Temping is Refuge on Rough Road for Law School Grads

Newly minted lawyers are finding their opportunities for work are few and far between, a fact that is sending many to temporary assignments as their first out-of-school jobs.

“I met a recent grad who went to Duke and Harvard Law School, and had done impressive law clerking,” said Cameron Peterson, director of recruiting and staffing at Compliance Staffing’s Los Angeles regional office.

“She can’t find a full-time job in this economy.”

Compliance specializes in providing contract attorneys (essentially the term for “temps” in the field of law) to clients ranging from large law firms, to medium-sized companies of all types.

Compliance, and firms such as Kelly Legal, Ajilon Legal and Black Letter Discovery, report a sizable uptick in the number of candidates knocking on their doors and, to a lesser degree, in the number of firms seeking temporary legal staffing since the beginning of the year.

According to Peterson, last year, the average new attorney would have been working the day after graduating if they so desired.

“What a difference a year makes,” he said. “Because of the layoffs we’ve seen in the profession, the contract lawyer business has been picking up on both sides. There’s an influx of candidates, and that pool is changing in that they are coming from the big national law firms. Correspondingly, there are also a lot more of the big firms utilizing contract lawyers for document review.”

For law firms, the growth of the contract lawyer market has an upside: less expensive staffing costs. The down side for such firms is, however, they have fewer opportunities to groom young associates to fit their particular cultures.

For recent graduates, having few options besides signing up with temp firms, means missing the chance to fill a dedicated stall in a stable of attorneys where they might cut their teeth.

It also means less money.

“The pay rate is hourly, and ranges from $30 to $37 an hour,” Peterson said. “It has come down since the beginning of the year because of simple supply and demand.”

Peterson said clients are charged about $50 to $60 per hour for a contract lawyer (although that can be higher, as can the pay rate to the lawyer in some cases).

“The client can save a significant amount of money by utilizing a contract lawyer instead of hiring a new associate, who can be billed at $300 to $400 per hour,” he said.

That’s no solace to those who have recently graduated and passed the bar exam. Shooka Moallem, who passed the exam on her first try, knew she wanted to be a lawyer from a very early age.

“They were the heroes for my family,” she said. “As asylum seekers from a Middle Eastern country (Iran), I saw what they could get done for our family when I was just four or five.”

Moallem told the Business Journal the attorneys who helped shepherd her family into the safety of political-asylum status in the United States had what she calls a “JFK aura.”

Having grown up in the San Fernando Valley, Moallem went to Hoffstra Law School in Long Island, N.Y. and did visiting-student work at Pepperdine University. Yet, so far, the only law jobs she has been offered were equivalent to internships.

“Free,” she said. “They wanted me to work for free. I’ve already paid my dues as an intern. Why should I work for free or do the same work as a law clerk or a paralegal for eight or ten dollars an hour that I would be doing as an attorney for five times that much?”

Moallem said she has registered with several contract-attorney staffing companies, but has not actually worked for any yet.

“I’ve had a couple of experiences where they’ve offered me something and I was ready to go to work, only to have it fall through at the last minute,” she said. “That happened twice.”

For now Moallem, who lives in Woodland Hills, is surviving on what she’s been making by doing background work on film and television productions. Although she moved back home with her parents, student loans are still a big expense for her.

“At the time I entered law school, first-year law school loans were not available from the federal government, so I had to take out a private loan,” she said. “While my federal loans are on hold as far as repayment goes, I still have to make payments on the first-year money; it’s a significant amount.”

Nevertheless, Moallem has no regrets about getting her law degree, and she believes she will eventually find a job as an attorney.

In the meantime, it may be at a firm such as Encino-based Greenberg