Graduate glut: 12,000 new lawyers every year in Australia
February 19, 2014 Leave a comment
Graduate glut: 12,000 new lawyers every year
February 14, 2014
Edmund Tadros
Law students are being urged to look beyond the legal field for career options, as a massive oversupply of graduates floods into a tough job market.
The number of law students has doubled in the past decade, with more than 12,000 graduates now entering a job market that comprises about 60,000 solicitors each year.
The startling increase in the number of law graduates has been driven by the popularity of post-graduate law courses, where the number of students completing their courses increased 330 per cent from 1635 in 2001 to 7036 in 2012, The Australian Financial Review‘s analysis of university course data shows.
The number of bachelor’s graduates in law increased by a more modest 26 per cent during the same period, from 4514 in 2001 to 5706 in 2012. Combined, this has meant a jump of students graduating with some form of undergraduate or postgraduate law qualification from 6149 in 2001 to 12,742 in 2012.
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There are about 60,000 practising solicitors in Australia, according to an Urbis survey from the national law market.
Structural change
Law students and graduates are now being told to broaden their career prospects beyond becoming lawyers. Carolyn Evans, the dean of Melbourne University’s law school, said: “What I would say is that people should be aware when they go into law school, they’re going in at a time of rapid change.
“There is structural change in the legal profession and uncertainty in the Australian economy,” Professor Evans said. “[Students] can’t assume because they have a law degree, they’ll have a job as a lawyer.”
The proportion of bachelor’s-degree law graduates who find full-time work has fallen from 96 per cent in 2001 to 83 per cent in 2012, according to Graduate Careers Australia.
The new arts degree
Many of these graduates have already accepted they will not work in law, with only 70 per cent of those surveyed in 2012 working in the legal field. The broader market for lawyers has also contracted, with the number of internet job ads for solicitors falling from a peak of about 6300 a month in mid-2008 to about 1800 a month in mid-2013.
The president of the Law Institute of Victoria, Geoff Bowyer, said law degrees should now be considered a good generalist qualification.
“The law degree is changing from being a career-specific [degree] to a broad degree,” he said. “Law degrees are seen in corporate and government as a good base for making good administrative people. Arts used to be seen as that generalist field. In a society where regulation is increasing, being able to [understand it] is a skill.”
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