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Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

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Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#81

Who has switched from Software Engineering to Law? I'm considering it because of the lack of women in software engineering, and the multitudes in Law.

The job market in Law is far worse than most people think. Make sure you do some serious research before you consider switching.

It's easy to end up six figures in debt with no decent job prospects.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#82
post #18

While the American Bar Association certainly dose not use violence the whole system stinks like a protection racket. The fact they pushed states to enact a form regulatory capture is pretty messed up. Then add the fact apprenticeships are not the norm so these lawyers are not making as much. Overall, it's quite silly and sad.

Yes it's terrible the ABA has created a system that rigorously weeds out unqualified individuals, polices it's professional members ethics and uses education and testing to ensure all lawyers have a solid baseline education. Terrible! I wish software engineerers had an actual equivalent to the ABA, and no the ACM doesn't count.

There's a software engineering PE exam now, fwiw. I don't know anyone who's taken it though. I took the computer engineering exam the year before the SE exam was offered; I would imagine the two have a lot of overlap.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a prosecutor's job to get someone convicted. So, given they succeeded, why do you consider them incompetent? Perhaps the innocent man's own lawyer (defender) was incompetent?

> It's a prosecutor's job to get someone convicted. It's their job to seek justice. May seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's a crucial one. http://www.henrycty.com/Departments/States-Attorney/The-Role... https://sidebarsblog.com/prosecutorial-misconduct-spiderman-...

Is there a metric for justice? I assume convictions are easier to measure, so that's what prosecutors want on their CV.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#84

I come from a family with several California lawyers (I am a lawyer as well) and see this transition from apprenticeship to law school in my family. My great, great uncle was a lawyer and a judge in a small town in the Bay Area. He never went to law school. His nephew, my grandfather, went to law school, but only needed a 2 year college degree to attend law school. He became the judge in the town after his uncle reti…

Thanks for the insightful comment.

I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has strict rules about that stuff because they have been, and still are, abused (see the entertainment industry).

Overall though, whether lawyers or other professions, our move away from apprenticeships and other sorts of on the job training or investment in employees has most likely been detrimental. When you read complaints about us Millenials job hopping and 'having no loyalty' a quick peek behind the curtain should reveal that it's not only economic (esp. given student debts) but you learn rapidly how merciless companies can be.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#85
post #84

I come from a family with several California lawyers (I am a lawyer as well) and see this transition from apprenticeship to law school in my family. My great, great uncle was a lawyer and a judge in a small town in the Bay Area. He never went to law school. His nephew, my grandfather, went to law school, but only needed a 2 year college degree to attend law school. He became the judge in the town after his uncle reti…

Thanks for the insightful comment. I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has…

On internships, there are different contexts. One can clerk at a law firm during law school and be paid for it and a starting attorney at a firm is often arguably paid more than they are worth making them akin to an intern (the firm is investing in cultivating future attorneys for their firm). These are the opportunities I am suggesting are shrinking dramatically, but still exist. The intern context I’m speaking about is in the context of small firms such as my 6 partner transactional firm. California sets out a set of requirements for a unpaid internships to be legal. Essentially, it must be an educational experience where the intern is not really engaged in productive work for the benefit of the business. Our firm is not in the position to create an educational experience for an intern without tangible benefit to the firm. At the same time, the services they might provide to our firm are not important enough to us to merit paying them even the minimum wage (plus deal with other employer hassles and risk). Transactional work (e.g. negotiating a SaaS agreement) is particularly challenging in this regard because it doesn’t require much low-level work as compared to litigation or M&A work. All of that said, I’d be happy to mentor a new attorney in negotiating and drafting commercial agreements in exchange for them say, organizing my forms library. I believe that this would be a mutually beneficial arrangement and I don’t think there is much likelihood of abuse. New attorneys are capable of evaluating the benefits of this arrangement and leaving if it doesn’t work out. Entertainment is a peculiar example where there is unusual desperation to get into the industry and unusual concentration of power in individuals in the industry (and many egos and *holes). I’ve heard of production companies where the interns not only didn’t get paid, but had to pay the company e.g. $30k. I’m sure there are industries where these unpaid internship restrictions provide some important protections and I’ve no illusions about businesses’ capacity to take advantage of people, but in my context, I think it’s preventing what would be a useful arrangement to help address a critical need.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#86
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the insightful comment. I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has…

On internships, there are different contexts. One can clerk at a law firm during law school and be paid for it and a starting attorney at a firm is often arguably paid more than they are worth making them akin to an intern (the firm is investing in cultivating future attorneys for their firm). These are the opportunities I am suggesting are shrinking dramatically, but still exist. The intern context I’m speaking abou…

That makes more sense now given the specific context of law. I guess it's a field most that us non-lawyers are unaware of in terms of how it operates internally. Thank you for clearing it up!

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#87

I come from a family with several California lawyers (I am a lawyer as well) and see this transition from apprenticeship to law school in my family. My great, great uncle was a lawyer and a judge in a small town in the Bay Area. He never went to law school. His nephew, my grandfather, went to law school, but only needed a 2 year college degree to attend law school. He became the judge in the town after his uncle reti…

[deleted]

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#88
post #67
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is Mike Ross? When searching such a common name (at least it sounds common to me, a non-native speaker), I see a politician, someone who got capital punishment, and a bunch of other people. Adding lawyer to the query doesn't seem to help.

> Adding lawyer to the query doesn't seem to help. Maybe it's your search engine that's to blame? In Google the whole first page if full of relevant results when searching for either Mike Ross and Mike Ross lawyer.

Maybe I wasn't looking for a TV show but for a Wikipedia article on a lawyer. Thanks to another comment I know now.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#89
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the insightful comment. I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has…

On internships, there are different contexts. One can clerk at a law firm during law school and be paid for it and a starting attorney at a firm is often arguably paid more than they are worth making them akin to an intern (the firm is investing in cultivating future attorneys for their firm). These are the opportunities I am suggesting are shrinking dramatically, but still exist. The intern context I’m speaking abou…

[deleted]

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#90
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawyers currently have one of the most bi-modal salary distributions of any profession. I understand what you're saying but I feel like the top 50 would be occupied by people in various types of art, food preparation/serving, personal care/service, and writing. It would probably be top 3 easily for the amount of debt most of the lawyers go into for their degree(which seems to be the issue you are getting at anyways…

Income in those professions is not bimodal; it follows a power law. The frequency distribution of income for US lawyers has two clear modes (local maxima) at around $50,000 and $160,000 [1], meaning that roughly the same number of lawyers earn each of those salaries. Put another way, a randomly-selected US lawyer is more likely to earn $160,000 than the much lower mean US lawyer salary. [1]: https://economix.blogs.ny…

I literally posted a bls link where they discussed how bimodal at least a couple of those types jobs are. Did you bother to ctrl+F "bimodal" in that link? Furthermore upon a quick glance at your source, nothing in your source seems to discuss any of the jobs I had mentioned. Were you hoping your gut feeling was evidence enough?
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