by Susan MacFarlane

Many of us choose law because we anticipate a dynamic career filled with challenges inviting creative solutions. Few of us anticipate that searching for articles could be among the greatest of those challenges.

The Hares: Be Fast or Be Last
Focusing on summer articles is now common practice among large firms, and large firms are the most significant employer of articling students.

For these firms, the summer articles program is a chance to foster teamwork and loyalty. It is also a chance to hire students on a probationary basis before investing in them for a year, or longer.

For the students, the net effect of this pre-articling recruitment is that few articling positions are actually available for those who have not already been branded and groomed by a firm through its summer articles program. A firm may advertise that it hires five articling students, for example, but the reality is that the previous year it hired five summer students, all of whom are expected to fill the available articling positions. Occasionally one may fall away, leaving one actual position available to the scores of applicants who are not so hot off the mark.

The Tortoises: Determined to Win
The students who are not snapped up for summer articles tend to be mature students who are less likely to bond with a crop of eager 20-somethings, and those with only average marks. That is a large portion of the student body. There are other reasons why a student may have missed out on the summer hiring: some transfer in from other jurisdictions; some give birth and take a few months off, or more; some take perhaps the last chance they’ll ever have to go travelling for a few months. Those choices may come at tremendous cost to their articling prospects.

Mary is a lawyer called in another jurisdiction who has been actively searching for articles since coming to B.C. over a year ago. “It is devastating,” she says. As both a foreign-trained lawyer and a middle-aged adult, she is doubly disadvantaged. She says that “companies do not trust foreign credentials,” and even worse, “I’ve been told I won’t find articles at my age.”

The irony is that even young students who land the more lucrative articling spots in downtown firms were sometimes forced to go that route despite their preference for slower-paced “lifestyle” practices in smaller markets. Joan is one among many who graduated with student-loan debt so significant that it limited employment options. Joan did the usual schooling: after high school she went straight to a B.A. and then an LL.B., after which her debt load was so high that she could not afford to take the sort of job she would have preferred. She still came out owing roughly $45,000. Payment for those loans began six months after graduation, so Joan could only accept a job that would allow her to meet that obligation. Payments on a debt load that high are more than $400 a month, spread across 174 months. “That is a long time to be paying, but in the short term it also had a significant impact on my job choices. When I first began to make articling application, I was really attracted to working in a small to mid-sized centre. I applied to firms in places like Kamloops, Kelowna, Vernon, Nanaimo, and Abbotsford. I got some offers at very cool places where I would have been doing some interesting and diverse work, but the pay scale was horrendous.”

She described offers as low as $1,350 monthly and concluded that “I had to start looking for higher-paying jobs, despite the fact that I wasn’t interested in working at a large downtown firm.”

Students now working for little more than $1,000 monthly are still luckier than some, who resort to offering to article for free. Free articling is evidently not something many firms will consider. It creates inequality and a stigma among young lawyers, particularly where an articling student is already on salary at the firm, or has recently become a junior associate. Free articling is only an option at small firms where the cost would prevent them from hiring a student, and Mary, who has tried offering to article for free, says even these small firms “are not keen.”

Splitting articles is an option for a student who may be articling with a boutique that can only offer limited instruction, or with two small firms, each of which can only afford half an articling student. More common is a student wholly assigning articles, whether because the fit just didn’t work or because the initial firm ceased to exist.

For whatever reason, the percentage of law-school graduates who secure articles has been declining in the past five or so years. Although there are articling positions out there, “this is very cold comfort to anyone who just doesn't match the profile that articling students are generally expected to fit,” Leon says. He is a mature student who has been searching for articles for over a year. He has looked at alternative careers, but says, “It is my impression that those who successfully pursue them usually have articled and been called. An LL.B. without being called is an abortive project.”

No one expects articling to be easy, any more than one expects the practice of law to be easy. The people who are attracted to it are fiercely dedicated and determined. But there are unexpected hurdles in this race that are higher for some than for others, and we have to consider whether that is in the best interests of the profession generally.

Susan MacFarlane is a research lawyer and a member of the BarTalk Editorial Board.

Pseudonyms were used in this article.

This article was published in the June 2005 issue of BarTalk. © 2005 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.