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An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

nytimes.com

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Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#111

Post by [deleted] »

chii wrote: post #99
rhino369 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers out of law school have a pretty hard time practicing on their own. A lot of these broke lawyers never get a substantive job and never really become lawyers. You can hire these people but you need someone to manage and train them. You need an expert. The cheaper fields of law pretty much do that. Personal injury, traffic and dui, immigration, insurance defense etc. will take broke lawyers and pay them shit. Th…

> you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore. so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.

[deleted]

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#112

Post by vostok »

evanpw wrote: post #107
vostok wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not that relevant to the argument, but you're right that the numbers are way off. For a 26-year-old, $200k is in the top 1%, but probably not in the top 0.1% (and definitely not top 0.01%). I don't know anything about tech salaries, but there are lots of 26-year-olds making that much in finance (total comp, not salary). [1] http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf (roughly 4M 26-year-olds in the US; 0…

I think it is relevant because I would be willing to take a quality of life hit to be in the "top 1% of 1%" that I wouldn't take to make $200k. I make more than $200k, but I suspect that I'm nowhere close to the top 1 bps.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#113

Post by punctilio »

chii wrote: post #99
rhino369 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers out of law school have a pretty hard time practicing on their own. A lot of these broke lawyers never get a substantive job and never really become lawyers. You can hire these people but you need someone to manage and train them. You need an expert. The cheaper fields of law pretty much do that. Personal injury, traffic and dui, immigration, insurance defense etc. will take broke lawyers and pay them shit. Th…

> you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore. so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.

That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice.

I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#114

Post by wallflower »

My friends who went to law school said that the terms 1L/2L/3L are fixed in stone. It is impossible to take courses in an accelerated manner to graduate in 2 years instead of 3 years. Why? Because the law school and bar association make it that way. Milk the most tuition money out of the students.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#115

Post by rhino369 »

chii wrote: post #99
rhino369 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers out of law school have a pretty hard time practicing on their own. A lot of these broke lawyers never get a substantive job and never really become lawyers. You can hire these people but you need someone to manage and train them. You need an expert. The cheaper fields of law pretty much do that. Personal injury, traffic and dui, immigration, insurance defense etc. will take broke lawyers and pay them shit. Th…

> you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore. so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.

Sure. Most degrees don't give you pratical skills, but law is particularly egregious. Law schools go almost out of their way to teach impractical stuff. The only writing class usually teaches appellate writing. Total joke.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#116

Post by nommm-nommm »

vostok wrote: post #40
caminante wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

>That's pretty comparable to, if not less than, what you could expect in tech at that age

Only in big "tech" cities. This article is about someone in Indiana.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#117

Post by Pxtl »

mcguire wrote: post #79

The author has buried the lead: " “People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.” " Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything else is good, why would anyone re…

Lede. Yeah, it's one of those words.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#119

Post by punctilio »

wp1 wrote: post #45
MichaelBurge wrote: post #23

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 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.

Right. And there's been a trend at least over the past 10-15 years at larger companies of more work being done in-house -- the baseline, routine stuff you speak of -- rather than being outsourced to firms, another factor in the increasing pressure on the traditional big firm legal services model.

Re: An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It

#120

Post by ghaff »

rhino369 wrote: post #106
yourapostasy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Automation also caused the e-discovery field to explode In the first place. There was a brief period after explosion of email where e-discovery got huge. Before email people would mostly talk in person or on the phone. People had to review documents but it was hundreds or documents or thousands. But after email, word processing, etc, now there were tens of thousands or maybe even millions of files to search. Digital…

Essentially, better technology raises the bar.

Before the spreadsheet, one didn't run what if analyses with 100 different variables.

I've also been told that, while it's certainly true that it's easier to search for relevant cases, etc., a lot of what does is raise the expectation that you will in fact find and make use of all of the most relevant cases.

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