Aside from setting unnecessary and extraordinarily costly requirements for legal education and opposing key, cost-saving reforms, the American Bar Association found a new way to prove that it is woefully out of touch with the current legal market and ensure that many members of the new generation of lawyers won’t become dues paying members to an organization that remains crushingly out of touch with the reality of today’s legal job market.
Last week, ABA President Laurel Bellows sent a letter to the Department of Labor, urging them to interpret the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow for-profit law firms to hire unpaid law student interns and law grads to do their pro bono work.
At a time where new law grads are facing an unemployment rate of 50% in actual, paying attorney gigs and struggling to responsibly manage their debt load, this is exactly the wrong move for the ABA. Instead of encouraging firms to develop new business models to address the twin crises in the legal job market and access to justice, such as the one semi-jokingly suggested here, the ABA instead insists that the new generation continue to pay the financial price for the top-heavy, unsustainable, law firm model.
It’s shameful. The ABA seems to think that recent law grads can pay rent, eat, travel on, and get prescriptions from professional references. These are the same attorneys who bill every minute of their time that they can even tangentially relate to their cases. Why exactly does Laurel Bellows believe that her time, work, and passion is worth money and mine is not? I think Laurel Bellows should have to answer that question in front of every single young lawyer in the country before she lobbies for laws that will make it even more difficult for young lawyers to find positions as paid attorneys .
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