After entering law school with designs on graduating to a job with a six-figure salary, Geri Hartley found the job market a bit more daunting.

As law school graduates are entering the workforce with mounting debt loads, they are finding a legal marketplace increasingly unfriendly to inexperienced workers.

Hartley has $90,000 in debt from her combined degrees. She is happy in her job as a lawyer in a small firm in Paola, but that wasn’t her original plan.

She had designs on graduating with her J.D. and M.B.A. combination and becoming a general counsel for a large corporation. Instead, she was unemployed for awhile, and briefly took a position at H&R Block that didn’t require her to have passed the bar exam.

When she enrolled at KU, she recalled that the two graduates who had her degree combination left for jobs at salaries of $170,000 and $240,000. Her current job pays much less than that, she said.

“It may not be financially rewarding, but there are other things,” she said.

Hartley has more time to spend with her children, she said, and it’s a lot less stressful. She can at least contribute some to paying down her debt. And who knows what the future may hold, she said.

Many of her classmates are having a difficult time. Almost none has stayed on their original plans when they went to law school. One is working behind the cosmetics’ counter at Macy’s, she said. Another creates websites for a living.

Bill Modrcin is a 1978 KU law graduate now working as an attorney in Overland Park. He’s worked for several large Kansas City-area firms, and he’s seen the drop-off in recent years.

On the whole, the industry is doing just fine, he said. Established lawyers in large firms are doing well. But entry-level positions are extremely hard to come by, he said.

In the past, good first-year students could find summer clerkships relatively easily, and most graduates could count on finding a high-paying job.

“It’s no longer the golden ticket it used to be,” Modrcin said.

These issues were brought to the forefront in an article last month in the New York Times. It told how many law schools massaged employment statistics and still painted a rosy employment picture.

Todd Rogers, assistant dean for career services at KU, read and responded to the article on KU law school’s blog. KU has seen employment figures shrink, but it’s reported the dips as they’ve been discovered.

KU figures showed that more than 4 percent fewer graduates were employed nine months after graduation in 2009 than the year before, Rogers said, but the university wasn’t afraid to submit the figures to U.S. News & World Report. The stats play heavily in the magazine’s closely-watched university rankings.

Rogers encouraged prospective students to press for more detailed employment statistics when shopping for law schools, and not to stop at the rankings.

For example, one metric measures how many graduates are working in posts that require admission to the bar nine months after graduation. That weeds out, say, grads working as waiters at Applebee’s.

“If you’re going to law school to be a lawyer, that’s the information you need,” Rogers said.

And, as could be expected, recent years have seen those stats slide downward at KU. After years of percentages in the high 60s and low 70s, in 2009, KU fell more than 12 percentage points to 62.2 percent.

That’s in comparison to its much higher figure of 89 percent of its graduates who were working at all. The U.S. News & World Report rankings ask for those figures, so that’s what the school provides, Rogers said.

Both Rogers and Hartley said it was important for people looking to go to law school to become good consumers, and know what to ask for when applying.

It’s important to remember that law schools operate like many other private enterprises, Hartley said. “They’re an educational institution,” she said, “but in the end, they’re still businesses.”

KU will release a new set of employment statistics later this month, Rogers said, and it will be interesting to get a fresh set of facts to share with prospective and current students.

“We want to try to be as transparent as possible,” he said.