Do movies and tv shows give the wrong impression and lure the wrong people to law degrees?
An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
81–90 of 146 posts
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#82Why 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…
I don't understand this, either. If there is a glut of lawyers, why are their rates so high?
People don't hire lawyers without real-world experience. The supply of lawyers with experience is much smaller than the supply of JDs, because there are only so many opportunities to file briefing or argue in court.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#83Why 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…
Very true. Where are the lawyers that will work for a measly $80/hr? The same amount which makes a lot of freelance programmers very happy.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#84Why 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…
This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff (litigation, big transactions). In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.
In my company the in-house counsels are in the highest salary ranges. At a law firm they would have to do sales whereas in a corporation they have a pretty stress free job from what I can observe.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#85It 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…
The size of the legal market is the same as it was in 1990, and so is law school enrollment. There was a spike in both legal demand and enrollment in the aughts, but the ratio of work to graduates isn't much different now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
What's different now is not the market. Folks at Valparaiso were never getting recruited into high-paying jobs. What's different now is the extreme amounts of debt. And that phenomenon that's not confined to law. The whole education sector is overblown by irrational pro-education rhetoric and free flowing federal money.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
2500-3000 hours billable typical result: burn-out, alcoholism, drug abuse, self destructive behaviors, infidelity.
They're talking about 2000 billable hours and 2500-3000 actual hours (50 to 60 hours a week). Of course, many engineers work similar hours, for far less than a NYC law associate.
Some engineers work that for 50k in the name of "working for a startup to be the next zucker".
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That's not how it is anymore. There's no free pass to success, no check all these boxes and then you've made it. You gotta use your brain early on, figure it out for yourself, because ultimately you're going to be the one having to live with the consequences of how you've spent your youth. To be fair, the other pillar of "expensive degree leading to lucrative, high prestige career", medicine, is still doing well. As…
Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?
Google has had a far bigger impact in medicine so far.
Of course it also means I come to a doctor with 3 self diagnoses and he yells at me and tells me to stop googling.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#88It 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…
The distribution of salaries in law is bimodal. Lawyers at the school mentioned have never commanded big law levels of compensation. The information is readily available, and it is why I chose not to attend a top 20 law school in 2007.
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny because you look at these figures, you look at real estate prices, you look at stock prices, and you think, wait we are in a double digit inflationary environment! Actually what is inflationary is the activities of the middle/upper-middle class (college, housing, stocks, etc), which are of course underrepresented in the CPI indices. The combination of the never ending debt bubble and quantitative easing ha…
A 25% increase in 10 years is not double digit inflation / year. It's around 2% / year.
Those figures were already adjusted for inflation (it says 2016 dollars)
Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
#90Why 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…
[deleted]