D'Juhn Keep on 2/8/2009 at 10:27

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competition :nono:

Starrfall on 2/8/2009 at 14:30

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It's so new lawyers can't say "WHY DIDN'T YOU WARN ME" to the old lawyers.

It's kind of hard to explain well but even as rbj is telling me to stay away, I have a friend who is just starting law school this year and I am horrified and astonished at how exited she is about it. She's all posting about her first law school assignment on facebook and I'm all like omfg get out before its too late.

Competition is part of it, but that also goes more to being a warning than it goes to self-preservation. I only tell people I like to stay away from law school, and (http://www.elsblog.org/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/30/nalp_bimodal.jpg) this is one of the reasons why. For a lot of people three years of more school plus then wasting three months of your life on this shitty test is NOT worth a 40k salary and 160k of debt, which is what a lot of law school grads end up with (if they're lucky enough to get a job at all these days).

edit: so in other words the competition is already there, the problem is that most incoming students don't realize it

Rug Burn Junky on 3/8/2009 at 02:38

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Yeah, Starreh already covered a lot of my reasons. It's not so much competition - I'm in a different boat than any law school student entering now - and they really have no effect on my career at this point. I've been through the young associate wringer, and have come out the other side with most of my loans paid, and with enough experience that I can have some control over my future (at least, once the economy picks up).

That salary distribution chart is pretty much common knowledge post graduation, but kids don't know that going in - they see that the average lawyer makes $2-3M more over the life of their career vs. a college grad, but don't realize that that's skewed by the guys that go to corporate jobs that they'll never have a chance at.

Really, the legal industry in the U.S. is somewhat in crisis at the moment, and law school is simply not a good investment for the majority of people that go. I was really lucky, and got in the door at probably the perfect time. When I applied to law school, tuition was in the low 20k range, and starting salaries at Biglaw firms were about 80k. That bimodal distribution had yet to really take hold

I was among the first class to get hired after the massive salary hikes started (the year I graduated, 125k was standard in NYC. Between the time I accepted my offer and my first day of work, I got $40k in raises) and one of the last classes to graduate before the tuition hikes started (tuition is now above $45k at my school - double). I got tremendously lucky, and didn't realize what kind of a bullet I dodged when I got my first job. I had to borrow the complete cost of school, but that was lower, and my Biglaw career spanned the entire boom enabling me to take a sizable chunk out of my student loans.

When I went, there was a tremendous demand for young lawyers. Every top tier school (ranked 1-50 or so) had a chance of getting you into a corporate job. At the Top 14 schools, and the top regional schools, it was a shoo-in, and down the ladder it only took a modicum of hard work, luck and decent resume in the upper percentages of your class and you could land a 6 figure job.

I turned down a scholarship at a school on the bubble in order to go to the top regional school in NYC, because I wanted to cement my employment chances - this was 1998, just before the boom. I probably didn't need that edge in hindsight. But that was only a $60k mistake for me - paying more to assure that I got the proper result - whereas now, it would be $120k more to even have a chance at that result.

Now? Only the kids at the T14 schools have a good shot, and the kids from the top regionals have a chance only if they play everything perfect. Beyond that? You're screwed.

At my last job (at a major media organization, after I left firm life), I was tasked with overseeing young contract attorneys, and it really made me pretty sick to my stomach. These kids are coming out of school with, like Starr says, $160k in debt for a $40k job, and even worse, the work that they're doing is dead end stuff that will taint their careers. These are not just kids from shitty schools. A couple went to my alma mater, and 1 was even from a top 14 school. They'll never get hired up to do corporate work, and they won't even be able to interview for entry level shitlaw jobs a year from now, because nobody is going to hire them over someone just out of school because they'll make negative assumptions about what they're willing to put up with as a young attorney.

Here's the crux of the problem. Law firms began to really operate like a business focused on the bottom line in the 90's. At the end of the day, they sell the time of their lawyers. In order to maximize their profit, they leveraged up the number of associates doing work that could be billed at exorbitant rates, keeping a relatively high ratio of associates to partners.

This created the demand for lawyers - we were, frankly, the raw materials that they sold. By doing so, they changed the nature of the game. Where-as previously, you could count on a reasonable chance at partnership someday, the sheer number of associates made it a crap shoot. It also changed the nature of the work. At most of the top firms, the work became very basic grunt work, and the young associates weren't given much responsibility. (I was lucky to make it into two elite, boutique firms. If you think of the associates at corporate firms as livestock, we were at least free-range.)

Eventually though, this model reaches a breaking point. Partners realized that you didn't need to have your top tier lawyers doing all of this work at $300/hour, there are only so many of them you can hire anyway. They started supplementing this with temp and contract attorneys who were paid minimally, and billed out at $150/hr instead.

So there's a giant pyramid of lawyers, and for a while everything works swimmingly. The problem is, it relies on demand for legal work remaining constant or increasing. Most firms don't have a tremendous store of cash on hand, they operate month to month. Actually, it's even worse than that - they take out loans to make payroll during the year, and pay it back out of collections by year's end. So if there's a sudden drop in work, they've got high priced lawyers drawing salaries without justifying it, and they quickly have to pare down their rosters, and the whole pyramid comes crashing down. Which is where we stand now. The schools are still pumping out young lawyers, but the jobs just aren't there.


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That's the macro view, here's the micro one.

Beyond that, there's another reason, and this stems from my dissatisfaction with the nature of the job. The work itself, often, is interesting and stimulating, but the job, at its heart, is client service. I had a long list of clients at all of the major investment banks. I would generally deal with both the junior bankers staffed on the deal who were providing me with information I needed to draft my docs, and their bosses, the decision makers. My dissatisfaction comes from different aspects of each relationship.

With the senior guys, I could go through the reasoning for every decision, and come up with a plan of action, but at the end of the day, I was never the guy to pull the trigger. A lawyer is always an agent, not the principal actor. So I could lay everything out, but the client was always in charge.

In talking through issues, the junior guys would rely on everything I said, because I knew the deals far better than they did. I could, de facto, almost make the decisions for them. But even in spite of this perceived seniority, I was still beholden to them - if they fucked something up and it had to be fixed at 2 in the morning, I would get the call and have to go back into the office.

In short, in both cases, as a lawyer, you're ALWAYS someone's bitch: I think most of you can guess that my ego can't take the sort of sublimation necessary to do that forever. This doesn't change as you go up the ladder either - the partners had much different relationships with the clients, and obviously ran their own business as principals, but on a day to day basis, they were still at their clients' mercy, and that's quite a faustian bargain. Some people can handle that, but I don't think most law students really understand the psychic toll that that takes.

I made a conscious decision early in my career that I wasn't in it for the long haul - aiming for partner track - and was going to transition to something else for exactly that reason. A good friend of mine, who was a young associate when I was applying to law school, told me to go to business school instead and I probably should have listened to him. I want to be the Don, not the Consigliere.

d0om on 3/8/2009 at 11:15

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Well RBJ, you sound like you could do with a career as a Patent troll!

Just buy up patents which are probably junk, and go around suing people who might be infringing them! You are your own boss, you get to call the shots!

They either settle for cash, or have a long and protracted case with lots of legal bills.

Since you are representing yourself you don't need to worry about your mounting legal bills, and so the game of chicken is firmly on your side!

Of course you have to have no morals at all....

gunsmoke on 5/8/2009 at 01:59

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That is precisely why I got out of law in '07...doom and gloom from the lawyers I knew on the near future