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When big law firms began announcing en masse in the spring that the battered economy had forced them to delay the hiring dates of new law-school graduates, the news sent shock waves through recruits and the schools that had been busily churning them out.
But then the idea was only an abstraction.
Now the deferral programs have kicked in, and young lawyers by the hundreds are entering the workforce - just not quite in the same manner they had imagined as starry-eyed law students.
They've mastered torts, contracts, and criminal law. They've landed sought-after summer internships at lustrous law firms. Many already have passed the bar. By definition, they are a rarefied group. Big firms typically recruit only from the nation's top 30 law schools - and then try to skim the best of their graduates.
But for the next six months to a year, these highly credentialed legal fledglings will work far from the glistening high-rise aeries of the white-shoe firms that made them initial job offers.
Some are waiting tables, some are writing briefs in socially meaningful cases and getting a crash course in on-the-ground lawyering, and a few have become stay-at-home parents while they wait for their start dates.
Yet many of these same lawyers say the downturn in the legal market has been a sobering reminder that economic cycles affect law firms, too. It was only a few years ago that the nation's top firms frenetically bid up starting salaries to $160,000 in many cities.
Times were so heady that one Center City law firm's chairman remarked then that he probably could save $2 million to $3 million a year simply by wasting less food at catered lunches and dinners.
Those days are gone for now, and for young law-school graduates, it is a brave new world. Here are a few of their stories:
MIKE DUFFY
Temple Law School
Ballard Spahr
There may be some career parallels between Mike Duffy and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Greenspan studied music at Juilliard, the clarinet specifically, but later decided that his talent wasn't going to carry him across the stages of the world's great concert halls.
Duffy also was a music student, at Swarthmore College, where he studied composition. His hero was Mozart, and he says he still is capable of muddling through the great man's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the piano.
Duffy, who was raised in Media, did not become an economist. Instead, he went to law school and was offered a job by one of the more prominent firms in Philadelphia, Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll L.L.P. Yet, like other Ballard "first-years," Duffy was deferred.
He landed at the Greater Camden Partnership, a nonprofit organization devoted to the struggling city's redevelopment, where he began on Aug. 17.
Since then, he has helped clear vacant lots, among other things. He organizes volunteers, prepares the legal releases, checks out legal-liability issues, and then pitches in by tossing tires and other trash.
"To be honest, it is the perfect combination between legal work and just rolling up your sleeves," said Duffy, 29, who plays in a rock and hip-hop band and lives in Roxborough.
One of his tasks has been to research the issue of permeable paving surfaces, which might be used in parking lots and hold the potential to reduce the huge amounts of damaging storm-water runoff in the city.
"I can't say that I saw this coming," he said of the downturn in the legal market. "Looking back, there was a sense that our future and the future of the firms was pretty bulletproof. That kind of thinking is going to change. When times are good, a little bit of discipline is a good thing."
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