![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article explores the entry-level legal job market based on a survey of graduating full-time Russian law students fielded in 2016. The findings contradict the prevailing assumptions about the post-Soviet labor market that connections trump experience. They show that law-graduate-respondents placed little value on the contacts of friends and family. Regression analysis confirms that personal self-confidence and experience are much stronger predictors of success on the job market.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Cynthia Buckley, Peter Murrell, Tim Frye, and an anonymous reviewer for the journal who provided invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the article. Help with coding and analyzing the data was provided by Maayan Mor and Valeriia Umanets.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. About half of hiring in the US, UK, Japan, and the Netherlands made use of personal contacts (Yakubovich and Kozina Citation2000, 480).
2. Gerber and Mayorova (Citation2010, 879) document that personal networks served as the primary basis for 33.4% of hires in 1985, and for 56.9% of hires in 2001.
3. E.g., Bocharov and Moiseeva (Citation2016), Jordan (Citation2005) [advokaty]; Volkov et al. (Citation2016) [judges]; Titaev and Shkliaruk (Citation2016) [investigators].
4. He urged greater attention to producing engineers. (Medvedev Citation2011). Officials at the Federal Service for Supervising Education [Rosobnadzor] have similarly criticized the oversupply of lawyers and economists at the expense of other more useful fields, such as information technology and medicine (Vashenko Citation2018).
5. Lempert writes that “[b]eing a notary was finding oneself in the dead end of the profession until 1990. It was where people ended up when they were forced out of other specialties” (Lempert Citation1996, 1181).
6. The most prominent example is the “After the JD” project spearheaded by the American Bar Foundation, which has led to a steady stream of publications. See generally http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/research/project/118.
7. This explains the disproportionate number of studies of advokaty, as compared to other types of Russian lawyers (e.g., Jordan Citation2005; Bocharov and Moiseeva Citation2016).
8. The phrase “law faculty” is used to describe all Russian institutions of higher education that produce lawyers. In reality, the names of these institutions vary. Some are stand-alone entities that are known as institutes or academies of law. But most are part of larger institutions.
9. State-funded law faculties are generally considered to be more reputable than private law faculties. The funding of their law faculty did not affect the propensity of my respondents to have a job at graduation ().
10. Examples of specialized legal institutions in my sample include: Moscow State Legal Academy im. Kutafina, Saratov State Academy of Law, and Urals State Legal University.
11. Examples of technical law faculties in my sample include: Kuban State Agrarian University, Moscow State Academy of Water Transport, and Nizhegorod State Architectural-Construction University.
12. Examples of humanitarian law faculties within my sample include: Moscow State Linguistics University and Vyatskii State Humanitarian University.
13. The survey also encompassed a second sample of correspondence (zaochnye) students, who are not included in the analysis because most were already holding down full-time jobs. Although some may seek a different job upon graduation, their rationales for doing so and background make them unlike full-time students. See Hendley (Citation2018) for a discussion of the differences between full-time and correspondence students.
14. Clarke (Citation2000) argues “[f]ar from disappearing with the transition to a market economy, the prevalence of personal relations and the priority of loyalty over any other desirable personal or professional quality appears to have increased considerably.”
15. Respondents were asked to assess their level of satisfaction with friendships made while law students on a four-point scale where lower scores indicate less satisfaction. The mean for LJRs was 3.14, compared to 2.99 for non-LJRs (p=0.004).
16. Among LJRs, 11.5% had mothers who worked in the legal field, 19.4% had fathers who did such work, and 34.4% had other close relatives, such as grandparents or siblings, who were lawyers.
17. Much of the labor market literature analyzes the relationship between level of education and job attainment. Because my respondents are all graduates of university-level law faculties, I refocus attention to the quality of their education.
18. In February 2020, we reviewed three websites: headhunter [hh.ru], SuperJob [superjob.ru], and Rabota [rabota.ru]. The number of postings for entry-level legal jobs on headhunter, the most popular of these sites, was 876. It increased to 2,130 for those with one to three years experience. The most common prerequisite was “grammatical oral and written speech” (gramotnaya ustnaya and pis’mennaya rech’). Only the posting from Sberbank, one of Russia’s oldest and largest banks, indicated that graduating from “top Russian and foreign institutes will be an advantage.”
19. For example, Baker & McKenzie, a global megafirm with 4,700 lawyers in 48 countries, advertised for summer interns in its Moscow office by asking for a copy of their transcript and a one-page essay commenting on which aspects of freedom need to be defended to meet the challenges of our time and why. Requiring this sort of essay is a way to create a level playing field for all comers. https://www.bakermckenzie.com/en/careers/job-opportunities/emea/russia/summer-internship-program-2020
20. The exception is the Higher School of Economics, which was founded in 1992, and has evolved to become one of Russia’s leading universities. Notwithstanding its name, its mission is not limited to training economists.
21. MGIMO and the Finance University, which are consistently among the top-ranked law faculties, did not participate in the survey.
22. Although degrees from departmental law faculties carry the same weight as those from other types of law faculties, some have very different curricula. Those associated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, for example, focus on preparing their students for a career in policing (Semukhina and Reynolds Citation2013, 147–148).
23. A different but related question is whether having better grades leads to higher paying jobs. The survey did not ask about LJRs salaries, making it impossible to speak to the relationship between LJRs’ grades and their starting salaries. A 2019 case study of graduates of the Higher School of Economics documented that, as a general matter, each additional GPA point gave rise to a 9–12% increase in salaries for graduates of bachelor programs (Rudakov and Roshchin Citation2019, 175). But the more detailed analysis failed to show that this advantage inured to the benefit of law graduates (Rudakov and Roshchin Citation2019, 167, 170, 174).
24. The Russian grading scale runs from 1 to 5, with 5 signifying excellence.
25. The percentage of their grades that fell into this top category was 50 for LJRs and 46 for other respondents (p=0.039).
26. A table detailing the mean responses for LJRs and others as to the value of theoretical versus practical training is available in online Appendix A.
27. This ostensible preference for public-sector internships may strike readers unfamiliar with the Russian legal environment as odd. It makes more sense when we factor in the reality that most of my respondents (53.3%) planned to work for the state (Hendley Citation2019).
28. In the decades of Soviet power, students attended institutes of higher education at no personal cost. At present, a majority (60%) of full-time law students pay tuition. The state covers the tuition for the remainder (much like their Soviet predecessors; Moiseeva Citation2015, 4). Among correspondence students, 90% pay tuition. As I have argued elsewhere, the caliber of these zaochniki tends to be lower than their full-time counterparts (Hendley Citation2018).
29. In their more comprehensive study of Russian university students’ employment patterns, Roshchin and Rudakov (Citation2017, 320, 324–325) found that almost two-thirds worked while studying, often beginning these jobs in their third year.
30. The total number of respondents with jobs was 645. Of this number, 124 had law-related jobs. This represents 12.3% of the sample, but 19% of those who had jobs.
31. The mean (on a 1 to 4 scale, with higher scores reflecting greater importance) for LJRs who had law-related jobs was 2, compared to 1.19 for LJRs who did not have such jobs (p=0).
32. For the text of all of these interviews, see http://www.consultant.ru/edu/news/interview/istoriya_uspekha/istoriya_uspekha_vypusknikov/.
33. A table detailing the means for LJRs and others is available in online Appendix B.
34. A table detailing the means for LJRs and others is available in online Appendix C.
35. For more on Pussy Riot and its legal woes, see Gessen (Citation2014). Navalny’s career as an opposition leader can be tracked on youtube (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj7V2yopm6U).
36. A table detailing the means for LJR’s and others is available in online Appendix D.
37. Because the variables measuring support for the Navalny and Pussy Riot verdicts are highly correlated, I could include only one in the regression.
38. Given that over 89% of my respondents began their study of law immediately following their graduation from high school, it is unsurprising that their mean age is 22.1 (standard deviation = 1.5 years).
39. A robustness check that included fixed effects for regions confirmed that regions are not a significant predictor of success on the legal job market.