Articles Posted in Options for Lawyers

by

 I met Debra Snider on Twitter in a conversation about women & large law firms.  That conversation led to a spirited email discussion, which we’ve broken down into four blog posts.

After a distinguished 21-year legal and business career, Debra became an author and speaker.  As a lawyer, she handled corporate and securities transactions for two large law firms and a real estate syndication company, then was Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Chief Administrative Officer at a $20 billion publicly held commercial finance company.  Thus, she has the perspective of someone who has been an associate at a large firm, an in-house staff lawyer with management responsibilities, a partner at a large law firm, and a client of many law firms, large and small.

Debra is the author of the well-received novel A Merger of Equals, which is set in the business world.  She has also published two business books: The Productive Culture Blueprint (an American Bar Association Career Resource Center publication that offers a blueprint, complete with case study, checklists and other practical tools and tips, for building sustainable strategic productivity into the in-house law department and enduring, effective relationships with outside law firms); and Working Easier, an organizational design toolkit.  Debra’s website is loaded with free career and other resources in addition to more information about her books, her background and her popular speaking topics.

Continue reading

by

This is for discouraged lawyers (be they unemployed, underemployed or simply dissatisfied) and law students(1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls).  

Today I read this post by The Unemployed Lawyer who is in the Seattle area. Here is the comment I added to her blog.

“I called the Washington State Bar Association and was told that there are 13,000 members from King County. Based on standard US demographics, that would likely mean that about 75%, or 9,750 are in private practice. Julie Salmon at the WSBA said that about 65% (or about 6500) are in firms of 10 or less. Again based on standard US demographics, 50% of the 6500 are sole practitioners, 35% are in firms 2-5 and 15% in firms of 6-10.  THAT MEANS THAT THERE ARE ABOUT 4000 SMALL FIRMS IN KING COUNTY AND MANY OF THEM NEED YOU.

Continue reading

by

It is critically important at this time when there has been a decline in recruiting by the large law firms who have dominated campus interviewing to deemphasize employer outreach.

A school unable to attract sufficient employer responses adds to the students’ frustration. Their self-esteem is diminished since they are not being considered by the firms courted by the school, apparently the ones who have the school’s stamp of approval. Some career planners believe they are not using their talents and time to their own best advantage and that of their students. One said that 85% of her resources are devoted to employer outreach from which only 15% of her students found positions.

The goal of employer outreach by career staff is the scheduling of on-campus interviewers to supply students with the knowledge of where the jobs are.  Where there are a substantial number of firms recruiting on campus, many accept jobs they are not suited for because their decision making process is flawed. They are unaware of the breadth of their options and the importance of balancing priorities such as work satisfaction and high income.

Continue reading

by

ORIGINAL ARTICLE IN THE BOSTON GLOBE

For law graduates, a public-service detour on road to success

By Rich Barlow, Globe Correspondent  |  April 27, 2009

Continue reading

by

As many of you may know, in July 1992 the ABA’s Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap issued what came to be called the “MacCrate Report”, a withering critique of traditional law schools. In substance, the task force compiled a list of the 10 fundamental skills and the 4 fundamental values needed to be taught in order to be a trained member of the legal profession. It found that law schools teach only 2 of the skills and not well at that.

 While it did not make specific findings about the deficiencies in teaching the values, it suggested more emphasis on them including a recommendation that law schools should be concerned to convey to students that the professional value of the need to “promote justice fairness and morality” is an essential ingredient of the legal profession. .

 At the heart of the report is its “demand” that: law schools affirm that “education in lawyering skills and profesional values is central to the mission of law schools”; they should use effective teaching methods, and they should make students aware of the full range of opportunity for professional development in the rich variety of private practice settings.  

Continue reading

by

Since in so much I have written I have taken quotes from the ABA’s MacCrate Report and one issued by the Mass School of Law, both in 1992, I decided to publish (in three parts) a handout I distributed at a panel I moderated for the National Lawyers Guild in 1993 which  is primarily quotes from both.

Aspects of the Traditional Law School Experience Which Inhibit or Divert Law Students From Careers Serving the Legal Needs of the Public.

INTRODUCTION

Continue reading

by

When the U.S. News & World Report issued its ranking of law schools in March, 1990, I drafted a letter criticizing one major defect in its analysis; i.e., failing to include as a criterion the extent to which the law school ensures that its graduates fulfill the legal profession’s obligation to serve the legal needs of the public. I never sent the letter but, as I reread it, I was not surprised as I realized that most of it was still relevant and current. I decided to post it with edits such as raising the starting salary at BigLaw from $70,000. I reconsidered because I thought that you might want to be aware of how much change is needed in the education provided by law schools and how little progress has been made in the last 20 years. 

To what extent does your rating chart perpetuate or create the crisis in public interest law? To what extent will schools try to conform to your criteria? To what extent will students in colleges choose law schools based on the criteria which you use? To what extent will law schools continue to encourage the kind of results that will be defined as success?

If the criteria of the best law school is the one carrying out its responsibility to the public to ensure that its graduates fulfill the obligation to serve the legal needs of the public, the order may have to be reversed. We can’t be saying that society won.

Continue reading

by
Are you a law student attending a hard-to-get-into law school (notice that I did not use the descriptive words “good” or “best” or “tier x”)?If yes, here’s a research project for you.

What percentage of the Class of 2006 graduates took positions right out of law school in BigLaw or did so after a judicial clerkship?

What percentage of the Class of 2006 dreamed of such positions when surveyed during their first year of law school?

Continue reading

by

Below are excerpts from a Memorandum which I sent last year to the Professor at Stanford Law School who was heading up the search committee for an Executive Director for its Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest.

_______________________

(O)ver the last 44 years since I graduated law school in 1963, I have continued to be concerned about whom graduating law students represent. As critical social issues continued to come to the attention of the public (poverty, health, housing, education, the environment, as well as the rights or women, children, minorities and gays), as many as 95% of those graduating from law schools, especially the highly selective ones, took positions in the largest law firms representing the largest corporations and the wealthiest 1% of our citizens.

Continue reading

by

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC 20500
January 1, 2011

Dear President Obama,

We all knew it was coming!

On December 3, 2008, an article appeared in CNNMoney.com “Verdict is in: Legal job market tightens” The article said “Employment opportunities for legal professionals have traditionally been plentiful – and lucrative. But as the economy has dried up, so too have those jobs…. (This) is a job market that is contracting for the first time in recent history….(R)ecent graduates not only face experienced competition for limited jobs but also hefty student loan bills. ‘Recent grads are going to have a hard time'”.

The lead story of the December 10, 2008, Boston Globe “Harvard Curtails Tenure Searches” began, “Harvard University officials said yesterday that they will postpone nearly all searches for tenure-track professors in the school’s largest academic body, a sobering indication of how the economic crisis has hit the world’s wealthiest university.”

What followed was: a sharp decrease in the number of applications for admission to law schools in the fall of 2009; dissolution and failures of hundreds of large law firms; an increase in the number of bankruptcies filed by law school graduates of the classes of 2006, 2007 and 2008. By October, 2010, deans of most of the ABA accredited law schools in the country, accompanied by thousands of their most prominent alumni/ae descended upon the nation’s capitol to plead for a $3 billion bailout to save their industry. In their impassioned testimony they urged Congress to act, pointing out how the failure of the law school industry could have widespread negative repercussions throughout the country:

Large law firms who represented the biggest corporations in the world would have to lay off thousands if the law schools were unable to “funnel” unwilling law students to their firms;
Large corporations would suffer: i.e., a large corporation producing Hummers unable to retain lawyers to plead the case against higher fuel efficiency standards; coal companies unable to obtain permits for strip-mining; tobacco companies unable to prevent the distribution of material warning about the dangers of smoking; oil companies unable to lobby to “drill, drill, drill”;
Law schools, with their graduates unable to repay the extraordinary amount of the loans that they have incurred, would have to reduce salaries of professors and lay off thousands of staff; and
Even the universities to which the law schools are a department would suffer as the law schools, affectionately referred to as “cash cows”, no longer infuse the colleges with needed subsidies. Some universities would, in order to survive, have to extend the winter recess from October 12 to April 14 in order to continue to pay professors their full salaries.

Congress also heard from others, however, who emphasized how out-of-touch the management of the law school industry is and how they industry has failed for decades to produce a product needed or desired by the American public. One witness read this 1980 quote from Lloyd Cutler (legal adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton: “The rich who pay our (lawyer) fees are less than 1% of our fellow citizens, but they get at least 95% of our time. The disadvantaged we serve for nothing are perhaps 20-25% of the population and get at most 5% of our time. The remaining 75% cannot afford to consult us and get virtually none of our time.” And provided statistics from the National Association of Law Placement which indicated that at most of the “select” law schools (that doesn’t mean they are good, just that they are hard to get into) until recently, upwards of 95% of their graduates took jobs with large law firms.

Others from non-select law schools testified that their vision was to emulate the select law schools and find all their graduates jobs in large firms so that they could make a lot of money and pay back the loans taken to attend law school and donate lots of money to pay the high salaries of the professors who devote most of their time to making appearances on TV and writing arcane papers.

A member of a consumer group reported that responses from law schools indicated that not one of the law schools had surveyed its students as they registered at their school or at any time during the first year to find out who they wanted to represent (individuals, small businesses, public interest organizations, large corporations) and how many want to start their own firms rather than being an employee at a large law firm.

Another witness was a member of the highly regarded committee that released the MacCrate Report (the chair of the committee was Robert MacCrate, former President of the American Bar Association 1987-88). The MacCrate report found that there were ten fundamental skills needed by a lawyer to competently practice law and the law schools only taught two (and did that poorly.) It also compiled a list of four fundamental values of the legal profession required to be taught by law schools. One of them is: “Striving to Promote Justice, Fairness and Morality. … As a member of a profession that bears special responsibilities for the quality of justice, a lawyer should be committed to the values of: 2.1 Promoting Justice, Fairness and Morality in One’s Own Daily Practice; 2.2 Contributing to the Profession’s Fulfillment of its Responsibility to ensure that adequate legal services are provided to those who cannot afford to pay for them; 2.3 Contributing to the profession’s fulfillment of its responsibility to enhance the capacity of law and legal institutions to do justice.”

As the ABA began to take serious action to implement the recommendations of the MacCrate Report, a law school dean who was a leader in the opposition became a leader of the ABA and the MacCrate Report was relegated to what is commonly referred to as the “dustbin of history”.

A second year student recalled reading the annual rating of law schools in the US News & World Report to decide which was the best law school. Only recently did she realize that the criteria used by the magazine were useless in that not one evaluated law schools based on the extent to which they provided the skills and values needed to practice law competently.

Recent graduates testified about: not being taught the value of promoting justice in any course except that “silly” professional responsibility course that the law school was required to have but everyone knew was irrelevant;” not being taught how to practice law; the on-campus interview program and the negative effect it had on them and their classmates; not knowing what their options are for practicing law or anything about the demographics of the legal profession, thinking that everyone practiced in large law firms, not knowing that 66% of the profession practices in firms of 5 lawyers and that over 50% are sole practitioners; never having been exposed to career planning (what are your interests, your vision, your goals, your options, your preference, how to promote and market yourself); how their experience in law school had destroyed their self-confidence, their self-esteem and their sense of self-worth;
with tears in their eyes, how they hated the boring meaningless work they were doing in the large law firm; being over their heads in debt; being so dissatisfied with their career path but having no idea of what to do except apply along with thousands of others to the few advertised jobs; and wistfully recalling they had gone to law school so that they could continue to assist women and children as they had done while in college.

Videos compiled by over one hundred consumer organizations were shown. In each one of them individuals from all walks of life testified about how they were unable to find a lawyer to represent them in a wide variety of cases including sickness caused by pollution, evictions from homes being foreclosed, insurance claims for hurricane damage, discrimination against gays, discrimination in employment of women, injuries to veterans, abused children, claims for injury from toys, denial of insurance, inadequate public education, access to public buildings for the disabled and abuse of the elderly.

I appreciated the opportunity I had to testify before the committee first quoting my warning from an article I posted on FindLaw about fifteen years ago entitled “Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Choosing the Best Law School”:

Continue reading