Every profession has an entry toll. Law’s is unusually brutal and unusually well disguised.
For decades, young people have been encouraged into law with promises of intellectual challenge, social value and financial security. What many encounter instead is a business model built on overwork, hierarchy and silent attrition. The exploitation is economic and structural. And it is routine.
The large New Zealand law firm depends on a simple arrangement. Senior lawyers and partners bill clients at very high hourly rates. Much of the actual work is done by junior lawyers and clerks, often fresh from university, on fixed salaries.
Those salaries look reasonable on paper. In practice, once the hours are counted, the effective hourly rate they are paid can fall to levels that would look modest in almost any other professional occupation and in some cases can approach or fall below the living wage once unpaid overtime is taken into account.
This is not a secret. It is not a scandal. It is how the system works.
Junior lawyers draft, research, proof, collate, manage files and respond to urgent instructions late at night and at weekends. They do so under intense time pressure, with limited control over workload and with a clear understanding that resistance will be remembered. The work is then billed out at senior rates, justified by supervision, review and institutional reputation. The margin is captured at the top.
When this is criticised, firms reply with a single word: mentoring.
Mentoring is the profession’s all-purpose defence. Long hours are mentoring. Low effective pay is mentoring. Being required to absorb stress and uncertainty is mentoring. It is said that junior lawyers are not being exploited, they are being trained.
This claim deserves scrutiny. Genuine mentoring involves time, feedback and investment. It is costly. What junior lawyers experience is not sustained mentoring but labour extraction under the promise of future advancement. The distinction matters.
The path from graduate to senior lawyer functions less like an apprenticeship and more like a sifting-out process. Large numbers enter. A small number remain. Attrition is not a failure of the system. It is one of its design features.
Universities New Zealand estimates that only about half of law graduates obtain work in law firms or in roles directly relevant to their degree. Many of the remainder take positions that are effectively general administrative or clerical roles, despite holding a professional qualification. Many will leave within five years.
This sifting process serves several purposes. It keeps the supply of senior lawyers artificially scarce. It normalises extreme working conditions. And it ensures a steady pool of compliant junior labour to sustain billing targets.
Nowhere is this clearer than in legal aid.
Legal aid is often presented as a public service strained by underfunding. That is partly true. It is also a system that exposes the internal economics of law firms. Legal aid payments are capped or fixed. Those rates are several times higher than the effective hourly rates paid to junior lawyers and would be regarded as viable in almost any other industry.
The constraint is not the legal aid rate itself, but how that work is organised and costed within firms. To remain viable, firms must push work downwards. Junior lawyers carry heavy caseloads under supervision that is sometimes nominal rather than substantive.
Again, this is described as training. Again, the labour is real, the responsibility significant and the pay effectively low once hours are counted.
The public consequence is familiar. Legal aid lawyers are exhausted. Files move slowly. Clients feel unheard. Turnover is constant. The system lurches forward on goodwill and attrition.
None of this requires bad people. It does not depend on individual cruelty. It is the predictable outcome of a professional structure in which lawyers design the rules, regulate entry and control pricing, while presenting the result as a neutral market outcome.
Because law degrees typically do not produce work-ready practitioners, firms effectively control who will be trained, how many will progress and on what terms.
This is why the exploitation of young lawyers is inseparable from the failure of civil justice more broadly. When routine legal work becomes prohibitively expensive, it is not because junior lawyers are well paid. It is because the system is organised to protect senior income and firm profitability.
This brings us to the awkward question: what advice should be given to people considering law school?
The honest answer is uncomfortable. Do not assume that a law degree guarantees professional employment. Do not assume that intelligence, diligence or good intentions will be rewarded. Do not assume that hard work leads predictably to security.
Do not assume that the rhetoric of mentoring matches the reality of practice.
Some will thrive. Many will endure. A significant number will leave, often with debt, stress and a sense of personal failure that is not warranted.
This is not an argument against law as a discipline or against law as a public function. It is an argument against pretending that the current business model is benign. It is not.
Young lawyers are not merely being trained. They are being used.
That use is legal. It is professionalised. It is normalised. It is also, in plain terms, exploitative.
For many, the safest advice may indeed be the simplest: think very carefully before you begin.
■Bruce Curtis is an honorary professor at the University of Waikato.
