It seems that the story is a that a once upwards spiral is now spiraling downwards, and people and institutions must adjust.
At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off.
Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.
The size of the legal market is the same as it was in 1990, and so is law school enrollment. There was a spike in both legal demand and enrollment in the aughts, but the ratio of work to graduates isn't much different now than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.
What's different now is not the market. Folks at Valparaiso were never getting recruited into high-paying jobs. What's different now is the extreme amounts of debt. And that phenomenon that's not confined to law. The whole education sector is overblown by irrational pro-education rhetoric and free flowing federal money.
Exactly right. The easy money available through student loans has completely distorted the market pressure that would normally keep tuition and fees more in line with demand.
> The whole education sector is overblown by irrational pro-education rhetoric and free flowing federal money.
It's worth mentioning that you'd have been downvoted into oblivion for mentioning this on a social network just several years ago. This was also true offline, people didn't want to hear it.
One thing I think is interesting here is the uncontrolled growth in costs. Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns, and Money posted the average private-school law tuition [1]:
All figures have been adjusted to constant 2016 dollars:
1956: $4,178
1974: $11,232
1985: $16,803
1995: $26,480
2005: $35,550
2015: $45,123
It's funny because you look at these figures, you look at real estate prices, you look at stock prices, and you think, wait we are in a double digit inflationary environment!
Actually what is inflationary is the activities of the middle/upper-middle class (college, housing, stocks, etc), which are of course underrepresented in the CPI indices. The combination of the never ending debt bubble and quantitative easing has created a very localised inflation.
The distribution of salaries in law is bimodal. Lawyers at the school mentioned have never commanded big law levels of compensation. The information is readily available, and it is why I chose not to attend a top 20 law school in 2007.
Where are the huge numbers of $160,000 salaries coming from? It's like a delta function right at that one level. Is that a standard starting package for major firms?
Yes, it's the standard package for "BigLaw." There used to be a database on Greedy Associates that showed the salary progression for each firm, but I can't seem to find it. They tend to move in lockstep with each other.
Graduates of the top 14 schools per US News and World Report rankings feed into these jobs. Some at lower ranked tier 1 schools end up in big law, but they are typically at the top of the class. I would bet that not a single student of the law school mentioned in the article ended up in with a $160k starting salary.
It's tempting to counter by citing the "lucrative" special case: The top 5-10% of T14 law schools who receive entry-level associate salaries of $160K/year base + bonus.
However, pricing power appears limited, creating a ceiling on wage increases. To this point, Vault100 firms have recently trickled out pay increases to $180K/year for incoming associates. Clients have laughed and said, "Good for your employees, but you're not passing those costs onto us!" [0]
lucrative is also a relative term, since they are often working 2000 billable hours a year (which, depending on type of work/attorney, may be 60% to 90% of actual hours worked per year)
In biglaw, i have friends who easily work 2500-3000 hours a year to make their billable hours requirement.
So these salaries are not exact as great as one would think anyway
I'm familiar with the sum($)/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.
And $160k-$180k is first year salary, which is bumped up automatically until the seventh year, at which point the associate is making $280k-$315k salary. If they then make partner, they'll make much more.
I would argue, pretty strongly, many engineers do not work similar hours (or work at such "efficiency") in as stressful a way as the lawyers are working.
Of course, I don't argue doing such a thing is necessary or even useful to being a good engineer, just that i think you are giving pretty short shrift to the other side of this :)
Perhaps a lawyer's working hours tend to be more "efficient" or more stressful. My interaction has been primarily limited to in-house patent attorneys, and they don't seem to work appreciably harder or be more stressed out.
Work-related stress is a big issue. Regardless, putting in long hours at work, regardless of stress level, means less time for family, friends, hobbies, recreation, exercise, sleep, etc.
yes, but (and I'm biased), it seems plausible that a higher percentage of engineers enjoy a larger fraction of their work than law associates. I have no numbers to back this up, but very few people pick up corporate law as a hobby.
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.
What planet do you live on? $195k is WAY above the average salary for a programmer. Only in SV or other super-hot markets will a 26 year old command a salary that high, and even then, only if they're amazing at their job. Most places, you're looking at $70-$100k.
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).
I think it is relevant because I would be willing to take a quality of life hit to be in the "top 1% of 1%" that I wouldn't take to make $200k. I make more than $200k, but I suspect that I'm nowhere close to the top 1 bps.
It's talking about someone in Indiana who is not making the kind of money that GP mentioned.
> Yet in financial terms, there is almost no way for Mr. Acosta to climb out of the crater he dug for himself in law school, when he borrowed over $200,000. The government will eventually forgive the loan — in 25 years — if he’s unable to repay it, as is likely on his small-town lawyer’s salary. But the Internal Revenue Service will probably treat the forgiven amount as income, leaving him what could easily be a $70,000 tax bill on the eve of retirement, and possibly much higher.
>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.
First you can not say a person works "in tech" any more like you can with Legal. The Information Technology industry has sooo many different Job Classification today that you can not longer loop everyone that "works in tech" together. Not even all programmers or administrators can be looped together anymore IMO. However there is 3 Basic area's of information technology that you might be able to Group together. Support, Administration, Development...
That said like the legal Field, Technology has also be decimated, H1B, "The Cloud", the rise of MSP model @ the expense of Internal IT and other issues are massively lowering the wages
So while a person @26 working for a Top Silicon Valley Company (apple, Amazon, Google, etc) as a High level Programmer, might get 195K, I do not believe you can say a person at 26 should "expect" to get 195K far far far far far from it.
If they are in Operations/Administration, you are looking at 40-70K nation wide, if you are in programming a little more, if you are In Repair or "HelpDesk" a little to much less..
Specialty Area's like DBA or Senior Linux Admin can command those high pay levels in select regions as well.
And this is what's wrong with the law profession generally. It's seen as "lucrative" instead of as "a calling." No modern law school will ever create an Oliver Wendell Holmes or inspire a fictional Atticus Finch.
I see where you're coming from, but most people work for a paycheck rather out of higher level motives (like "I was meant to be doing this"). By the same measure, all professions would be "wrong".
Some professions (lawyer, doctor, law enforcement, clergy) should have as a fundamental motive the desire to help people rather than profit, since they have by their very nature the power to help or harm others.
In US it is becoming increasingly difficult to dedicate yourself to a cause. Since no one has your back you have to fend for yourself and your family. Good affordable healthcare, education, daycare, e.t.c. is not a given and they dedicate their lives to tend to their families and service their debts.
PS: I assume you are comparing with Sweden
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
"employment numbers?? you should be in school for the pursuit of knowledge no matter what your socioeconomic situation happened to be, this clearly applies to everyone"
Why are lawsuits so expensive if there are so many broke lawyers aching for a job? It seems like a company could pay them a middling salary of $70k/year to handle ongoing lawsuits, rather than the $300-$700/hour that other lawyers demand.
Obviously not for your big Oracle vs. Google lawsuits or where the entire company is riding on it, but for anything less than that. For example, every public company gets sued by opportunists every time there's a merger or acquisition, or every patent troll expects nobody to fight their case because it's so expensive. There's lots of little things that come up where you just need someone to do the paperwork.
It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours.
I've considered using paralegals to write up paperwork to be reviewed by an actual lawyer. But it seems like there should be a 'cheap broke lawyer' option in between the two, who would probably do a fine job.
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. They bill out at ~200 dollars an hour, but don't collect anywhere near 40 hours a week. The associates are getting paid in the 50k a year range.
There are good reasons most companies don't try to do litigation in house. Litigation comes and goes and isn't steady. I'm defending a medium sized company on a patent case. But they have a patent case maybe 2-3 times a decade. During certain parts of the case we'll need 2-3 associates working full time. But a year ago they had no need for even one patent litigator.
Plus certain parts of the case are hard to handle with in house lawyers. They might be forbidden to see certain confidential documents.
Another big difference is that law is specialized. A guy who does DUI defense doesn't have the slightest idea how to do a patent troll case. And a patent lawyer can't do a DUI case. Once you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore.
That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice.
I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).
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.
Sure. Most degrees don't give you pratical skills, but law is particularly egregious. Law schools go almost out of their way to teach impractical stuff. The only writing class usually teaches appellate writing. Total joke.
> It seems like you could hire a couple broke lawyers to fight patent trolls, and the cost wouldn't run into millions when your attorney books a ton of hours.
That's approximately like saying you could hire a couple of broke developers to build a software package upon which much of your company's success will depend. Both the 10X-productivity phenomenon [0] and the FizzBuzz Problem [1] can show up in law just as much as in software development.
The law market is a quickly-narrowing pyramid for the top jobs. If you're a top 10% (ish) grad from a top 20 school, you can get a high-paying job with one of the big firms. For 10 or so years you work super long hours for maybe 120-150k. Then after about a decade, maybe 5% of those get offered partner. Everyone else gets sent out; best case in that situation is getting an in-house counsel job at about half the pay you had before. Or you could be a public defender, for probably less money than a teacher makes.
Source: my dad works at a top 25 law school and my brother works at a firm in DC (there's probably some attenuation here)
This is exactly what most companies do. They hire in house counsel for their baseline, routine legal needs. And then outsource to biglaw for peak law stuff (litigation, big transactions).
In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm and you don't have to pay the difference between the firm's billings and what an associate--who's actually do the work-- gets paid.
> In house counsel salaries are way less than those at a top law firm
Just to expand: in house counsel gets a salary and doesn't have to do the business-building that a partner at a law firm has to.
Also for tech companies, in house counsel can get stock options. In the 2000 boom this caused mass defections of gold-digging lawyers from traditional law firms, which screwed them up too (boo hoo).
Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!
> Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!
This is not meant as a flaming comment as I do not know enough about it but in the US it seems you do? I have read and heard a lot of silly lawsuit cases against startups over there which killed the startup because of (feared) legal costs. I have been through a bunch of legal cases in the Netherlands and here no party wins usually in business cases. Even if you win you do not really win money so most cases just settle for a few bucks or win for the same few bucks at more legal cost. You get nominal expense back if you win aka if you pay E300 per hr for your lawyer then if could be you get E70/hr back. I do not know the exact numbers but it's basically mostly a loss for all which is why it happens very little and no one is really afraid of it.
>> Not that very many startups need any in house lawyers!
> [...] in the US it seems you do? I have read and heard a lot of silly lawsuit cases against startups over there which killed the startup because of (feared) legal costs.
Don't worry, it's not as bad as it looks. I do see a lot of lawyers running up the bills at the expense of inexperienced entrepreneurs. That really ticks me off.
In the first few years of a startup my legal bills are typically under $15K/year -- well under. Setting up the company doesn't cost much, and apart from some minor routine stuff (the odd employee termination mainly, plus a few contracts and the like) there just isn't much legal stuff to do. An A or B round financing shouldn't cost more than $20K even in the valley. In fact legal bills can be lower in the valley because the firms are used to doing the kinds of thing you need.
Patent stuff is more expensive but again, most companies have no need to bring that in house. If you hire some overseas people you'll need some legal help but you wouldn't bring that in house.
Some businesses do have an explicit legal needs (e.g. Uber) if they are going after a regulated industry. But, for example, one of my startups developed a drug and got it into clinical trials -- even though it's a highly regulated field there was no need for in house counsel, and actually the legal part of that was not huge.
If you get sued you'll hire an outside firm that specializes in litigation.
Right. And there's been a trend at least over the past 10-15 years at larger companies of more work being done in-house -- the baseline, routine stuff you speak of -- rather than being outsourced to firms, another factor in the increasing pressure on the traditional big firm legal services model.
In my company the in-house counsels are in the highest salary ranges. At a law firm they would have to do sales whereas in a corporation they have a pretty stress free job from what I can observe.
People don't hire lawyers without real-world experience. The supply of lawyers with experience is much smaller than the supply of JDs, because there are only so many opportunities to file briefing or argue in court.
Alternatively, if you are a participant in a hundred million or billion dollar loan, you aren't going to hire some green lawyer fresh out of law school to represent you. You're going to get the guy who has written dozens of these contracts.
Do members of both professions find clients with equal ease and reliability? A plumber or an electrician bills at a rate closer to double that, but i think it's partly because work is less steady.
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, was skipped.
(Hint: Good law schools don't care about GPA. Do well on the LSAT and all is forgiven.)
Want to get a job? Law is all about selling knowledge. You have to show that you actually know something beyond the bar. Sit down and become an expert on something. Publish a few papers. Get your name out. That's what worked for me. Becoming a recognized expert in a very narrow law+technology field opened doors that were firmly shut to bare-bones law grads.
And.. learn to speak properly. Too many law schools are letting grads slide through with poor grammar. It might sound trivial but is really important when you are claiming to actually know something.
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.
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.
Kids are being advised by parents to get an expensive degree because when they were growing up that's how you made it.
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.
I think there are actually good opportunities in vocational schools. Marketable skills that you can use to find a good job. Law, liberal arts and communication degrees maybe not as marketable.
>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 the population ages, there will be an even higher need for medical professionals. Of course, part of this seems to be a result of residency programs being restricted in the number of seats available.
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 grandfather was somehow talked into have his pacemaker replaced a few months before his 101st birthday. There were complications, infections, etc, and my aunt had to fight to get him on hospice care. Replacing this pacemaker was a mean thing to do to an old man who'd spent years hoping to die in his sleep. It would have been kinder to have never given him the pacemaker in the first place. He would've passed away 10 years earlier, but those last 10 years were of little value to him.
Obamacare has only made "paying the bill" for medicine even more problematic.
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.
> 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.
My aunt was his caretaker, and she would've been there... But her 'job', for the last ... 10+ years, was caretaker for her parents, and it was easier for her emotions to allow the doctors to keep her father going.
My other grandfather had his defibrillator replaced when he would have liked to have been pushing daisies. I think his reasoning was that replacing the device would hopefully keep him from being even more of a burden to his daughter/caretaker.
Is it still doing well? There are still jobs, yes, but everything I hear about the working conditions for doctors entering the field today is that their quality of life is not substantially better than that of a homeless drug addict.
> 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.
But there are plenty of glass ceilings that can only be breeched via formal education. If you want to be on a board of directors some day, you better either be a billionaire or have a masters or better, preferably more than one.
"“People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.”"
Less than 2/3 of Valparaiso's students can pass the bar. Even if everything else is good, why would anyone recruit there?
It's intentionally misspelled, ostensibly to avoid old-school newsroom confusion with "lead," the linotype separators that sat between lines on a printing press. It's debated whether it's a word that was actually used back then, though.
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?
A lot of what's been going on at the higher end of the legal services industry is greater cost control by clients. Expensive, elite law firms had a long run in which they were able to justify heavy pyramid-like staffing of matters based on a pure billable hour model. Those days are basically over (though major litigation work has probably changed the least in this respect). That change has had some effects on the amount of hiring done by the elite firms and also has had some effect on salary structure. Pressure at the more elite end of the profession has ripple effects downward to the less elite end.
One paragraph in the article gets at what's been happening: "With big-firm jobs drying up, however, many of these graduates began competing for lower-paying spots at midsize firms, which also downsized, and certain government jobs they wouldn’t have sought in an earlier era."
I don't quite think of it as the American economy actually needing fewer lawyers than it used to. Rather, for a period of maybe a couple of decades (I think beginning with the 1980s business boom, so roughly 1985-2005) the biggest law firms enjoyed unusual success with the business model I refer to above. I think we're seeing a kind of correction where the legal profession is starting to look more like it was before the 1980s.
In some ways I think there may be more interesting opportunities for lawyers now. I see a lot of lawyers with a few years' experience establishing solo or boutique-firm practices in specialized areas that I don't think would have been as viable a couple of decades ago. Someone commented that you should only go to law school if you go to 'Harvard or Yale', but I am not sure that is what I'd take from recent developments. However, if your goal is to get a job in a big elite firm after graduating from law school, opportunities for those who didn't go to one of the top national schools (not limited to Harvard and Yale of course) are no doubt more reduced than 10 or 20 years ago.
Speaking only from second hand anecdotal sources... I know that 10 years ago, the primary occupation of 1st year associates at large law firms was searching through boxes and boxes of case history for relevant citations. That has to be done instantly with a search engine now and therefore requires far fewer 150k/year 1st year associates.
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 sub-industry went from needing a mass of associate lawyers to a sliver of a fraction of that. Data transmission and global supply chain got good enough fast enough that those pages that fell below a configured confidence scoring on the OCR were sent to offshore teams for a fraction of the cost of the remaining American associate lawyers, for manual clarification.
This scenario will play out and repeat itself in many industries. A stunning amount of white collar middle class work today across an astonishing array of industries relies upon fairly basic reading, writing and reasoning skillsets, increasingly more coming within striking range of software advances with each passing decade.
I don't think blue collar work is particularly safe from automation, either. We're likely not too far from a lawn maintenance robot that autonomously and continuously maintains every aspect of a simple grass lawn (mowing, edging, ant hill removal, insect control, fertilization, weed removal, soil aeration). From there, we only have decades before more general-case, sophisticated, consumer-grade, reliable set-and-forget lawn maintenance robots arrive on the scene.
I suspect we won't see industries entirely shrivel, I think what is happening is a lot of industries are relying upon relatively routine and repetitive work to support a plurality or even the bulk of their sustaining revenue, while expert-level work boosts their margins. Automation seems to be revealing cost structures of the routine, repetitive work, and re-pricing the expert-level work. The experts will still be paid a lot, possibly even much more than they are now per unit sale (whether per hour, client, incident, etc.), but the volume of their work will decline, while the lower-skill work is decimated to working wage levels.
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.
Before the spreadsheet, one didn't run what if analyses with 100 different variables.
I've also been told that, while it's certainly true that it's easier to search for relevant cases, etc., a lot of what does is raise the expectation that you will in fact find and make use of all of the most relevant cases.
At least a good part of it is. Looking for relevant jurisprudence, for instance, has gotten much easier. First everything was digitized, and in the 2000s better search engine tech got much better. What used to take a whole lot of experience, or many hours of search, now can take minutes. Similar things happen with the output of discovery: Before you'd have to pay people to read through every single document, make notes on what they contain, cull what is interesting... It was a huge amount of labor that nowadays computers can do.
There are other fun advancements in the horizon: When computers start to gain some understanding of documents, they can read them for us, saving even more time. Eventually helping a non-lawyer understand a contract, and even provide basic advice, all automatically, becomes possible.
There are other factors to the decline of our need of lawyers, but they are cyclical, and will perk up again. The technology changes are here to stay though.
Say we need three times more lawyers than we did in the 80s, but are graduating ten times more. This can lead to a lawyer glut even when we need more lawyers than ever. It also leads to people feeling like lawyers are no longer "in need", as there's plenty of competent ones available.
The supply/demand inflation phenomenon described in the article (and also referred to as having happened in Dentistry) is a good warning for coding bootcamps.
In fact bootcamps seem to already been in full bubble even though they're only a few years old. You see so many hiring their own grads or using faux graduate-employment metrics, which unfortunately the 3rd and 4th tier law schools are doing too.
This is an unintended consequence of the 2005 US bankruptcy "reform" act. That act made it impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy.
Because those loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, it's less risky to make student loans. Therefore, lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money.
So, it's easier to get a student loan. And, it's easier to borrow more money. So, it's easier for educational institutions to increase tuition and fees, and still fill up their classes. This turns into a vicious cycle increasing tuition and student debt.
I don't want to pick on Valpo. I don't know anything about their law school.
If the lenders were taking a close look at the Massachusetts College of Law (MCL, local to me, and struggling a bit) and asking whether their grads were getting decent jobs, they might make it harder to borrow so much money. That would put downward pressure on MCL's tuition and fees. But the lenders are not doing that.
But why should the lenders bother? It's a hassle to underwrite an educational institution. Student borrowers can't declare bankruptcy and get out from under those loans, even if the education bought with that money turns out to be worthless to them. So the lenders risk little.
It's time to repeal that part of the bankruptcy "reform."
Until then people who sign student loan papers should realize they are literally signing away their lives. Student lenders are clever and dangerous predators, and student borrowers are their lawful prey.
> lenders don't have the same incentive as before to underwrite their loans. That is, it isn't quite as important to make sure their borrowers have a decent shot at repaying the money.
But the students' incentive to make sure they can pay back the money is much higher.
If you're looking to underwriters to keep debt levels reasonable, you are looking in the wrong place. In any industry (school, real estate, etc.), their max is far higher than you should actually take.
The legal profession has been in the doldrums long enough people should know better than to go to law school. If you can get into Harvard or Yale it makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting your money and time.
Mostly automation. E-Discovery companies have dramatically reduced the cost for discovery. It used to require a room full of lawyers to discover evidence but now it is possible to have one person in a room full of computers to automate 10 such cases.
> How much have legal costs to the client been reduced due to this increase in efficiency?
It's pretty hard to answer that one as it depends on the type of legal services. Anecdata only...
My experience is from a UK based perspective. Over the last decade I reckon the likelihood of using an external firm for standard commercial work (sales contracts/standard employment) has dropped dramatically (80-90%). There are lots of reasonably trained lawyers coming out of the large firms, so you can hire an internal resource or use a boutique firm. They can do almost all that work.
International work remains the bread and butter of the large firms. Where you're dealing in jurisdictions that you're uncomfortable or your internal resources are not trained for. Super large deals where (frankly) the insurance from the law firm is worth it. Or specialist matters (complex IP) where the business risk is too significant.
Litigation is a different matter. No fundamental difference there in my experience. Perhaps on the administration side, but that's often a rounding error compared to the costs of the partners/counsel.
Someone said earlier that 'commercial management' has improved. As a non-legal specialist managing lawyers that is definitely a cultural change that the legal profession is embracing but still adapting to.
Peak legal. Automation is affecting discovery and the demand for the junior lawyers that used to do it, but there just isn't the demand growth to keep up with the supply growth of lawyers.
The junior work is being deskilled. Paralegals are doing some of the work junior lawyers used to do, and search and recordkeeping systems are doing much of the work paralegals used to do. A friend of mine is an attorney at a big Silicon Valley law firm, and she says that most of the low-level work is now automated.
Yeah, it's the perfect storm of automation and an industry that assumed growth would go like gangbusters forever. And by "industry" I mean law schools - law schools were (and maybe still are) big profit centers for universities, so they were expanded as quickly as possible.
Law is relatively cheap to teach compared to the hard sciences and engineering. You can charge students a lot so it is not surprising that universities want to keep the lawyer production pipeline open and gushing.
I have paid a lawyer on Upwork $125/hour for a few hours to create TOS, Privacy, DMCA policy for my apps and sites. In total, he has worked 1947 hours: $243K. edit: that's his lifetime earnings across 84 different jobs, not how much I paid him. I paid him total of a couple hundred bucks.
Regarding the best connected category -- lawyers eventually move up to become partners, who are rainmakers. Their job is to bring in deals and manage the client relationship, rather than drafting the paperwork. The work is very different from that of the associate level.
WSGR takes a mix of top 5 law school grads as well as Santa Clara law school grads. The latter is seen as having a better local network through their family and upbringing (and have a better retention track record compared to their higher academically ranked counterparts), and are seen as effective future rainmakers even if their legal abilities are inferior to their peers.
I believe it's a misattribution to automatically equate lower-ranked law schools with "inferior legal abilities". Especially considering that law school coursework (1) is largely the same at various law schools, and (2) rarely covers the same subject matter as actual practice. The prestige is different, sure, but that is more an amalgamation of undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores than representative of actual legal ability.
Yeah this is just second hand information from those who went to the toppest of law schools, who are naturally rather insecure about themselves and are surprisingly condescending.
I agree, but I'd add that the amount of money people are willing to pay for that quality will fall dramatically if technology provides a cheap alternative. The cost of education will have to fall in accordance.
Lawyer and part-time adjunct law professor [0] here. In terms of root-cause analysis, some of the comments to the NY Times article are thought-provoking --- they suggest that perhaps the urge for prestige and income, on the part of both students and schools, resulted in an upward ratchet for law-faculty salaries and thus for law-school costs, resulting eventually in a mismatch with market realities.
For example (all italics are mine):
"The question many have asked is why is law school so expensive .... [O]ther than books and space to sit in lectures and small sessions, what is there? Medical schools need labs, cadavers, hospitals, and other expensive equipment. Physicists need telescopes, rockets into space and expensive equipped labs. ...
But law school? Every time I hear that graduates are hundreds of thousands in debt, I wonder where the money went." --- from "Dale," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"As to the commenter who asked why law school is so expensive, try taking a look at the professor and dean salaries. [1] I was shocked when I learned what some of the professors and deans made at the third tier law school I attended. And, in my view, the school routinely admitted students who had no business being there, likely to pay the bloated salaries of the professors and deans." --- from "JJ," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"But in the mid- to late 1980s, he said, the school put an increasing emphasis on legal scholarship .... Across the country, many law schools were undergoing a similar evolution. It’s no coincidence that the average law school faculty began to grow quickly around this time: Each professor was teaching fewer courses to make time for research. ... Every law school seemed to want to emulate Harvard and Yale." --- from the article itself, not the comments
"I heard a lawyer say recently that in law school there were many students for whom the 'choice' to do law was more the result of a process of elimination. They are not able or interested in stem fields, but want the prestige and income of a white collar profession which the soft sciences don't necessarily provide, i.e. Sociology, social work, psychology. ... [T]his is why the field is saturated." ---from "Johanna," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"Make no mistake, the American Bar Association created this mess. The ABA has certified too many law schools and has placed ridiculous standards on these school thus driving up tuition to back-braking [sic] levels. Now law schools are admitting unqualified students to keep their numbers up. It is scary to observe many of these recent graduates. They are poorly read, lack critical thinking skills and are loosely educated." --- from "Peter," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"There are crushing unmet legal needs in communities across the country. Survivors of gender based violence lack representation. Police violence is uninvestgated. Predatory lenders prey on retirees." --- from "monte," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
"There is a genuine need for lawyers in this society. First, let's all get beyond the popular fantasy that they should all be upper middle-class. Yes, a minority can become well-paid attorneys. For the reset [sic], lower tuition, train them at public universities, and shut down the lawyer -mill expensive private places. Teach most to expect social worker-type salaries and conditions. Allow some loan forgiveness for those who work with the indigent. If nothing else, such an approach to legal training would attract people who would otherwise go into social work." --- from "Oceanviewer," http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expen...
[0] Adjunct law professors are paid a pittance, so we're not part of the problem of escalating law-school costs --- we all have day jobs as lawyers or judges, and teach because we enjoy it and find it rewarding.
[1] I looked up the faculty salaries at my alma mater law school, at UT Austin, as reported by the Texas Tribune. Supposedly, the dean makes $466K; 64 full professors get a median salary $212K; one assistant professor gets $172K; one associate professor gets $122K; 18 lecturers get a median salary of $91K. https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-aus...
The prestige angle is really important as a factor in why people go to law school.
I know parents who have worked every hour God gives so their son or daughter can be a lawyer - they see it as a route for their kids into the middle class. It's a shame, I feel the legal education system is benefiting from their ignorance of how bad it is out there for graduating lawyers.
My friends who went to law school said that the terms 1L/2L/3L are fixed in stone. It is impossible to take courses in an accelerated manner to graduate in 2 years instead of 3 years. Why? Because the law school and bar association make it that way. Milk the most tuition money out of the students.
In Germany the consensus is that there are so many underutilized lawyers that they resort to shady business tactics like cease and desist as a model of income, looking for opportunities to threaten website operators or trick users with traps and later c&d. And then we have pedagogically incapable and unqualified teachers who only are equipped with field knowledge (math, history, etc.) but are in no way able to teach humans anything, making one wonder if more of the smart enough population should consider education, though that would require reasonable wages. I can't help but think there are not many societies that favor education as importantly as it should, if we consider what teachers and public researchers can make.
Is it possible to go to Europe, where law is usually taught at undergraduate level, in public universities, and in some countries, with very cheap tuition fees, and then pass the bar exam back in the US?
Just passing the bar won't get you hired at a white shoe firm though; yes there are Loyola grads who actually, you know, practice law, but most likely at 'barely scraping by' rates.
When I went to university (sometime in the 18th Century) the idea was not vocational training but "learning to think" - at least that's what I was told. Most of my courses had underlying principles that if had attended lectures or worked hard I probably would have picked up. And I would assume the same is true of a top law degree - you may not be a lawyer, but fast thinking hard working articulate graduates are valuable whatever.
The ABA has stringent standards for accreditation that include levels of tenured faculty and quality of library. This places an artificial floor on faculty wages and conditions that mean the adjunctification of university isn't going to happen to law schools.
And most newly minted law professors have real research doctorates in addition to J.D.s or top tire law degrees or both. They have much better outside academia options than social science or arts academics and their salaries reflect that.
No. Not at any reputable school. Getting a job as a law prof usually requires a degree above the normal law degree. And you better have gone to a top-tier law school. It's a real commitment.
While some US law schools offer what are termed masters (LLM) and doctoral (often 'SJD' or 'JSD' or the like) advanced degrees in law, few law professors (other than those with a first law degree from outside the US) have such degrees. (Edit: It's somewhat more common to see law professors with a JD and a PhD in some other field such as economics or history, but this is still not the typical profile of a law professor at any tier of US law school.)
At least at the relatively elite law schools, law professors do tend to be hired not too many years out of law school, often following a prestigious federal judicial clerkship and perhaps a couple of years of a stint at a top law firm. (That's probably mostly because those are the relevant biographical characteristics of those doing the hiring.) It is relatively uncommon to hire very experienced professionals (apart from adjunct positions). As you move to less elite tiers of law schools you see more ordinary faculty drawn from experienced professionals not necessarily having the cookie-cutter star credentials new hires at the elite schools have.
First year classes may be taught by either very experienced law professors or fairly junior ones.
My guess is that police, doctors, nurses, lawyers and crime scene forensics are over subscribed to because of television serials.
If television didn't exist then those jobs would have higher rates of pay or at least less competition per job opening.
I think the intersection between jobs which are not easy to outsource + not easy to televise is an interesting one.
It reminds me of Warren Buffet's ideas about growth and value corporations. Growth jobs are obviously photogenic but may not pay as much in the long term as 'value' jobs.
I feel like the NYTimes missed that their data point is a school that simply isn't that good. They call it well-established to give you a sense that it's a mid-tier school. It isn't. The median student has scored at the 40th percentile on the LSAT, the 25th percentile student at the school has scored at the 33rd percentile on the LSAT. In 1600-point SAT terms, that means the median student is around a 933 out of 1600 on the SAT.
The article notes that the person passed the bar on his first try. Indiana and Illinois (the two states grads from Valparaiso usually take the bar in) are 80.93% and 89.38% for first-time takers. So, noting that you passed the bart the first time doesn't seem to say much given the high pass rates in those states.
Honestly, is the story more that they picked a case from a school that just has mediocre students? What is the comparison between students who go here for law school and students that go to undergrad institutions with 900 SAT scores?
Are people who are well below median in tech really doing that well? For example, a friend of mine went to a top-50 school and has a BS in Computer Science. They can't find employment as a SWE because they're not that good (they got through the courses with a combination of a lot of TA help and sheer force of will). They're working for a tech company in a combination of a support and project management position. And that's someone who was smart enough to get into a top-50 ranked undergrad institution. Are people who are mediocre and attend an undergrad institution whose median SAT score is in the 900s getting jobs as SWEs with a BSCS? Are they taking adjacent positions where a BSCS might be seen as an "advantage", but not totally related to the work? Are they taking IT-related jobs?
It just seems like the story here is that people who are below median don't magically become 75th-90th percentile by a certificate or degree - and that mediocre law schools have been promising that dream to people. In the tech area, we have these bootcamp schools, but at least they're not charging students a couple hundred thousand. Like, if you spend $15k on a bootcamp and come out with a $60k salary, that might seem low compared to the dream of six-figures at Google, but you aren't saddled with a lot of debt. http://report.turing.io/ - Turing has reported that the average salary is $74k for their graduates which is respectable, but if they were taking $200k from students and 3 years of missed wages and 25% of students were earning under $60k, I think it would be the same situation - they'd be saddled with debt and even if they're earning more than they used to be, they're not earning a lot compared to the debt. But Turing isn't taking that amount of time or money and so if a student comes out with a somewhat mediocre salary by CS standards, they didn't waste a lot of time/money and might be earning a reasonable bit more than before.
And the thing is that places like Turing probably get people who might have done an undergrad at a good school, just not in CS. These are smart people who just lack a specific skill rather than below average people who also lack a specific skill. I mean, give me someone who studied at Boston College and I'm getting someone smart who just might not know any programming. Bootcamps might be getting a lot of those people - smart people who just don't know programming. Now, that doesn't mean that any smart person can make a great SWE, but it's a much better starting place than someone who is below average.
A better story would have been trying to figure out how much value add schools provide. Are elite institutions taking people who would otherwise be successful and marking them as such? Are mediocre institutions not improving outcomes for their students? To what extent do degrees actually improve student outcomes? People who go to schools and graduate schools have historically been privileged people - those who are smart enough to get in and those who are rich enough that they can afford it. Today, loans, a delay in marriage and child-having age, a proliferation of schools, etc. mean that way more people can go to post-secondary institutions. I don't know how much schools improve human capital, but that's definitely a story. Maybe elite schools do improve human capital a lot because really smart people can use education a lot. Maybe mediocre schools do well for some students and not others. These are important questions. These are questions unanswered by a NYTimes article pretending a mediocre law school with mediocre students means that no one is hiring lawyers.
At one point in time, law was lucrative, and there were not enough lawyers. Schools responded by growing in size and in tuition. Students could justify the loans because there was a high chance that the "investment" would pay off.
Fast forward a few decades and law as an industry is contracting. Since the profession is not as lucrative, if you follow the chain, then schools should have contracted in response, minting fewer lawyers. But they can't easily adjust when they've built a bureaucracy and dramatically increased the number of tenured faculty. That lead to them misleading applicants by not having transparency with their true employment numbers. For a while, students were duped. But at this point, the cat is largely out of the bag. Applicants numbers are down, and the demise of debt-burdened law grads have hit national headlines numerous times over the last 5 or so years. So now, in uncoordinated fashion, schools must adjust and finally down size. Too bad students were caught in the crossfire for many years before the flares went up.