Look to Your Left, Look to Your Right…

AuthorColin Lachance
DateJanuary 26, 2015

…One of you won’t be here next year.

Variations of that famous phrase, according to legend, are routinely directed at first year law students, though now mostly in jest. Many people have been credited as being the first to warn law students that at least 1 in 3 wouldn’t be able to handle the rigours of law school and would soon be seeking other pursuits, with records suggesting the first utterances came as early as the 1930s, if not earlier. If it were ever true for law students (Hint: I doubt it. And certainly not in living memory), it is seemingly now applicable to practicing lawyers (at least in the U.S.).

The American website Lawyerist.com today published an article entitled “25% Of Your Colleagues Will Quit Being Lawyers By 2022,”basing its headline on Bureau of Labor Statistics data crunched by another lawyer/blogger to reveal that the 2012-2022 “occupational transfer rate” is 25.5%. All underlying details from the Bureau of Labour Statistics are available here, and a quick review suggests the headline overstates matters slightly by omitting reference to the 2012 starting point of the exodus. However, the headline actually understates the impact of the overall change to the legal profession because it only refers to people who change careers and omits the 17.1% that simply leave the workforce for reason of retirement, family planning, etc…

Still the same legal profession?

If you change the blade twice and the handle thrice, is it still the same axe?

If 42% of lawyers exit the legal profession over any given 10-year period, at what point do the newcomers exert greater influence than the more seasoned members? Surely it’s just a matter of time before EVERYTHING CHANGES.

This could be a tricky question to answer because you need to know who is actually leaving and whether the influence of the...

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