the proposition of the 120K loan looks worse and worse.

They are getting less in-demand due to the post crisis glut. I know grads from top schools who still can't find anything other than contract work from time to time.

Re: Cost of lawyers, I'd love to try to get H1s. Smart, hardworking.

Why only software engineers?

These are probably the same students who asked to be excused from exams because they were too shaken by the verdicts of certain cases vigorously reported by the media.

On a tangent but, we have self-driving cars, perhaps we should have lawyer robots as well soon ;-)

Maybe point Watson to all the case history and see what he can do.

It is funny how we read the article yesterday about the "New Aristocrat" class. Maybe automation will replace the Aristocrat class at some point for a change...

This reminds me of the movie "idiocracy", where the protagonist got his law degree at Costco.

The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam, and instead insists that the students are just getting dumber, the eternal complaint of the aging generation, and are getting worse at taking an exam she declined to ever take herself. It's mind-blowing she is allowed so much power to shape what American lawyers look like, but this is coming from a profession that works very hard for 3 years to completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following.