Jennifer Kates dreams of working one day as a public-interest lawyer. A 2007 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia, Kates hopes to use her law degree to provide legal services to the underprivileged, perhaps focusing on housing policy. Yet, come this fall, Kates will start work as a first-year associate at Dechert, a 1,000-lawyer firm based in Philadelphia that is better known for its work defending the makers of Vioxx than tenants facing eviction.
Ask Kates why she has chosen to enter private practice rather than the public sector and she’ll tell you about the ease of finding a big-firm job through on-campus recruiting and the opportunities to do pro bono work while at Dechert. But Kates also acknowledges that financial considerations played a part in her decision to work at a large law firm.
“I don’t know how I’d afford [working in a public-interest job],” Kates says. “I’m really not sure how the money would work out.”
While the average starting salary for public-interest lawyersin 2006 was $36,000, according to NALP, an association for legal career professionals, a freshly minted lawyer starting her legal career at Dechert earns $145,000—not including annual bonuses or thousands of dollars in perks like reimbursement of bar-review fees.
The outsized salaries the private sector offers can be tempting for students who face tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt upon their graduation from expensive law schools like Penn—where the annual cost of attendance last year topped $56,000. That financial pressure, experts say, can lead law students who are interested in working in public service to instead enter private practice.
Hoping to encourage students to consider jobs in the public interest after they graduate from law school, the ABA Law Student Division has undertaken an aggressive lobbying campaign designed to ease the financial pressures facing public-interest lawyers. The Division’s plan focuses on increasing the incentives that federal and state governments provide to lawyers working in the public sector.
“The number-one issue that concerns law students today is the cost of law school,” says Christopher Casey, who graduated in May from Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, Rhode Island. “It impacts everyone’s lives. It impacts where you work. It impacts where you live.”
Law students know all too well the sacrifices they must make to cope with often-crippling debt payments after graduation, adds Casey, who served until August as one of three delegates from the Law Student Division to the larger ABA. Last year, the Division surveyed students about the total amount of debt they expected to carry after their graduation from law school and asked whether those debt burdens would lead students to avoid the sort of low-paying jobs that often predominate in public-interest work. The response was striking.
“We heard from a lot of students who want to go into the public sector—who even went to law school specifically to go into the public sector—who just can’t do it when those jobs are paying 30 or 40 thousand [dollars] a year,” Casey says. “It’s tough to give back when you’re facing such crushing debt.”
The average 2005 graduate of a private law school carried over $78,000 in debt from law school alone, according to an Equal Justice Works report released last year. Graduates of public law schools fared somewhat better, but not by much—the report found that their average law school debt load at graduation was over $51,000. The burden is even more onerous for the majority of law students who carry debt from loans taken out to finance their undergraduate education. The average undergraduate left school with over $19,000 in educational debt, according to a 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Education. The result is that thousands of young lawyers start their careers with debt loads that easily top six figures.
Of course, eye-popping debt loads like those many law students face might be manageable if legal salaries were at similarly stratospheric levels. In the public sector, however, that just is not the case. The Equal Justice Works report found that the median entry-level salary for a lawyer at a legal-aid organization was $36,000. Public-interest groups working on issues like immigration and civil rights paid starting lawyers slightly better, with a median salary of $40,000, while beginning public defenders earned a median salary of $43,000. Lawyers beginning their careers as prosecutors pulled in the largest public-sector salaries, at a median of $44,000, the Equal Justice Works report found. Making matters worse, a 2005 study conducted for the Building Movement Project found that students entering public-interest work in all fields tend to have higher debt loads after graduation than do students entering the private sector, making them all the less suited to bear the lower salaries the public sector offers.
Compare those public-interest salaries to what a beginning lawyer can expect to make at the highest levels of the private sector. For instance, a first-year associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, a white-shoe law firm in New York City, earns $160,000 in salary and an annual lockstep bonus of another $30,000.
Armed with statistics like those—and many more—a group of law students took to Capitol Hill last semester, hoping to persuade lawmakers to support a series of measures designed to ease the debt burden facing students who want to work in the public interest. As part of the American Bar Association’s annual ABA Day lobbying event, the law students told their stories in dozens of congressional offices.
“A lot of times, staffers and members of Congress only hear from professional lobbyists that either work for the lenders or are far removed from the real-life experience of facing over $100,000 in debt at graduation,” says Sam Jammal, who served until August as one of the Division’s delegates to the ABA. “By telling our personal stories and those of law students from around the country, we were able to put a sympathetic face on an issue that has long been ignored. Lawyers aren’t the most sympathetic community on Capitol Hill, so it’s even more important that we meet in person to talk about the difficulty faced by those seeking to work for the public interest.”
In a spacious conference room filled with the mementos of a political life, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) listened intently as Gary McDonald Jr. told her his personal story. A 2007 graduate of Texas Wesleyan School of Law in Fort Worth, McDonald spoke of his experiences in law school and his dream to work as a prosecutor in his home state of Texas. But McDonald also told the senator about the $120,000 in loans he must repay following his graduation and his concern that his debt burden could derail both his dream and the contribution he wants to make to the justice system.
Hutchison nodded as McDonald told his story, and she assured the group in her office that she remembered the challenges facing young lawyers from her own experiences after she graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. She also pledged to read an information packet she received from McDonald and Marcus Fernandez, a third-year student at South Texas College of Law in Houston who serves as the Law Student Division’s vice chair and who attended the meeting with Hutchison. Although Hutchison did not explicitly promise to support the ABA-backed legislation, she vowed to keep an open mind as it moved through the legislative process.
In a Capitol Hill office building just a few blocks away, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) leaned in and listened as Jammal and Casey told him about the challenges facing recent law school graduates and asked him to support the two loan-assistance bills pending in the Senate that had received backing from the ABA.
Whitehouse, who in January began his first term as senator, told the law students that he was all too familiar with the financial pressures facing young lawyers. In his previous positions as Rhode Island’s attorney general and the state’s U.S. attorney, Whitehouse says he saw lawyers often make the choice between the public-interest work they loved and the debt-driven financial pressures they faced.
“You really have to love it to do a job that pays that little,” says Whitehouse, a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville. “We lose so many people because they just can’t afford the hit in salary.”
Whitehouse’s familiarity with the issue—as well as the rest of the Capitol Hill reaction to students’ concerns about debt-repayment issues—impressed Jammal, a 2007 graduate of the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., who began his career this fall as a public-interest lawyer working on legislative matters for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“The Division received a really positive reception,” he says. “We had more meetings than ever before and met with key committee members in the House and Senate. For the most part, it was easy to get these meetings and we were able to have a real dialogue on the issue of rising law student debt.”
All told, Law Student Division representatives met with offices representing nearly three dozen senators and members of the House over a two-day period—and the students weren’t alone.
Because the larger ABA made improving access to legal education one of the 10 issues its members raised with lawmakers during the annual ABA Day lobbying event, offices all over Capitol Hill buzzed with support for the loan-repayment efforts.
“We’re focused on this because it impacts us right now, but it also impacts the entire legal profession,” Casey says. “The ABA has been committed to this issue for years—it’s not just the law students. We’re a top priority for the ABA, and that’s a great thing for us.”
Lawmakers, it appears, are starting to take notice. Less than a month after Law Student Division representatives lobbied Congress, the House passed a measure designed to provide loan repayment assistance for prosecutors and public defenders. Representative David Scott (D-Ga.), who was one of the bill’s major sponsors, says that students’ ballooning debt loads could mark the beginning of a crisis in the legal system.
“A serious situation is emerging impacting public safety, justice, fairness, and the integrity of the criminal justice system, as a severe shortage of qualified prosecutors and public defenders looms large over our entire nation,” Scott says in a statement. “In Georgia and throughout the country, the recruitment and retention of public prosecutors and defenders has been a daunting task in recent years. This is largely because crushing student debt burdens have deterred many talented law graduates from pursuing public-service careers.”
The law students and lawyers participating in ABA Day focused their efforts on two key pieces of legislation designed to make it easier for law graduates to pursue public-interest careers.
Named after a well-known district attorney from South Carolina, the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007 would provide up to $60,000 in loan repayment assistance to law school graduates who agree to work for at least three years as local or state prosecutors or for three years as local, state, or federal public defenders. Eligible lawyers would receive loan repayments of up to $10,000 a year and would have the option to renew their participation in the program for another three years.
Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has championed the proposal through several congresses, introducing S. 442 in January. The House companion measure quickly followed and was adopted by the House in May. Circumventing obstacles to consideration of his bill in the Senate, in July Durbin amended the bipartisan Senate bill to reauthorize and amend the Higher Education Act (S. 1642) to include his proposal. His amendment also incorporated language proposed by Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) to provide similar loan repayment for civil legal assistance lawyers, at $6,000 per year to a maximum of $40,000. S. 1642 went on to unanimous approval in the Senate. The legislation is expected to come up for House consideration this fall.
The second measure to receive ABA support would completely forgive the balance of any eligible federal loans for lawyers who have worked in the public sector for 10 years and made punctual student loan payments during that time. This program was included in House and Senate legislation to reform federal student lending. The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (H. 2669), which went on to bipartisan approval in both houses of Congress, is awaiting conference to reconcile the differences between House and Senate versions of the bill. This valuable program has been championed in the 110th Congress by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Representatives George Miller (D-Calif.) and John Sarbanes (D-Md.).
Even with progress in both houses of Congress, the Division delegates urge members to continue to become active in the effort to improve loan-repayment options for public-interest lawyers. Students can use tools on the Division’s website (www.abanet.org/lsd/legislation) to write a letter to their Congress member about debt-repayment issues or to set up a meeting to discuss their concerns with their lawmakers.
“It is critical for law students and young lawyers to get involved because, if we don’t, then we’ll continue to see the astronomic tuition increases and interest rates that make public interest work unaffordable,” Jammal says. “No one else is going to tell our stories, and there isn’t any army of professional lobbyists on the Hill ready to plead our case.”Craig Linder, 2006-07 student editor of Student Lawyer is a 2007 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadephia..
