Provost Larry Cunningham cited "two key benefits to the change: it will bolster the school’s academic
reputation, separating it from those institutions accused of being
'diploma mills,' and it will make fundraising easier as potential donors
will be attracted to the tax advantages of giving to a nonprofit
school." Charlatan Charleston will, however, be a diploma mill whether it is nominally non-profit or not. It's so odious that even InfiLaw tried to acquire it. As for raising funds, I suppose that someone somewhere will be ass enough to donate to this flagging über-toilet and may be more inclined to do so if money can be saved on taxes. Still, it's a hopeless scam-school with no future.
In addition, the ABA has given provisional accreditation to the upstart über-toilet at Jacksonville University. Scarcely a year and a half old, this bullshit institution started life with a handful of students and still expects only 40 in the next entering class. It's a ridiculous and ill-fated attempt to establish a law school in Jacksonville where Florida Coastal failed after years with more than a thousand students. Of course, the ABA hands out provisional, and even full, accreditation like breath mints, so its scam-enabling conduct comes as no surprise.
This has gotten completely out of control. When I, a lawyer, explain to people that there are 10 ABA-accredited law schools in the state of Pennsylvania, they are absolutely shocked. I mean, lawyer like to think they're smart people, but they do some aggressively stupid things, like flooding their own job market to an insane degree. I don't pay dues to the ABA--I'm not going to waste a penny on them--but I do think that what is happening is profoundly unfair to established lawyers who either have trouble finding work, or can't charge what they are worth, because so many desperate new JD's are flooding into the job market every single year. Where I practice I'm pretty sure that the Court Interpreters are paid more than Panel Attorneys for the Public Defender's Office. Think about that--some guy with a GED who's sole ability in life is that he speaks Spanish and English makes more money than a person with a 4Y college degree, a 3Y law degree, who passed a two-day Bar Exam. I am glad that practicing law worked out for me--with some bumps along the road, and some periods of unemployment and underemployment--but today it seems to draw people who are profoundly gullible, unrealistic, and unintelligent, almost by default. If you're dumb enough to get a law degree in a state with 10 law schools--or 8 (Virginia) or 6 (tiny DC, which already has far too many lawyers) if you're that stupid, how can you possibly be smart enough to draft a Memorandum of Law in Support of a Motion to Suppress Physical Evidence, and analyze the Fourth Amendment, the statutory law, the case law interpreting, analyzing, and applying the statutory law, the Common Law underlying both the governing statutes and the applicable Case Law, and put some Public Policy arguments in there as well, exploring the development of modern technology, like the use of drug-sniffing K9 dogs, as it relates to the reasonableness of a search and seizure of a person's home, vehicle, or perhaps a pat-down of their body? Frankly, would a gullible victim of the Law School Scam even know when, and when not to, move to Suppress Physical Evidence, and be familiar with the Exclusionary Rule, the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, etc.? People are probably literally going to jail due to the problems associated with modern law schools accepting anyone with a pulse and the ability to sign some student-loan documents.
ReplyDeletePennsylvania is one of the largest states by population, but indeed there is no need for ten ABA-accredited law schools there. Two might be one too many.
DeleteInterpreters are seldom professional; a lot are just "bilingual" workers in ethnic restaurants who are brought in for the nonce. Bench and bar, being largely unilingual, don't appreciate what is needed for professional interpretation. In court a few weeks ago, an interpreter kept getting things wrong, and sometimes Old Guy had to feed words and even entire sentences to her.
Years ago, I posted here a report showing that switchboard operators and janitors were paid more than lawyers in the courts of Massachusetts.
The scam has been recognized in popular culture for decades but it appears the lemmings are unable or unwilling to catch on. There was a hit comedy called "Cheers" in the 80s; in one episode the star-a bartender named Sam-had to go to court. So he enlisted one of his barflies, who happened to be an attorney. The case ends, Sam looks at his "attorney" and says to him "thanks...and by the way my hedges need to be trimmed; see you Saturday?"
DeleteInteresting article here published on January 2nd of this year is about how For-profit colleges would convert to non-profit status just to keep their scams going but most of them failed even after the conversion.
ReplyDeleteCharlotte Lemmings will see the non-profit status and think like the Salvation Army that it means they are looking after the students interest.
https://www.republicreport.org/2024/predatory-colleges-converted-to-non-profit-are-failing/
Correction....I meant to say Charleston School of Law. Freudian slip since Infilaw's for-profit toilet Charlotte already was shuttered.
DeleteAll of this business of changing the formal status of the institution is akin to shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. There simply isn't a need for ten ABA-accredited law schools in Pennsylvania, god knows how many in Florida, or almost 200 in the US. Charlatan Charleston will face substantially the same problems if it gets "non-profit" status. It is an unwanted and unneeded predator feeding on people who have no business attending law school.
DeleteWow. They've definitely succeeded where others (e.g. the infilaw schools) have failed. Guess the ABA must have been convinced that the "owners-turned-donors" were actually donating enough to make the thing sustainable, as opposed to Infilaw which tried to strip out every liquid dime possible prior to the donation and caused the regulators to deny them for being potentially insolvent without a parent guarantee. We'll see if the Dept of ed acquiesces too, I guess.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it is just rearranging Titanic deck chairs, but the fact of the matter is that whether we agree that there's a big difference or not, the regulators think there is and they tend to target the for-profit schools for more enforcement as well as requiring them to receive less of their overall revenue from federal student loans (look up the "90-10 rule" on wikipedia). So a move to nonprofit is an attempt to get back below the radar so that the loan dollars keep flowing.
If you can pull it off, it is an effective maneuver. Whether it should work so well is another story, but the fact is, it does.
There aren't really any "for-profit" schools left. "Non-profit" status is of significance to accountants but not to the public, because the money ripped off by "non-profit" entities simply ends up in private pockets by different means.
DeleteAs for the ABA, anyone who takes it seriously as a regulatory body has not been paying attention during the 11-year history of OTLSS.
Old Guy - What do you think of the more prestigious accrediting body the AALS? And how about the uber prestigious Order of the Coif?
DeleteThis is true. I think there's only 1 for-profit ABA law school left, though there are more for-profits remaining at the undergrad level and such.
DeleteI'm not saying there's much real difference, basically the nonprofit school just inures to the benefit of its employees and administration or university parent instead of the passive stockholders at a for-profit.
What I am saying, though, is that the for-profits were basically sacrificial lambs. Killing them off is what enabled the rest of the cartel to keep on scamming. This is much like when a drug cartel deliberately tips the authorities off to some of its own mules in order to get others through unhindered or to make it so that the third-world cops still do some busts to "keep up appearances" so that the bribes they are taking aren't quite so obvious.
So, I wonder what the ABA is gonna do to keep up appearances now that this perceived low-hanging fruit has pretty much all been picked. Open question I guess.
Hasn't the ABA's track record been so bad that way back when during the Obama administration the DOE threatened to remove the ABA's authority to accredit law schools?
DeleteI'll give others the first chance to comment on the AALS and the Order of the Coif.
DeleteThe ABA, 11:10, may not have gone after the for-profit toilets as such; it may just be that it needed to appear to take strong measures against a couple of law schools, and the easiest targets just happened to be for-profit institutions. These did, of course, congregate in the shittiest area of über-toiletry.
DeleteI don't agree that the ABA took strong measures. Charlotte just bolted the door without a word; the ABA really didn't do anything against it.
Which will be the next sacrificial lamb? Maybe Cooley, now that it has nearly dried up and blown away. Maybe some such thing as Appalachian or Ohio Northern, both of which have one foot in the grave anyway (as did some for-profit über-toilets by the time the ABA pretended to take action). Golden Gate was probably next in line when it announced its own closure.
Yeah, OG. It is debatable whether the for-profit status is a cause or a symptom. In other words, it could be that the ABA/DOE targeted for-profits, or it could be that the for-profits really did have the strongest incentive to admit the most unqualified students in pursuit of those profits and thus ended up as the "worst of the worst" like even worse than the Cooley's of the world if that is somehow possible.
DeleteIt's an interesting question: Take, say, Cooley vs. Florida Coastal before the latter closed. Could it be possible that as horrendously bad as Cooley is, that FCL was EVEN WORSE? Eventually they get so bad its hard to say how its even possible to be worse, which makes me suspect deliberate targeting of the for-profits.
In addition, there's a third dimension to the equation which is financial viability. At the end of the day, FCL got shut down because Infilaw wasn't willing to guarantee its obligations anymore, and so it was felt that without that guarantee the place was potentially insolvent. Because for-profit owners "sweep" any "excess cash" from the institution to pay dividends, and because those owners don't like signing things that put them at risk of having those dividends "clawed back," the for-profits are particularly at risk there too.
But as to the the next sacrificial lamb, you're probably right. What they'll do is find the kinds of places that would've gone belly-up on their own eventually and just sorta hurry that along a little bit.
OG - Do you really think Cooley will ultimately fail? It is such a toilet institution, a toilet among toilets par excellence. And from what I have heard a lot of good things happen there.
DeleteCooley, the last time I checked, was down to two campuses. Not all that many years ago, it was opening a branch in Kalamazoo. It's failing. Will it collapse in the next ten minutes? No, but remember that the InfiLaw über-toilets too had more than a thousand students each just a few years before they folded.
DeleteIt could be a while before Cooley collapses; they were awash in cash for years, with their massive enrollments and their equally massive tuition. They should be sitting on a pile of money. But even with that, it's most likely it will go back to its roots...in other words, one campus.
DeleteAnd 11:05, please enlighten us about all the "good things happening there." My guess it won't take long.
@ 4:40 pm. Nothing good happens at Cooley because I am a graduate from there and completely regret my decision to go there. I graduated in the late 90's and since back then there was no scam bloggers to find out about the law school scam I essentially went there blind. To me all it was is simply a 3 year bar preparation course. A expensive one. I did pass the bar exam the first attempt but being a first generation in my family with no legal connections I never worked a day in a law office. It's a "Good 'Ole Boys Club" and if you don't know anyone in the aristocracy you have zero chance of getting your foot in the door. I actually ended up right back at my old job prior to law school and the opportunity cost besides tuition set me back
DeleteSorry that that went so badly for you. I'm not surprised, though. Cooley is indeed an exploitative shithole. It really cannot be anything but a glorified bar-preparation course with the sort of material that makes up the great bulk of its student body. With 25%+ of the class scoring no higher than the low 140s on the LSAT, it can only try to spoonfeed enough rudimentary law to people to see them through a bar exam somewhere. And of course it fails even at that.
DeleteYes, 6:05, the DOE some years ago did indeed threaten to strip the ABA of its accrediting function. Unfortunately, it relented.
ReplyDeleteThe irony is that back in the 90s the ABA has actually been pursued by the DOJ in the opposite direction, i.e. the contention that accreditation standards were too strict and that this amounted to an antitrust violation as it would operate to protect the established law schools from competition. That suit settled almost immediately with the ABA agreeing to make accreditation EASIER to get!
DeleteSo the whole accreditation thing is kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's why I say screw accreditation. Instead, make explicit price controls. Basically if you are going to agree to take federal loans then you have to agree to take what the feds are willing to pay, and if you can't make that work then close. We already do that with Medicare and Medicaid so I don't see why student loans should be any different. If a third party is paying for something then it should have authority to decide what it is willing to pay. I also think we need to restore bankruptcy protection to private student loans (and prohibit cosigner requirements) to prevent private lenders from just jumping up to fill in the gap left by gradPLUS reform and destroying both the student and cosigning parents' lives in the process.
Accreditation can be criticized, but it's quite open to criticism when the accrediting body has no particular qualifications. How the hell did the ABA, just a private entity that purports to represent lawyers, come to be the US's sole authority on the accreditation of law schools? Not because of any proven ability, still less for the independence that would be essential to that role.
DeleteThis recruiter actually provides a lot of reasons not to go law school:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIkJHG-qxDE
In this article, you will learn the unwritten rules you need to follow to survive and thrive in a big law firm at time when the option of leaving practicing law is considered by more and more attorneys.
Here are some interesting observations:
• The majority of attorneys who join large law firms out of law school may never make as much money (adjusted for inflation) ever again. That's right. Even in smaller firms. In New York and Los Angeles, a young associate can make $200,000+ a year. The average attorney with 15 years of experience does not even make that much. Many in-house and government jobs pay senior attorneys less than $100,000 a year.
• Most attorneys who join large law firms out of law school never work at firms as prestigious ever again. Attorneys generally move a few times (to large law firms) before finally stepping out of a large law firm into something smaller or different. Once they do this, the odds are greater than 95% that they will never work in a large law firm ever again.
• Only half of the attorneys who join large law firms out of law school are likely to be practicing law in 10 years, while over 85% of the attorneys who join small law firms are likely to still be practicing in 10 years. I have no idea why this is. Maybe the attorneys who were in large firms became burned out and demoralized. What I do know is that most attorneys I see who join large law firms end up leaving the practice of law.
• The majority of attorneys who join large law firms out of law school will never work on matters as large or for clients as important again. Most attorneys will never have the experience of working on as important matters ever again as they had in the large law firm. For the most part, the rest of their careers (if they stay practicing law) will be dedicated to servicing smaller clients.
The fact that the future for most large law firm attorneys holds (1) less money, (2) less prestige, (3) less important work, and (4) the strong possibility they may even stop practicing law says something. Big firm life is not for everyone; however, I sincerely believe that many people who should be in large law firms are not because they do not understand how to keep those jobs.
Scamsters will say they left law to pursue greener pastures like banking, consulting, and corporate management. “Law open lots of doors outside the profession.” The reality is they were shitcanned and burned out.
DeleteI think 4Y is the average tenure of an associate in a large law firm. I have been told that the odds of a first-year associate becoming a true "equity partner' are in the realm of 5%, or less. As for money, as I have said before, and EXPERIENCED criminal defense attorney can do about an hour's worth of work on a DUI case, ending with a 10 minute plea the courtroom, for a fee of $1,200 and up. Associates at large law firms may earn as little as $50 per hour, pre-tax, without overtime if they are, for example, working 70 hours a week for $190,000 per year. So, to me, in fact, big law does not equal big money, unless you are an equity partner. Please understand that this post is not meant to generate controversy, like the last time I talked about flat-fee billing for serious traffic cases. I am saying that an attorney with, say, at least 5Y of experience, in a busy jurisdiction, could get some of these cases, sometimes. There is a LOT of competition for DUI cases in particular. I am not saying, nor do I mean to imply, that this is easy money or anything like that. I am just trying to point out that there are ways to make a lot of money in little time practicing law that have nothing to do with Civil Litigation in large law firms. The job of a Criminal Defense Attorney is not easy, and there are definite drawbacks, like potentially being threatened or worse by your own clients, who may be violent, drug-addled, criminals. In closing, to me that real problem is, and has been for the last 20Y or so, that there are far too many lawyers, and far too few jobs/paying clients in the US right now. I hope we can all agree on that, at least.
DeleteThere's a reason biglaw hires in what they themselves call "classes" of associates. Classes graduate.
DeleteMost people aren't trying to make partner. They're there to pay off their loans and get a golden stamp on their resume that will get them a prestigious in-house or gov't job which, though it will pay less, will allow them to have a family life.
I've always known that to be pretty much the deal going in. Except for a few masochists who really are gunning for partner (a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie) everyone I know who's gone that way goes in with neither the expectation nor desire to spend their entire career there or at similar firms. They're there for the "exit opportunities" and you can't leave too early or too late. There's a sweet spot around 4-5 years in when the recruiters are interested, and that's what most of them seem to plan around.
At least in my state, 10:16a is right. Our AG's office became a haven for Biglaw refugees. They'd put in 4-6 years, pay off their loans, and then jump over to a lower-paying but much less stressful job at the AG's office. They'd often compare pedigrees; as in "I spent four years at X" vs. "Oh, well I was five years at Y". It was all pretty strange for a non Biglaw type like myself to hear them compare backgrounds...as if bailing before making partner was a mark of achievement.
Delete“Prestigious” in house is a poor outcome for anyone who went to a good undergrad or had an adult job (not waiting tables) before law school. Repetitive, rote responsibilities. Disrespected by profit making centers of your employer since you’re back office. You’ll be professionally dead in the water until you hit 65 and nurses start wiping your butt for you shortly thereafter.
DeleteRespectfully, what you are saying was absolutely true 25 years ago. It was common for associates in BigLaw to put in a few years, and then smoothly transition to another good job. That is no longer the case, and has not been the case for many years. Those "prestigious in-house or gov't jobs" you speak of are very hard to get. Some associates become "staff attorneys" after they get a poor Performance Review and are pushed out of a large law firm. Staff attorneys are NOT associates, are NOT on the partnership track, and may end up, in fact, reporting to first-year associates. They are paid much less, do "scut work" like Document Review, and typically do not get an annual bonus. That is not an ideal outcome for someone working in a large law firm, of course, but it is a common outcome. Law students typically do not even know what a "staff attorney" is, have no idea that they will only be permitted to keep their job in big law for 4-6Y, depending, or understand that far less than 10 percent of the new associates will ever make Equity Partner. Sadly, they don't even know that they will end up earning only 50-60 per hour, pre-tax, with no overtime pay. . .a rate so low that the Public Defender's Office pays it to "panel attorneys", and successful Criminal Defense attorneys typically won't get involved in cases for that little money. I have tried to explain it to people, but when they say "I'm not good at math" I have to walk away shaking my head. Some people are just beyond help.
DeleteRespectfully, you're flat wrong. First of all, these Biglaw refugees were associates, not staff attorneys, so no idea why you even brought that up. And nobody said the jobs were easy to get. But then, you're the person who previously said that a ADA would get into trouble for not taking a DC's call about being late. That is complete nonsense; you've clearly missed the tough on crime trend in DA elections, where the DA's office and the defense bar are barely on speaking terms. So yes, some people are just beyond help, as you post regularly about a world of criminal litigation about which yu apparently know nothing...except perhapd watching L&O on tv.
DeleteLet's kindly elevate the tone of the messages here. There's no call for rude personal comments. I'd prefer not to have to censor postings.
DeleteAnother State Does Away w/Mandatory Bar Exam for Attorneys:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXCvpQyiRtw
He said he was a law professor for 10 years and had some students who wouldn't be good attorneys. I wonder if he advised these students about this?
DeleteYeah, any moral authority for a cull in would be Lawyers go out the window the minute the student loan check is disbursed to the law school. The fact so many law school graduates fail the bar is an insult to the schools but tje wonderful people who make up this profession don't care. The Wisconsin model with reasonable standards for admission is so much better.
DeleteThis could be fantastic if the apprenticeships were actually good, as in, real apprenticeships accredited in some way at firms with real organized training programs, like the way doc residencies work. But if it's just "get a certain number of hours working under anyone you can find" then it's a dumpster fire.
DeleteI also wonder whether, by making this route optional, it self-defeats the idea of making brand new lawyers actually know what they're doing. I mean, it seems to me that for most people, it'll still be easier (and a whole lot faster) to just take the bar as opposed to apprenticing somewhere for however many years. So the only people who go the apprenticeship route are the ones who are pretty sure they would fail the test, which creates a problem known in the insurance industry as "adverse selection."
Britain, Canada, Australia, and some other countries require an apprenticeship for admission to the bar: a graduate of law school must complete "articles" for a year or so. Indeed, 10:56, these are not systematically managed for quality; they can amount to putting one's time in, without doing much or learning anything. People who know about them have described them to me as a farce.
DeleteOf course, there must be people who do get good experience and learn much as articling students. But that is far from being true of everyone.
Yeah you could well be right. I always thought the articling stuff was only at specifically designated firms (usually big ones).
DeleteTake the UK for example. I'd heard that tons of LLBs seeking to become solicitors (not barristers which I know even less about) don't get "training contracts" for essentially the same reason that most US JDs don't get biglaw. But the difference over there, I thought, was that not getting biglaw effectively means not getting licensed, because only the big firms had the resources to become approved training programs.
It wasn't as big a deal though, cuz you would get the LLB right out of high school so you wouldn't be as pigeonholed, plus it's so much cheaper there so you're not in nearly the debt. So, as I understood it, most LLBs never actually practice, as they get weeded out if they don't get the right job right away.
But admittedly, I don't know much about how it all works over there, so I could be wrong.
You're right: articles are required for admission to the bar. If for whatever reason you can't find articles, you are shit out of luck: you will not become a lawyer.
DeleteAbout ten years ago, something like one graduate in seven in the Canadian province of Ontario could not find articles. The bar there set up a consolation prize in the form of some sort of school that people could attend after law school in lieu of completing articles. It was good enough for admission to the bar, but I rather suspect that it was perceived as a stigma.
Geez, so law school is a scam across the globe in the English-speaking world.
DeleteWell 6 in 7 getting it is better odds than I'd heard!
DeleteAnyway, I see no need for the pearl clutching some places seem to be doing about the issue. It's part of the beauty of apprenticeship. Part of why medieval guilds worked was precisely because it helped ensure that new apprentices were produced only in sufficient quantities to replace those leaving and were as good as the people they replaced, thus ensuring BOTH a high quality service for the customer AND a livable wage for the craftsman.
Places that have those systems shouldn't be trying to find articles for the people who can't get them, or a substitute for articles for them. They should see it as part of what the whole thing was designed to do.
HOWEVER, Canada following the US' lead and switching from LLB to JD was bad. The kids who cant get articles should not be pigeonholed or in big debt. They should be seen as like anyone else who doesn't get a job in their literal undergrad major (i.e. most people), and the way to do that is to go back to LLB.
The US used to have the LLB; Yale was the last holdout, going over to the JD in the early 1970s. Canada finally gave in and followed the US's lead, mainly because the degree in practice was much more like the US's—ordinarily a postgraduate degree—than the UK's.
DeleteA hundred years ago, or just a bit more, not many lawyers in the US had any sort of degree. Eventually, in a bid for "professionalism", the goalposts were shifted to require formal training in law, although in Vermont and a few other states it is still possible to "read law" with a lawyer if one can find one who is prepared to act as teacher for four years or so. Now we see what has become of this "professional" education: anyone who can fog a mirror can get into multiple law schools, perhaps even with a "scholarship"…
I recently retired from my own firm. I could no longer tolerate the law. I can't say it was always bad. When I started out in 1984, I actually liked practicing law. Started out as a defense lawyer for a mid-sized maritime firm and eventually drifted to my own firm doing mainly maritime personal injury under the Jones Act, which was pretty lucrative. The Judges, especially in Federal Court, were for the most part competent, opposition lawyers competent and at least fairly honest and not so quick to play the bullsh^t games. You could have a really nice practice with just a quarter page ad in the Yellow pages.
ReplyDeleteTimes have changed. Much more bullsh^t. the judges on the Federal Bench more conservative and willing to ignore individual rights, the State Judges more incompetent and the lack of civility is through the roof. The pettiness of the practice of law and the abuse of the discovery process got to be too much. The failure of the current crop of State Judges to even make an effort to understand maritime law, let alone the basics, got to be too much. Competing with massively sized non-stop advertising firms who inundate the air with television, radio and internet ads too much, and fighting for Google space just not worth it. I know other lawyers who continue practicing despite their ages. I don't get it. Not me. Getting out of that hell hole is bliss. Living off of my investments until I reach 70 and collect the maximum amount in Social Security. Meanwhile, Medicare and supplemental insurance has significantly reduced the cost of health insurance and health care making costs very manageable. I have a good friend who is an appellate attorney who spoke of another lawyer he knew who died in the hospital while he had his case binders around him...working until the end. He seemed to think that was something to respect the guy for. I felt very sad for that lawyer. We are all slaves to a system that makes everything harder and harder on lawyers as the years go by. Is it worth it? For you young guys, I would suggest its not, but to each their own. This is a game where prestige is all important, and if you play that game, you will never be happy. You will never be satisfied. You may be making 500K a year but you will be looking at your lawyer friend making a million a year and think to yourself why can't I do that. And if you are like many lawyers I know, you will be chasing accolades and awards from your fellow lawyers as if in the end that all makes a bit of difference to anything. Good luck folks.
Maritime law is so different from garden-variety civil stuff that one can't just wander into it: real preparation is required.
DeleteI too have become quite jaded about the practice of law.
I think CS Lewis' essay on the "inner ring" is really applicable for the legal field. Although something has changed since the 1950s. Lawyer used to be a respected and honored profession. Now it's a scam full of bad people.
DeleteNot so sure it's been respected or honored for a long time. If you get a chance, watch the 1946 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The portrayal of the lawyer is wonderful to watch but less than flattering.
DeleteThe Top 10 Ways Working as an Attorney in a Law Firm Ages and Kills You Prematurely:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ORGpoPH3c
Why Attorneys and Law Students Almost Never Find Quality of Life and Lifestyle Firms:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udcdMMlpPj8
That guy is talking about the biglaw refugee "boutiques" that try to recruit based on work-life-balance and find it a difficult promise to keep. But the real "lifestyle firm" is a solo practice in a small town that does divorces and minor criminal defense and stuff like that.
DeleteTaking normal holidays, there's about 250 working days in a year. Even at $200/hr, you only need to actually collect around 2 hours per working day to gross 100k. Since the average divorce retainer around here is about 5k, that means pulling in around 20 clients (or retainer re-ups) per year, and then you need a couple hours per day on average to successfully bill it out of the trust account.
With overhead as low as a couple hundred a month for office space and a shared receptionist with no employees, and no real IT needs beyond a normal consumer-grade laptop and office software, I see a lot of solos around here working pretty relaxed schedules.
I call it the rule of 2x2. Two new client retainers per month and two billed hours per day should get you to 100k. I see a lot of solos around here hit targets like that and then knock off for the day, or they hit it early and knock off for the week. They seem to have a lot of flexibility in their schedules, provided they're OK with very unsophisticated work and a very middle to lower-middle class standard of living.
So the guy isn't wrong that big city lifestyle firms are a bit of a fiction. But small town solos are living that life all the time. I just think the guys places like BCG would work with could never imagine living on 80-100k like most of America actually does.
I agree with him that the so-called boutiques for biglaw refugees are rarely if ever able to provide the lifestyle they promise long-term. But I see plenty of solos who have good work/life balance if they're OK with living in small towns doing small town work.
DeleteThere are a lot of drawbacks to law, but one of its few advantages is that it can be a very low-overhead business. In my town you can rent a one-room office with all utilities and a shared receptionist included for like $400-500 a month, and the going retainer on (for example) a divorce is about 5k. So they really only need like 1-2 new clients (or retainer re-ups) per month. And then like 2 billed hours per working day times 250 working days in a year should be enough to get them into the low six figures.
Except that nobody ever just pays a family law retainer. They bitch and moan about every little cost, constantly try to get things for free, and if you send them a bill for $200, they'll make a formal complaint about you. There is no money in small law (or in fact in any law except where the money is coming from a third party insurer etc).
DeleteSomeone keep posting links to this recruiter guy as if he is important. He makes me nauseous. His whole premise is based on all lawyers starting out in 'big law' and then either being forced out or looking to get out. Only a small number of overall law grads ever work in 'big law'.
DeleteI really wish people would stop pretending that "there is no money in small law". Factually there are, and always have been, lots of successful solo practitioners, and lots of small and mid-sized law firms practicing family law, criminal defense, Personal Injury law, and a variety of other practice areas with a degree of success. That does not mean that it's a good idea to go to law school or that it's easy to succeed. At the risk of repeating myself, some people will thrive in an awful market, and simply are talented and hard working enough to attract paying clients even in challenging times, manage their expenses, and turn an good profit. Similarly speaking, some people will fail in a booming market, due to their own laziness, greed, dishonesty, incompetence, etc. Pretending that successful lawyers don't exist, outside of Big Law is not helpful. It is absolutely true to say that "most solo practitioners fail" and it is absolutely false to say that "all solo practitioners fail". Ditto for small and mid-sized law firms.
DeleteCertainly there are people who succeed at small law, although the "success" may be strictly monetary. As you said, however, the public gets the wrong idea about lawyers. The fact that some people succeed at small law does not imply that any ass-eyed moron out of Cooley should open a one-person office.
Delete25 Reasons Attorneys Go Crazy (And What To Do About It):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXakBR6z1Zo
The guy is right on about the isolation of big firms. I haven't worked at one, but I do hire them because I'm in-house and every time I go over there for client meeting or whatever, its rows and rows of closed doors with everyone just sitting at computers billing like crazy behind them. Dead silence. You can hear a pin drop. Just exactly like he says: Huge fancy skyscraper, beautiful office, but you'd hardly even know anyone was in there if you didn't open one of those doors.
DeleteSeems to be little to no socializing; they only interact with others if its a billable meeting or if it cannot otherwise be avoided. That cannot be good for mental health or for feeling like any kind of team.
This one is kind of depressing.
ReplyDeleteWhy Attorneys Must Always Have Access to Lots of Work and Be Busy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODHZfv6RwvM
Notable quote: "The legal profession is SAVAGE" @9 min.
Cooley circles the Drain:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/with-a-tarnished-reputation-and-declining-enrollment-cooley-law-school-hopes-for-a-comeback/ar-AA1nzH3G
Almost unbelievable-they're still paying LeDuc half a million a year? And as noted on this blog-schools can be out of compliance repeatedly and for years with no actual repercussions. When was the last time the ABA actually closed a school?
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