Need a lawyer? They're out there

By Dick Hughes  

JUNE 30, 2011 11:48 a.m. (0)

South Carolina, along with just about every other state, is producing far more lawyers than there are jobs, according to Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. or EMSI, but a spokesman for the Charleston School of Law doesn’t believe that’s so.

EMSI said almost twice as many people passed the 2009 South Carolina bar exam (506) as job openings (262).  That’s not the experience of graduates of the Charleston School of Law, said Andrew Brock, school spokesman.

He said the EMSI data appears to be misleading in that it seems to include only lawyers going to law firms.

The school’s job placement records show that 90 percent of the school’s graduates are employed within a year of graduation.  Charleston, the University of South Carolina School of Law and law schools in other states each graduate about third of the South Carolina law graduates.

North Carolina’s surplus is 529 and Georgia’s is 438.  New York tops the surplus-lawyer list with 7,687. Vermont has only four more than it needs.

Only three places have more jobs than new job-seekers: the District of Columbia (345), Wisconsin (14) and Nebraska (3).

According to EMSI, the median wage for lawyers in South Carolina is $33.03 an hour.  Not surprising considering its deficit of attorneys to jobs, the medium average wage in Washington D.C. is $70.96, the highest in the country.

Of the 156 students from the Charleston class of 2009, 36 percent were employed by law firms, 21 percent by the judiciary, 10 percent in government, eight percent in business or industry, five percent in public interest law and 10 percent were pursuing doctorates in law.

The Avery index of lawyers per capita shows South Carolina with eight attorneys per 10,000 people while in Georgia it is 12 and Florida 20.

One of the reasons the Charleston School of Law was started four years ago, he said, was because there was a need more lawyers in the state.  Sixty-six percent of the 164 members of the class that was graduated in May are South Carolina residents.