(CN) — Standing at the pinnacle of their academic careers, spring 2020 law school graduates are staring at a profession battered by winds of pestilence. And the dragon they’ve been preparing to slay, the state bar exam, is slipping out of range.
They’ve spent fortunes on their apprenticeships. Their average student loan debt is around $115,000. On a debt that big interest does not just accrue, it can cripple. They need to get to work — fast.
In a typical year after walking the stage in their caps and gowns they would hunker down for weeks studying full-time for the July bar exam, putting in around 500 hours, including prep courses, which cost $2,000 to $5,000.
“You are crazy if you don’t take a bar preparation course of some kind,” said Nell Collins, who is to graduate in May from the University of Indiana Maurer School of Law.
But several states have postponed the exam until the fall, others indefinitely, taking a wait-and-see approach on the pandemic that has closed courthouses and stopped trials across the country, forcing law firms to slash pay, lay off and furlough staff and freeze hiring.
Kenneth Andres said his Haddonfield, N.J., personal-injury firm Andres & Berger is not hiring.
“We’ve seen a decrease in business because there are fewer cars on the road, so there are fewer motor vehicle collisions,” he said. “Folks are not out in the public suffering trips and falls, and all medical procedures, which are elective now in New Jersey, have been postponed.”
Collins said she has a clerkship lined up with an Allen County, Indiana, Circuit Court judge. She’s supposed to start in August. The Indiana Supreme Court is to decide on May 8 whether to push back the bar exam set for July 28 and 29.
“My clerkship is contingent upon my passing the bar and I’m not sure how that will change the position if I’m not able to go take the test in July,” Collins said. “We’re really afraid that some of the firms and legal employers will rescind their job offers if we aren’t able to take the bar.”
The Indiana Supreme Court has provided some flexibility: It’s letting people who graduated after November 2019 work as legal interns until the February 2021 bar exam.
But Collins, mother of a 2-year-old son, said that won’t work for many new graduates because they would have to take time off to study, leaving their employers in the lurch.
“If I have to do a job and on top of that study for the bar and be a mom, there’s just not enough time in the day,” she said.
Collins and some of her Indiana University classmates recently sent a letter to the Indiana Supreme Court, asking it to consider authorizing a “diploma privilege” for 2020 graduates whereby they could be admitted to the Indiana State Bar and receive their law licenses without having to pass the bar exam.
Students across the country are lobbying for this option.
California students, in an April 1 letter to Governor Gavin Newsom, said the state granted diploma privilege to graduates in 1906 after the devastating 7.9 magnitude earthquake leveled San Francisco, killed thousands and left more than 200,000 people homeless and during World War II.
Collins said she would prefer to prove her mettle by passing the bar in July.
“We don’t really want to be a class that has the stigma of not taking the bar over our heads. Because the bar, whether we like it or not, is an important rite of passage to being a lawyer,” she said.
The Utah Supreme Court is poised to let some 2020 graduates skip the bar and enter the realm of licensed lawyers as apprentices. They’ll have to do 360 hours of legal work under a state-licensed attorney by 2021 to become licensed.