According to the blog The Last Gen X American, written by Minneapolis attorney Matt Leichter, nearly 69 percent of attorneys in Puerto Rico aren’t working as attorneys.
But that’s not the only state or jurisdiction where more than half of lawyers are employed in non-lawyer fields. In Alaska, nearly 57 percent of attorneys are employed in other fields. Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Minnesota round out the list of states where half or more of lawyers aren’t working as lawyers.
Leichter refers to those lawyers not working in attorney jobs as “excess attorneys.” In order to get his numbers, he found the number of attorneys in each state and calculated the difference between the number of acting and resident lawyers in a state, comparing that number to state governments’ statistics on the number of employed attorneys.
That is not to say the attorneys who aren’t currently practicing aren’t using their law degrees, though.
“‘Excess Attorneys’ may be judges, politicians, businesspeople whose careers advanced due to their law degrees; or, they may be people who were unable to find careers as lawyers, are working in fields that don’t require law degrees, are choosing not to work at all, or are unemployed yet still maintaining active licenses,” Lehciter wrote.
There are areas in the U.S. with higher concentrations of attorneys than others. For example, Washington, D.C. has the most lawyers per 10,000 residents, at 773.8. New York takes second place with 88.7 attorneys per 10,000 residents. The rest of the top 10 includes Massachusetts (63.5), Connecticut (60.2), Illinois (49.3), New Jersey (43.5), Minnesota (45.2), California (42.7), Missouri (40.9), and Louisiana (40.8).
However, Leichter warns people who have used the data on his website to argue that there is an attorney shortage that “this is very, very, very wrong. There is no evidence of a general shortage of lawyers anywhere in the United States. Those who use these data to argue that deliberately mislead their audiences by failing to recognize that having a aw license and working as an attorney are not the same thing.”
There are many non-law fields in which attorneys may be employed. Some of these are obvious and others might not seem like they would be inside an attorney’s purview. Here are a few examples from Santa Clara University Law School’s careers website: politician or political advisor, legal software developer, legal consultant, corporate trainer, editor, investment banker, FBI special agent, foreign service officer, special event or conference planner, management consultant, real estate developer, stockbroker, trust officer or estate administrator, journalist, or lobbyist.
Are you an attorney working in a non-law field? Please talk about what you are doing (or not doing) with your law degree. It could be a big help for law students reading this blog and thinking about exploring other careers.
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