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The current issue of the BellSouth Yellow Pages for Baton Rouge contains 76 pages of attorney listings—59 pages more than in 1990.

Unscientific? You bet. Still, it points out what everybody knows: Baton Rouge has too many lawyers, one seemingly on every street corner, with a new batch of graduates every year.

Where does this leave the hundreds of hungry law grads LSU and Southern University pump out each year? It often means looking for work outside Baton Rouge. For those who insist on staying here and don’t want to commute, it may mean no law-related work at all.

Even grads in the top third of their class are finding it a challenge to squeeze into the crowded elevator that is Baton Rouge’s job market for lawyers.

Amy Newsom graduated from the LSU Paul M. Hebert Law Center in May 2006. She was on the moot court team and in the top third of her class. Newsom passed the bar exam in July and hit the pavement. Looking everywhere there was to look, she saw exactly one help-wanted ad in Baton Rouge for a lawyer between August and December.

Somebody else in her class got the job, so Newsom, who had clerked for a couple of different firms during her time in law school, went back to clerking—this time for a small estate-planning firm in Baton Rouge. It was a humbling experience.

“I was very overqualified and very underpaid,” she says. “I was paid hourly.”

She also applied for jobs in New Orleans, which has a lot more openings, even though the Baton Rouge native wasn’t thrilled with the idea of moving there. The New Orleans firms weren’t thrilled with her, either. They were looking for a long-term investment, Newsom guesses—somebody with roots closer to New Orleans and not a lifelong Baton Rougean ready to bolt for home at the first opportunity.

Newsom thinks Baton Rouge, with two law schools, has always been a tough market to break into but one that became more difficult once Katrina drove hoards of lawyers into the city. New Orleans, meanwhile, continues turning out new lawyers from Loyola and Tulane.

But she kept looking. Finally, in late March, Newsom went to work as an associate for Forrester, Jordan & Dick in Baton Rouge. She feels grateful. Newsom likes the firm and knows fellow graduates who’ve fared far worse.

Newsom’s friend Rachel Dendy, for instance, also graduated in May 2006 but still hasn’t found work. Dendy is a native of New Orleans. She loves the city, but worries about being there post-Katrina and finds the prospect of commuting daunting.

Like Newsom, Dendy graduated in the top third of her class and is committed to staying in Baton Rouge. But she hasn’t been able to find the kind of work she wanted in juvenile law, which she complains is underfunded by the state. Instead, she’s becoming involved with her husband’s small business, ATA Black Belt Academy, and doing transactional legal work—like estate planning—on the side.

Dendy says she knew it would be tough finding a job, especially after Katrina dislocated so many lawyers. Still, she was surprised by just how difficult it was and thinks the LSU law school’s marketing department might be partly to blame.

“When I applied to LSU, one of the things they really marketed in all their literature was that 98% of their (law) students find a job within six months,” Dendy says. “I think they exaggerate the truth a bit about how easy it is to find a job.”

Tracy Evans, head of career services for the LSU law school, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Jason Bonaventure graduated from the Southern University Law Center in 1998 and was fortunate to have a clerkship with federal Judge John V. Parker waiting for him. He also clerked for U.S. District Judge Ralph Tyson before eventually getting hired by Forester, Jordan & Dick, the same firm that hired Newsom.

Bonaventure, president of the Baton Rouge Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Section, says the pay scale for federal clerkships is pretty decent. Not so for state court clerkships, where starting pay is around $25,000. Still, it’s a job, and many graduates might not have much of a choice.

“It is an awesome experience; it just doesn’t pay very much,” he says. “But your student loan bills—they don’t go away when you’re taking these public jobs.”

Bonaventure is still paying on $50,000 in loans, about average for recent graduates. Getting on with a large firm is tough because many times those firms want experience, he says. It’s a catch-22 for the eager grad.

There’s always the option of hanging out one’s own shingle and hoping for the best. This doesn’t always pan out, moving the Louisiana Supreme Court a couple of years ago to add rules to state bar membership that require eight hours of professional ethic and law office management. A lot of newly minted lawyers, it turned out, knew tons about the law but zero about how to run a practice.

“There are a lot of green attorneys out there,” Bonaventure says.

Many graduates end up taking work outside the legal profession, and he knows several who’ve gone out of state. Dallas, Houston and Atlanta aggressively recruit top Louisiana law students.

Barbara Baier, a 1989 Southern law graduate and 2007 president of the Baton Rouge Bar Association, says Southern tends to place a higher percentage of graduates out of state than LSU because more of Southern’s law students come from outside Louisiana. Baier is an attorney with Louisiana Department of the Treasury.

Pat Mascari, who chairs Kean Miller’s recruiting committee, thinks the job market has actually improved in that the people her firm courts invariably have offers from multiple firms—not always the case before. To see just how competitive things have gotten, just look at how salaries have gone up at Baton Rouge’s larger firms: 80% over the past decade compared to perhaps 10% or 20% the previous one. Blame it on Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, where big firms pay more.

Those cities hadn’t discovered Baton Rouge in 1964, when Shelby McKenzie graduated from LSU’s law school. McKenzie, a partner with Taylor, Porter, Brooks & Phillips and an adjunct LSU law professor, had two good offers waiting for him when he got out of school, though he’s not surprised to hear it’s harder now—especially for less distinguished graduates.

“There are so many people who graduate from LSU,” he says. “Many have been in Baton Rouge for seven years at that point and Baton Rouge is where they’d like to stay, although there are already a lot of lawyers in Baton Rouge.”

But don’t despair. McKenzie recommends clerkships or positions in state government—both opportunities to prove oneself, meet other lawyers and maybe even land a private gig.

“I think legal training is a good background for other professions,” he says. “If they’re having difficulty finding a position in a private practice, there are other things they can use their legal degrees for.”