The year of the free-agent lawyer

The year of the free-agent lawyer by Jordan Furlong

Sobering thoughts for those of us at "national law schools" that focus on placement at large firms that seek premium fees from corporate clients and work on the pyramid structure with "top school, top grades" associates at the bottom of the pyramid topped by rain-making equity partners:

Law firms, for once, appear to be near the front of a business trend: the lawyer employment model is shifting away from full-time work in law firms towards temporary, contract, part-time, dispersed, and/or remote free-agent lawyers. And this should be no surprise, because legal work itself is making the same transition: from a model in which every task was performed (and billed) by full-time lawyers inside the law firm, to a model in which legal work is carried out by the most appropriate, efficient and cost-effective performer, regardless of status or location. Associate leverage ratios have declined from their historic mid-’00s highs and figure to stay lower for the foreseeable future; formerly bottom-heavy pyramid-shaped law firms have become and should remain noticeably slimmer.

It’s a rational development, and in the end, it will produce a legal labour model more aligned to marketplace reality than to lawyer traditions. But from now on, many lawyer jobs will be much less secure, and significantly lower-paying, than the last few decades have led us to expect. And it will give rise to a number of implications and repercussions:

• Law schools have not seen this trend coming and they have not adjusted their business model, which still pretends that huge tuition fees can be paid off quickly with a high-paying law job. At least three years’ worth of students have graduated into an entirely different market than the one on which their schools’ economic assumptions were based, and every year that schools fail to adjust adds another year of graduates with misaligned expectations. The long-term impact: a winnowing of the number of law schools and a general (although not universal) slump in revenue among the schools that survive.

• h/t John Steele - Legal Ethics Forum