JD-Disadvantage, Part III

Here we go again with the tired, worn-out "a JD is versatile" argument.  But economic pressure being what it is, the concept has its desperate defenders and, by extension, its earnest detractors whose mantle I proudly assume.  Without further ado:

 

In April of this year, Kaplan Test Prep did a survey of 200 pre-law students. Fifty percent of those students stated that they do not intend to use their future law degree in a traditional legal field. If this statistic extrapolates out to the larger law student population, we have a generation of law students of which only half will ever be practicing lawyers. So if half of law students do not intend on ever practicing law in a traditional way at a traditional firm—what is their intention?

 

News flash:  correlation is not causation.  The fact is that now, with access to actual law school employment-data-sans-spin, we see that 50% (at best) of law grads are going to "law firms."  That is the reality of the legal market, not the a priori effect of the pipe dreams of the lemmings contemplating law school.  (See, I went to law school, ergo I use terms like a priori.  And ergo.)  If only grads could actually manipulate the state of the market with the sheer force of their efforts and desires - there would be no scamblogs, I can guarantee you that.  And, with all due respect, what do 0Ls know about the legal market, anyway, except for those with inside information?

 

Interest in these jobs skyrocketed as the market fell, with more and more students seeking the J.D.-preferred positions when there were many less traditional positions available. In fact, in 2011, one in every seven jobs taken by new law graduates fell into the J.D. advantage category. (NALP Bulletin, May 2013).

 

As I have discussed before, 15% of your graduate pool going into a catch-all category does not scream resounding success or market demand for said catch-all category.  "Interest" increased due to the lack of jobs, folks.  Maybe I just have a funny way of looking at numbers, but if  "JD-Advantage" jobs were actually on par with "law firm" jobs then that might be interesting, as graduates would then be trading off costs and benefits between different career paths.  As it stands, at 50%, the preference is still lies heavily with "law firms," with government jobs and academic jobs coming in around 20% as well.  Some 75% of graduates are opting not to go the "JD Advantage" path, I wonder why... 

 

In my opinion, the category and even the term "J.D. advantage" is a bunch of rubbish.

 

Agreed.  For most, the "JD-Advantage" is the also-ran of law school outcomes.  It is the result of the actual legal market drying up, not the increased demand for people with legal training in traditionally non-legal fields.  I learned all this the hard way, trust me.

 

Therefore, all professional opportunities can and should be defined under "working" and not put under some other nomenclature of J.D. advantage. There are few professional pursuits that would not value the analytical thinking and knowledge of the law and ethics that law school offers. This new category describing any deviation from the traditional path is not required and seems to paint in broad strokes a picture of these jobs as "lesser." Jobs outside law firm associate positions are in no way less, and in some cases can offer much more.

 

Wait, what?  ALL professional opportunities should be in the "JD Advantage-working-catch-all-whatever-the-hell" category?  In other words, everything from a banker to a barista would benefit from a JD grad, and should be categorized as such by saying they are "working"?  O rly?  That accurate employment data is so tedious and boring, anyway; let's just call them all "working."

 

Another News Flash:  people go to law school to be lawyers, y'all.  For those poor dears who were unfortunate enough to not get into law school in the first place, they can console themselves with this thing called GRADUATE SCHOOL that fills the gap for those who are still looking for analytical thinking and knowledge skills.  Yep, those also-rans have to suffer through education in fields like accounting, architecture, construction management, computer science, medicine, business, engineering, history, mathematics, and language, to name a few.   How about other fields that require significant training all on their own, such as car mechanics, HVAC repair, plumbers, electricians, the various trades, etc.?  No analytical thinking skills or unique knowledge base there, nope, nor sir, sorry, not at all, according to law schools.  Next time you need your HVAC replaced, be sure to call your friendly neighborhood JD.

 

To put it another way - in my own experience, my flashing red neon JD letters did not exactly throw open the floodgates of opportunity.  There are many, many others who have had a similar experience.  Our would-be employers apparently just didn't get the memo on how awesome we all were.  We're JDs…!!!...why are you hiring other candidates when you could bask in the glow of an employee with a JD and mad analytical skillz!?!?!!  

 

So here is what we know—there are fewer jobs in traditional legal roles for entry-level attorneys.

 

Thank you for telling the truth, for once.  Now, wait for it, wait for it...Law Schools to the rescue!

 

Law schools have already begun a huge era of revitalization of legal education—some might say an overhaul. Some of these changes are meant to streamline legal education, others to provide more practical training. However, there is another factor that is changing law school: teaching to and preparing the ever-growing population of graduates that do not wish to practice in a traditional forum. Brooklyn Law School teaches a business boot camp and has a clinic that incubates new businesses in all facets, not just legal. There are other law schools that have language classes and compliance courses that are not rooted in the law.

 

The JD turned MBA.  Thanks, we already a degrees in business with a sprinkling of applicable laws.  They are called...MBAs!  See above.

 

Friends, all snarky-ness aside, there is no "JD Advantage".  At least, not in a real, appreciable sense that you can count on being worth three years of opportunity costs and significant student loan debt on the outside.  While it may be true that more and more 0Ls want to go to law school for the express purpose of not being a lawyer (although, just think about that, for a minute), the fact of the matter is this phenomenon is due to the imagined preftiege and marketability of the JD being foisted upon an unsuspecting public.  LSATs are declining, applications are falling, and the Law Schools are being forced to reinvent themselves in a desperate attempt to be relevant to a broader audience.

 

The people who are actually looking for "JD Advantage" jobs are the recent graduates who found out the employment statistics were bunk, have no job prospects lined up and need something quick because Sallie Mae is knocking.  Employers don't want JDs for reasons that have been described ad nauseaum (more legalese), but the simple fact of this is that only 15% of graduates get these jobs.  This is not high market demand.  This is not the reinvisioned law degree of the 21st century.

 

This is desperation, on the part of both the scammers and the scammed.  0Ls, run for the hills.

Read more: http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/PubArticleNY.jsp?id=1202625041552&A_Rise_in_Alternative_Careers_Is_Changing_Legal_Education#ixzz2jyGQBziH

Response to Brian Leiter's "American Law Schools: The New Economic Realities"

On December 29, 2013, Professor Brian Leiter published the first part of a two-part article on Huffington Post, entitled "American Law Schools: The New Economic Realities".  And my response might raise a few eyebrows with readers here, but bear with me.

It's a damn good article, right up until the last few sentences.  Professor Leiter (correctly) points out that:

Money has taken over much of the practice of law in the United States. The American Lawyer magazine ranks law firms by their revenues and profitability. U.S. News & World Report -- a news magazine a generation ago, and now merely a website that ranks anything that can be ranked -- began evaluating U.S. law schools in the late 1980s. The driving force of their rankings, as numerous critics have noted, is money: how much money is spent per capita on education. (My institution, which ranks 4th currently, would rank 1st if my dean would only double faculty salaries!) The dramatic increase in law school tuition, partly attributable to the general financial pressures on institutions, like universities, that do not achieve productivity gains through technology, is also partly due to the perverse U.S. News incentive to spend, spend, spend.

U.S. News also purports to "measure" employment outcomes, though only in the sense of asking the schools to self-report how their graduates fare. Given the media frenzy that surrounds the U.S. News rankings each year, it was predictable that schools would massage the data to over-state the outcomes -- in a handful of cases, even hiring their own graduates as library assistants to boost the employment numbers! As I wrote a decade ago, the employment statistic for most schools published by U.S. News "should be treated as essentially fiction: it may have elements of truth, but basically it's a work of the imagination."

 . . . two events in the last eight years unsettled the status quo, one familiar, one less so.  The familiar event is the collapse of the global capitalist system in 2008, which soon spread to the legal sector, which entered its own severe recession. Less familiar is that in 2005, Congress overhauled the bankruptcy laws to make them much harsher for debtors and much friendlier to creditors; among the changes, no student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy any longer, except in extraordinary circumstances. The combination proved toxic for many American law schools. Suddenly, substantial minorities of law school graduates were unemployed, thanks to the recession, and many were saddled with significant debt without any recourse of relief in bankruptcy. . . .
 
The ABA had been derelict in its duties for far too long, and there is nothing like stern reprimands from U.S. Senators to focus the attention. Soon enough, the ABA mandated improved employment data reporting by law schools, which made clear how poorly graduates of some law schools were faring during the recession. Around the same time, the New York Times began running a series of front-page stories about the collapse of the job market for new lawyers and the staggering debt loads some were carrying.

(And before we go any further - skeptical readers, take note!  The bolded statements above are straight from the pen of a law professor.)

You'll hear few complaints from me about any of that.  All fairly solid, accurate information.  Many parties were at fault for allowing legal education to spiral out of control, and many parties were at fault for allowing the legal profession to turn into a money printing machine for a select few elite lawyers.

But then the wheels fall off.  After such a promising start, Professor Leiter's second part of the article, entitled "American Law Schools and the Psychology of Cyber-Hysteria", missed the mark so widely that its failings must be addressed.

The thrust of the entire second part of the article is that bloggers blame law professors and law schools for these problems.  I was expecting the second part of the article to propose the solutions to the problems highlighted in the first part, but no, Professor Leiter went off on a sadly predictable tangent.

You see, it's not that anyone believes that law schools and law professors alone caused this mess.  That's just a distraction, a fiction created by legal academia uninterested in addressing anything of real substance.  It's window dressing.  It's a red herring.  We know - and have known all along - that everyone had a hand in causing the mess.  Higher education is out of control in terms of expansion and expenditures.  Professors are very handsomely compensated and enjoy the benefits of a leisurely life in academia (including, it would seem, having time to pen double-headers for Huffington Post on their students' dime, articles which are insultingly insensitive to the plight of many law graduates who funded those very articles).  The legal profession thrives on churning through the glut of new entrants and throwing them out when next year's models arrive.  Students are sometimes greedy and attracted to false promises of high salaries and wonderful careers.  The government funded the entire thing through student loans.  We're all to blame for it happening - schools, educators, lawyers, the government, the ABA, everyone.  We're not placing the blame solely on the shoulders of law professors and law schools.  I want to believe that Professor Leiter is smarter than this, but he's not giving me a lot to work with.

Here's where his confusion stems from, I believe.  We're no annoyed because we believe law professors are the cause of this entire mess.  We're annoyed because when it comes to legal education, law schools and law professors are precisely the parties who hold the power to facilitate change.  And they have failed to do so, time and time and time again - perfectly demonstrated by Professor Leiter's twin articles.  The first article highlighted the problems, but the second article, instead of proposing solutions, blames the students and sweeps the mess under the carpet once again.  Worse still, it dismisses the entire reform movement (which is predominantly student- and graduate-led) as not just an internet "meme" (most of which are rather frivolous - LOLCats, for example), but goes on to portray law professors as victims!  Only in the KrAzY world of legal academia, folks!

Yes, the law professors, most of whom work remarkably few hours per week in safe and comfortable conditions with wonderful job stability and extraordinary benefits, free from stress and boredom and clients and phone calls and deadlines and all those other pesky attributes that make work so unpleasant for those of us outside the ivory tower, those professors are the individuals who should be complaining, not unemployed graduates with their six-figure nondischargeable debt trying to fight for scraps of work in an oversaturated and shrinking market, trying to salvage what remains of their broken careers.

Instead of wasting such a good opportunity to propose meaningful change from within academia, the entire second article was wasted in a petty revenge piece.

Which is, unfortunately, the position of legal academia from top to bottom, Yale to Indiana Tech, with notable exceptions I can still count on just one hand.  Many years ago, when these issues were first raised, doors were slammed shut, hands were placed over ears, and almost everyone in legal academia started chanting, "Lalalalalala can't hear you lalalalalalalala."

So the activists did what activists do, which is to draw attention to the problems through any means necessary.  To do what gets attention.  And I think it's been working - applications are dropping, people are getting the message that there's a problem with the legal education system and it needs to be fixed.

It's not that law schools and law professors are the (sole) cause of the problem, as Professor Leiter misunderstands, although they were a contributing factor and certainly not blameless.  It's that they refuse to help solve the problems!  Worse, they have almost total control over solving the problems!

Example - the moronic decision to allow Indiana Tech Law School to open in 2013.  How did so many in legal academia look the other way and allow something like that to happen?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

Example - it's clear that there are still twice as many law graduates as there are jobs for those graduates.  Sure, some people seek a legal education for the enrichment the study of law brings, but most - the vast majority - want to become practicing lawyers.  Why have so few schools reduced class sizes to address the weak market demand?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

Example - why are law professors paid so highly (the source of which is student loan money borrowed by students), when they work so few hours, produce such valueless scholarship, and clearly are not being lured away by the private sector or government?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

Example - why have law schools not switched to a two year curriculum?  Why are some law schools as expensive as medical schools, yet have a fraction of the expenditures?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

Example - why are law schools giving large portions of their tuition to the parent university, essentially subsidizing the undergrads (and sports programs etc.) on the backs of the law students?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

Example - why do professors at the top (good) law schools refuse to speak out about the hundred or so bottom end law schools that are admitting underqualified students, devaluing the JD, flooding the market with grads who have little hope of success as lawyers (from a business perspective), and who are making a mockery of the entire legal education system?  Why do we still have 200+ law schools?  Only law schools and law professors can solve that problem.

The list goes on and on and on and on.

The solutions to all of these problems lie in the hands of law schools and law professors.  So law professors, step up SOLVE THEM!

You might not have made the mess, but you're the ones who are holding the mop and bucket.  Oh, and you own the building where the mess is.

Few would blame only law professors for the problems occurring in the first place, other than those looking to distract - again - the focus of potential law school applicants and those who supply the money.  But blame for failing to solve the problems in a timely manner lands squarely in the faculty lounge.  Law professors, deans, and administrators control how much the JD costs (which affects student debt), how many grads are produced (which affects employment prospects, salaries, careers etc.), and law schools are the primary filter through which the profession self-regulates.  Law schools are ground zero for these problems today.

The blame game is getting old.  Nobody cares.  What matters is the solution.  So instead of covering up the problem by spending time writing articles about how some bloggers are playing by their own rules, let's hear solutions to the problems from within academia.  What is being done to cut class sizes?  What is being done to cut costs?  What is being done to modernize the curriculum?  What is being done to bring sanity and dignity back to legal education?  The debate has changed from "do these problems exist?" to "what can be done to solve the problems?"

The personal attacks directed at law professors are, it seems, motivated by frustration that those who can change the system are failing to do so.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Leiter's second article is not without any redeeming features, and does conclude with at least a partial solution: "Congress will need to take up debt relief for a generation of students caught in the vise of an economic catastrophe."  Agreed.  Except that's just one part of the puzzle.  Debt relief would help and it must be pursued, although debt relief alone merely shifts the problem onto the (innocent) taxpaying public as a whole and ignores the source.  Let's not hide the problem by diluting it in the ocean of government accounting.  That's just lazy.

What needs to happen too is for the cost of education to be brought back down to sane levels.  It was possible to deliver a JD for a fraction of today's price a decade ago, two decades ago, three decades ago.  Not much has changed over the years, yet the cost of law school has skyrocketed.  Why?  Law professors should be working to bring the cost of a JD back down to those pre-madness levels.  Reducing the debt in the first place is far better than forgiving the debt after the fact.

The flood of JDs onto the market also needs to be addressed.  By graduating twice as many JD grads as there are jobs, significant unemployment will continue regardless of what The National Jurist predicts.  Law schools need to reduce class sizes, or simply close the low-performing law schools where employment levels are truly appalling.  And no new law schools.

The solutions are, in general, really rather simple.  They just happen to be solutions that law professors don't want to hear.  And I can understand that, because nobody likes to hear that the solution is downsizing their own job, or trimming the budget from their own department.  But unfortunately, that's what needs to be done.  The excuses for why it can't be done are becoming more and more tortured, illogical, twisted and unbelievable.

And that's where the stalemate arises.  Law schools and law professors acknowledge that reform needs to occur, they hold the keys to reform, yet they refuse to reform.  Which is why the pro-reform activists are doing whatever they can to break the stalemate with their limited resources, much of which involves chipping away at the source of stability for law schools: cash-wielding incoming/returning students.  If we can stop the students/money going into law schools in the first place, things will have to change.  But as everyone living in the US recently can understand, brute-force blanket cuts forced by strangling the flow of money across the board are far more painful than negotiated and gentle reforms reached through sensible compromise.

I, for one, would rather see the ABA or a group of deans/professors step up, bring everyone to the table, and implement some changes that everyone can live with.  Break the grip US News has by refusing en masse to submit data.  Every school agrees to freeze class sizes right now and then reduce seats by five percent per year over the next decade.  Freeze tuition right now and reduce it by five percent per year over the next decade.  One law review per school, and include experienced members of the practicing bar on editorial boards so that frivolous scholarship is stamped out.  Tenure remains, but only if professors teach a full class load each semester.  And no new law schools; if there's demand in the future, increase seats at existing schools again.  There's nothing too radical in there, right?  And there are dozens of other common-sense solutions that we can all happily live with.

So law schools, if you need a little help with figuring this out, all you need do is ask.  You've got thousands of grads (and professors) who know these problems inside out, and who have great solutions.

Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”.  He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.

The Life of An Attorney: Myth vs. Reality

Since I decided to leave the legal field behind, my father and other relatives have given me a hard time. "How could you leave such an interesting and challenging field?", they ask. Like almost all non-lawyers in society, my family members are convinced that I left a genteel, upper class line of work for a rough and tumble existence in the corporate world. To help others in my position who are getting unnecessary guff for making the right choice, I present myths vs. realities of the legal profession.

Myth: Law school is a hotbed of ideas. Students study with professors who are as brilliant as Plato. The Socratic Method teaches students the law while also raising their consciousness. Everyone in law school is devoted only to the furtherance of everyone's learning and knowledge of the law. It is three years in an intellectual idyll, after which law students are totally prepared with the knowledge of all areas of law.
Reality: Law school is like high school if there were no parents and tons of alcohol. Professors are insecure bullies who enjoy making students squirm and relish in hiding the ball as much as possible. They have no real experience in practicing law, so they will push the limits of legal abstraction in trying to prove their brilliance to their law student sycophants. Professors have little time to help students outside of class, making it clear that they have more important things to do.  The students are mostly comprised of the overcompetitive and socially stunted people you hated in high school and your undergraduate studies. In the hyper competitve atmosphere fostered and encouraged in law school, these peoples' most sociopathic tendencies come to the surface. Law school prides itself on "teaching students how to think like lawyers". The only thing the school does is teach students how to be law professors. The dirty business of actually training student the ins and outs of daily practice is left to law firms. Never mind that firms fighting for their financial survival have little to no interest in showing a new lawyer the ropes. They need someone who can hit the ground running, which is not how most new law grads can be characterized.

Myth: Law firm life is like "The Good Wife". You work in a skyscraper, but are able to take cases that the "little guy" who is innocent but being accused of terrible crimes by a system gone mad. The firm is able to use tons of resources hunting down clues to spring these innocent clients. After you win the case, you all sit in a plush library, drinking brandy from snifters while the partners break down what went right and what went wrong, taking pains to help the junior lawyers understand.
Reality: Law firm life is toxic and pressure packed. If you work at a big firm, you have sociopathic partners trying to parcel out small pieces of their cases so that junior associates can't steal their business. Clients will be fighting the firm on the bill tooth and nail, while the partners put ever more pressure on the associate whose time they must write off. If you're at a small firm, you have the same environment but with more anxiety around bringing in business. Partners will hold meetings telling all the junior associates what they're doing wrong. In both cases, senior attorneys have no interest or incentive to mentor young attorneys. So, the training that law schools expect firms to provide is non-existent. The young attorney is left in a limbo where she cannot make mistakes, but doesn't know enough to know whether she is handling the case correctly. The clients are either cheap or unethical, often both. If the firm is able to get paid on a matter within 30 days, it's a cause for celebration. Most of these clients, who feel like they can do what the attorney just accomplished, will be very slow to pay or will simply threaten to file a bar complaint because of the fees. The firm will discount the fee and find the next unsavory character to represent. The sociopathic people from law school are now opposing counsel, and more vicious because there is now money on the line. There is a myth that the law is a collegial field full of fellowship and camraderie. This supposed collegiality is a thin veneer that hides the horrible and unethical things attorneys do to each other on a daily basis because they are "zealously advocating" for their clients.

Myth: Attorneys live in spacious suburban houses. They drive late model cars and wear stylish business attire. Money is no worry, because the legal field provides plenty of it to all attorneys. They dine at the finest restaurants, serve on local civic boards, and use your legal wiles to help out a non profit or two. Since money is no object, attorneys have enough money saved for retirement and their kids' college educations.
Reality: The above may be the case for BigLaw, but it comes with a steep price. The attorney is expected to work at least 80 hours per week, and must be at the beckon call of clients day and night. This type of work schedule is naturally not conducive to a relationship, so the attorney may have a divorce or two under his belt. If the attorney is a solo or works for a small firm, the financial picture becomes much more dire. The small firm associate will be driving a 10 year old car with various mechanical issues, trying to squeeze just a little more life out of the vehicle before it's time to add yet one more debt payment to the pile. Retirement saving is a pipe dream for the attorney who might be able to get IBR, but who still makes too little to live a truly comfortable life. The kids college fund probably only has fifty cents in it, if anything. If the kids want to go to college, then they will have to get loans too. And the cycle continues.

It's 2014, not 2004 (or 1994)

I received a link to this widely-circulated “Checklist for Opening Your First Law Office” recently, and was utterly amazed at how dated it was. The original piece was first published in 1999, but it is still being used today, seemingly without any updates, as advice to newly-minted lawyers on how to get their solo practice up and running after passing the bar exam.  And it's a glaring example of the kind of information law school applicants (and students) are still taking as gospel today, fifteen years on.

The checklist appears to have been written for new attorneys living in a world where clients grow on trees, and where lawyers are as rare as unicorn tears; financial analysis, business plans, marketing strategies and so forth are barely even mentioned, and the checklist invites the reader instead to:

Consider the Area in Which You Wish to Practice

1. Where are your friends and relatives?

2. Pick a growing, rather than decaying, area. Watch out for blight and decay. Consider possible changes in economic patterns due to escalating energy costs.

3. Do you want an urban, rural or suburban practice? Analyze whether you can really be happy in a rural or small-town atmosphere or in an urban atmosphere. This is a matter of your personality and background.

As if seeing your mom once a week is truly more important than figuring out whether the market is saturated with lawyers in that area.  And as if you can pick where you’ll be happiest living and automatically a successful law practice will follow you there.

The checklist goes on to ask new grads to:

Consider Quality of Life Factors

1. Quality of professional life: What kinds of cases and clients can you expect to get where you will practice?

2. Quality of social life: Do you want proximity to museums, symphonies, young intellectual people, etc.?

3. Quality of atmosphere: Is there smog and pollution, or clean air and water?

4. Quality of recreational life: Do you want proximity to swimming, skiing, boating, hiking, hunting, etc.?

5. Quality of home life: Is the area safe for your spouse and children? Will you be afraid to go out at night or to sleep with the windows open?

6. Quality of economic life: What kind of money can you earn there?

Smog?  Skiing?  Symphonies and museums?  Boating?  Leaving the windows open at night?  Really?  All of this is before even one mention of whether there are any clients in that area, or any need for another attorney.  (Perhaps this is a question that doesn’t even need to be asked though, because the answer is, “No, there is no need for another attorney here.”)

And point 6 above, "What kind of money can you earn there?" That's about as deep as the financial analysis goes in this checklist.  Basically telling you to pluck a figure out of thin air and run with it.

Continuing on:

Consider Miscellaneous Factors

1. Proximity of office to public transportation for staff and clients.

2. Proximity to eating places for client entertainment and meetings.

3. Proximity to law library.

4. Proximity to major anticipated clients.

5. Type of practice you are planning. For personal injury, worker’s compensation, and criminal law, proximity to courts and administrative hearing locations or jails may be important.

6. Proximity to other lawyers for possible consultation, referral of overflow work, or library sharing.

7. Will office and building be accessible for people on crutches or in wheelchairs, or elderly people?

At last, clients start to appear on the radar.  But “anticipated clients”?  As if one can simply look at a list of corporations and decide who you’ll accept as a client rather than the other way around.  If only starting a practice was that simple.  Even back in 1999, the demand for legal services did not exceed the supply of lawyers.  In 2014, demand for legal services is so small compared to the massive number of lawyers that the very mention of “overflow work” is laughable.  It's all written as if clients are the least of the new attorney's worries.  As if the new attorney should be more concerned about entertaining them (who'll pay for that?), rather than finding them in the first place.  The new attorney needs to be told how to find clients, not how to wine and dine them.  No, scratch that.  The new attorney need to be told that there aren't any clients in the first place.

The checklist contains a huge amount of items to consider when renting space, although not one of them is “can you afford it?”  Then the checklist moves on to marketing, with hot suggestions that nobody has ever thought of before, including mailing your law school classmates, your family, professional associations, etc.

There’s no mention of technology whatsoever.  The checklist suggests that you should plan on waiting up to two months for your letterhead to be printed and delivered.  It speaks at length about telephones, including dedicated fax lines and dictation equipment.  It suggests that you “consider getting a domain name and e-mail addresses if you want to attract out-of-state and international clients.”  Yes, it's that outdated yet still being circulated as guidance for new attorneys.

And then we’re on to furnishing your office, still with next to no analysis of if you can even afford to do this in the first place.  Get a photo of your family for your desk.  “Your desk should be at least six feet wide with overhang in front, and treated to protect against scratches and spills. Consider putting your computer or keyboard or monitor on a separate desk behind you or alongside you.”  Your wastebasket should match the desk.  Magazine rack.  Umbrella stand.  Yup, an umbrella stand.  I'm surprised it doesn't suggest one made from the lower leg and foot of an endangered species - hippo perhaps, or rhino.  Maybe elephant.  That's how outdated this checklist is.

Office equipment.  Today’s solo can survive on a laptop, a smartphone and a printer.  But the checklist suggests otherwise, and advises that you purchase a copy machine, word processing systems – “This requires serious study. Don’t depend on vendors to advise you. Consult secretaries, office administrators, and other lawyers” – standalone fax machines etc.  And office supplies:

Ask your secretary or another lawyer’s secretary to help you make up an initial order list. Consider such items as staplers, paper clips, scissors, two-hole punch, three-hole punch, telephone message pads, rubber stamps with inking pads, scratch pads, legal pads, paper cutter, felt-tip markers, staple removers, adhesive tape, desk calendars, pens and pencils, manila envelopes, Rolodex™ files, coffee maker and cups, check protector, fireproof safe, etc.

Secretary?  Huh?  Who’s going to pay her?

Then we get to insurance requirements, hiring a secretary (seriously, hiring a secretary will be an instant $40,000 per year hole in your budget), filing systems, starting an accounting system, and then we’re almost at the end of the checklist and we see the first signs of “how are you going to pay for all of this” – the budget.  Sources of income for that first year include:

a. Estimated income from fees for services. 

b. Savings accounts.

c. Working spouse.

d. Relatives who may offer help.

e. Bank loan.

f. SBA guaranteed loan.

g. Credit union loan. 

h. Bar association credit union loan.

So one out of eight sources of income is fees.  The other seven are beg and borrow (yet no mention of "repay").  And not one mention of whether you want to borrow (or can even borrow) when you're $150K in debt already.  What bank will lend you start-up capital?

And that’s the kind of information being circulated by state bar associations to new lawyers as actual, real life advice on how to start a viable law office.  Basically, Field of Dreams levels of "if you build it, they will come."  It's misleading.  It's read by people thinking about attending law school, and all they take away from it is, "Oh, that looks easier than I thought.  Pick a city, sign a lease, hire a secretary and buy me an umbrella stand and the cash will start rolling in."  Nothing can be further from the truth.

My advice?  Don’t go to law school in the first place.  If you’re already in law school, get out.  And if you’re already out of law school and unemployed, find a job doing something else and don’t look back.  (A few exceptions apply, but I’m currently of the opinion that law is like gambling – the house always wins in the long run, and the only way to “win” is to not play in the first place, or to cut your losses if you’re already suckered in at the table.)

But that’s not the point of this post.  The point of this post is that we’re now in 2014, and information containing advice on whether to attend law school or not is stuck in the prior century.  The books and guides and materials that applicants are reading are so inaccurate at this point, so derivative, and so misleading that many people end up in law school thinking that the legal profession is like it was in the 1990s, and they graduate (too late) in the legal profession of the 2010s.

I tried to address this point in Con Law (more updates on this book in the near future, because the message is still just not getting out there.)  Thane Messinger and I tried to write a guide book for the 2010s, something from scratch, throwing out the old information and starting afresh.  I updated my earlier book, Later in Life Lawyers, to reflect the new legal economy, issuing stern warnings about the low number of law jobs and the high cost of a JD.  This blog and the other “scamblogs” are trying to get the word out, but it’s all being drowned in a sea of outdated advice.

I remember, back in the late 1990s, reading many of the law school guides that are still topping the lists of best-selling guides today.  Some have been updated, some are still offering the same old mid-nineties advice.  Those that have been updated rarely contain significant revisions.  The overwhelming body of information upon which law school applicants rely is hopelessly outdated, rather like reading a manual on how to ride a horse when prepping for your driving test.

And this is perhaps one of the biggest challenges we face in the upcoming year.  How to get the point across that the rules have changed, that the entire game has changed, when it comes to legal education and legal careers.  There are far fewer winners today, and the cost of losing is so much higher than before.  Much of what is still relied upon by law school applicants was now written when those applicants were babies, some perhaps not even born.

So where to get updated information?  Well, here for starters.  From newspapers – look for articles about the state of the legal profession.  From current lawyers, from lawyers who left the profession because it was too rough.  From Con Law.  Just anywhere except the old sources that are now so out-of-touch with reality that they have slipped from being merely harmlessly out-of-date and have now become dangerous misinformation (and that includes your pre-law advisor at college who has been in that role for thirty years.)

And of course, the best source of information is you.  You can ignore the commentators and the advice-givers.  You can do your own research.  Look at how much law school will cost you.  Look at how much time and effort it will take to repay those loans.  Search for law jobs in your local area and see how many you can find (and then figure out how many law grads will be looking for that same job.)  Look at the Yellow Pages and wade through the fifty pages of lawyers, all of whom are your future competition and all of whom have more experience than you will when you graduate from law school.  Do some analysis, even if you don't like the answers.  Don’t be like the checklist where you merely assume that the money will take care of itself somehow, and that you can be more concerned about the finer things in life such as skiing and umbrella stands.  Work through the facts and figures specifically for you, and do that first.  You can’t afford to trust other people to tell you that law school is a doorway to a great career anymore.  This isn’t Field of Dreams, and getting through law school is the easy part, not the hard part, of a successful legal career.  The real struggle starts after you graduate.

Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”.  He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.

Here's To A Great 2013

The last year has been a banner year for this site and the law school scam in general. A lot of important work has been done by the contributors on this site. We have directly engaged professors and shown that we will not be silenced until there is meaningful change in how law schools operate. The end of the year is a good time for reflection. So, we all want to share our thoughts on what we feel was the most important development this past year.

MA: The continued precipitous decline in law school enrollment was an encouraging sign that more and more people are unwilling to swallow the lies being disseminated by deans and professors. Since 2010, some schools’ entering classes have been cut in half. We must be vigilant though. Law profs take every negative story and try to spin it so that it looks like law school is still a good option for students. Law professors are now writing articles telling students that the drop in enrollment means that the job market will reach an equilibrium by 2020. We must continue to fight these falsehoods in 2014 and we cannot stop until the worst schools are either shuttered or forced to cut tuition to the point that attending law school is no longer an albatross that hangs around graduates’ necks for the rest of their lives.

dybbuk:  Happy New Year!  2014 will almost certainly be the fourth consecutive year of substantial declines in law school applications, declines I believe are due in significant measure to the scamblogs. A few more years of truth-telling in our online forums should rip away any lingering illusions about prestige or versatility, and drive down applications even further. When University and law school trustees realize that the law school scam can no longer generate enough money to meet expenses, let alone support a professorial Dolce Vita, they will be compelled to develop and implement a much less expensive and training-oriented model of legal education, perhaps run by the practicing bar instead of by six-figure salaried pseudoscholars who are lawyers in name only. Either that or they will have to shutter their law schools altogether-- in my imagination to the musical accompaniment of Ode to Joy.

dupednontraditional:  Friends, the burden of proof is shifting away from indebted graduates and disillusioned practitioners, and back to the purveyors of the law school scam themselves, where it squarely belongs.  I think we can safely say that gone are the days where ScamDeans and LawProfs can regurgitate a pithy, half-baked article or a dismissive interview with no data, and that be enough in and of itself to put critics on the defensive.  The pain is real, and more and more people are getting the message.  While some commenters complain that the scamblogs rarely have anything "new" to say, it is precisely the need to repeat the tried-and-true message that helps us win the information war and alert new readers before they become new statistics.  Onward and upward into 2014!

OTLSS:  This year has seen yet another decline in student interest in attending law school, and also a commensurate increase in interest in the message that law school (and in many cases higher education) is a broken system that is run for the benefit of profiteers, not students.  The focus has started to shift from education to money.  The conversation is changing from highlighting the victims to instead highlighting the scammers.  You'll note that this blog (and blogs like Third Tier Reality) are at their most effective when highlighting the personal greed and stupidity of those professors who are desperately trying to hide behind their titles and degrees and scholarship.  While we need to continue to press the message that a JD is a worthless degree and that there are still no jobs for law grads, we also need to focus on highlighting the personal stories of professorial malfeasance - these stories generate interest, and they focus the attention on exactly where the student loan money is going.  And by following the money, following each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of dollars borrowed in non-dischargeable debt as it flutters from student to professor, we can really bring into focus the sheer madness of the system.

LSTC:  Happy New Year!  2013 was a great year in that the next few dominoes towards real reform in the legal education sector fell.  Whereas 2011 and 2012 were largely about raising consciousness of the issues that had been existing and worsening for some time, 2013 saw state bar associations begin to question legal education and applications dropping to levels that threaten sustainability for mid- and lower-level law schools.  Whereas deans and administrators could easily dismiss verbalized complaints and courtroom allegations of fraud, they cannot fight against the dwindling supply of money in the pot.  Stakeholders will not indefinitely support law schools when they're a money-losing proposition spitting out graduates that the market cannot bear.  Budgets can only be slashed so much before several law schools will be staring closure in the face.  The most entitled and least-networked professors will be whining rather loudly.

Charles Cooper:  540,000 page views; that speaks for itself.  I think the most important development in 2013 was the fact that the message turned from dismissable myth to undeniable reality in the eyes of many professors, students and lawyers.  They finally woke up and realized that the scambloggers were right after all, and that there is a problem with the system.  But there's still a massive disconnect between the acknowledgement of the problem and the reality of its effects, rather like an addict knowing that he takes too much cocaine but thinks that it's not a problem because he still gets to work on time, pays the mortgage, and puts the kids to bed in the evening.  There's plenty of work to do in 2014, and I'm looking forward to playing my part - it's a worthwhile cause, and one in which I wish more people would become actively involved.

AdamB:  I just wanted to thank the original admin for starting this project to fill the void of the mostly inactive Inside the Law School Scam.  Without that moment of inspiration, the scamblog circuit would have started to weaken.  Now, we wield a power that many in the law school world fear.  The recent retaliation by certain professors shows how much power we have.  The tables will continue to turn this year.

Is The Attorney Life A Life For Normal People?

On this site, we address the lack of jobs out there in the market for newly minted attorneys. But, what about the people who get one of the attorney jobs that are actually out there? Is the work environment for an attorney worth risking financial ruin? Not by a long shot. Attorneys are among the unhappiest people, as measured by job satisfaction surveys. I recently ran across a couple of different posts: one by an associate at a large firm, another who took jobs with small firms. As you will see, neither job scenario is appealing at all.

The large firm associate's day can only be described as hectic. The busy day for this associate is a continuous fire drill, comprised of client created emergencies. The most galling part of it is that the attorney spends almost 21 hours in one day at the office. When a person always works at least 13 hours a day, 7 days a week, that $150,000 starting salary suddenly doesn't look that great. The attorney ostensibly accepts a work schedule that would be unacceptable to most normal people because he has huge loan payments that need to be paid off so he can move on to something more satisfying. The Biglaw job essentially becomes a way for the associate to erase the huge financial mistake he has made by going to law school in the first place. Is an "education" that is so useless and financially burdensome that it forces graduates to take jobs that with this much stress really worth it? Oh, and if you are laid off, you have a black mark against you that makes it much harder for you to find another Biglaw position.

If you are unable to get the brass ring that is a Biglaw job, things are even worse. Not only do you have to put up with a schedule that can rival the Biglaw associate's, you have to do it for a lot less money. This person had a couple of terrible jobs that are representative of what to expect if you are unable to break into a mid to large size firm (Note: there is a lot more in this article I will discuss at a future date). His first job was at a firm that "ran through associates like tissue paper". I unfortunately also worked at such a firm. The partners had no interest in developing anyone or providing the training law schools expect firms to give new graduates. They simply hired whoever would work for the least money and let them go if things didn't work out. There were so many people out there that their ad would always get tons of resume submissions. The second job this person took required him to work for free as an "intern" for three months. After that, he made $1,000 per month for three months before getting a raise to a $2,000 per month salary.

I unfortunately also have experience with this. My first job out of law school was with an attorney who agreed to hire me for $400 per week plus 20% of any fees received from cases that settled or that we won. This was reduced to $300 per week one day after my boss expressed surprise that I expected the $400 per week. He swore up and down that he had said $300 per week. Not wanting to rock the boat, I agreed to the reduced amount. I eventually ended up leaving after five months when no case monies were coming in and I was forced to ask my parents to loan me gas money so I could drive to the office. This was in 2004, so I can only imagine what indignities law graduates are having to put up with now.

For most people, the law is a terrible choice. I do everything I can to discourage people I meet who want to go to law school because it seems "interesting". Still, some fail to heed my advice and still go. The fight is not over until our message is known to everyone and the ScamDeans and ScamProfs are forced to discount their services to what they are actually worth.

Christmas

It's been a busy year and we'll have more retrospective posts later this week.  But for right now, it's time to turn off the computer and spend a little time with family and friends, or just crack open the booze/drugs and slump in front of the TV.  Whatever gets you through Christmas.

Indiana Tech Law School had a "Treat Tree" this year, from under which students could take delicious free food to sustain them through their pre-exam studies.  But from the school's Facebook page, it looks like there's just a half-eaten box of crackers.  And I'm sure in a year or two when the school is showing off its "Employment Outcomes", there'll be little more than the career equivalent of a half-eaten box of crackers too.

I hope you all have a happy 25th.  Remember, even Santa is underemployed and works just one day each year.  Probably still paying his student loans from centuries ago too.