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I recently read an on-line article from a London newspaper that Baker & McKenzie cut six New York associates in an office of 140 lawyers including 60 partners as part of a range of cost-cutting measures introduced in response to market conditions. The article used the English term saying the firm had announced “redundancies”, a definition for which is “having lost your job because the employer no longer needs you.”

Baker & McKenzie, of course, is not alone. Layoffs of associates have been announced at Foley Hoag in Boston, Parker Poe in Charlotte and Blank Rome in Philadelphia and seem likely at Kirkland and Ellis in Chicago.

Somehow being “redundant” seems to say it with more of a kick in the pants than simply being laid off.  

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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.

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(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.

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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”:

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(Note the use of the Roman numerals in the title. While it might be inconsistent with a Russian theme, I thought it might gain the status of the NFL Super Bowl.)

When asked whether a new law school graduate is ready to practice law, most say “No.”

The basis for the problem is that for over one hundred years law schools have seen their mission as teaching students how to think like a lawyer – what might be referred to as a Graduate School Model, uniformly rejecting the medical school approach which prepares students to practice their profession – the Professional School Model. The MacCrate report strongly criticizes law schools for their heavy reliance on the Socratic method and appellate case analysis as somewhat effective in teaching legal reasoning and research but not so for the other eight fundamental skills needed by the practitioner (problem solving, factual investigation, communication, counseling, negotiation, litigation and ADR, organization and management of legal work, recognizing and resolving ethical dilemmas.

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As you may have read, I am campaigning to be appointed Law School Industry Czar (“LSI Czar”) based on the platform that law schools have failed students, graduates/lawyers and the public. To allow time for public input, I am publishing now the Ukases (edicts of the Czars) I expect to promulgate upon taking the position.

For future reference there will be frequent references to my two bibles: the first is Legal Education and Professional Development – An Educational Continuum – The Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap published by the American Bar Association Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar in 1992 (“MacCrate Report”).

The second was also published in 1992 and is titled The Deeply Unsatisfactory Nature of Legal Education Today – A Self-Study Report On The Problems Of Legal Education And On The Steps The Massachusetts School Of Law Has Taken To Overcome Them. (“MSL Report”).

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Recently I posted My Request to Be Appointed Law School Industry Czar on another blog but have now transferred it here and suggest you read it. As of today I have two supporters in my campaign.  I sense the beginning of a grassroots movement in favor of my selection. 

If you have read the request, you know I am convinced that law schools have failed their students, their lawyer/graduates and the public over the last decades by not teaching their students the skills and values they need to practice law, not informing them about their wide range of options, and not providing career guidance instead simply offering on-campus interviews. These failings, when combined with tuition much too high for the services provided, results in thousands of law students being “funneled” to BIGLAW  where they do not want to be, and thousands of others floundering with no vision of what to do with their degree.

What follows is predictable – an extraordinarily high percentage of lawyers expressing their dissatisfaction with their jobs and careers while millions of members of the public with serious legal issues have no recourse to lawyers and the legal system.

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