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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

#11

Post by davnn »

hkmurakami wrote: post #5
mevile wrote: post #2

Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they were growing up that's how you made it. 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. I think th…

>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?

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

#12

Post by taxicabjesus »

hkmurakami wrote: post #5
mevile wrote: post #2

Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they were growing up that's how you made it. 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. I think th…

>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…

Medicine has a few impossible problems.

Family practice/internal medicine is arguably one of the most important roles, but many new doctors specialize so that they can better "cash in" on their M.D. degree. It's much cheaper to be proactive than reactive, but medicine doesn't think that way.

Another problem is that Medicine spends a ton of money trying to keep old people alive for a few more days.

For example, my grandfather was somehow talked into have his pacemaker replaced a few months before his 101st birthday. There were complications, infections, etc, and my aunt had to fight to get him on hospice care. Replacing this pacemaker was a mean thing to do to an old man who'd spent years hoping to die in his sleep. It would have been kinder to have never given him the pacemaker in the first place. He would've passed away 10 years earlier, but those last 10 years were of little value to him.

Obamacare has only made "paying the bill" for medicine even more problematic.

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

#13

Post by danieltillett »

bbcbasic wrote: post #7
gozur88 wrote: post #3

The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.

What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by paralegal? Fewer court cases?

Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.

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

#14

Post by godzillabrennus »

davnn wrote: post #11
hkmurakami wrote: post #5

Earlier 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?

Yes in diagnostics but for research social innovations will be far more impactful.

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

#15

Post by godzillabrennus »

bbcbasic wrote: post #7
gozur88 wrote: post #3

The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.

What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by paralegal? Fewer court cases?

Mostly automation. E-Discovery companies have dramatically reduced the cost for discovery. It used to require a room full of lawyers to discover evidence but now it is possible to have one person in a room full of computers to automate 10 such cases.

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

#16

Post by hibikir »

guelo wrote: post #9

That 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?

At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do.

There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible.

There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.

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

#17

Post by Animats »

danieltillett wrote: post #13
bbcbasic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the cause of this? Computer automation? More work can be done by paralegal? Fewer court cases?

Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.

The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.

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

#18

Post by nikanj »

guelo wrote: post #9

That 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?

Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.

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

#19

Post by damon_c »

guelo wrote: post #9

That 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.

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

#20

Post by wpietri »

hkmurakami wrote: post #4

It 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…

One thing I think is interesting here is the uncontrolled growth in costs. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted the average private-school law tuition [1]:

  All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars:

  1956:  $4,178
  1974: $11,232
  1985: $16,803
  1995: $26,480
  2005: $35,550
  2015: $45,123
That just blows me away.

[1] http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/06/end-game

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