You could gain admission to Stanford, pay a fortune, graduate with a degree in law, pass the bar exam, pay for a license, and try to find a job.
Or you could just lie.
Robert Sinclair Argyle of West Bountiful, Utah, reportedly favored the latter approach. He managed to get a job at a law firm on the strength of false claims to hold a JD from Stanford and a license to practice in both Utah and California. He was caught and fired soon enough, but right away he landed a job paying a cool $175k plus benefits. There he "worked for a short time and was terminated when a background investigation revealed the defendant lacked verifiable legal education and law experience". Now he and his wife face multiple criminal charges related to these and other incidents.
But suppose that instead you went to now-defunct Valpo, and even graduated, but kept failing the bar exam. Should that be an obstacle to your legal career?
Why, not if you are Kelcie Miller. She lied her way into a job as a lawyer at the public defender's office in Madison County, Illinois; she even produced a forged document to substantiate her bogus license. Only when a court reporter checked the spelling of her name, and a judge tried to look it up in the directory, was she exposed. On Friday she pleaded guilty to a single count of false impersonation of an attorney. Sentence: 30 months' probation, plus restitution of $40,232 (apparently for salary fraudulently obtained). She happens to have a few more charges related to passing bad checks. In the meantime, the real lawyers of the public defender's office have had to review the cases on which Miller had illegally acted.
Miller was lucky to get off so lightly. I'm surprised that she didn't spend time in jail for that.
Suppose, however, that you had never gone beyond community college but really wanted to be a lawyer. You could, of course, go for a bachelor's degree and then a law degree, pay for both, pass the bar exam, and try to find work.
But Kimberly Kitchen had a better plan: lying through her ass. She held herself out as having graduated at the top of the class from Duquesne's law school and then having taught law at Columbia. She passed a number of forged documents to lend color to her false claim to being a lawyer. She practiced law for ten years, even becoming partner of a firm and head of the county's bar association, before being caught. She was convicted of various charges and sentenced to jail.
Kitchen's lawyer called her "incredibly competent" and presented a number of clients who testified to their satisfaction with her services. Plainly Kitchen was not competent, incredibly or otherwise, to practice law. The satisfaction of the clients has nothing to do with that. Indeed, it is astounding that a (presumably) licensed lawyer could call a fraud like her competent, thereby degrading the whole legal profession.
Well, Ms. Incredibly Competent appealed against the sentence on the grounds that she had been "a good fake lawyer" and that no fraud occurred, since no one suffered any damage. How her counsel could seriously present that argument is beyond me. Can anyone suppose that her clients and the firm, never mind the legal profession and even Duquesne, lost nothing? The losses go well beyond the obvious ones, such as fees paid. At one firm where I worked, when I found out that a lawyer who had left almost a year earlier had mishandled two matters in the same way, I called for every one of his files and reviewed them all myself. That took a great deal of time (and, yes, I found other errors of the same sort that I had to correct). What if I had found out that a non-lawyer had had carriage of matters for years? Someone would have had to examine all of those matters. And what if serious errors had come to light? The firm would have been fully liable for any losses. As the court pointed out here, the insurer would not have covered them.
About twenty years ago, there was a spate of exposés of "degrees" from diploma mills. Loads of people in exalted positions turned out to have bought a "degree" in this way. On top of that, many people—including the dean of admissions at MIT, who had the unmitigated gall to lecture the public on the importance of honesty and integrity—turned out to have fabricated degrees outright. Yet scamsters are still getting away with this sort of fraud. As long as the sham of credentialism lasts, Old Guy can only recommend verifying credentials aggressively.
At the heart of all this is the oft-repeated axiom that law school doesn't teach you how to practice law. These folks picked up the mundane, work-a-day stuff on their own.
ReplyDelete^^^This.^^^ Apprenticeships in law would be a great alternative path to licensure, and the financial risk would be significantly less.
DeleteI agree with this too. It is telling that generally speaking, these people don't get caught because someone notices serious deficiencies with their work. What happens is that some clerk can't find their phone number or something, tries to look it up in the bar directory, can't find it, and stuff snowballs from there.
DeleteI don't know why employers don't take the 5 minutes to do primary source verification (i.e. type the name into the bar website before they make a hire) but the fact is that no one notices any actual deficiencies until a real lawyer is reviewing files after the person has already gotten caught. Of course, the reviewer already knows the file they're reviewing contains the work of a fake lawyer, which obviously biases their analysis.
Don't get me wrong. Being a "good fake lawyer" is not and should not be a defense of any sort. No matter how good the work was, there's always the prospect that the client can no longer count on their confidential information being protected by privilege, nor can they count on the person they hired having any professional ethics at all, and malpractice carriers might disclaim if something does go really south. But law school's insistence on disregarding essentially all aspects of law below the federal appellate level, and then charging prices that make it impossible for a lawyer to charge less than like $200/hr just to recoup their investment, does not bode well for the perceived legitimacy of the profession.
If it weren't for separation of powers and the courts' exclusive right to decide who can practice before them, I suspect we would have seen a lot of red state legislatures deregulating this profession a long time ago.
No malpractice carrier would cover a non-lawyer's "legal" work. The firm and the allegedly "good fake lawyer" would have been stuck with any liability, which means in practice that the firm (and, if it failed, the client) would have eaten the entire loss.
DeleteI agree that law schools should teach more than some big appellate cases (usually brought by large corporate or other institutional actors, not representative of the public or of legal practice). But that ranks rather low on my list of complaints about law schools.
12:36 here; I agree that the lack of a practical pedagogy for law schools is a relatively low-priority issue. In fact, it's something of a red herring when the real problem is that there simply aren't enough jobs.
DeleteBut, there isn't an epidemic of fake lawyers either, at least not this extreme kind that commits literal fraud as well as UPL. So when you do post about someone who commits that kind of fraud, it's worth exploring the reason they get away with it for as long as they do. That reason, of course, is because there isn't much in rinky-dink state courts that a reasonably intelligent person can't just pick up as they go. (And again, this fact is not and should not be any kind of defense in an actual prosecution, but it is relevant when talking about law school's value).
Come to think of it, if we really want to talk about a kind of fake lawyer of which there actually is a bit of an epidemic, we shouldn't look at the literal criminals. Look at something like the pseudo profession known as compliance. Compliance with what? Law and regulation. How can anyone do that without advising an employer about what the law is, how it applies to the employer's facts, and making a recommendation about what to do next? That's pretty much the dictionary definition of legal advice.
We're all taught in law school this broad definition of the "practice of law." And indeed, that is the definition on the books pretty much everywhere. But I don't see any prosecutions of corporations for having compliance departments that aren't supervised by lawyers, nor do I see anyone batting an eye at the numerous companies that see themselves as too small to need in-house counsel and who essentially rely on CPAs and such for legal advice because they think a clean audit opinion means they are in compliance with all laws. And don't even get me started on the "contracts specialists" and whatnot.
SO here's my question: What is UPL? Not in theory, but in reality. Is the giving of legal advice the practice of law, or not? Is the drafting of transactional legal documents the practice of law, or not? These newspaper cases are easy. Those people would have been guilty of fraud even if there was no UPL-specific law.
But if the REAL definition of legal practice goes beyond things that involve a nonlawyer who fraudulently claims to be licensed to practice, then state bars need to look at the corporations that create entire departments whose entire job is essentially to practice law without a license. But I see no such efforts. So what good is a broad UPL definition that is effectively unenforced except in the most extreme and obvious cases? If that's not going to change, then state supreme courts need to just get honest about what they can actually enforce, and maybe admit that the only thing being a lawyer REALLY gives you the right to do is the right to (a) market yourself as such; and (b) to appear in court on behalf of another person or entity.
For the Love of......
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2020/01/06/new-england-law-dean-will-leave-with-more-than-million/MdbdYod3kPQ6LEVWwo0RyN/story.html?outputType=amp
Wow!!!
ReplyDeleteOld Guy, there's a surprisingly good article in today's Chronicle of Higher Ed.
ReplyDeleteThe Law School Crash
What’s worse than a decade of financial turmoil? Not learning from it.
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20200103-LawSchoolCrash?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=587553
It's from Benjamin H. Barton is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. This essay is adapted from his new book, Fixing Law Schools: From Collapse to Trump Bump and Beyond (New York University Press).
I think it is behind a paywall. Perhaps you can get it from your library/elsewhere.
Thanks. Feel free to review his book; we may be willing to post a review.
DeleteNothing will ever change until they stop giving student loans to any mouth breather who applies for them. And the student loan scheme wont stop until all the nonsense about the benefit of 'ed-yu-cay-shun' is finally abolished from the culture. it is happening- but very slowly. People are only slowly realizing that most university 'education' is utterly worthless.
ReplyDeleteNotice how everyone that scammed their way to these prestigious positions is white. That is because minorities actually get investigated. This is one of the biggest ways minorities are frozen out, unless you are connected you are extremely unlikely to have the credentials the prestigious jobs demand. And there aren't enough people that actually have those credentials to actually fill all those spots.
ReplyDeleteNotice also how it's better to lie about the prestige of the degree than to get a non-prestigious degree and have a non-prestigious career trajectory.
The greatest scam the elites managed is to convince the commoners that the world is a meritocracy, and to get the commoners to fight and tear each other apart under that fraudulent facade.
The Boomers, especially white male Boomers, did not get any background checks done on them. Stories abound of them lying about their backgrounds and getting great jobs. Way easier when you don't get checked and you don't have to compete with women or minorities. Much harder when only the elites get spots and everyone else gets scammed hard and excluded.
Such is the way of the world. There is nothing to be done about that now except one crucial thing: be honest to your children. Admit the system is rigged and the odds are against them, and instead of siding with the oligarchs and the privileged, side with your children and worry about their well being. If every commoner family did that, the system tumbles down like the house of cards that it is. The elites are few in number and rely on propaganda to convince parents to force their children into slavery. The second the parents outright refuse to allow their children to be exploited by academics, bankers and capitalists, it becomes muuuuuuch harder for said classes to just count their easy money and bully the less fortunate.
That is the only thing I want to see now. I want to see the elites with their ill gotten gains too frightened to show their faces in public, hiding away in armed compounds with paid security, rather than gloating in public and walking around as if they're above everyone.
You're right. A Black person who perpetrated any of the above-mentioned fraud would be investigated. A white person who does the same may well get away with it.
DeleteWhen odious liar Marilee Jones was busted for fabricating three degrees on her way to dean of admissions at MIT, plenty of idiots rushed to her defense: she was so good at her job, they said, and anyway who cares about some ancient degree? Well, if no one cares about the degree, why did she invent three of the things? For that matter, why does MIT operate at all, if it is acceptable to fabricate a degree rather than earning one? The argument that she was good at her job also fails to impress me. Her job was easy, just sorting applications into three categories: admit, reject, put on the waiting list. Plenty of people could have done it at least as well—but only she got the chance, thanks in part to her lies.
As for children, just don't have any at all. It should be a crime to bring children into this fucked-up world.
Ok, there's no question that Boomers had it easier, and the lack of thorough background checks was only part of it. The early baby boomers had it much easier, in that a college degree actually meant something, since relatively few Americans were college educated. As it stands in 2020, the average BA is the equivalent, more or less, to having a HS diploma in the 1950s. Which is why the advice given to kids now to just get that degree is stupid and pointless. Unless the degree is in a demand area, the only jobs available will be retail. And even in 2020, a retail job can be had with a HS diploma.
ReplyDeleteBut it's clear you've got a greater ax to grind against the American system, which is worthy of criticism. And I'm sure that PDs everywhere will be delighted to know that their jobs are "prestigious". But the rest of your post...well
First, no doubt due to a lack of space, OG didn't touch on the "notario" scam perpetrated on immigrants-and virtually all notarios in the US aren't you're country club types. You'd be hard to find any notarios who weren't from the community upon which they are preying.
Second, no question the rich work hard to stay rich, and keep their kids rich. But the rest of you post in which you call for class warfare-well, to paraphrase the Beatles, you can count me out. It's possible to makes change without "armed compounds"; it needs to start with HS guidance counselors actually telling students that maybe that college degree is just a path to debt slavery. That would be a very un-PC thing to do, but that's where it starts.
The baby boomers were the one and only generation that really profited from degrees. Previous generations, as you said, had very few degrees; subsequent generations have abundant degrees but few jobs, thanks in large measure to the boomers' predation and greed. And those subsequent generations, unlike the boomers, have also paid a fucking fortune for those damn degrees.
DeleteUntil the late seventies, or even the early eighties, an able-bodied man in the US could get a well-paying blue-collar job without even a high-school diploma. As those jobs began to vanish, young people were urged to finish school. Just a few years later, they were urged to get not only a high-school diploma but also a bachelor's degree. The universities greatly expanded, and also raised costs right through the roof. But the white-collar jobs for which those degrees were allegedly needed have also dried up, so now people are being told to get a master's degree, a PhD, a law degree…
I didn't even think of discussing the "notario" scam. But since you mentioned it, here goes:
Jurisdictions that use civil law often have a sort of lawyer called a notary, who does not represent clients or appear in court but does handle conveyances of land, draft and record wills, draft contracts, and attend to various other non-contentious matters. The duties of a civil-law notary greatly exceed those of a notary public at common law, which don't go far beyond attesting to signatures and the like. Well, various notaries public in the US advertise themselves in Spanish with the term notario público, which seems to translate the English term but misleads the Spanish-speaking public by suggesting the legal expertise and qualifications of a civil-law notary (notario). A number of bar associations, especially in places with a large Spanish-speaking population, have cracked down on this deceptive practice. Unfortunately, it continues.
I'm not convinced that the rich work hard to stay rich. It's not hard to sit back and let the dividends roll in.
I should have been more precise in my use of "work hard"; by that I meant they'll work hard to keep what they'e got at your expense if necessary, but not that they'll actually do hard work, or any work at all for that matter.
ReplyDeleteI'll compare it to my clients when I was one of those prestigious PDs; my clients were the most competitive people on Earth. That doesn't mean they sought to excel at the rat race-hardly. Instead, it really bothered them if they didn't have everything they wanted, so if you had something they wanted, they'd steal it from you or rob you of it. It was a consumer based competitiveness, nothing more.
So the rich don't want to do hard work-godforbid no! But they will work hard to keep what they've got, at the expense of all others.
Completely and totally off topic, but of interest to student debtors everywhere-especially New York:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/student-loans-discharged-in-bankruptcy-kevin-rosenberg-190151284.html
And everywhere law professors and deans are heaving a sigh of relief and are hopeful this develops into a big bankruptcy bailout for student debtors. To take the heat off law schools.
DeleteCurrent biglaw associate here:
ReplyDeleteI am going to reiterate some of the points I’ve read on this blog and others, in addition to commenting on how those comments relate to the legal market as a whole.
It’s been said here, over and over, that most people in the scamblog movement and in the general population as a whole don’t comprehend the structural changes that have happened to the US economy as a result of globalization and the changes to the US tax code over the last 30 years, and it’s causing people to make poor career and life choices, including attending law school as a general matter, and this is my addition: exacerbating the error by going at the wrong time.
With respect to the general point that’s been made over and over, law school is bad no matter what school you attend and no matter how much it costs you, unless you have access to significant financial resources independent from the practice of law (rich family, rich spouse, lottery, etc).
There is no way to specialize out of the problem and there is no way to maintain a 30 year career unless you can originate significant business whether in shitlaw or in biglaw. Nothing else matters. If you aren’t generating business, you will get hit in a downturn, it will hurt, and at some point you won’t be able to recover. Inhouse can’t save you. Specializing can’t save you. You can mitigate the damage by becoming a government attorney in a secure position, but if you take that route, as has been discussed ad nauseum, you were better off pursuing some kind of government employment that costs less in time and money than becoming a lawyer.
The people that appear to be doing well in law would in almost all cases have done better in something else. You can not compare a trust fund baby in biglaw making 350k to a fast food cook. You compare the biglaw trust fund baby to his or her appropriate analog, namely, to a trust fund baby in finance making 750k a year pulling the same hours. And with respect to such comparisons, and as you go down the chain, you make congruent comparisons to understand why law is a bad move in all circumstances.
Im also not going to reiterate the true statements that you aren’t rich by a mile working a job like that in any city where the salaries appear to the middle of the country to be astronomical. A biglaw associate making 200k in nyc isn’t going to left with 30k in discretionary spending after taxes, loan payments and rent. If people want to understand that, spectacular. If not, it is what it is. I’m also not going to reiterate the point that it’s better to secure stable and protected government employment as early as possible because the economy is going to get worse and the path to wealth is no longer about commanding a high salary (especially in unstable fields), it’s about investing as much as possible and as early as possible so your money grows tax free and compounds over time. Trading time for money was never a path to success, but it’s absolute death in this new economy. They key is invest early and invest young. Again, it’s been said over and over. If people want to understand that, great; if not, law school professors need victims to live a good life.
But onto the more nuanced and important point, which hasn’t been hammered home: it’s not just that the legal market has been terrible for 25 years, but it’s been absolutely devastating for individuals that attend right before a recession, and less bad for people that attend right at the end of a recession.
Continued:
ReplyDeleteThe class that graduated between 2009 and 2011 had the best credentials in comparison to the classes that followed. Those people had the worst outcomes in relation to the classes that followed, which had substantially worse credentials. I see this about to happen again. Law school applications are increasing, better qualified applicants are going, and they are going to be absolutely destroyed.
Kids are seeing 190k starting salaries without a fathoming on what their life is going to be like working in an environment like that, what that salary means when the government is going to literally take half, and rent and loan repayments another quarter. People don’t want to digest this. Fine. Law school professors need your money, and they will piss on your misery when you graduate in the next few years into a fully dystopian economy (it’s coming).
I know these are hollow words, but you never know, maybe there are mature twenty year olds out there that will listen.
It's called Confirmation Bias. They don't acknowledge that half of the salary will be taken by taxes and half of what remains will be taken by student loan payments because they don't want to believe it. In addition, they don't want to recognize that BigLaw often requires living in places with very high costs of living (D.C., N.Y., Chicago etc.) and that rent and basic living expenses will gobble up whatever money they have left after taxes and student loan payments, and, most damning of all, they refuse to acknowledge that the average tenure of first-year associate at a big law firm is 3-5 years (2 year 'careers' are common at Cravath). A few miserable years of working 7 days a week and sleeping at their desk. At most law schools, these amazing jobs are only available to the top ten percent of the class, though it's top 5 percent at low ranked schools.
DeleteAnd that the "career" in law usually ends with that short stint—if any—in Big Law.
Delete@4:22: You're so right. Paul Campos once said that the "ultimate lawyer dream" is "zero net worth." We don't get to dream of retirement, or buying houses or raising kids. For us, the best imaginable dream is just not being in debt up to our eyeballs.
DeleteThat's so true for biglaw. Given those short stints, it seems like the smart money is on living like a pauper for those 5 years while working miserable 80 hour weeks in the highest COL areas of the country, all for the grand reward, the best possible outcome: Not amassing a dime of net worth, but rather just paying off your student loans before they decide you aren't partnership material and give you "the talk," which everyone knows is what will eventually happen for about 90% of each incoming associate class. Getting back to square one. That's pretty much the best you can hope for. That homeless guy you pass on the street? He's not broke, he's even.
Now, consider that a traditional student graduates law school at about 25, and would exit biglaw in their early 30s. So yeah, in this best-possible scenario you have essentially had no life for most of your 20s, what should otherwise be among the best years of your life. You basically sacrifice those years just getting back to zero, and that's if you are very very lucky.
But law schools keep selling the dream and gullible dupes keep buying it. I find this criminal. So glad I went to law school nearly 30 years ago, when the tuition was reasonable and the job market wasn't too bad. Law worked out for me, I do well and am happy with my practice, but it stopped working out for most law students 20 or more years ago.
Delete