An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.

Why are lawsuits so expensive if there are so many broke lawyers aching for a job? It seems like a company could pay them a middling salary of $70k/year to handle ongoing lawsuits, rather than the $300-$700/hour that other lawyers demand.

Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just need someone to do the paperwork.

It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours.

I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.

I agree, but I'd add that the amount of money people are willing to pay for that quality will fall dramatically if technology provides a cheap alternative. The cost of education will have to fall in accordance.

A lot of what's been going on at the higher end of the legal services industry is greater cost control by clients. Expensive, elite law firms had a long run in which they were able to justify heavy pyramid-like staffing of matters based on a pure billable hour model. Those days are basically over (though major litigation work has probably changed the least in this respect). That change has had some effects on the amount of hiring done by the elite firms and also has had some effect on salary structure. Pressure at the more elite end of the profession has ripple effects downward to the less elite end.

One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era."

I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s.

In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.

lucrative is also a relative term, since they are often working 2000 billable hours a year (which, depending on type of work/attorney, may be 60% to 90% of actual hours worked per year)

In biglaw, i have friends who easily work 2500-3000 hours a year to make their billable hours requirement. So these salaries are not exact as great as one would think anyway