In the almost three years since he graduated from the Ocean State’s sole law school – Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol – Jose F. Batista has transitioned from working for the R.I. Public Defender’s Office to opening his own firm, Jose F. Batista Law Firm.
A South Providence native, Batista said, “My decision to start my practice was from a need I saw in my community.”
Batista entered the workforce six years after the height of the Great Recession and said, at the time, he and his fellow RWU law graduates “had to be assertive” to find employment during that period.
He said, based on the amount of work he sees in the market, today “the industry is doing better … and will continue to get better.” He cited six classmates who took the entrepreneurial route within a year of graduating, too.
According to RWU data, the number of law graduates employed in positions requiring passage of the bar exam 10 months after graduation has risen from 50.9 percent in 2014 and held steady at 54.7 percent in 2015 and 2016.
Opening a one-person practice is “very common” among recent RWU law school graduates, said Michael J. Yelnosky, dean of the law school. “This younger generation is particularly entrepreneurial.”
The top three states where RWU graduates found employment in 2014 were Rhode Island (29.4 percent), Massachusetts (15.7) and Connecticut (7). In 2015 the top three states were Rhode Island (38.4), Massachusetts (8.5) and New York (7), and in 2016 they were Rhode Island (33.7), New York (10.5) and Massachusetts (9.3).
In addition, the data show graduates are steadily falling in number from 173 in 2014 to 130 in 2015 and 86 in 2016. The decrease in graduates is in line with national trends, said Yelnosky, and fewer job hunters is good news for graduates with debt.
While Yelnosky called RWU data an employment “snapshot,” not characteristic of a career spanning multiple years, he said the state’s law industry is “slowly” rebounding from what he called, “the toughest recession for lawyer hiring in my lifetime – nationwide.”
He added, “Legal employers are hiring again” – be they law firms, government departments, in-house, corporate lawyers or nongovernmental organizations.
Armando Batastini, a 1998 RWU law school graduate and partner at Providence-based Nixon Peabody LLP, is now the R.I. Bar Association president. He characterized the state’s 1998-era law industry as “robust and growing,” saying jobs were available in multiple practice areas, including corporate litigation, workers’ compensation, family law and criminal defense.
“It was a good time to be a new lawyer on the job market [because] big firms had a need for a lot of junior associates,” he said.
Batastini sees two hurdles that were “nonexistent or just beginning” to infiltrate the industry when he was a student. First, the internet and a nonlawyer’s use of technology to attempt do-it-yourself legal services decreasing the number of clients who would have previously sought an attorney’s advice and negatively impacting sales.
Second, the Great Recession, he said, had a “profound impact” on how businesses budgeted for legal services and the decreased demand for work led to layoffs of those hired in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“The level of work that pre-existed 2008 has never come back,” he said. “Large law firms aren’t hiring the way they historically did and that has a trickledown effect in terms of the availability of positions for people leaving law school.”
To combat the lingering effects of the recession, Batastini recommends students seek licenses in multiple states. “I love practicing and living in Rhode Island,” he said, “but the fact of the matter is rates for legal work [here] are not the same as in larger metro markets.”
Batastini is currently licensed to practice law in Rhode Island, New York and Massachusetts.
While he declined to comment on the health of, or his outlook on, the industry, Batastini said RWU has come a long way since 1998.
“I have seen the law school really excel at promoting and placing their gradates, particularly in the last decade,” he said. “Those efforts have manifested themselves in placing graduates with some very prestigious firms that, when I was coming out, wouldn’t even talk to RWU graduates.”
Yelnosky agrees. Today, RWU graduates aren’t novelties, thanks to the careers of predecessors such as Batastini. In 1996, when the first cohort of RWU-trained lawyers graduated, they were “unknown to the market,” he said. In 2017 they are “very well-known and that has made hiring easier because law firms, government employers and businesses have a positive view of the quality of RWU graduates,” he said.
It’s not all rosy though, said Yelnosky, who believes a lack of large law firms, and an increasing trend in corporations bolstering their in-house council rather than hiring outside firms as representation, is a challenge for recent graduates.
This is happening, he said, “on the theory that [businesses] can reduce their total legal spend by hiring someone who knows the business well, they can train and who can stay with them.”
Yelnosky, along with Batista, maintains a positive outlook for the industry but said technology and globalization could play a role in shaping the future of legal services in Rhode Island.
