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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

#101

Post by ajkjk »

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 pretty common. Doctors don't really learn to be doctors in any sort of independent way until after their residencies. Certainly not from med school alone.

And I can attest that as an entry-level engineer with a CS degree, I was a totally useless person to assign a project to. It was several years before I could be handed something and expect to do it well at an enterprise level.

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

#102

Post by chii »

taxicabjesus wrote: post #12
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…

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 gra…

> talked into have his pacemaker replaced

i don't want to sound callice, but it seems like the "sales person" was trying to get more sales (as they are wont to do). A car sales man would talk you into replacing the car you don't need to replace because that's his job.

It's up to the consumer to be clear about rejecting, and if an elderly isn't of sound mind to do so properly, their relatives should've been there to do the thinking on their behalf.

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

#103

Post by chii »

gumby wrote: post #54
davnn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine?

> Don't you think AI will have a big influence in the future of medicine? People have been hoping so since the 70s and haven't made any progress. Having worked in both fields I realize that 1. Medicine as a discipline is still poorly understood so isn't really amenable to that many automated tasks and 2. Medicine, as a social phenomenon is structured such that automation won't itself reduce costs.

lately, a lot of GP seems to be relying on an expert system to help diagnose/work out treatments for things. AI, as populeraized in hollywood pop culture, seems to only include things like human intelligence, where as in reality, AI encompasses things like expert systems, which is already very common.

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

#104

Post by sandworm101 »

tnecniv wrote: post #100
sandworm101 wrote: post #28

Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so everything else, everything useful, wa…

What do you define as useful? Is a philosophy degree useful? They score among the highest on the LSAT.

The LSAT is a reading test. Philosophy majors do well because they are good readers, not because of any knowledge they picked up. You can be a good reader with other degrees too. The LSAT maps well onto law school performance because law school is also much about reading.

Want to get a job as a lawyer, start with a compsci, biotech or engineering-related degree. But having some professional life experience also counts. Nobody wants to get legal advice from someone who doesn't have any realworld experience.

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

#105

Post by chii »

yourapostasy wrote: post #66
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?

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 video effectively explains your point very succintly and well! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

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

#106

Post by rhino369 »

yourapostasy wrote: post #66
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?

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 offices great many many many more files than pre digital offices.

OCR also just made the industry bigger. Because you could just ask for any email the company had that had specific key words. Sounds more efficient right? Wrong. The number of false positives is insane. Before OCR, judges would never make you read through every email in a company.

Machine learning (called predictive coding in the legal industry) is taking some jobs. But I've heard you need half a million documents to train the program. But you still need someone to do a second level review. It's incredibly useful but only on huge projects.

The bigger reason for job losses is that contractors now operate overseas. Indian document reviewers are cheap.

I bet the discovery industry is still probably 5x bigger than it was in 1980.

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

#107

Post by evanpw »

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.

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; 0.01% is 400 people)

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-top-... (for 27-31, 1% = $135k, 0.1% = $300k)

[3] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/ ($200k is within the top 1% for 26-year-olds)

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

#108

Post by anoonmoose »

tnecniv wrote: post #100
sandworm101 wrote: post #28

Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so everything else, everything useful, wa…

What do you define as useful? Is a philosophy degree useful? They score among the highest on the LSAT.

A philosophy degree seems to only be useful with regards to getting a law degree...since we're in the comments on an article about how a law degree isn't as useful as it used to be, I think you could probably toss "not useful" on it.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #28

Blame the schools if you want, but I went to law school in the US and I blame the students. Once upon a time the typical law student had a useful undergrad degree. The JD was something valuable over and above the undergrad. But today's typical law student has spent the last four or five years carefully honing their undergrad to maximize GPA. Law school was always the goal and so everything else, everything useful, wa…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by punctilio »

rashkov wrote: post #95
Snackchez wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true: many lawyers work entire careers in the human rights field. Many modern law schools have produced these types of lawyers. It's just not as glamorous as what people have in mind for a lawyer, and thus not as publicized.

Yes, but the debt required to do that kind of work is completely unsustainable. 150-200k debt to service on a 60k salary working in human rights. Only with family help or huge sacrifice

A small number of law schools have debt-forgiveness programs for graduates who take low-paying public-service jobs.
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