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Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers

2007-11-22T12:18:00.000-08:00

Growth of Legal Sector
Lags Broader Economy;
Law Schools Proliferate

By AMIR EFRATI
September 24, 2007; Page A1

A law degree isn't necessarily a license to print money these days.

For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.

The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.

"Unfortunately, some find the practice of law is not for them," Seton Hall's associate dean, Kathleen Boozang, said through a spokeswoman. "However, it is our experience that a legal education is a tremendous asset for a variety of professional paths."

A slack in demand appears to be part of the problem. The legal sector, after more than tripling in inflation-adjusted growth between 1970 and 1987, has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2% since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according to Commerce Department data.

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Some practice areas have declined in recent years: Personal-injury and medical-malpractice cases have been undercut by state laws limiting class-action suits, out-of-state plaintiffs and payouts on damages. Securities class-action litigation has declined in part because of a buoyant stock market.

On the supply end, more lawyers are entering the work force, thanks in part to the accreditation of new law schools and an influx of applicants after the dot-com implosion earlier this decade. In the 2005-06 academic year, 43,883 Juris Doctor degrees were awarded, up from 37,909 for 2001-02, according to the American Bar Association. Universities are starting up more law schools in part for prestige but also because they are money makers. Costs are low compared with other graduate schools and classrooms can be large. Since 1995, the number of ABA-accredited schools increased by 11%, to 196.

Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing. A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book "Urban Lawyers" found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by 22% -- while income for the other 75% actually dropped.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, the inflation-adjusted average income of sole practitioners has been flat since the mid-1980s. A recent survey showed that out of nearly 600 lawyers at firms of 10 lawyers or fewer in Indiana, wages for the majority only kept pace with inflation or dropped in real terms over the past five years.

The news isn't any better for the 14% of new lawyers who go into government or join public-interest firms. Inflation-adjusted starting salaries for graduates who go to work for public-interest firms or the government rose 4% and 8.6%, respectively, between 1994 and 2006, according to the National Association for Law Placement, which aggregates graduate surveys from law schools. That compares with at least an 11% jump in the median family income during the same period, according to the Census Bureau. Graduates who become in-house company lawyers, about 9%, have fared better: Their salaries rose by nearly 14% during the same period.

Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools."

Meanwhile, the prospects for big-firm lawyers are growing richer. While offering robust minimum salaries, those firms are paying astronomical amounts to their stars.

Now, debate is intensifying among law-school academics over the integrity of law schools' marketing campaigns. Defenders argue that the legal profession always has been openly and proudly a meritocracy: Top entrance-exam scores help win admittance to top schools where top students win jobs at top firms. Even the system that is used to issue law-school grades -- a curve that pits student against student -- reflects the law profession's competitiveness.

David Burcham, dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, considered second-tier, says the school makes no guarantees to students that they will obtain jobs. He says it is problematic that big firms only interview the top of the class, "but that's the nature of the employment market; it's never been different."

For the majority of students and alumni, he says, Loyola "turned out to be a good investment."

Yet economic data suggest that prospects have grown bleaker for all but the top students, and now a number of law-school professors are calling for the distribution of more-accurate employment information. Incoming students are "mesmerized by what's happening in big firms, but clueless about what's going on in the bottom half of the profession," says Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied the legal job market.

"Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data," adds Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the market for new lawyers.

Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.

On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn't include what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.

"It's within most individuals' nature to keep that information private, unless it's a high amount," says Carlos Dávila-Caballero, assistant dean for career development at Tulane, who adds that his office tells prospective students to use the median figure as a guide because starting salaries vary widely.

Academics who have studied new-lawyer salaries say that the graduate surveys of many law schools are skewed by higher response rates from the most successful students. The National Association for Law Placement, which aggregates and publishes national data based on those surveys, concedes that it can't vouch for their accuracy. "We can't validate the figures; we have to rely on schools to report to us accurately," says Judy Collins, NALP's director of research.

A prospective student studying NALP data might conclude that the study of law is a sure path to financial security. For 2006 graduates who entered private practice, or nearly 60%, NALP shows a national median salary of $95,000, a rise of 40%, adjusted for inflation, from 1994 graduates.

The NALP data also show that the percentage of graduates employed in private practice has been steady, fluctuating between 55% and 58% for more than a decade. But in law schools' self-published employment data, "private practice" doesn't necessarily mean jobs that improve long-term career prospects, for that category can include lawyers working under contract without benefits, such as Israel Meth. A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, he earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia University.

A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the school reports that 41% of last year's graduates work for firms of more than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits, Joan King, director of the school's career center, concedes.

Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract attorneys is "minimal" but declined to give a number.

The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006 graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract employees nine months after graduation. Schools "should be sharing more information than they are now," says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for career services who put the changes in place. "Most people graduating from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."

Adding to the burden for young lawyers: Tuition growth at law schools has almost tripled the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, leading to higher debt for students and making starting salaries for most graduates less manageable, especially in expensive cities. Graduates in 2006 of public and private law schools had borrowed an average of $54,509 and $83,181, up 17% and 18.6%, respectively, from the amount borrowed by 2002 graduates, according to the American Bar Association.

Students taking on such debt may feel reassured by incessant press reports of big firms scrambling to hire and keep associates. Making headlines this year was a bump up in big-firm starting salaries to $160,000 from $145,000 in many cities.

And indeed, some law graduates of lower-tier schools do find high-paying private-practice law jobs. In recent years big firms have boomed thanks in part to the globalization of business and Wall Street deal making; firms have been casting a wider net for new lawyers, though they still generally restrict their recruiting at lower-tier schools to students at the very top of the class or on the law review. Some students have leads on a job at a family member's or friend's practice.

But just as common -- and much less publicized -- are experiences such as that of Sue Clark, who this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs," she says.

Harold Krent, Chicago-Kent's dean, said it's not uncommon for new lawyers to wait a few months to more than a year to find a job that's a good fit. He added that there is a "small spike" in employment after his school's grads receive their bar-exam results, several months after graduation, because some firms wait until then before hiring.

The market is particularly tough in big cities that boast numerous law schools. Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying work since.

Some un- or underemployed grads are seeking consolation online, where blogs and discussion boards have created venues for shared commiseration that didn't exist before. An anonymous writer called Loyola 2L, purportedly a student at Loyola Law School, who claims the school wasn't straight about employment prospects, has been beating a drum of discontent around the Web in the past year that's sparked thousands of responses, and a fan base. ("2L" stands for second-year law student.) Some thank "L2L" for articulating their plight; others claim L2L should complain less and work more. Loyola's Dean Burcham says he wishes he knew who the student was so he could help the person. "It's expensive to go to law school, and there are times when you second-guess yourself as a student," he says.

Some new lawyers try to hang their own shingle. Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice.

He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me $500."

--Mark Whitehouse contributed to this article.

FALLING BEHIND INFLATION

Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing. Starting salaries of many lawyers have stagnated. The inflation-adjusted average income of sole practitioners -- about one-third of all lawyers in the U.S. -- has been flat since the mid-1980s, according to the IRS.

A recent survey of Indiana lawyers showed that among those at firms of 10 lawyers or less, wages for the majority either only increased nominally, keeping pace with inflation, or dropped in real terms over the last five years.

Change in Indiana lawyers' income in the past five years, by firm size

Source: "Financial and Billing Survey of Indiana State Bar Association Lawyers,"
by William D. Henderson, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington, Ind. Note: Data may not add to 100% due to rounding.

RICH GETTING RICHER, POOR GETTING POORER

A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in 2005 found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners in the survey group grew by 22%, while income for the other 75% of earners dropped.

Distribution of Chicago lawyers' total income from practice, by quartiles, 1975 and 1995

Source: "Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar," 2005

TOO MANY LAWYERS?

GROWING SUPPLY

According to the American Bar Foundation, there was one lawyer for every 572 Americans in 1971, but by 2000 there was one lawyer for every 264 people.

U.S. lawyer population in select years

Source: American Bar Foundation

SLO-MO GROWTH

The legal sector, after more than tripling in inflation-adjusted growth between 1970 and 1987, has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2% since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according to Commerce Department data.

Inflation-adjusted growth of the legal-services industry and U.S. gross domestic product since 1987.

Source: Commerce Department data

DEGREE DELUGE

More lawyers are graduating, thanks in part to the accreditation of more law schools and an influx of applicants after the dot-com implosion earlier in this decade.

Number of U.S. law degrees awarded, 1980-2006

Source: American Bar Association

SOARING TUITION

School costs are skyrocketing. Tuition growth at law schools has risen by nearly triple the rate of inflation over the past 20 years.

Average tuition and fees for public and private law schools, 1992-2006

Source: American Bar Association

GROWING DEBT

Students are also graduating with more debt. Graduates of public and private law schools in 2006 had borrowed an average of $54,509 and $83,181, up 17% and 18.6%, respectively, from the amounts borrowed by 2002 graduates.

Average amount borrowed by law school graduates, 2002-2006

Source: American Bar Association

INCOMPLETE STATISTICS

MISSING INFORMATION

Law schools present a rosy career outlook for graduates, but important information is often left out. Many law schools report high average starting salaries but don't report what percentage of graduates disclosed salary information. Career-services directors say high-paid lawyers are more willing to report their wages.

A Brooklyn Law School brochure says the school's 2005 graduates who went into private practice had a median starting salary of well over $100,000, but the school failed to note that less than half of graduates responded to the survey. Below, employment data on Brooklyn's Web site is also incomplete:

Source: Brooklyn Law School

MORE DISCLOSURE

By contrast, Richmond's statistics not only show the actual number of graduates employed in various areas but also highlight the number of graduates who work as temporary or "contract" attorneys. The statistics, however, don't convey that the salary figures are based on 56% of graduates who responded to the school's survey.

Source: University of Richmond School of Law

McDermott to Add Lower-Paid Associates - The Recorder

2007-11-22T12:11:00.000-08:00

Kellie Schmitt
The Recorder
November 2, 2007

With soaring associate salaries, rising litigation costs and general counsel's resistance to it all, something has to give.

While some firms quietly turn to contract attorneys or even ship grunt work overseas, McDermott, Will & Emery plans to create a new tier of attorneys -- think of them as permanent contract associates -- to handle lower-end tasks at lower billing rates.

"In a market where high compensation for lateral partners, lateral associates and associates are creating pressures, we're trying to bring the best quality service at the lowest price to our clients," said Robert Mallory, a partner in the L.A. trial group. "We live in a very competitive world."

First-year associates at big firms now earn $160,000. Meanwhile, electronic discovery has dramatically increased the amount of basic work that usually goes to those high-priced associates.

"This is a topic of great importance, since the cost of document review has become intolerable for everyone," said David Balabanian, the head of Bingham McCutchen's litigation group.

While hiring contract attorneys is nothing new, creating a second class of full-timers is.

It's probably a smart move, said Susan Hackett, the general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel. General counsel already fed up with high legal costs have been known to hire contract attorneys themselves or force firms to hire the cheaper outside help.

"Firms may be starting to think, 'Hey, we might as well meet the demand instead of being corralled into working with people we don't know and whom we don't make a profit from,'" Hackett said. "I think McDermott is on a good mission: 'Let us find a way to make the cost more reasonable so you'll continue to hire us.'"

At a firm retreat in October, the 1,000-lawyer firm decided to create a cadre of staff lawyers outside the partnership track who will be paid less, work less and charge less per hour. Having a flexible separate staff to move from big litigation to big litigation could help McDermott make the best use of its high-priced associates.

The idea is that the new hires -- the firm is looking into starting with a pilot group of 15 -- will be lawyers "with good pedigrees" who have practiced for a few years but don't want to deal with big-firm hours, Mallory said. Instead, they'll put in more like 30 to 40 hours and be paid something like 25 percent less, though an exact pay range hasn't been decided.

"They'll have a status within our structure that's brand-new," Mallory said. "I don't know what we'd call them -- this is a new animal."

These attorneys will probably be housed in a similar fashion to accounting firms, rotating desks with no home base.

The new class of attorneys will probably take some of the more mundane tasks like document review off the plates of more expensive associates on the partnership track.

"The idea isn't that this will be a training ground," he said. "This isn't a path into the firm."

REACTION AND IMPLICATIONS

Hackett predicted that McDermott's plan could have broad-reaching effects, both positive and negative for associates.

It could free associates to work on more interesting matters, but it may also threaten their salary leverage -- and their jobs.

"Unless new work is generated for associates in the regular tier, it could make them nervous: 'I might be extinct in this firm,'" she said.

Mallory said he doesn't think associates will feel threatened by the new group.

"I believe it will be embraced because it will take some of the more routine work they'd be doing off the table," he said.

Hackett said the McDermott program could create more options in big law firms, where young attorneys could decide whether to gun for partnership or take a more lifestyle-oriented approach to big law.

One consultant noted that while contract attorneys are nothing new, McDermott's plan to openly use lower-paid attorneys who aren't on the partnership track makes an interesting statement.

"I think firms worry about whether it will affect the perception of their high-quality brand and what it takes to be a lawyer at their firms," said consultant Peter Zeughauser. "They've obviously gotten over it, because they do it, but they aren't ready yet to tell the world."

COST CONSCIOUSNESS

McDermott isn't the only firm scrambling to bring down legal bills without cutting profits.

"If litigation becomes uneconomic," said Bingham's Balabanian, "everyone's going to suffer, so it's a shared challenge."

New York-based SQ Global Solutions offers to ease litigation burdens by sending low-end legal work -- such as document review -- to lawyers in India. Alan Gershowitz, the former Skadden attorney who runs the company, said law firms often turn to SQ Global on big-volume cases. It's like using contract attorneys, only cheaper: Indian attorneys bill at $25 to $35 an hour, a dramatic savings that outside firms may -- or may not -- pass to clients.

But William Urquhart, a partner with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, questioned how much law firms could or would utilize that approach.

"In high-stakes litigation, it would be giving up too much control," Urquhart said. "A document that might seem harmless might be the key to victory, and we'd be really fearful that sort of thing would be missed."

Reed Smith's Janet Kwuon, a partner and director of complex litigation e-discovery, agreed. "There is this pressure to keep cost down, but at the same time, if you don't do it right, there's a huge sanctions risk."

Balabanian added that missing something could create enormous problems, though he predicted the practice could catch on.

"In time, vendors could establish themselves and their track records, and it could be just like using a reporting service," he said.

Hackett said clients will continue to put pressure on law firms to find solutions, whether it's contract attorneys, outsourcing or a plan like McDermott's.

"The cost of litigation is a great concern as associates become more and more expensive," she said.

Attorney at Blah - Washington City Paper

2007-11-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

The temp life without a J.D.: menial labor, asshole bosses, $10 an hour. The temp life with a J.D.: menial labor, asshole bosses, $35 an hour.

By Arin Greenwood

Posted: November 7, 2007

Jay Kuperstein had a good job. He worked in New York for the NBA, editing basketball videos. Then he got tired of sitting in front of a video monitor for 15 hours a day and decided to go to law school.

Kuperstein, who is 30 years old, graduated from American University’s law school in 2005. The plan was to become a sports agent. “I thought it would be good with my background and law degree,” he says. “But it turns out it’s a job that’s nearly impossible to get.”

And so this new lawyer found himself sitting in front of a computer for 15 hours a day, working as a temp document reviewer, one of a growing species of big-city lawyer that sifts through electronic documents to determine whether they are relevant to pending court cases and investigations.

Kuperstein does not do research, and he does not write; he does not go to court, and he does not meet with clients. The clients whose cases he works on do not know his name. There is no room for promotion in this job, and there is no health insurance.

But there is the potential of a six-figure salary and also very little stress—except for the stress of knowing that the job may end any minute now, without warning.

Though it’s not what he expected, Kuperstein is happy with his work. His job exists to support big-firm lawyers, who do meet with clients and go to court and research and write. It is tedious, time-intensive grunt work that used to fall to young big-firm lawyers but has now been outsourced to temps.

For more and more law school graduates, this is the legal life: On a given day, they may plow through a few hundred documents—e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, memos, and anything else on a hard drive. Each document appears on their computer screen. They read it, then click one of the buttons on the screen that says “relevant” or “not relevant,” and then they look at the next document.

This isn’t anyone’s dream job, but more and more lawyers in big cities around the country are finding that seven years of higher education, crushing student loans, and an unfriendly job market have brought them to windowless rooms around the city, where they do well-paid work that sometimes seems to require no more than a law degree, the use of a single index finger, and the ability to sit still for 15 hours a day. Is this being a lawyer? It is now.

Dear Marie,

Paris next week for a meeting with [bank name redacted]. Free for dinner?

Yours,

Frank

When you are a temp document reviewer, you live for e-mails that have some spark of humanity in them, even if they are banal and about people who are being investigated by the Department of Justice, because those e-mails are not spreadsheets; they are not brochures or policy statements.

They are also not relevant. A relevant document would be a lot more boring, for the most part, and would not conjure up fantasies of Camembert sandwiches in the park. You know, or something. Move the mouse so the cursor is over the “not relevant” button. Click the “not relevant” button. Click the “next” button. It’s another e-mail—Marie turning Frank down for dinner, saying that she is going to be in Croatia that week. With her boyfriend.

Again, not relevant. At least not to the big-city lawyer. Frank no doubt feels differently. (If there were a real Frank, that is; this e-mail is similar to a real e-mail I’ve seen but is not the exact e-mail, because writing down a real e-mail would be a violation of a contract every temp document reviewer signs pledging confidentiality.)

This is all by way of saying that I have also been a temp document reviewer and probably will be again. I graduated from law school more than seven years ago, with $150,000 in loans. After paying around $1,000 a month for the last seven years, I now owe a mere $101,000. Add to this a wicked wanderlust and certain carelessness with money, and you can see how I end up looking for new ways to pay my bills.

I’d heard about temp document reviewing before I got to D.C. this past summer. A friend told me she’d done it in New York in between full-time jobs; she said it was hell on earth. Another friend was doing it in Boston, where he’d recently moved, and he didn’t seem to mind it too much.

But I thought of my friends as anomalies. I didn’t realize that temp document reviewing was a full-fledged phenomenon until I got to D.C. this last summer and found myself talking with lawyer after lawyer who was doing or had done this work.

Some of these people included a cousin of mine who couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t do the work, especially since I kept asking her to pay for lunch. I resisted at first, because when I was a new lawyer, working as an associate at a big law firm in New York, I had done some document reviewing as part of my job on the firm’s litigation team. Box upon box of paper documents were my territory. The boxes were dusty and aggravated my allergies; the paper was sharp and cut my delicate fingers. I took naps on my office floor when I couldn’t bear to look at more documents. It felt like exquisite torture, spending all those weeks in all those boxes. A friend who was also reviewing documents at his law firm back then said to me he thought he was getting the same box of documents to review, over and over and over, as part of some psychology experiment.

But bills being bills, before long I’d signed up with five or seven of the 60-odd lawyer temp agencies around the city and was put to work.

My first “project,” as these assignments are called, was at a big law firm near the White House. It paid $35 an hour, 40 hours a week—no overtime, clock out for lunch. My brother, another Greenwood child who fecklessly indebted himself for a J.D., was also assigned to this project.

The project started at 9 a.m. on a Monday in a conference room with a nice view, where a lawyer from the firm gave the 20-odd temps an overview of the case (it was a company investigating itself, in anticipation of a Department of Justice investigation—I can’t say more, or I’ll violate a confidentiality agreement I signed; anyway, you don’t really want to know). The lawyer handed us binders with more information about the case—about how we’d discern the relevant documents from the irrelevant—and then a member of the administrative staff told us not to use the Internet too much, or we’d be in trouble.

From there we were taken to our work station: a windowless room filled with computers. We each had a computer; we were trained on the particular computer program we’d be using, then got clicking. Relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Two staff attorneys—full-time lawyers hired by the law firm to oversee the temp document reviewers—sat at a table in the front of the room, watching us click in this quiet, quiet room. Mostly quiet room. One of the two sometimes sent around e-mails that said things like:

“We notice that some of you are listening to music too loud on your personal stereos.” And, “We notice that some of you have long fingernails which are making loud noises on the keyboards. Because your job does not require the use of the keyboard, only the mouse, we are confused why we are hearing so much loud fingernail-on-keyboard noise.”

The passive-aggressive e-mails? Not relevant. My music was quiet, and my nails are short. The staff attorney meant those missives for a couple of the other temps.

The rhythm of the day, for me, was that in the morning, I’d arrive and get coffee and then sit happily enough at the computer reviewing documents and surfing the Internet, on and off, for three or four hours. Most of the documents were fairly dull—spreadsheets, brochures, e-mails talking about financial stuff. Every once in a while I’d get a good e-mail, not as good as the e-mails the other people said they’d sometimes seen—things about people getting divorces and arguing about their child visitation rights, arranging secret rendezvous, and downloading porn—but things like: “Hey dude, I’m in Hawaii with my wife. She sure likes to spend money. Nice hotel. How’s the XYZ deal going? Paul”

Oh, I’d think. Hawaii. Hawaii sounds nice. Then I’d look up the hotel where Paul said he was staying and see what amenities it had, if it was close to town.

The documents we reviewed had some chronological order, so after I read about Hawaii, I read e-mails between Paul and the dude about Paul’s return from Hawaii, about how both Paul and the dude hated some other co-worker who had undermined Paul’s efforts to put together a certain deal, about the dude’s attempts (foiled!) to buy a house, and so on. I read enough about these senders that I got mildly involved in their lives and started hoping the deal would go through, the bid for the house would be accepted.

The document review room was nearly silent except for the sounds of computer clicking, the sounds of people eating, and the sounds of someone’s too-loud personal stereo or too-long nails on the keyboards.

But we temp lawyers got to talking around the coffee machine or in the bathroom. The other temp lawyers seemed to come from every walk of lawyerly life—one had left an associate job at another firm, another was trying to make it in the hip-hop world. A third was looking for a job as a patent lawyer, maybe, or maybe he’d just do document review and travel between projects. A woman told me that usually she did document reviews in foreign languages—she speaks Dutch, she said—and makes more money doing that. An older man told me he’d recently retired from the federal government. It seemed as if people fell into one of three camps: people who only wanted temp jobs because they liked the freedom; people who were between regular jobs; and people who were stuck doing document review forever—not between jobs, because there were no jobs to be between.

For lunch, I’d go to the firm cafeteria for a tomato and mozzarella sandwich, which I’d eat in front of the computer so as not to waste time. And with lunch eaten, I’d sit at the computer for another few hours and despair—this is what I was doing with myself? With my fancy law degree? My friends were becoming well-known, they were making a lot of money, and this anonymous, stupid work was what I was doing with myself?

Then I’d spend a surreptitious hour looking for other jobs, hoping the staff attorneys wouldn’t notice, hoping they wouldn’t send me an e-mail saying, “We notice that some of you are looking to get fired…” I never got this e-mail.

After that, I’d settle back into my life and review documents for another couple of hours and feel OK about it. The day was almost over, I’d go for a nice walk after work, see a movie, or get some drinks, and I’d have earned enough money over the course of the day to keep myself fed and housed, and then some.

This was the easiest job I’d ever had, the only job that was neither physically nor intellectually taxing, and I was making nice money. Every day was the same, every day was quiet, every day was a combination of angst and contentment, until the day that one of the two staff attorneys—the more chatty one— unexpectedly stood up and said the documents had all been reviewed, and it was time for us to go home. If it had been the other staff attorney sending us back into employment, I’m sure she’d have done it by e-mail: “We notice that there is no need for you to come to work anymore…”

You may have noticed that there are too many lawyers, more now than ever before.

From Jan. 1, 2000, until today, the New York Times published 20 or so articles about the skyrocketing salaries and staggering bonuses that brand-new baby lawyers were getting. An article from Feb. 2, 2000, talks about first-year lawyer salaries rising to $140,000 per year; an article from Oct. 27, 2000, discusses the $35,000 bonuses for new lawyers at big law firms. An article from Aug. 1, 2000, talks about law students earning $2,000 a week as they worked at law firms during their summer vacations. By Sept. 1, 2006, the Times was reporting that first year salaries had gone up to $145,000, before bonuses.

Perhaps because of the lawyer’s pay scale and the burst of the dot-com bubble, applications to law schools went up, up, up. According to the American Bar Association, in the 1999-2000 academic year, 132,276 were enrolled at American Bar Associationnapproved law schools. By 2003-2004, that number had jumped to 145,088. In 2006-2007, it’s 148,698.

New law schools opened; some got accredited. (There are 195 accredited law schools in America now; there were 175 in 1990.) Hordes of new law school graduates went to law school and graduated, expecting that they were about to strike it rich (or at least rich by normal standards—first-year lawyers making $145,000 a year still manage to complain that they’re not earning enough, according to a February 2005 New York Times article titled “Six Figures? Not Enough!”).

The cost of law school also rose by a staggering amount, meaning law students had to take out higher loans. In 1985, the average law school tuition and fees were $7,526, according to the American Bar Association. By 2006, the average law school tuition and fees were $30,520. The average law school debt in 2006 was $83,181.

Who cares about debt when lawyers rake in all the money, right?

Well, they don’t.

A little more than 10 percent of new law school graduates are earning $135,000 as a starting salary. But the median starting salary for an employed law school graduate is $62,000 per year, according to the National Association for Legal Placement (NALP), an organization that studies legal hiring. And the small firms that employ most new graduates pay closer to $40,000 per year. It’s not enough if you’re going to make your loan payments, your rent payments, and still have money left for caviar.

The flood of indebted lawyers comes at an ideal time for big-city firms. These places have always had to sift through documents in the “discovery” phase of litigation, when the parties must submit all materials relevant to the case at hand. And for ages, that was a very manual exercise, in which junior associates would rummage through boxes of documents in search of the relevant ones.

Computers compounded that task. The documents that now have to be reviewed include everything on the hard drives of any person at a company who might be involved with the subject of the lawsuit or investigation.

If there were thousands of documents to review before, now there are millions. There aren’t enough law firm lawyers to review all those documents—companies can’t afford that luxury, not when the work takes months and most junior lawyers are billed out at $200-plus per hour.

But the documents have to be reviewed.And there are lots of lawyers to do the reviewing.

More and more attorneys are signing up to do this temp work, recruiters and lawyers tell me. And there’s more and more temp work to do since there is a growing amount of the activity that leads to big document reviews—namely, mergers and acquisitions and oversight of mergers and acquisitions. New recruitment agencies are cropping up all the time; they’re opening up offices around the city—some with windows and some without—dedicated to temp document review projects.

The District of Columbia Bar—the body that keeps track of lawyers in this city—says that there were 45,431 active lawyers in D.C. as of March 2007. Reliable numbers on the number of temp document reviewers for D.C. aren’t available—partly because the number is always changing (it is temporary work, after all) and partly because no one is keeping track. But recruiters tell me they estimate there are anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 lawyers doing temp document review on any given day. And they get more résumés every day.

If you ever want to feel good about your life, however bad it is, read a blog by Tom the Temp, a New York-based temp document review lawyer.

In Tom the Temp’s blog, which you can read at temporaryattorney.blogspot.com, I read about temporary attorneys slaving away in sweatshops, about cruel and inhumane workplace conditions including locked fire exits, filth, and blocked toilets. I also read that temp document review attorneys become stigmatized by their temp work—that once they’ve been temp document reviewers for a year or two, they can never move on to anything else—meaning they become an underclass of attorneys.

“The conditions were horrific. There were about 15 of us…packed into a small, windowless conference room,” the blogger writes. “It appeared as if the room had previously served as a supply closet.…Talking was forbidden. A heavy-set paralegal would periodically come around and bellow out in a deep, baritone voice to do, “more workin’ and less talkin’.” Like a child, you had to sign out to use the restroom.…One day, a middle-aged woman, who had recently been laid off from her in-house job, broke down in tears.”

About a project unexpectedly coming to an end: “Apparently, after having been promised six months of steady employment (many of us turned down other projects based on this assumption), over 100 of us were suddenly, without notice, dumped out onto the sidewalk just three weeks after the project had commenced…”

And describing a firm’s attempt to discover the identity of Tom the Temp and the ubiquity of same: “When you look with disdain at the ‘Temps’ or you encourage your employees to do so, you illustrate your morality. These ‘temps’ are people too, many of whom had dreams to be Perry Mason, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Clarence Darrow or Marty Lipton and not Perry Doc Review.…Look in the mirror, Tom the Temp is on every project, he is sitting next to you, he is a paralegal, he is an associate, he is a she, he has a friend who is a temp, he is your friend and he is your enemy and he may at times even yes, be YOU. I pray for a world where Tom the Temp is not necessary but unfortunately that may never happen.…WE ARE ALL TOM THE TEMP.”

Christopher Anderson is not Tom the Temp. He is, instead, a patient and bearish-looking guy with shaggy blond hair and a rumpled short-sleeved shirt who has been a document review lawyer since February.

Anderson, 39, was in private practice for 10 years in Rochester, N.Y. He and his father were the only attorneys in the practice, which encompassed just about everything—some criminal work, some civil litigation, a little of this and a little of that. Then Anderson married a mathematician who got a job in D.C., and he followed her here, thinking that with his “vast experience it would be no trouble to get a job with a small firm or with the public defender’s office.”

It was a lot of trouble. Anderson had a lot of interviews but no job offers. “At the public defender’s office, they said, ‘We’ve got a whole stack of résumés just like yours,’” he says.

Someone told Anderson about temp document review. He started doing it on a project that lasted for months. Then that job ended and another long-term project started. “I’ve been remarkably happy,” he says. “I’m making more money at this than at any other job I interviewed for and just about any other year in private practice. The work itself is mindless, which has its pluses and minuses. If I screw up, I don’t have to worry about my guy going to jail. In private practice, you never stop thinking about the case. With this, when you walk out of the door, it’s gone.”

Anderson says he expects—gladly—to do this work for another two years, by which time he’ll have paid off his student loans. He owed $110,000 when he graduated from law school and is down to $85,000 today. Then he can afford, he says, to take a more complicated job that is, in all likelihood, going to pay him less than half of what he can earn as a temp document reviewer.

He says that he hasn’t minded document review and doesn’t feel worried about much except keeping on working. “People are awful concerned about when the job will end,” he says. “But that’s a little more of the reality of the situation. They say that if you do this for more than a year that it’s a blot on your résumé. But to who? I’m not going to a big law firm anyway. I don’t think the work is nearly as rewarding as actually having clients, but I don’t think you’re untouchable because you’ve done it.”

Joseph Miller, 30, a temp document review attorney who graduated from New York Law School in 2002, also disavows any notion of a stigma. He’s just worried that the doc reviewers will stagnate on their own. There is no natural progression of temp document reviewing to any other job—and there are no real job training or networking resources available to them, either. Plus, he says, temp document review lawyers are prone to thinking of themselves as bottom-of-the-barrel and good for nothing but what they’re doing.

Miller started a Web site—JDWired.com—that he’s hoping will get these lawyers thinking about training and careers. Elsewhere on the Internet, there are temp document attorney Listservs and online bulletin boards where temp document reviewers are hashing out these same issues, with various levels of angst and humor. There’s talk of unionizing, too, and lots of discussion of why the temp agencies take such big cuts.

I am told that the agencies are paid about $51 per hour, around $35 of which is given to the temp attorneys themselves. Temp document review wages haven’t increased in about two years. In fact, it looks like the wages are actually going down right now—to $32 an hour. It doesn’t bode well for temp document reviewers. This fall the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about miserable recent law school graduates who can’t find jobs. And at the same time, applications to law school are finally going down. Perhaps by the time the temp document review jobs all get to India, there won’t be this surplus of lawyers in the U.S. to do the work, anyway. Here’s hoping the loans are paid off by then.

I met a former document reviewer one Saturday morning. He’s moved away from D.C., to a better job, but comes back to visit and is still active in the D.C. temp document reviewer community. He asked me not to publish his name.

This guy said there were a lot of upsides to this work—the money, the flexibility, the colorful co-workers. He said he’d managed to use the “temp” nature of this work to travel—he took projects in Connecticut and Los Angeles and New Orleans and all over America, wherever documents needed to be reviewed.

There were downsides, too—the normal downsides of work, the particular downsides of this kind of work. But the worst part about this job, when he was doing it, was going home for Thanksgiving and trying to explain what he did to relatives. They knew he’d graduated from law school, but this wasn’t really being a lawyer; he didn’t have a full-time employer, he didn’t have a good story to tell them about what his job was all about, he didn’t know how to help them with their divorces and their slip-and-falls. Corporate lawyers and government lawyers couldn’t help their relatives with divorces or slip-and-falls, either, but at least they could tell a good yarn about who they worked for and what they did know about. He had to try to explain that he knew about documents.

And, like all the things you really can’t explain to your relatives at Thanksgiving, that was just embarrassing.