One might wonder how U.S. News, which Old Guy has rechristened You Ass News, came to be recognized as arbiter of matters pertaining to the commercial side of legal education, in particular the choice of a law school and the promotion of the law-school scam to the general public. After all, You Ass News has no expertise in the area; it couldn't even keep its magazine afloat.
A new scam-promoting piece in You Ass News, "What Type of Salary Can You Expect with a Law Degree?", takes us back fifteen years to that time when just about every ABA-accredited law school claimed an average salary of $160k for its graduates. It's all peaches and cream for people with fresh JDs, one would think after reading this dithyramb to that Million-Dollar Degree™.
Median starting salaries for those in private practice range from $155,000 in firms with 100 or fewer lawyers to $215,000 in firms of 1000 lawyers or more, "according to a report recently published by the National Association for Law Placement, an association of more than 3,000 legal career professionals who advise law students, lawyers, law offices and law schools". This information is at least suspect. First, it is published by a group of "legal career professionals"—people whose bread and butter come from the law-school scam. (Why are "more than 3,000 legal career professionals" needed, if well-paying opportunities for lawyers abound?) They can hardly be expected to publish information that might shrink their future clientele. Second, the claim that law firms with 100 or fewer lawyers have a median starting salary of $155,000 cannot be correct, since the vast majority of firms in that category are tiny ones with only a handful of lawyers (often only one) and no ability to pay such fancy salaries. Old Guy isn't going to waste money on the "report" in which this claim appears, but the press release at the link above—yes, a press release, touting high salaries—shows that only 29 firms in that category provided information about starting salaries and that only 26 cities, all large, were considered. The urban restriction itself renders the selection unrepresentative, and it seems likely that the firms surveyed were on the large end (where placements would generate fees for the "legal career professionals"), not two-lawyer offices.
The article creates the illusion of choice by presenting various options as if they were realistically attainable—delicacies on a menu placed before discerning JD-anointed toileteers. A tout for the National Association for Law Placement advises that "[a] student taking a $100,000 position in Indianapolis is going to have a better standard of living than a student receiving a $250,000 salary in New York City because of the cost of living in those places." Perhaps (I rather doubt it), but the vast majority of new graduates won't be offered either position, let alone both. Likewise, the assertion that the public-interest sector pays around $50k at first comes unaccompanied with any information about the dearth of positions and the stiff competition for them. Indeed, many positions in "public interest" are unpaid.
Only two notes of caution, both soft-pedaled, are sounded anywhere in this article. One states that "law firms are notoriously stingy" about benefits, something that might lead one to take a job in government instead. But the option will not arise unless one actually gets an offer of a job in government, which, for the great majority of law students, is a very big if. The other points out "that top 14 law schools, often referred to as “T14,” are more likely to have graduates who work in bigger law firms". That's true, but the rest of the article implies that those outside the T14 can settle for $155,000 or so—something that is not true at all.
Nowhere does one read about the high rate of unemployment among recent graduates of law school—several times that of the general public, which doesn't take on a six-figure amount of non-dischargeable debt at high interest for the privilege of being out of a job. Nor is anything said about starting salaries in "business and industry", a category calculated to inspire thoughts of management but more likely to involve flipping hamburgers or gathering shopping carts.
If called out for this deception, scamsters and their bitches would hide behind the claim that they have only presented data that are necessarily incomplete. Wrong: they purport to answer the question "What Type of Salary Can You Expect with a Law Degree?" By suggesting that new graduates can expect such fancy salaries, without the slightest reference to the likelihood of having to sling hash at a fast-food dive or being outright unemployed, this piece misleads the public. And since the facts of the law-school scam are well known to those who have been selling their "rankings" and other scam-promoting propaganda for more than a third of a century, it can fairly be concluded that they have willfully engaged in deception.
Wow just wow. I haven't seen anything this misleading since the darkest days before all the disclosures. USNWR reporting using NALP data is no pretense at all of journalism, because even a cursory look at what NALP actually shows clearly demonstrates how misleading they are:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib#2022
Look at the class of 2022. I don't know why they use averages ("adjusted" or otherwise) and not medians at all, since averages never meaningfully snapshot anything when you don't have a normal bell curve distribution, and NALP plainly discloses the bimodal distribution issue.
But regardless, NALP's graphs plainly and visually disclose that they are reporting an "average" of 110k that is the actual salary of almost no one. It's either a lot more or a lot less depending on whether it's biglaw, and people who didn't get jobs in law at all are excluded from the data entirely.
How many lemmings can even define average (never mind mean)? Now how many can define standard deviation? (Oh, shit, it has a square root in it? Count me out!)
DeleteAlthough the mean of bimodally distributed data exists, it is not useful, as you said. More useful would be to report that there are one concentration at the low end and another at the high end, with little in between.
Let's take a closer look at those concentrations. At most law schools, only folks in the top 10 percent of their class will be interviewed for BigLaw and Federal Clerkships, which usually lead to jobs in BigLaw. Yes, the top 1/3 or more may get those interviews at Harvard/Yale/Stanford, but 5 percent or literally no one may get those interviews at low ranked schools. So for most US law schools, we're talking about folks in the top 10 percent of their class.
DeleteNow, if 10 percent of the class gets interviews for BigLaw, not all will get offers. Some will be the wrong age, some will be awful interviewers, there are multiple factors. Overall, if a student is attending a law school that is, say, top 1/3 or so, probably about 8 percent of the student body will end up in BigLaw. If you 1) make the top 10 percent of your class 2) make Law Review and 3) are a good interviewer of the right age, you will probably get a job in BigLaw. 8/100. Great odds, right? Especially when the remainder will struggle for "Temporary Document Review Projects" paying $22.00 per hour, and many will never find jobs as lawyers, at any salary, at all. All of this is why most smart people stopped applying to law school decades ago.
DeleteAt most law schools, even the top 10% of the class won't get interviews. Plenty of law schools won't see a single graduate interviewed for Big Law.
DeleteOld Guy's very first article here, a guest posting in the early days of OTLSS, was entitled "Which Law Schools Are Worth Attending?". The answer to the question was that only 13 law schools made the cut: these were the ones at which at least 50% of the class got Big Law or a federal clerkship. Stretch the limit to 40%, and still only 16 law schools qualified. Even down at 10%, it was something in the 70s, as I recall. You can look the article up for yourselves.
A couple of years ago, someone else came up with a list of 16 schools by looking at salaries and debt upon graduation. Interesting that the number is still around 16, just like the traditional advice that only the so-called T14 (the group that used to monopolize the top 14 spots according to You Ass News) were worth considering.
Big Law will consider nearly everyone from a Harvard or a Yale, other than those of us whom it flags as too old (just as it used to flag people as too female or too Jewish). There will still be some interest at a Vanderbilt or a Minnesota, much less at an Ohio State or a Colorado. Down below, a few may be favored by geography, such as Cardozo. But interest falls off quickly—and ends long before the likes of Appalachian and Cooley.
Bully for you if you make the top 10% of your class at Cooley and also make law review (if they have a law review there). But you're at the top of a heap of shit, and everyone knows it. Do not expect to get an interview from Big Law. Perhaps you'll get one from some middling firm in Detroit.
When law schools and those promoting The Law School Scam lie about the amazing salaries that are just 3 years away, once you graduate frow law school they are relying upon a psychological phenomena known as "Confirmation Bias" aka "wishful thinking". This is a phenomena whereby people are deeply inclined to believe thing that confirm their pre-existing belief set, while disbelieving information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. Essentially, people tend to believe what they WANT to be true, as opposed to what actually is true. So telling some fool considering law school that they are making the right decision, and it will pay off big for them is an easy way to con more student loan conduits into JD programs. By way of example, consider this: why did so many people honestly believe a random e-mail from a "Nigerian Prince" really would lead to great wealth? Because they desperately WANTED to believe this tale of instant riches, of course. All successful con artists know that the easiest way to fool someone is to tell them a story they want to believe is true . . .and Law Schools are, in fact, run by Con Artists, compulsive liars, narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Smart people understand the law school scam, and the true state of the legal job market, and have been avoiding law school for decades. Dumb, gullible people still fall for the scam, and the schools love using them for those sweet student loan dollars.
ReplyDeleteExactly: they already want to believe that law school is a path to riches, so they look for statements that confirm that belief. Similarly, they dismiss negative reports as the work of embittered losers.
DeleteI think the "embittered loser" attitude is what sunk me when I tried to talk a lemming out of going to law school a few weeks ago. Said lemming is a 24 YO who couldn't handle any engineering classes at a lower ranked state school and is convinced she will be a high end commercial real estate lawyer or an entertainment lawyer. I told her she won't be negotiate contracts with LeBron James and will likely just graduate (if she even graduates, she's as dumb as a box of rocks) with $120K in debt and no job. She won't listen to reason. Regrettably, there are still thousands of lemmings out there.
DeleteSo many lemmings...so many cliffs (law schools). Had the same discussion with a young lady about 5 years ago. "Grandma wants me to be the first lawyer in the family, so she is paying for it all. I'm going." To a law school in Dekalb, IL, I recall. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."
DeleteAs an aside, real world numbers, a child of mine-medicine-starting salary was $40,000 a MONTH. About $150,000 yearly benefits, 8 weeks vacation first year. Loan forgiveness after 4 years or so on $300,000 debt. And a job at a top 50 law firm is a good deal? Work day and night, never home only to be ousted after 5 to 7 years for "fresh meat." Hardly.
As a further aside, looks like a firm bringing in $1.2 BILLION
Reminds me of a counseling session I had with a young lady about 5 years ago about the advisability of attending law school. “Grandma wants me to be the first lawyer in the family, so she is paying for all of it. So I’m going.” (“Gee, grandma is putting a noose around your neck-lucky you. Didn’t you compliment her on her cookies?”) Went to a law school in Dekalb, IL, I believe.
DeleteSo many lemmings…so many (law school) cliffs.
“Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
As an aside, let’s talk real world numbers. A child of mine-medicine-started at $40,000 a MONTH. About $150,000 in benefits, and 8 weeks vacation. Loan forgiveness in 4 years or so. That’s about $300,000.
More than five times my income after 45 years of law practice.
A job in big law is a marginal accomplishment compared to that, what with the hours demanded, and the likely prospect of being kicked out at 5 to 7 years to make room for “fresh meat.”
A top law firm, as I’ve read, bringing in $1.2 Billion dollars is deferring new hires for a year but reportedly offering them about half their salary for the deferral. This is really telling. A week’s interest, more or less, would cover the cost to bring them on in the usual cycle, but no, we want to look CHEAP. And they do. And it highlights their raw greed.
Been a solo for virtually my entire career. And compared to the billion dollar firm, never laid off a single lawyer, nor staff, either.
Now getting a job at a solo practice is not necessarily easy. I had to interview twice to get the job. (?)
Solo is brutal. The skills it takes-well-another post, perhaps.
An M.D. is transportable everywhere. In high demand. A J.D. is trash.
My child will soon be working remotely for the hospital, 1,000 miles away for the same salary and benefits, perhaps never to return to the mother ship.
Now, I have to admit that a medical education is considerably more demanding than a legal education. And not everyone can do it. But not everyone is going to get a big law job either.
In all likelihood, law school will destroy your life.
Law schools love to lure gullible dolts like her in, with big talk of their "amazing International Law Program" along with courses of study in Sports Law, Entertainment Law, even Space Law! I've been practicing law for over 25 years, haven't met a Space Lawyer yet. In all likelihood this young woman honestly believes she will be like Tom Cruise, who played a sports agent in that movie "Show Me the Money!" People who are that dumb and gullible have not business setting foot on a law school campus, or even going to college, for that matter, but somebody has to pay professors and Deans hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, so the higher education scam rolls on. She will get to avoid the workplace for three more years, rackin up loans she will never repay, perhaps she will have fun dancing at her school's "Barrister Ball". . .
DeleteSpecialization isn't a myth, but it IS a myth at the student level. With the sole exception of a tax LLM (and even then only at NYU Georgetown and for some reason U of Florida) the specialties employers actually care about are developed in practice and not in the classroom.
DeleteBasically, after the JD, you can get a tax LLM at one of the 3 above and basically pay another 100k for one more shot at OCI which may or may not work out. Any other academically-developed specialization, before the JD or after, is a complete and total scam.
Taxation is indeed the only area in which one can meaningfully pursue a specialty in law, and only at the LLM level. Corollaries:
Delete1) You will not be taken seriously because of some bullshit certificate in Global Leadership™ or whatever the hell your über-toilet law school is touting.
2) Any LLM other than one in taxation is of very limited utility—mainly to get into a US bar after training in another part of the world. (Note that many states do not accept foreign training, even supplemented by an LLM.)
As you said, an LLM in taxation is very expensive and may well not work out. It also has a typecasting effect, so expect problems if you try to get into some other field after failing to break into taxation with an LLM.
Utterly absurd are the sexy but non-existent "specialties" that the law-school scam promotes. To this list may be added "environmental law", another über-toilet chestnut. If any of this stuff really existed, it would be swallowed up by Harvard and Yale. Have you not noticed that it seems to be prevalent only at toilet law schools?
That is a very perceptive point and goes beyond the promise that a law degree promises big law, but rather it promises anything you want it to be. You want to go into big law? The J.D. will provide it. You want to work in your home town law firm? The J.D. will provide it. You want a 9-5 federal or state agency position? The J.D. will provide it. You want to be an Asst. DA? Public Defender? No problem, the J.D. guarantees it. Maybe you want JD preferred like risk compliance? Corporations can't get enough JDs for that. The world is your oyster.
DeleteNALP employs 3,000 people but if you read their so called "protocols" for career services obtaining graduates' employment data and "assisting" graduates to find a job. When you go to their section called
ReplyDelete"NALP Best Practices Guide for Managing Law School Employment Outcomes " you see the discretionary word SHOULD used profusely rather than a mandate must. Fact is if you are unemployed 10 months after graduating law school and the law school submitted their statistics to the ABA, you are on your own and most likely unemployed for life regardless of the rhetoric coming from NALP.
The fact remains that law schools' so-called "placement offices" or "career centers" or whatever do not have an army of employees calling all over the place in an effort to line up you with a job as a lawyer. Typically the person at the top is a former (read: failed) lawyer and the one or two others are non-lawyers. At best they will give you their uninformed thoughts on your résumé and utter a few platitudes about envisioning your "dream job" or leafing through listings of law firms. They will not, indeed cannot, offer you meaningful help. Time spent in their offices is time wasted.
DeleteException: if you're from the upper crust and are assured of multiple offers in high places, they'll have ample time for you. Otherwise, go to hell.
And you can be sure that the "professionals" at NALP don't give a tinker's damn about document review, two-lawyer shops in rural Nebraska (or even Brooklyn), or public prosecution. Note that their puff piece presented only very large firms in very large cities ("markets", as they put it in their plutocratic way).
Ok, this was years ago, but our placement office consisted of an assistant dean, period; no support staff, nothing, just the good dean. And the dean's qualifications: had previously been a real estate agent who was unburdened by a law degree and had never attended any law school anywhere.
DeleteYour post reads like what we were "sold" back in the mid 1970's except the prized big law salaries were about $90,000. Most got a job at 10% to 20% of that. Bimodal. A brutal way to make a mediocre living.
DeleteA real-estate agent with no legal training as assistant dean of a law school? Sounds like something that Cooley would do.
DeleteRight. The career services office at my TTT in 2008 was a dusty mess, with a couple of admins and a failed lawyer. It felt like they hadn't updated the place since the 1980s.They were the equivalent of an appendix.
DeleteAnon from 5:02: My law school placement office was nothing but binders of law firm info and Martindale Hubbell. No help whatsoever. No one there had a clue.
DeleteSeconded RE the placements offices. They basically run a job board (which is contracted out to Symplicity anyway), coordinate the paperwork and room assignments for OCI (which is more like event planning than anything else and only benefits the top of the class at most schools), and probably also pitches in later with the ABA disclosures to make the data look as good as it can without outright fabrication. That's about it.
DeleteI remember one time I was chatting with someone who happened to work in the placement office at a crappy law school. She let slip that all the firms that year had outright told them that they weren't going to hire anyone from that school, but would come anyway for appearance's sake.
As promised, not a single person, not one, got an offer from OCI that year. Tons of interviews, but unbeknownst to the student, the interviews were essentially fake. No one had a chance and the career office knew it. But they went through the motions all the same. If you calculated that out as a number of students' hours wasted, it would be astronomical I'm sure.
Wow, this article from U.S. News clarifies my 2nd tier toilet law school's apparent poor employment outcome for the class of 2022 ten months after graduation. The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.5%. But 10% of the recent graduates of my toilet law school failed to obtain a full time, long term bar passage required job, JD "advantage" job, or professional position job. Those graduates must be taking their time deciding whether they will take that private practice law firm job paying $160k with terrible benefits vs that public defender job that pays $50k with a Cadillac health insurance policy. Thanks to our friends at career services and NALP for clarifying the current state of the legal market. Maybe they can help these recent grads finally choose a path.
ReplyDeleteAnd your toilet law school is ahead of half or more of the ABA-accredited law schools. Still the rate of unemployment among its graduates is three times that of the general public. They could have been unemployed without borrowing a couple of hundred grand. Never mind: hackademic scoundrels assure us that the JD is the Million-Dollar Degree™.
DeleteThat's easy to understand: newly minted JDs have 3x the unemployment as the general population. Maybe that will sink in to prospective applicants.
DeleteThey'll tout those salaries, and that million dollar premium and whatever else they can say to get that student loan money, and then afterwards they'll insist no reasonable person could possibly have believed them. It reminds me of Fox News, who used the exact same defense successfully.
ReplyDeleteBut ultimately I do think most people end up doing fine, because the alternative is really rather miserable and depressing. Yes most people are in debt and only half get actual legal careers, but that half does fine and the ones that move on also eventually just move on with their lives, the debt is insult to injury but ultimately not having to practice law may be a boon in of itself.
The most awful part of all this-and yes, there are many awful parts-is the fact that this blog is it in terms of offering a different voice, specifically detailing what a scam law school is. All other blogs/websites, etc etc have gone extinct, and the mainstream media, with its very short attention span, has moved on also.
ReplyDeleteSo USNWR gets to spin its essentially fictitious tale about placement/salary with virtually no pushback of any kind. And the scam is still the scam, which makes it all even more depressing.
There are, however, 740 articles at this site. They continue to get attention, even in law reviews.
DeleteWhere I live, there are literally billboards with dollar signs on the side of major roads advertising "cash signing bonuses for Nurses". There are radio ads pleading for nurses to apply to various healthcare providers, for great money, wonderful benefits, and a good work environment. One can spend 4 semesters studying Nursing, and immediately get multiple well-paying job offers with cash signing bonuses. In the alternative, one can spend 4Y studying nursing, and really cash in, with an employer who will pay for, and encourage you to pursue a Masters, at their expense, for even more money. At the same time, dolts spend 4Y in college, 3Y in law school and sit for a challenging 2-day Bar Exam, to earn $22.00 per hour in "temporary document review projects". My plumber (a solo in his late 20's) charges $140 per hour, and he takes the pipes he removes from clients home to scrap yards for more $. My electrician. . .well, it's about $100 to even get him to come out to the house, and it goes up from there. They are well worth their pay, BTW. So what does all of this mean? It means that dummies go to law school in 2023, and smart people go to Nursing School, or Trade school to become Electricians, Plumbers, etc. The Bar Pass rate has been declining for years. I have met and interacted with many smart Nurses, Physician's Assistants, etc., and many deeply stupid lawyers, who usually fail the Bar Exam at least once. You don't need the Internet to tell you that going to law school has a terrible ROI, and studying fields like Nursing/Electrician School/Plumbing school has a great ROI: you just need brains and a modicum of Common Sense.
DeleteIn addition, if you go on YouTube you can find plenty of videos titled "Don't go to Law School" that lay out horrific details, like people living out of their car, buried in debt, who are basically unemployable with their JD. You can also go on Reddit and read about idiots planning for their law school "Barrister's Ball" and other nonsense. . .When I attended the best law school in my state, in the early 90's, there were no dances and no social scene whatever, to speak of. I have some good memories of wine and cheese being served at a Debate Society wherein law students debated heated issues (the legality of gun control laws, Death Penalty debates, that sort of thing). Those were actually fun, and, in my opinion, prepared people for arguing real cases in court. But there were no dances, or sporting events, or other nonsense, not from day 1 until graduation, as I recall. Just an awful, awful lot of studying and work, which actually paid off in that era's job market.
DeleteA good topic for a paper would be the history of the notion that lawyers are smart. In my experience, most are not.
DeleteIt may have in part to do with the fact that in some times and some places lawyers have been required to pass exams in Latin or plead in Norman French at the Inns of Court. Those skills alone would have marked a lawyer as possessing a degree of erudition (though Norman French at the English bar plummeted in the second half of the fourteenth century). But Latin as a requirement vanished from the North American scene a century ago, and nothing in particular has replaced it. Nowadays most lawyers can't write a decent paragraph in English, never mind Latin.
As for intellectuals, they're about as rare at the bar as hen's teeth—and no more common among scam-professors. At my élite law school, a professor and I counted on surprisingly few fingers the professors who could be called intellectuals even out of courtesy.
There certainly are nurses, plumbers, electricians and others who are intelligent, even intellectual. It's unfortunate that these worthy professions have been maligned as mindless manual labor. I'm fond of nurses; I don't like lawyers.
I think lawyers are probably smarter than the average bear, but that doesn't mean they're all that smart. Intelligence is relative, and so we have to look at what it truly means to be of average intelligence.
DeleteTake the fleisch-kincaid readability scale, for example, which many governments use to try and make official notices understandable and which many marketers use to help their message get across. According to the research that was used to create that stuff, the average US adult reads at roughly the 8th grade level and has difficulty understanding anything more complex than that.
Let's think about that. The average American adult cannot even read at a high school level. So I guess relative to that, someone who can manage to finish a BA and a JD (even if both degrees are from toilets) is probably pretty darn smart relative to the true average, sad as that may be.
What counts as "eighth-grade level" also seems to be changing, for the worse. When Old Guy was in school, mastery of the multiplication table (sometimes up to 12×12) occurred in the third grade. Now it seldom occurs at all.
DeleteHere's the reality: many of us attend law school because it's the path of least resistance. It beats being unemployed, it sounds good, and it provides three additional years to contemplate what to do when you grow up.
DeleteAnd yes, being a nurse or electrician or whatever is a great idea, but here's the problem: those things take, you know, actual work and effort. If you've skated through college as I did, studiously avoiding anything requiring the least bit of exertion, you can't be a nurse or electrician or whatever. I mean, nurses take science classes and electricians need to know math; godforbid a liberal artist like myself should deal with that sort of thing. You'll get your worthless BA and be qualified for nothing in the real world.
Who's fault-well, mine of course. But fully 1/2(and some near 100%) of toilet law schools are attended by people with no job prospects who are simply trying to avoid the future.
Law was the original subject of Western universities. Now it's a sick joke of a subject, turned into a pretentious hackademic farce about Open Roads and Hip-Hop and other pseudo-intellectual tripe, with the so-called students drawn largely from the semiliterate.
DeleteI suppose that this is what happened in the US:
In the early years of the twentieth century, most lawyers had no degree of any kind. Professionalism led to the institution of formal training, with both a bachelor's degree (any major) and a law degree. Law, after all, was a learnèd profession—the original learnèd profession, indeed.
But law, unlike medicine or engineering, didn't require particular knowledge of anything. There was no need to demand prerequisite courses. And since a bachelor's degree really meant something a time when only about 15% of the population completed high school, it was a sufficient requirement for admission to law school.
Fast-forward a hundred years, and still only a bachelor's degree is needed—except that now that bachelor's degree is worth less than the high-school diploma of 1920.
To restore the balance of yesteryear, we should perhaps require for admission to law school some exams in the integral calculus and Latin prose composition.
May this site never end.
Delete"Law was the original subject of Western universities."
DeleteYes - law and theology. And the trivium and quadrivium basically qualified someone for either. Martin Luther's father wanted his son to become a lawyer. He opted for theology.
Oh - and 3,978?
I just made up an arbitrary Roman numeral. There's no significance to it.
DeletePetrarch's father forced him into law. He quickly gave up.
Health care is big now that the Baby Boomers, the largest generation in history, have reached retirement age and need lots of health care.
ReplyDeleteYeah pretty much. I honestly don't know of any other field besides healthcare right now where someone can, by sole virtue of acquiring an academic credential and the government license it leads to, put themselves in a position where demand exceeds supply pretty much anywhere you look geographically.
DeleteThat is exactly correct, and that is why smart, serious people who want to work go into these hot fields with lots of good jobs, and dummies who watched too many episodes of Law & Order go to law school. As a practicing attorney, the whole thing disturbs me tremendously. The Bar Pass rate keeps dropping, year after year, and more and more dummies, many of whom had no business setting foot on a college campus, let alone a graduate school, flood into the marketplace. Where I practice, "Panel Attorneys" for the Public Defender's Office are paid $50 per hour, pre tax, with limited hours allowed per case. Meanwhile, court interpreters are paid as high as $90 per hour, depending on what languages they are proficient in. It is insane. It would be like going into a Doctor's Office where the janitor is cleaning the building is paid more than the MD. This leads to bad lawyering, unhappy judges, and clients getting terrible outcomes in their cases.
DeleteWhy, didn't you know that janitors and switchboard operators at certain courthouses make more than the lawyers who work there? You must not have read this eight-year-old article by Old Guy:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/06/jd-disadvantage-make-less-than-janitor.html
I'd also like to mention that many Court Reporters make more than the judges. My partner of many years was a court reporter and I was surprised to learn how much they made. In audition to a nice salary, they sell the transcripts of the day's proceedings to both plaintiffs and defendants should either side request a transcript for appeals. You could also work in the private sector taking depositions at law firms. If you're entrepreneurial, you could start your own agency. It takes about two years at a special school to learn how to operate the machine. It's quite a racket; but I'm not sure how much longer it will last given advances in technology.
DeletePerhaps technology will displace court reporting, but that day is not here yet. Pen-written shorthand, once common in courtrooms, barely survives today; Old Guy still uses it, just for personal convenience (he doesn't dip into the boss's office in a demure skirt and take a letter).
DeleteOld Guy's vocabulary can throw court reporters for a loop; how machines might fare is hard to imagine.
Vocabulary is pretty much irrelevant. Shorthand systems are phonetic. It's not spelling, it's sound.
DeleteShorthand must still be transcribed into the orthodox orthography.
DeleteI've seen loads of strange errors in my transcripts. Sometimes I make an extra copy and write in the margin what I probably said.
One might expect a court reporter to distinguish "liable" and "libel", but frequently those come out wrong in transcripts.
The job may pay well, but it isn't always done well.
DeleteTrue story: Got a transcript from a motions hearing; as I reviewed it, I noticed that I was mis-identified in every single instance. So I call the court reporter, and she admitted that as she was recording, she wasn't listening as closely as she should have and just took a quick look over at counsel table and saw a balding old white guy so she id'd him as Attorney X even though it was me, Attorney Y. A humbling experience to learn that us old white guys all look alike.
But this could be headed towards a political head. As you said the Boomers keep coming and need lots of health care. And Medicare as a percentage of coverage keeps going up and the federal budget and the deficits to pay for it. What happens when the federal govt can no longer sell its debt? Will the current workforce tolerate the huge tax increases necessary to pay for the infirm Boomers? If you are old, stay healthy my friend.
DeletePaying for it will indeed be a big problem. So will finding enough workers to attend to a bloated population of old Boomers. Already South Korea knows that it's in deep shit, with a fertility rate below 0.8 children per woman and a policy hostile to immigration.
Delete8:58. I am persuaded by your need for a comfortable life. Just loaded my revolver. Thanks for giving me a bona fide reason to die so you can enjoy a more comfortable life (that I paid for).
Delete2:34 this is why I usually push back on boomer hate when it is directed against individual boomers, as opposed to a broad statistical or demographic issue.
DeleteUnless the boomer is telling you to pay your college tuition out of pocket with a summer job or something incredibly out of touch like that, they are not the problem on an individual level. They're just a generational cohort that TENDED to benefit from a post WW2 economic boom that brought things like cheap tuition, more and better blue collar opportunities, and cheaper housing. But you don't know if any given individual saw all those benefits in the same way, many still led hard lives. And yeah, the demographic realities are now leading to an imbalance between those paying in and those receiving benefits from things like social security and medicare. But we must also remember that they EARNED those benefits. So while we must find a way to keep the same promise to the generations paying in now, it can't come at the price of what the current beneficiaries earned either. And there are ways to do that without raising the retirement age, like scrapping the earnings cap on SS tax.
So, I say, gripe all you want about boomers as a group. But don't attack individual members of that group just for being boomers unless they give you a damn good reason to do so, like if they start lecturing you about bootstraps or whatever.
In my state, courts always just make a recording of proceedings unless someone requests a court reporter, but the court has discretion to deny that request and tell you to supply your own if you want unless it is a criminal case and the defendant has waived speedy trial. The only time it is automatically and always a court reporter is a death penalty case. So for appeals you get the CD, take it to a reporter and have them transcribe it off the audio recording.
ReplyDeleteTranscripts prepared from audio recordings usually come back with [unintelligible] or [inaudble] in various places on the transcript. If an appeals court thinks any of those inaudible parts are important enough to mean they don't have an adequate record, they will order a new trial.
If that's not an outcome you want to risk, better ask for a court reporter and supply one on your own dime if the request gets denied. But replacing it with speech recognition software? Yikes. If a human can't decipher something when listening to a recording of it later, odds are a machine trying to understand the speech would do even worse.
I've always understood a live reporter produces a superior transcript.
DeleteWhile it is perfectly true that US News & World Report is posting fake salary numbers, here is the other thing: anyone who says it's a good idea to go to law school "because it says so in a magazine" is inherently stupid. Trust me, as a lawyer with decades of experience, there are an awful lot of dummies out there, and separating dummies from their money is a great American tradition, championed by P.T. Barnum ("there's a sucker born every minute") and many like him. While I have no problem, none at all, with profiting from people who make big mistakes, get caught, get arrested etc., the though of gullible, low-IQ going to law school--must be true, says so in a Magazine!--disturbs me greatly. I went to a law school that rejected about 80 percent of its applicants. The smartest group of people I have ever met, worked, and studied with in my life were fellow students, and yes, Law Schol Professors. They were not all honest, or ethical, but they did all have very high college GPA's and LSAT scores, and they weren't dummies. Oh, the folks I went to law school with--if the job market back then was what it is today, they would drop out weeks after starting. They were way too smart and savvy to spend three years of their lives, and tens of thousands of dollars, on a bet that wouldn't pay off. Everyone I graduated with found work either in school or shortly after graduation, and I mean everyone, real jobs working as lawyers (some very well paid, some poorly paid, and lots in the middle.)
ReplyDeleteOG-Today the Wall Street Journal, in an effort to sell more subscriptions, published ITS version of college rankings. In large part, these rankings are very bit as nonsensical and non-objective(20% is given for "learning environment") as all the others. And no doubt, these rankings will be quoted again and again-after all, it's the WSJ.
ReplyDeleteSo in addition to law school, we need the OG College Rankings Index; everybody else is doing it, so why not? Yours might actually make some sense.
It says they "emphasize how much a college improves its students’ chances of graduating on time, and how much it boosts the salaries they earn after graduation."
DeleteIn other words, they're coming up with a formula that, unlike USNWR, tries to ignore stuff like selectivity and reputation and yet..Well, it's six of one and half-dozen of the other. The most selective schools still come out on top. Maybe in a slightly different order here or there but it really doesn't matter how you slice it, the bottom line is the same.
Selective employers prefer selective schools and they don't much care what you actually learned there. Attempts to re-rank based on something other than prestige only end up proving the null hypothesis, which incidentally is also something any damn fool knows and which, given the way in which prestige is generally cemented across hundreds of years, never changes in any way that would necessitate annual re-ranking.