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Lawyers' Paths Postponed

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.

Kristina Moon (left), who once worked for AmeriCorps, is working for the Juvenile Law Center, a public-interest legal organization. (CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer
Kristina Moon (left), who once worked for AmeriCorps, is working for the Juvenile Law Center, a public-interest legal organization. (CLEM MURRAY / Staff PhotographerRead more

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."

ANDY COHEN

Penn Law School

Blank Rome

As an undergraduate at Emory University in Atlanta, Andy Cohen got himself a job waiting tables there and along the way discovered that he was a bit of a foodie.

So it seemed a good fit to sign on with a University City restaurant, MidAtlantic, when he learned earlier this year that Blank Rome L.L.P. of Center City had deferred his start date until early 2010.

Blank Rome's deferral period is relatively short. It provides no stipend, but also does not require its "first-years" to work for a public-service organization, as many firms require.

Hence, it made sense to Cohen to don a waiter's apron, at least until his start date with the litigation-practice group. He enjoys the rhythm of restaurant work, starting about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and finishing up about midnight, when he and his coworkers sometimes gather for a drink on their way home.

Cohen isn't the only lawyer working in the restaurant. Two other colleagues, also law-school graduates, are set to begin with the military's Judge Advocate General program in January. JAG units are the military's legal arm.

Cohen, 25, who lives in Center City and grew up in Upper Dublin, says that despite the recession and the sharp retraction in the legal market, he is confident law firms, particularly those with a strong litigation focus, will prosper.

One of the ironies of the current downturn, Cohen said, is that friends who were unable to get sought-after summer internships at big firms are now working as lawyers for smaller firms while the big-firm recruits are cooling their heels.

Turns out the smaller firms have been relatively healthy because of their lower rates and litigation focus.

Cohen says an added benefit at the restaurant is the collegiality. When he passed the bar, the owner gave him a congratulatory card. One of the managers at the restaurant confided that the staff was the smartest he had ever had.

"He said it made his job a lot easier," Cohen said.

KRISTINA MOON

Temple Law School

Dechert

Money was an issue for Kristina Moon, 27, when she first began to think about attending law school. She comes from a small farming community in western New York, and she knew the steep law-school tuition would be a burden.

She wanted to be sure.

So for one year after she graduated from Franklin and Marshall College, she volunteered with AmeriCorps in Seattle, where she coordinated a youth violence-prevention program.

Later, she returned to western New York, where she managed an after-school program for children and soon decided that a legal career could match well with her passion for social justice and fighting for the underdog.

It turns out that her deferral at Dechert L.L.P., one of the nation's largest and wealthiest law firms, has indirectly generated a windfall of righteous causes.

Since August, Moon has been working at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia. She helped write an amicus brief in an appellate case involving teenage girls from Wyoming County in northeastern Pennsylvania who have been threatened with prosecution for texting sexually suggestive pictures of themselves. The Juvenile Law Center, one of a number of public-interest legal organizations in Philadelphia, is seeking to prevent the prosecutor from pressing charges.

Moon said that because her family was not wealthy, she did not take for granted the job that she had been offered at Dechert. Thus, the deferral came as less of a shock. She also was not above working at a farmers' stand in Head House Square this summer, while she crammed for her bar exam before starting at the Juvenile Law Center.

ANTHONY LAGRECA

Georgetown Law Center

Dechert

There never was a shining epiphany for Anthony Lagreca, 25, when he finally realized he wanted to be a lawyer.

At first, while he was an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, it was more about the challenge of making his way through the legal and academic obstacle course of law school.

Later, while a student at Georgetown Law Center, the native of Huntingdon Valley was drawn to the transactional side of the profession, with its deals, negotiations, contracts, and complex legal calculus.

He gets a lot of that now in his current position at Philadelphia VIP, a public-interest legal organization in Center City that provides legal services to low-income people in civil matters. Lagreca will do work for small nonprofit groups and businesses on various transactional matters.

Lagreca says he was emotionally prepared for the news of his deferral because other large firms also had announced their deferral programs.

"After the dust settled, I realized one of the positives was that I would be working for a smaller organization and that I would be given more responsibility right away," he said.

One concern raised early by some public-interest lawyers was the potential for a culture clash between the first-year corporate-lawyers-to-be and the indigent clients they serve.

Lagreca says that is not a problem at all.

"Whether it is a multibillion-dollar company or an indigent client, the goals are the same," he said. "To represent your client. I keep that in mind, and it doesn't matter who you are representing."