Law firms pay new hires to work for public good

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If things had gone according to plan, Lindsay Murphy would be a big-city tax lawyer by now. Instead, the recent law school graduate found herself doing legal aid, listening to complaints about raw sewage bubbling up into the bathtubs of a Mississippi Delta housing project.

Murphy is among hundreds of newly minted lawyers who've been forced by the recession to take a detour on their way to the nation's top firms, spending up to a year helping out nonprofits for as little as a third of the salary they'd expected.

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The Associated Press: Law firms pay new hires to work for public good



Lindsay Murphy, an attorney working with the University of Mississippi's Civil Legal Clinic in Oxford, Miss., is photographed Oct. 16, 2009. Murphy helps poor clients with housing and tax problems as part of a deferred hiring plan established with a Dallas, Tex., law firm. She hopes to join the firm next summer. In early October she traveled to another part of the state to learn about a housing complex's sewer and water problems to help determine whether the clinic can help its residents. (AP Photo/Ryan Moore)