According to an August 2009 Gallup Survey, only twenty five percent of Americans had good things to say about lawyers. Only three industries – the automobile industry, real estate, and oil and gas got more negative feedback. Even as we are in an economic crisis sparked by Wall Street greed, bankers scored better than attorneys in this survey!

Economically, lawyers have taken a serious beating just like the rest of us civilians. Analysts say that law firms saw their “lawyer sales” drop by twenty one percent in the year of 2009. That puts those who work in the legal field in the second worst industry of the year, falling only behind the wood product manufacturing industry’s twenty six percent sales decline.

Since the recession started two years ago, the legal field lost 55,900 jobs as was noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the year of 2009 alone, 12,196 employees were terminated by the largest law firms in the country. In fact, the ten largest law firms in America accounted for about sixteen percent of the total layoffs.

Yet, with all of this bad news, one may be led to believe that prospective attorneys might be more hesitant to go grab a J.D. Sadly, the opposite is true. According to the Law School Admissions Council, applications to law schools grew by five percent for the next year’s incoming class. In the month of September, more than 60,000 students took the LSAT. The June and September Exams marked an increase of almost twenty percent in the number of those test takers. This is the largest percentage increase in about eight years.

Incoming law students may fantasize about a six figure salary and a definite job that will annihilate all of the student loan debtbut they should not hold their breath. Even students coming from the most renown law schools packing heat with good grades and the prestige of law journal experience claim they are having a tougher time finding employment. In fact, according to a recent LexisNexis survey twenty one percent of law students that took the polls wished that they had not gone to law school.

Mallory Megan works for a debt collection company. She also writes stories on business, finance, consumer spending and collection agencies.

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