Would you hire a lawyer who took out a mortgage without understanding the repayment obligations? Yet every year incoming law students take on mortgage-sized debt — currently averaging about $122,000 to attend a private law school — without knowing the terms or having a plan for how they will repay these loans.
Responsibility for this ignorance falls both on the borrowers and the law schools that help students secure the loans. Many incoming law students apparently have not realized that the decline in legal jobs, especially jobs at big law firms, means that they need a financial game plan to deal with the very real possibility that they may not be employed after graduation or may earn a salary that is only a fraction of their debt.
