Lawyerin'

May 1st, 2012
5 notes
“The critics of legal education are right. There are too many law schools and there are too many law students and we need to do something about that.”
—

Frank Wu, the chancellor and dean of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, “which will admit 20 percent fewer students than in years past, a decision that required the college to eliminate several staff positions.”

More to come; this is the tip of a very large iceberg. If you’re considering law school, please e-mail me so I can personally talk you out of it. (NB - I love my job but I’m unreasonably fortunate!)

Source: insidehighered.com
Dec 15th, 2011
33 notes
“Given all the foregoing, it perhaps shouldn’t surprise us that the attitude of legal academia toward the supposed employment and salary data that law schools publish has been a systematic indifference to the continual broadcast of enormous quantities of complete bullshit, in the most precise technical sense of the term. The employment numbers are, to speak precisely, bullshit, in that nobody (or more exactly nobody in a position to do something about this) really knows the extent to which they’re false, because nobody in that position wants to know. The “96% employed with an average salary of $145,000″ claims aren’t lies, exactly, because in order to lie one must, somewhat paradoxically, care about the truth. Those claims aren’t lies: they’re bullshit, because the people who make those claims don’t know what the real numbers are and don’t care.”
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Paul Campos - On Bullshit and Law Schools - Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Source: lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
Oct 17th, 2011
46 notes

cheatsheet:

A lot of boomers have become insufferably smug and complacent.

Paul Campos explains why baby boomers are clueless about Occupy Wall Street.

Some nice quotes in this one, including: “Since I went to law school in the 1980s, the cost of legal education has quadrupled in real terms, thereby ensuring most current law students will graduate with six figures of debt from law school alone. Meanwhile legal employers are downsizing and outsourcing, to the point where the ratio between new lawyers and new jobs for lawyers is approximately two to one. And most of the new jobs don’t pay enough to allow even those who are lucky enough to get them to pay their educational debts.”

Jun 29th, 2011
13 notes
Lawyers screwed, ABA just now realizing it →

This isn’t surprising to anyone who has had their eyes open in the legal profession for the past six years.

Whether BigLaw lawyers, boutique specialists or solo practitioners, U.S. lawyers can expect slower rates of market growth that will only intensify competitive pressures and produce a shakeout of weaker competitors and slimmer profit margins industrywide. Law students will find ever-more-limited opportunity for the big-salary score, but more jobs in legal services outside the big firms. Associates’ paths upward will fade as firms strain to keep profits per partner up by keeping traditional leverage down.

And those who wish to rise above the disruption will have to deal with technology that swallows billable work, a world market that takes the competition international, and a more sophisticated corporate client with vast knowledge available at the click of a mouse.

The part they don’t mention is the abdication of responsibility of the ABA and higher education institutions in general in allowing a massive surplus of lawyers to be churned out of far too many U.S. law schools in the vain hope of artificially sustaining a law school bubble that must burst, and burst quickly. This is completely aside from the exorbitant and mostly unjustified tuition that law schools charge, shackling their students with debt burdens that they can’t hope to pay off without those high paying jobs that don’t exist anymore.

H/t to Prakash.