LegaL ethiCS
By PHiliP slaytON
A chill wind from the south
It would be wishful thinking to believe the Canadian legal profession is
immune to the devastating trends happening in the United States.
14
April
2013
www.CANADIAN
information than Americans, who are well
served by a tradition of institutional transparency and prying journalists who won���t
take no for an answer. But it would be
wishful thinking to believe the Canadian
legal profession is immune to the devastating trends south of the border. Already,
between 10 and 15 per cent of Canadian
law school graduates cannot find articling positions. The Canadian Law School
L a w ye r m a g . c o m
Admission Council reports that this year
the number of applicants to Canadian
law schools has decreased by four per
cent. And according to Canadian Lawyer���s
2012 Compensation Survey, the median
salary of a first-year associate in 2012 was
$72,500, down by approximately $3,500
from 2011. The survey also found that in
2012 newly called in-house counsel had a
median salary of $7,500 less than in 2011.
JUSTIN RENTERIA
T
here���s a chill wind blowing
north, coming in from the
United States of America.
There, lawyers, law firms,
and law schools are finding the pickings getting slimmer and the
auguries becoming ominous. Can our
country, tied so closely to the U.S., be far
behind? What will hard times do to the
Canadian legal profession?
The news from the U.S. is pretty much
all bad. The New York Times recently
commented the American legal profession is ���faced with profound and seemingly irreversible shifts.��� The Wall Street
Journal reported applications to U.S. law
schools are down almost 50 per cent,
to an estimated 54,000 this year from
100,000 in 2004; little wonder, said the
newspaper, since ���barely 65 per cent of
2011 graduates had landed law-related
employment within nine months of graduation. . . .��� According to The Atlantic
magazine, median pay for new graduates in private practice has fallen 18 per
cent since 2010. Citi Private Bank tells
us the demand for high-end corporate
legal services in the U.S. has fallen about
0.4 per cent every year since 2008, and
during this period the growth in rates,
billable hours, and revenue has dramatically slowed. The title of a January article
in The American Lawyer Daily sums it all
up: ���The Boom Years Are Not Coming
Back, Get Used To It.���
The situation is more opaque in
Canada. We always seem to have less
