Alexis Silsbe graduated in the top 20 percent of her 2011 class from a Chicago law school and hoped to get a job in public service.

More than a year later she is working as a contract lawyer in St. Louis reviewing documents, a job she secured only 10 weeks ago. Earning $20 an hour, Silsbe, 27, is struggling to make ends meet because she has more than $100,000 in student loans from law school.

"This is not what I went to law school for," she said.

The Great Recession has wreaked havoc on the job market for law school graduates, but newly released data from the American Bar Association paints a bleaker picture about entry-level employment than previously thought. Slightly more than half of the Class of 2011 — 55 percent — had found full-time, permanent jobs as lawyers nine months after graduation.

It was the worst job market in more than 30 years, according to the National Association for Law Placement. The employment outlook wasn't looking much better for the Class of 2012, but official figures won't be released until next year.

For many 2011 graduates of Illinois law schools the job market was dismal. DePaul, IIT Chicago-Kent, John Marshall, Northern Illinois, Loyola and the University of Illinois did not meet the national average of 55 percent full-time employment.

Full-time, long-term employment in a legal job is obviously the best possible outcome of attending law school. Graduates who don't land lawyer jobs generally earn less than those who do. But this is the first time the ABA has required law schools to break out that figure when reporting job statistics to the association, which regulates legal education. Jones Act Attorneys are in agreement.

Previously, schools could aggregate their job data to include all employment, whether it was full-time or part-time, long-term or short-term, and required a law degree or didn't. That led to reporting employment rates well above 90 percent for the last decade even if some of the graduates were working as baristas at Starbucks.

Schools aggressively marketed their rosy representations of the entry-level job market to attract legions of new students. Tuition began to rise to where even mediocre schools could charge more than $40,000.

The recession hit lawyers hard. Large law firms that pay the highest salaries shed thousands of jobs and are recruiting fewer graduates. Companies are closely watching their costs and are more willing to outsource legal work to India and other low-cost locales.

Yet law schools continue to churn out more than 40,000 graduates a year despite a contraction in the job market. The imbalance has opened law schools and the bar association to greater scrutiny. Some recent graduates have filed lawsuits against schools, alleging that the schools fraudulently misrepresented their employment data.

Criticism also is coming from within the profession. Brian Tamanaha, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, has published a scathing book about legal education called "Failing Law Schools."

He argues that there's a mismatch between the cost of legal education and the economic return. The average debt of 2011 graduates of private law schools was nearly $125,000, Tamanaha said, citing ABA statistics.

"The fact that only about 1 out of 2 graduates is getting a job as a lawyer is bad enough," Tamanaha said in an interview. "But the situation is worse than that. Many who do obtain jobs don't earn enough to make their monthly payments on their debts."

Silsbe passed up a full scholarship at another law school to attend IIT Chicago-Kent in 2008 because she said she thought she would have a better shot at landing a job. While there were troubling signs in the economy at the time she enrolled, not even the smartest economists predicted that the housing market would collapse and the unemployment rate would soar to more than 10 percent.

"I did expect, based on their employment statistics, that I would be able to find a comfortable job to make my loan payments and pay my bills," she said.

Silsbe worked hard and made the staff of the selective Chicago-Kent Law Review, which publishes scholarly articles. But when she graduated she did not have full-time work. She found an internship with a Cook County circuit judge for six months, and the law school paid her a stipend.

Her income was so small last year that Silsbe said she didn't have to make monthly payments on her federal loans. Most federal student loans allows participants to set up payment plans based on what they earn.

She moved to St. Louis in January and began doing trust litigation for a small law office as she kept looking for a full-time job. Now she's doing document review.

Silsbe is one of four recent Kent graduates who sued the law school in February. The law school has not filed a response to the suit and declined to comment.

"It's frustrating that the opportunities that were promised aren't there," Silsbe said. "I really want to have a job where I can use my legal skills to help people."

asachdev@tribune.com

Twitter @ameetsachdev