I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.
An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
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Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#62I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.
1947 hours ?!? 1947/8 = 243,3 days or 48,6 weeks ..
What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere else with some adaptations ?
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#63I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.
1947 hours ?!? 1947/8 = 243,3 days or 48,6 weeks .. What exactly took him so long ? Wasn't it mostly a copy paste from somewhere else with some adaptations ?
OMG, I haven't paid him that much. I mean his lifetime earnings on upwork. I paid him for a total of a few hours. That's all I needed.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#64That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?
Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.
I know a few people who still do "box moving jobs", and who are on good pay. But like you point out, I can't see it lasting.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#65Lawyer and part-time adjunct law professor [0] here. In terms of root-cause analysis, some of the comments to the NY Times article are thought-provoking --- they suggest that perhaps the urge for prestige and income, on the part of both students and schools , resulted in an upward ratchet for law-faculty salaries and thus for law-school costs, resulting eventually in a mismatch with market realities. For example (all…
The prestige angle is really important as a factor in why people go to law school.
I know parents who have worked every hour God gives so their son or daughter can be a lawyer - they see it as a route for their kids into the middle class. It's a shame, I feel the legal education system is benefiting from their ignorance of how bad it is out there for graduating lawyers.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#66That was such a frustrating article. I kept reading anecdote after anecdote hoping to find out why the American economy needs fewer lawyers than it used to. They never explained it. Is it a software automation thing?
Software automation is purely responsible for the automation of a legal sub-industry: discovery. The most common interchange format for paperwork is TIFF scans and actual paper. A significant cost in litigation work was paying a small army of associate lawyers to manually read through this mountain of paperwork to find information relevant to the case.
OCR got good enough fast enough that within a single generation, this sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification.
This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade.
I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene.
I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#67Why 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-$700/hour that other lawyers demand. Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by op…
> It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours. That's approximately like saying you could hire a couple of broke developers to build a software package upon which much of your company's success will depend. Both the 10X-productivity phenomenon [0] and the FizzBuzz Problem [1] can show up in law just as much…
There are many more broke lawyers than broke developers.
(But do think you're right that they're not the bargain they already to be.)
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#68When I went to university (sometime in the 18th Century) the idea was not vocational training but "learning to think" - at least that's what I was told. Most of my courses had underlying principles that if had attended lectures or worked hard I probably would have picked up. And I would assume the same is true of a top law degree - you may not be a lawyer, but fast thinking hard working articulate graduates are valua…
The issue is those graduates aren't able to pay back their loans
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
lucrative is also a relative term I'm familiar with the sum($)/sum(hours) =< minimum wage arguments. We're also talking about the top 1% of 1% of wage earners in their age bracket. You might be able to get there via other means with better quality-of-life, but by all means -- absolute or relative -- $160K/year base + bonus is lucrative.
There is no way that $195k ($180k + $15k) is the top 1bps of wage earners at 26. That's pretty comparable to, if not less than, what you could expect in tech at that age. This is ignoring finance, small business owners, etc.
Most tech people make less than 100k.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#70It seems that the story is a that a once upwards spiral is now spiraling downwards, and people and institutions must adjust. At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off. Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting…
And this is what's wrong with the law profession generally. It's seen as "lucrative" instead of as "a calling." No modern law school will ever create an Oliver Wendell Holmes or inspire a fictional Atticus Finch.