About
An industry, not a profession. That’s our motto here at Big Debt, Small Law. What legal practice has been morphing into for the past 20 years certainly bears little resemblance to the halcyon “profession of ideals” that Webster, Lincoln, and Darrow once practiced. Rather, it’s degenerated into a money-grubbing, paper-churning farce, where the “winners” walk away with millions and the “losers” are packed elbow-to-elbow in sunless boiler rooms and forced to work sweatshop hours for slave wages, under conditions that often shock the conscience. We here feel that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and aim to shine our spotlight on the festering petri-dish that this former profession has lately become. Without further adieu:
Much noise is made about “ethics” in the hallowed halls of legal academia. All ABA schools require mandatory classes in professional responsibility, empower “honor councils” of fellow students, and even devote an entire examination (the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam) to the subject. A hapless One L caught writing 0.0009 seconds after time is called may be summarily hauled before a dean, dressed down, and have permanent doubt cast upon their moral fitness for entry into this exalted industry. Some even need to retain lawyers to “explain” these heinous transgressions to the Character and Fitness Committees of their respective state bars three years hence.
Yet is seems that the law schools themselves may need a refresher course when it comes to ethics and honesty. That same crowned dean who sits regally in judgment of his students is held to a far different standard in the discharge of his own duties. He can supply patently false employment statistics to US News and molest salary data like a sleep-over party at the old Neverland Ranch, yet encounter nary a peep of admonition from his peers. He may install recent grads in temp assignments to fudge employment stats, hound the few “success stories” for salary data while blindly ignoring the struggling also-rans, and publish slick admissions brochures that brazenly broadcast these self-serving lies. The stakes are high, after all: a rise of a few rankings slots in US News can mean big bonus bucks for the perpetrators of this fraud and a lifetime of crushing debt for the victims of same.
This double standard is not only the height of hypocrisy; it is downright wrong. If publicly traded companies engaged in the type of statistical chicanery and elastic truth-stretching that the legal education racket routinely engages in, newspapers would scream with the scandal. Heads would roll. Lest we forget, young people are borrowing well into six-figures of non-dischargeable debt based on patently bogus statistics and purely false promises. As we write, third and fourth tier law schools regularly list “average” starting salaries in the mid 80s, and report employment numbers that bear scant relationship to reality. Law student lemmings are led down the Yellow Brick Road of this fantasy-plagued scam, only to find the sorcerer at the end is a grizzled old clown behind a thin curtain, working some smoke and mirrors. Today’s law school deans are the modern day “Wizards of Oz.” They know full well (perhaps better than anyone) the gruesome market and long-shot odds that their grads will soon face, yet allow personal greed to trump all tenets of honesty and fair disclosure. And no, you can’t get away with blaming the “recession” for the struggles of your grads. Not here. We graduated in 2005, at the zenith of American economic hegemony, and faced a market not significantly different from what exists today. The truth is this: Small firms in most US markets pay south of 50 K, offer minimal (if any) health benefits, and provide baptism by fire “training” at the expense of clients who can ill afford it. A brief Digression:
I’m not just a click monkey or self-entitled malcontent. No, I haven’t spent my entire legal career, as it were, in the sub-basements of Biglaw. In fact, I worked sixty-hour weeks for two years as an associate at one of the most infamous personal-injury boiler rooms on the island of Manhattan, out there daily in the trenches of “practice.” My starting salary from a solid 2nd tier school, top 1/3 of the class (and top 15% after first year) was a whopping 45 K, with a Third World health plan to which I contributed $200 a month. I have taken and defended over 200 depositions, picked 14 juries first-chair (and taken two of these turds thru to verdict by myself with one 21 K win), and appeared in NYC Supreme and Civil Courts to argue countless motions and other papers more times than I can count. One would think that this “experience” would have some serious value, right?
Dead wrong. First off, the “trial experience” scam. For starters, about 0.0000001% of shitlaw fender-bender cases ever get as far as trial. Under NY’s tough “threshold” law, most accident lawsuits are dismissed outright for failure to state a “serious injury” under NY Insurance Law 5101(d). The few “winners” with significant injuries (broken bones, paralysis, etc) usually settle long before trial since most of the time the insurance policies are but a mere pittance (25 K state minimum or less). Much is read about 18 million dollar verdicts, and pre-law lemmings get excited doing the math, but the harsh reality is that you can’t take what folks don’t have. Your client could have a broken neck with halo traction and spinal fusion surgery, but if the car that struck him carried a 25 K policy with Allstate and the defendant is a Haitian cabdriver who lives in a cardboard box, I wish you good luck in collecting said judgment. And even getting access to these gutter cases is tough: most rinky-dink PI lawyers engage in criminal “kickback” arrangements where the case is referred by a “medical mill” that staged said accident and then engaged in bogus treatment to rip off the no-fault system before selling the PI lawyer the “injury” part of the case on a points-kickback system. You won’t learn this in One L torts, but after about five minutes in actual practice it will all start to make sense. The tiny handful of decent, legitimate cases usually go to firms with six-figure advertising budgets, not struggling recent grads. Sadly, most new “shingle hangers” will be quickly hung out to dry.
I’m also sick of hearing all the lectures about “building experience” in these 45 K gutter jobs. News bulletin: my landlord doesn’t accept “experience points” in lieu of rent payments. Sallie Mae likewise deemed my experience points non-negotiable when proffered to pay my loans. So saddled with debt are today’s grads that the salaries offered by small-law are simply impossible to survive on even if one wanted to try. And the “experience” gained from shitlaw just leads to more dead-end shitlaw at miniscule salary increases. In insurance defense, one can metaphorically “lateral” from McDonald’s to Burger King, but you ain’t gonna be chef at Waldorf anytime soon. There’s an endless supply of losers with the “experience” to cut n’ paste this low-end garbage and show up in kangaroo court to bicker over these turd cases. Thus, huge firms like Sullivan can walk into the middle of a doc review project (as they did recently) and cut all the coder’s pay by $2 an hour knowing that no one will leave. There’s nowhere else to go. That $2 may not mean much to these repulsive pigs, but to many recent grads it’s an electric bill payment or student loan that now has to enter forbearance. In a 160 hour month it’s $320 before taxes, after all. Multiplied by all the coders in that sewer, the partners can treat themselves to an extra round of golf or new drapes for the mansions in Greenwich.
And trials aside, the rest of the “court appearance experience” in injury cases are a complete joke. Preliminary and status conferences are just ways to waste time, and all one does is fill out carbon-paper stips that set deposition dates and other filing deadlines. A lobotomized circus chimp could do as well as most newbie law grads in this endeavor. One notorious insurance defense firm actually sent one of those tuxedo-clad monkeys that you can rent for kid’s birthday parties to a status conference once on a trip and fall matter. The judge didn’t even notice as the puckish primate honked his tin horn and hurled feces at the other shit-lawyers in the bullpen. I think the little fellow may have been a NYLS grad, but I’m not positive. Last I saw of him he was supplementing his pathetic insurance-defense income by playing a miniature accordion in the L train station on First Avenue.
As evidenced by the above, that’s why most personal injury & insurance defense mills in NYC pay 40 K or less to new grads (and the rest just cheat and send secretaries or paras to court to sign the “toilet paper” stips that pass for pleadings in this gutter area of law). Go ahead and scan NYC craigslist’s “legal services” section right now and count the hordes of older lawyers begging for per-diem work at $50 an appearance. Some of them will even mow your lawn and perform other non-legal work on the side. All new grads should pay a visit to the “courtrooms” of personal injury before plunking down the seat deposit. Just swing by CCP on the first floor of King’s Supreme or the dreaded landlord-tenant part over on Livingston Street. “Lawyers” who reek of cheap booze and look like they woke up on a subway grate haggle and bicker over $125 cases and, when it gets too loud, the court officer resorts to hammering a stapler inside a metal trashcan to get everyone to quiet down. Usually the air conditioner is broken. The elevators are as packed as a Springsteen concert and contain more disease-causing microbes than a biological warfare lab. The Republic of Myanmar’s court proceedings probably unfold with more dignity and decorum than what is seen in King’s “Un-Civil” Court on a daily basis.
Here in 2009, America’s legal system is the laughingstock of the entire Western world. From the infamous McDonald’s cup of coffee case to the Sarb-Ox sideshow to the asleep at the switch SEC, no other nation subscribes to the parasitic, money-sucking, time-wasting circus that is “law” in the U.S. It’s really downright comical. An example: From my first week of law school, I’ve often dreamt of being a “fly on the wall” at a meeting of the Bluebook committee. Those august Harvard 3 L’s and the tweed jacket profs who guide them, bereft of their briar pipes thanks to politically correct “smoking bans” which they themselves have championed. One can hardly imagine the heated debates about whether to underline punctuation marks in case citations or establish the font size employed when quoting King’s Bench cases from the fourteenth century. What a “war room” it must be! These nerds make Steve Urkel look like George Clooney. Really, how could mankind possibly conceive of a more pointless, boring, and all-around worthless waste of time? And let’s not kid ourselves, folks: behind this pedantic, tedious time-wasting is the sad realization that 99.98% of this shit is just totally fucking pointless. It’s like a mania that borders on autism: one could glean as much from memorizing a White Pages phone directory a la Rain Man as studying for the MBE or reading the Bluebook.
Most hilarious is the new “Legal Rebels” campaign spawned by the American Biglaw Association (ABA). Cry me a river for the recently laid-off AmLaw crew and their well-padded “plight.” Here’s a newsflash assholes: you’re about as “rebellious” as a 19 year old lesbian women’s studies major at Barnard pedaling her bicycle to a Natalie Merchant concert. Remember the Happy Days episode when Ralph Malph borrowed Fonzie’s leather jacket to impress a chick? It didn’t work for him, did it? You were never cool and certainly never “rebels,” as evidenced by your inaugural video of a twitchy 37 year-old geek who needs a hairpiece reading his “manifesto” straight into the camera, Unabomber style. Your “rule of law” plank and its hallowed relationship to civilized society is especially side-splitting! Surely you jest? I’m sure we’d quickly revert to cave-dwelling and pissing in chamber pots without such legal chestnuts as UCC-§2-207 and ERISA and the rest of the cash-sapping, needlessly complex, paper-pushing plagues that this parasitic joke of an industry extracts from its hosts.
We here at Big Debt are launching a quiet rebellion. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, we simply “prefer not to.” We prefer not be crammed elbow to elbow in document review gulags for less money than an ex-con gets paid to stamp holes in sheet metal. We prefer not to run around toilet courts and haggle over $500 whiplash cases for 45 K a year and no health benefits. Our sole purpose is to dissuade, deter and prevent more hapless lemmings from repeating the mistake of law school. Law has no rewards. Instead of pots of gold, you’ll find only piles of shit.
Law is 4 Losers, August 2009
August 16, 2009 at 3:10 am
Send me an email. I want you as a guest writer on the Legal Satyricon.
MJRPA at ME dot com.
August 19, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Nice choice Marc. =D Can’t wait. Love your blog too.
August 18, 2009 at 12:42 am
Looks like good stuff — only thing is I CAN”T READ IT. A shame ’cause I want to – can you make the point bigger or lines double-spaced or on white background or something. Please!!!
August 18, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Look at the bottom right of your browser screen. You will see a number expressed as a percentage. Clicking on that number will change the size of the text. Have fun.
August 21, 2009 at 2:20 pm
PrinceMichael,
Or even easier, just press the Ctrl button while scrolling your mouse wheel to increase or decrease the size of text.
August 18, 2009 at 11:49 pm
[...] new site, which several ATL readers have emailed us about: Big Debt, Small Law. We reached out to Law Is 4 Losers — the angry author, who still works as a contract attorney (he just finished a New York project [...]
August 19, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Finally. Someone who isn’t afraid of speaking the truth with respect to these over-glorified contract jobs that most ambitious, big-eyed, new attorneys accept. Things are a little better in my little speck of the world, but not by much. And while it isn’t much, at least my contract gig paid significantly more than the pay that a small law firm paid me.
Looking forward to more!
August 19, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Right on brother – I went frm working for the feds to toilet law collection and made it to biglaw … law school is a total rip off. DO NOT GO TO LAW SCHOOL
August 19, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Great article! I agree that the recession excuse has no merit. Both old and new grads have been struggling for years to find suitable employment. There’s so much “competition” due to the outsourcing of legal jobs – both contract and full-time – for cheaper rates. Clients don’t want to pay an attorney $30+ hourly to review their documents when they can pay someone else $5 to do it. But, I don’t blame the clients. I blame the large law firms that started and are continuing this trend and also the ABA for turning a blind eye to the ethical issues surrounding outsourcing.
August 19, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Keep preaching the TRUTH, my friend. Someone’s got to tell it like it is.
I’ve been practicing seven years – worked both in legal Biglaw temp hell and at two-bit firms that didn’t give me medical insurance. I can’t begin to describe the depression and hopelessness I felt as I busted ass working late every day, yet still watched helplessly as my credit rating dropped. I’ve slowly crept my way up a bit salarywise over the years, though not enough to pay down my bankruptcy-proof student loans.
August 21, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Testify! I am an ‘08 SHU grad (you’re an alum, right?) admitted in NY and NJ, and I haven’t been able to find a legal position in the past year (despite graduating with honors, etc.)
Your experience actualy seems valuable to me, though. You know enough about PI to hang out a shingle, so what’s stopping you from doing it? Your scumsucking bosses obviously weren’t breaking even by paying you $45,000 a year; they were making money off your back, even on BS cases constricted by the insurance law.
You could probably net more than $45k with one fender bender a month and a few broken bone cases per year. If I knew more about the “industry” of PI I’d do just that.
Plus, at some point before you turn 50 you might catch one or two million dollar cases against a defendant who can actually satisfy a judgment.
Anyway, if you go at it solo, shoot me an email if you want an apprentice.
August 21, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Send this blog’s link to as many SH people as possible. I depsise that school and wish the lying scum who operate it all the worst. and BTW going solo in pi is very hard- the malpractice insurance alone is over 30 K a year plus office rent, etc. And the good cases are VERY few and far between.
August 22, 2009 at 1:12 am
I love you. No, seriously. I too am a grad from that criminal enterprise also known as SHU Law (‘07). And I have been temping for the past two years. My one foray into being an actual attorney was the biggest shithole of shitholes with depths of misery I had never thought possible and lasted 2 months. My first temp gig I was working at a company where every permanent employee pretended we were invisible and our workstations were in the dining room/hallway/utility closet. I was there a year and half. I have an obscene amount of debt that is nondischargable, transferable, nothing. Why is that someone who really loves shoes and racks up $30,000 in credit card debt is offered more protection than someone who was ambitious, bright, and received an education? Not only that but the level of deceit, fraud, and theft that was spun upon us all boggles my mind and I am literally paying for it with my future. P.S. Everyone needs to go to Studentloanjustice.org and sign the petition and let everyone else know about the widespread and systematic failure of the student loan system. I’m a sucker through and through.
August 22, 2009 at 3:26 am
Seton Hall is a skid mark on the underpants of the law. Have you seen their Wiki page? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seton_Hall_University_School_of_Law&oldid=306264248
August 23, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Amazing! That sounds about right. Unfortunately, the entire legal “profession” is a skid mark and SHU Law is just a part of the problem.
I’m at a doc review project and it’s the most pathetic, demeaning thing the way all of these lawyers cannot get permanent jobs. They are smart, they are nice, hardworking and very much in debt, and they’ve been clicking buttons for 3+ years, all the while hoping to finally land a perm job- this is wrong, folks, just wrong. I feel like no one has a clue the reality of “being a lawyer,” except for the hordes of us doc reviewers and miserable practicing attorneys. I had been filled with anger and frustration and felt “tricked” for a long time now, as do many (nay, all) of my other attorney friends. Yet no where was the reality being discussed. Let’s hope this catches on- we need to expose the industry for what it is!!!
August 23, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Dear BigDebt Small Law,
I didn’t want to leave a public comment but I could not find contact information. I know that you don’t like me much and disagree with my view and that’s fair. However, I wanted to know if I could invite you to participate in my upcoming phone call with Julie Tower Pierce on Part Time Practice (comp) – just to see if it might be feasible for contract lawyers to start a part time practice. (I am happy to send a free tape if you can’t call in) If you think that PT is a completely ridiculous idea, you can ridicule me all over the blogosphere and I’ll link to your critique. (I also did not want to post this because I didn’t want you to think I was trying to get free publicity for my program; you can remove this comment if you want to).
I know that you think that I’m unsympathetic, but I feel badly for all of the wasted talent. I started my firm because I was laid off from my job, but I still felt that I had something to offer the legal profession – and solo practice rescued me. I know that it’s not the answer for everyone, but maybe it could help a small handful of people. And more importantly, maybe those people could make a difference in the life of a client, which is what the law is supposed to be all about.
August 26, 2009 at 3:27 am
L4L, you are full of shit.
While you rant about lemmings running off to law school because of glossy brochures and inflated job statistics, you engage in the same rhetoric of exageration. You claim that law schools and incoming law students inflate the value of a legal education and career, and then turn and deflate the value of the legal profession.
Your use of hyperbole is superb, but you use it to shoot yourself and your colleagues in the foot.
You may never sit on the Supreme Court or head up the M&A group at Cravath, but with hard work, focus, judgment and self-respect you’ll make it.
Your first step is getting over yourself.
September 23, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Slap Chop, you are FOS.
Now that we have Obama in office, we check our personal responsibility at the door. Society owes us a six figure income for going through 7 years of postsecondary education. Obama will see it through before the end of his term!
August 26, 2009 at 7:09 pm
This blog is so full of TRUTH. Keep it coming. Sure, it may be somewhat exaggerated for effect but it is all correct and I have experienced much of what this author is talking about and NO I did not graduate from a TTT, I went to a “top” law school and deeply regret this life-altering mistake. I hope that many others will open their eyes to the fact that the gravy train of law has taken off and we are all left at the station. Don’t make the mistake I and so many others have.
September 7, 2009 at 2:11 am
Love the site. Wish I could send an email directly to you – this will have to do. I’ve added the site to my blog roll at Judging Crimes. It occurs to me that you might enjoy my book For the Sake of Argument: A Life in the Law, just out from Kaplan, which attempts to tell everything I know now that I wish I’d known then, with “then” being every time I made a decision about law school and my legal career.
The last line of the intro is intended as a statement of theme: “If, as I believe, , the only appropriate response to pomposity is laughter, lawyers are rarely without a reason to laugh.”
September 14, 2009 at 10:53 pm
I really enjoy reading this blog, as you are a terrific writer and it’s important for those considering law school to be aware of the dangers. I agree that many schools use false salary statistics to lure naive students looking for a golden ticket to an upper-middle class lifestyle into a false sense of security so they pay the overpriced tuition costs. It should be a requirement that schools advertise accurate statistics, and the fact there is no one enforcing this just shows how messed up the system really is.
However, a burning question has been plaguing my mind ever since I started reading your blog and others like it. Being a victim of this scam, I hope you can answer it for me:
How do so many people who must be at least decent at identifying flaws in arguments in order to get into law school, fail to take the same approach when evaluating the employment statistics offered by the schools themselves?
October 14, 2009 at 4:11 pm
How do potential law students, who are good at identifying arguments, still fail to identify the flawed statistics?
1) Prospective law students have higher than average respect for authority. It doesn’t occur to them that the schools would flat out lie.
2) The LSAC appears to be independent, but it only repeats information provided by the schools, without attribution. Ditto the ABA and US News. So you see multiple respected outlets which all have the same information, and it looks accurate, because you don’t realize it’s really three outlets quoting one source.
3) When I attended law school a couple years ago, the BLS indicated that demand for lawyers would continue to grow more quickly than other professions, and said only that competition would be expected for positions with top law firms. Like almost everyone I knew in school, I didn’t want to go to big law anyway.
4) Available statisics for non-big law jobs don’t factor in the fact that most of these jobs are filled by FORMER big law attorneys. It makes it seem like there’s a back up plan if you don’t make it into big law, when that’s really not the case.
October 17, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Hi Liz,
Thanks for responding to my question. I was hoping Skadden would, but he appears to be MIA these days…
Your reasons for why potential law students would not question these stats are informative and helped me deepen my understanding of the application process through the eyes of a future student. I hope you are willing to discuss your points a bit further.
1. I have to disagree with you on this point. I do not believe that law students are any more prone to respect authority than the average human being. The Milgram experiment showed that 65% of people would do whatever an authority figure tells them to do because of being socialized to obey authority figures, not because those participants had a greater respect for authority than others. I don’t believe that all law students are sheep, but rather are comprised of average human beings, with some being more socialized to obey than others.
The fact that it doesn’t occur to students that schools would lie is the result of naïveté. Ask any law school career services office to provide you with raw data about its most recent graduating class and you will find discrepancies rather easily by doing your own calculations.
2. I agree with you on this point. The NALP should be doing a better job regulating this and it burns me that they don’t. If an organization like the NALP or LSAC isn’t willing to draw a hard line when it comes to statistics, who will? The law schools are too afraid to be the first, and whoever has the balls to do it will surely drop in the rankings.
3. I looked on the BLS website recently and it states that the law profession will grow by 11% between 2006 and 2016. That’s 84,000 new jobs for a decade with roughly 40,000 new graduates a year. This is obviously a very competitive environment for everyone involved, but if you think about it, the top graduates of T1 and T2 schools will always be in demand, so they will get the few new jobs. The not so spectacular students in T2,3 & 4 schools are the ones who will fall by the wayside. What were the statistics when you looked at BLS and how are they different from today?
As for you and your fellow classmates not being interested in biglaw, I believe it. From what I’ve heard, the biglaw lifestyle and workload are not exactly desirable, although the salary clearly is. But did you really not see dollar signs at your orientation when the career services rep started amping you up by citing big salary stats from previous graduates? I don’t blame you for being irked that promises of a high paying job were never fulfilled.
4. By non-biglaw jobs, do you mean mid-size and small firms? Because recent graduates are able to get small firm jobs and many do go this route. As for recent graduates not being able to get well paying jobs at mid and small firms because experienced attorneys take these jobs, why are you surprised? There is no business or career that doesn’t reward either talent or experience, and law is no different.
October 31, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Hi CA,
1. Well, to start with, I disagree with your disagreement about law students. We’re spending three years of our lives learning to enforce the rules and respect authority. Some people are jerks, sure, but even the biggest assholes tend to be the type who find and exploit some loophole in the Monopoly rules, making it less fun for everyone. Anyone who’s ever played a drinking game with law students should recognize that they care about rules, a lot. They question how to apply the rules, but they never question the idea that someone should have the authority to make the rules. And they idolize professors and deans, even when those professors and deans could obviously give a crap. Watching students fall all over themselves to kiss up at mixers, it was obvious to me that I was watching an emotionally abusive relationship dynamic in play. The school doesn’t care, but students almost have Stockholm Syndrome.
2. I went to a top-25 school, and I know a lot of grads from top 14 who are, to put it mildly, underemployed. U of Chicago, U of M, Georgetown – anecdotally, it looks like half of all their graduates are totally screwed. I even know two unemployed Stanford grads.
3 When I read the BLS report, I interpreted it the way you did: Prestigious grads would be fine, tier 3-4 would be screwed. Since you couldn’t get a clear picture from the information either, I feel less bad about my interpretation. If there were jobs out there for half of all new lawyers when I graduated, before the economic crisis, I’ll eat my oldest gym bra.
September 19, 2009 at 1:19 am
Law is not just automobile accident cases and no fault. What about Labor Law 240(1) and 241(6)? What about real estate (purchase and sale)? What about first-party claims (like homeowners’ policies)? I see solos all the time in Brooklyn Supreme appearing at CCP and in moving for summary judgment under CPLR 3212 and defending summary judgment (CPLR 3212) and dismissal motions (CPLR 3211). The picture is skewed. With your writing and reasoning you can do better than do auto defense work or code documents, yet you haven’t been doing it. What is going on? Can you tell us something about yourself?
September 29, 2009 at 1:17 pm
“Diversity & The Bar”, the free trade rag that some of us may get in the mail, has an article this month (Sep-Oct ‘09 issue) about contract attorneys. It starts off with the recruiters point of view: “Contract attorneys have the flexibility to bring up a family, write a book, travel….”* It then quickly gets to all the cons. It doesn’t quote this particular blog, but does quote others. ***Interestingly, it concludes by advising in-house counsel to be very careful about insisting that outside law firms treat the contract attorneys well, to be sure that they get a good work product.***
* This recruiter crap reminds me of the old joke about the little boys who find ten dollars, and one boy suggests that instead of buying candy, they buy tampons, “Because then we can go camping, swimming, horseback riding…!” Totally delusional.
October 8, 2009 at 7:19 pm
This is the greatest thing ever written about the law school scam. Thank you.
October 9, 2009 at 8:16 pm
There is a huge unmet need (pent-up demand) for lawyers among the middle class who are not poor enough to qualify for Legal Aid but not rich enough to afford high fees. The solution is obvious: as law and government become increasingly complicated, state and federal government should offer basic legal services to all citizens the same way we provide police and probably soon medical services. As your blog illustrates, there are many capable attorneys who would work for a reasonable salary, building up experience actually helping people. If someone is charged with a crime he didn’t commit, why should he have to pay thousands of dollars in fees? Why should only the indigent have free representation? Likewise the foreclosure epidemic creates a huge need (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09fri2.html?_r=1). Instead of blaming the ABA for outsourcing, write your elected officials and try to funding to meet the public need for services that are currently not being provided. This would also address the demonizing of lawyers: people fear getting sued and losing their houses because of high legal fees, but if they had free representation they would feel like they are finally getting something from their government; almost everyone likes their own lawyer, even if they dislike the other side’s lawyer. (Some of the abuses that do occur, in the ambulance-chasing arena, are motivated by desperation and would cease if a better alternative were available.) Law school is, actually, a good education; the economic situation has caused many to overlook the intrinsic benefits of understanding America’s legal system, which most citizens know almost nothing about. (Most citizens don’t even go to college, and have very understanding of federalism, for example.) The IRS has a free help line for all taxpayers’ questions, and every court should offer free legal representation for all civil and criminal defendants. Donald Trump can hire an accounting firm or law firm if he wants to, but nobody should be required to incur such expense simply to deal with their government. If state and local governments offer a reasonable salary for public service lawyers, nothing huge to arouse the ire of the public, it would solve the problems of unmet need and unemployed lawyers.
October 14, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Um, you want the government to pay for lawyers who will defend citizens against the government’s regulations?
You didn’t quite think that one through, did you?
October 14, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Oh, I forgot the biggest source of misinformation on legal employment: Older Attorneys.
Those who graduated in the last decade paid three times as much for the same education, and graduated into a much more competitive climate.
If you talked to any older attorneys, before law school, like I did, they probably told you crap like, “You can just go into government – there are plenty of jobs, and the student loans are totally manageable!”
January 30, 2010 at 12:09 am
That is SO correct!
I ended up in law school because this attorney who worked as in-house counsel for a title company told me to do it! He has the lake house and all those goodies.
And I know what you mean about the government job. Those jobs are almost unavailable to new graduates because they are being filled by ex-coworkers who left the entity, went out on their own, and then discovered that “solo practice doesn’t pay,” and are now running back to the warm shelter of a health insurance, no office expenses, and a guaranteed paycheck.
November 10, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Skadden, I hope you at least still read comments on this page. I don’t know why you quit, but you had a large following. There is a group of other law scambusters that is putting together a webring/chatboard. Let me know if you are interested. You can reach me at nando9936@yahoo.com. Right now the board is invite-only, so you will not be able to see the content of the page.
We need to get the word out, especially now that many are at least starting to realize that law is a trash “profession.” If you can join, that would be great.
January 3, 2010 at 2:39 am
RIGHT ON! I just discovered your blog. I read “about” and am a fan. I can’t believe there are lawyers being paid less than 50K in NYC. That is a crime. I thought it was bad enough that most of us who find employment in CO make less than 50K, but in NYC? There is just SO MUCH wrong with that, I won’t even start.
I’ll keep reading, thanks for your writing!
January 8, 2010 at 5:33 pm
Wow! Just… wow! L4L, that truly is the sexiest thing I’ve ever read.
My legal work experience and opinions of American law and law schools mirror yours, though you’ve articulated them all more artfully than I could have. Fortunately for your readers, you didn’t incur the same deficit in creativity that I did from going to law school.
Thanks!
January 15, 2010 at 5:07 am
I’ve been reading this blog and others like it all day. Much of what you’re saying is true. Somehow I ended up very, very lucky. I graduated 5 years ago from a top 10% of a decent second tier school and took a PI job out of desperation. I thought I would hate the place, but turns out I have one of the best bosses ever. I make in the 80’s with base salary and bonus. I work 35-40 hours per week, but much more than that if we’re on trial. My boss can afford to take on serious injury and malpractice cases so I’ve gotten to do a lot of complex and substantive work. I am treated very well and am very blessed.
What is my point here? I guess it’s that I feel I’ve kind of run up against a wall. My salary is pretty decent, at least compared to stories I’ve heard here, but I have no benefits. And, I think I’ve pretty much hit the glass ceiling with my current job. So I’ve been looking elsewhere for awhile, and the prospects for making much more aren’t really there.
My student loan debt is crushing me. Without it, I’d be happy as a clam on 80k per year. With it, I scrimp and pinch to pay bills and have a tiny little bit left over. Forget about saving anything. I too am pissed beyond belief at the false advertising of the law schools. I was 22 years old when I took out those loans and naieve beyond belief. I signed the dotted line without so much as batting an eyelash. Of COURSE I’ll make law review, I told myself. Of COURSE I will be the best and brightest and 6 figure jobs will be falling into my lap. Didn’t exactly turn out that way…I’m not living in hell right now, but I’m not exactly a legal highroller either.
So while I’m not in as dire straights as others, I am starting to feel the pinch as I am now at a point in my life where I realize time isn’t endless. Also, I made a stupid decision and bought a condo. Even though I knew the mortgage was cutting it close on my income, I still remained naieve and thought, of COURSE a higher paying job is waiting for me right around the corner.
So now I’m stuck with the student loans and a condo worth 25% less than I paid for it, and no way to get out of those payments. It’s not like I can just go rent a cheaper apartment. My fault, and I am totally aware of it, but now that I’m trying to find better pay, I am experiencing the same stress, depression, and frustration about the law as I’ve heard here.
It really is all a racket with the law schools, their outrageous tuition, and the total lack of oversight of any of this by the ABA. It is horrendous to think of 3rd and 4th tier schools charging nearly $40k per year in tuition…not much less than the top schools. Where do they get off doing that???
And, BTW, I know a 3L at Yale right now who can’t get a job. A real ray of hope and sunshine, right?
February 7, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Do you need a box of tissues for those tears?