State short on lawyers, report says

North Carolina needs more lawyers, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

The report says North Carolina has fewer private-sector lawyers per capita than any other state (758 people for each lawyer).

The report said state restrictions keep new lawyers from coming here. The state allows only graduates of American Bar Association-approved law schools to take the state bar exam. Also, lawyers from other states must have been licensed for four of the past six years in order to "waive" in to the North Carolina bar.

The report, which compares key factors such as tuition, bar passage rate, debt after graduation and starting salaries, found N.C. Central University's law school the only truly low-cost option for legal education in North Carolina.

The state has seven law schools. Two, Elon University and Charlotte School of Law, opened in 2006.

The report, available online at www.popecenter.org, also found:

* Forty-six percent of UNC-Chapel Hill law graduates leave the state for their first job.

* The median starting salary for a Duke law graduate is $110,000; for UNC-CH graduates, it's $100,000; for Wake Forest grads, it's $70,000.

* N.C. Central law graduates have a low debt load of $17,215, compared with $90,929 for Campbell law grads.

The Raleigh-based Pope Center is a higher education watchdog group that promotes accountability and diversity of ideas on campus.

The legal education report was written by Andrew Morriss, law professor at the University of Illinois, and William Henderson, law professor at Indiana University.