The Criminal Lawyer

Apparently there’s a conference going on right now where lawyers are talking about using the internet to get clients. Some think that’s the most awesomest thing ever, some think it’s ill-advised. As someone who has, in fact, gotten clients from the ether, I figured I’d share a little anecdotal evidence about what works and what doesn’t.

I have a solid internet presence — got a website for the firm, my own blog, a separate website where I do a law-related comic, I created and now mod one of the oldest lawyer groups on LinkedIn, I tweet and facebook and reddit and I even have a tumblr. And of course I’m listed on sites like Avvo whether I want to be or not. There’s more than that, of course, but this is enough to be getting on with.

So let’s see how each of these things stacks up, when it comes to getting clients.

1) First, ye olde website. I made it myself (I do all my own coding). It’s got lovely SEO, it’s easy to navigate, and it looks clean. You can reach out to me from any page to ask a question or seek help. The last client I got from it was back in 2007, I think.

Which is not surprising. Law firm websites don’t work like Yellow Pages ads — they’re not there so much to attract potential clients who might not have heard of you, as they’re there to reassure existing clients that they’ve got the right person on their side. (Actually, that’s not quite accurate — potential clients who found out about me from other sources go here to check me out before calling.) As with any law firm website, the pages with the most views are those about the lawyer and those with contact info. The website’s purpose is not to attract clients, but to give them information. My website does its job very well. And it brings in zero clients.

2) Next, the blog. It has a decent audience, though not huge. I post when I feel like it and have time, which can be three times a week or once a month. I love to write, and I love what I write about. Usually, I post when I think there’s something that needs ‘splaining, and I feel like I’ve got something to contribute. Despite the fact that I post when I get around to it, the blog has a steady stream of about 6,000 unique readers each month (ignoring the spikes that happen when Reddit or Slashdot find me). It is not a huge source of business. Still, I do get the occasional client from the blog.

In fact, I’ve gotten some high-profile clients simply because they liked my blog. They come to me because they’ve read my thoughts, and they like how I think. We’re simpatico. We’re on the same page. It’s like they already know me.

They don’t come because of SEO. In fact, my blog is awful for SEO. I don’t repeat ad nauseam that I am a New York City Criminal Defense Lawyer. I don’t seed my posts with keywords. I don’t post all the time. I host my blog on (gasp) the same domain as my website. I don’t do any of the stuff SEO marketers talk about. Because I’m not doing it for the SEO, and I never have.

I write for me. I don’t write for my audience. I don’t write to attract clients. And apparently, that’s the thing that attracts some clients.

Not many, but enough good ones that I can’t ignore it.

ASIDE: What do I mean by a “good” client? Very simple: someone who understands the severity of their situation, is willing to invest in their defense, and who doesn’t obstruct that defense. “Good” clients are bloody rare on the internet.

Most people who come to you from the internet are quite the opposite. If you’re a private lawyer, you want to avoid a lot of these potential clients, because they’re going to be more trouble than they’re worth. More on them later.

3) The webcomic. Boy howdy, does it have traffic! A couple hundred thousand pageviews per month. But it doesn’t generate clients. And it’s not meant to. It started out as an offshoot of my blog, and evolved into its own separate existence. The focus there is on education, explaining some fairly complex legal concepts as simply as I can, without resorting to caselaw or statutes. It’s not about me, and I don’t talk about myself there. Its readers come for the ideas, not because they’re looking for a lawyer. A perfect example  that lots of pageviews does not translate into business.

Great SEO, fantastic numbers, lots of eyes. Zero clients.

4) As for social media, you can’t honestly expect to get clients because you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., can you? Social media is about being social, not business. I love it, and I’ve met some really cool people online. I have long-time friends I first knew only in chatrooms and message boards. I’ve become friends with lawyers I first only knew online. I get to converse with awesome people whom, because of geography, I may never meet. But none of these people are potential clients (at least, I hope not). I have never gotten a call from a potential client who found me on social media.

The lesson so far is simple: A strong online presence does not generate good clients. At least for me, anyway.

So now let’s turn to

5) Avvo and its like. These kinds of things do generate phone calls, but rarely – rarely — from clients you’d want. For whatever reason, the calls and emails from these kinds of sites tend to be from people who are unwilling to pay what their defense is going to cost, or who are more than usually deceitful, or who are looking for their third lawyer after being dumped by the first two, or who are looking for their fourth lawyer after dumping their first three, or who are suffering from schizophrenic delusions, or who insist on free legal advice, or who otherwise want something for nothing, or… well, you get the picture. These are the “bad” clients from the internet. You don’t want them. Your job is stressful enough without them, they demand far more of your time and resources than they should — time and resources you owe to your other clients, and they are never good for your bottom line if you care about such things.

Yes, it generates a number of calls and emails. Almost none of which a sane lawyer would want to take. Yes, there have been two or three over the years who really were serious about their case and helpful to their defense and a pleasure to defend — but these were people who found me by chance. A statistically insignificant number.

-=-=-=-=-

 But where do my clients come from, then? I do get some from the internet, but hardly enough to keep the lights on.

6) Referrals. The clients you’ll want tend to find you, not by chancing upon you online, but because someone they trust recommended you to them. The vast majority of my clients call me because someone gave them my name.

Some referrals come from past clients who liked what I did. This kind of thing will vary depending on your practice — few of my clients are the kind of people who tend to get arrested, so they tend not to know many other people in need of criminal defense. But some do, and you can’t do better than a referral from a happy former client. (Also, due to the general nature of my clientele, I don’t get a whole lot of repeat business.)

Most referrals come from other lawyers. Seriously. White-collar cases come from friends at big firms, who represent the corporation and need someone to represent an exec or manager. Street-crime cases and civil cases come from people asking lawyers they know “who would you recommend.”

These referrals do not come from lawyers you met on the internet. I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten a case from a lawyer I didn’t interact with in real life. The best are from lawyers who have worked with me — represented a codefendant of mine, or handled the civil or tax side of a matter, or even who I helped out “of counsel” while starting out.

If you’re just starting out, I cannot recommend that enough: Go find lawyers who do what you want to do, and offer your services. They’ll pay you a cut rate, bill you out for a profit, and give you A) EXPERIENCE, B) MONEY, C) REFERRALS IF YOU DO A GOOD JOB, or D) ALL OF THE ABOVE. Seriously, if you’re a new lawyer, get off the computer and go knock on a working lawyer’s door. Don’t ask for a job. Ask if you can help out.

Or rather, don’t knock on their door. They’re probably busy. Meet them in a social situation — go to bar events. Go to lawyer events. And don’t be a wallflower — meet people. Don’t talk about yourself — you’re not that interesting — just chat about whatever. Some people will have things in common with you. You’ll make friends.

And your friends will be your greatest source of referrals.

And referrals are going to be your best source of clients.

So bottom line: Clients don’t come from the internet. Clients come from friends. Get off your computer and go make some friends.

A lot of the law is extremely formulaic. True, human intelligence is required to spot issues, devise strategies, and (most importantly) persuade decisionmakers. But in its actual application, the law is often little more than a series of IF-THEN decisions. A computer could be programmed to do it. This is just as true of corporate taxation as of advanced constitutional law. A law student could outline those courses with nothing more than a flowchart and do okay on the exam.

Knowing the formula is important. It’s specialized knowledge that you usually have to go to law school to get. But it’s only knowledge. It’s not understanding.

It’s like baking a cake. If you know the recipe, you can go step by step through the process and get a decent cake on the other side. If you don’t know the recipe, you’re likely to wind up with a big mess. But knowing a recipe that works isn’t the same as knowing why it works. It’s not going to help you if your ingredients suddenly change, or something new is added into the mix, or you have to use an oven with a very different temperature. In that case, if you want to make a cake, you’re going to have to understand the chemistry of what’s going on, the effect that the ingredients and how they are combined and the heat and the time have on the final result.

Knowledge is the what. Understanding is the why.

Most students can demonstrate their knowledge on an exam, and they’re lumped together in the curve. It’s the rare students who demonstrate their understanding who get the outlier As, however.

In fact, there are professors out there who will announce to the class that the final exam is going to cover things that never came up in class. Topics that were never discussed. Issues that aren’t in any of the books. The students will have to say, based on their understanding of why the law is the way it is, what the answer in that unfamiliar area ought to be.

These are awesome professors. If you ever get one, cherish the experience. Because you’ve lucked into someone who teaches the why, as well as the what. And you are going to be so much better equipped to deal with the law as it changes.

The law does change. Whatever field you practice in, the law is going to change during your career. If you know where the law is coming from, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where it’s going. And more importantly, whichever way it goes, you’ll get why. You’ll understand it better. You’ll be able to use it better, advise your clients better, persuade a court better.

So how does get this understanding?

What you’re looking for is policy. An underlying philosophy or purpose that explains the statutes and cases. What were the lawmakers and judges trying to do? What was the point of view that drove how they did it?

You’d think this would be easy — just look at the legislative record to see all the arguments for and against, the court opinions spelling out in excruciating detail precisely where they were coming from.

But if you try doing that, you’ll soon learn it’s not easy at all. The stated reasons for statutes, regulations and caselaw are inconsistent as hell. They’re all over the map. And what’s more, people are only human. The reasons we give for our actions are rarely the same as our true, unstated motives. We may not even be fully aware ourselves of the actual policies we’re acting on — most of the time because we haven’t reflected enough to actually know what they are, and so they remain unconscious, subliminal. And our brains are wonderfully adept at justifying after the fact.

So it’s a puzzle. The narrators are not telling you the truth. They’re not lying to you, but they’re not telling you the truth. The trick is to pick out the clues from what they say, from the situations they’re reacting to, from the problems they’re trying to solve, and from (most importantly) what they actually do. It takes a fair amount of insight into one’s fellow human beings to solve this puzzle.

And this is what sets apart the merely adequate law professor from the superstar. The adequate professor makes sure you understand what the various disparate laws happen to be. The superstar gives you an insight that explains them all (or most of them, anyway).

Now, there are lots of ways to explain what’s going on. How do you know which theories are best?

As with any other field of study, the simplest theory that explains the most data is best.

So for example, you might have a ton of cases that seem to be all over the place, if you just take the judges at their word. They seem to be espousing a given principle, but their decisions keep pushing the law in a different direction. That tells you that the real reason isn’t the one they’re saying. Maybe it’s emotion. Maybe it’s a desire for a certain outcome no matter what. Maybe it’s just pandering to a perceived public opinion. Maybe it’s just a backroom deal.

And those surface reasons give you a clue to the unspoken philosophy behind them. In a criminal case where the court is performing some impressive legal gymnastics, it could simply be that the desire to punish this guy is more important than any protections the law might have given him. (That’s the opposite of the rule of law, by the way. A good example of saying one thing but doing another.)

You can also watch as repeated reliance on the spoken, but incorrect, principles leads to bizarre outcomes. The exclusionary rule is a good example, where the courts keep saying it’s about deterring the police from violating your rights, when in reality it does nothing of the sort. The rule is intended not to make the police think twice but instead to ensure that violations of your rights don’t get used against you. And you can see how repeated insistence on its deterrent purpose erodes the rule — because in situation after situation the court recognizes that there is no significant deterrent effect, and so says exclusion wouldn’t matter here.

This kind of thing goes on in almost every field of the law.

The trick to understanding is actually formulaic: 1) Look at the facts and the outcome; 2) Look at the stated justifications; 3) Note any disconnects; 4) Apply your own understanding of human nature, various philosophies, history, culture, etc., determine likely explanations for the disconnects; 5) Select the explanation that explains the most data with the least complexity.

Go on, try it!

The other day, the Charleston School of Law was kind enough to invite me to speak to its student body as part of its Professionalism lecture series. My theme was, of course, professionalism in the law. But in the context of why we practice law. If you’re interested, have a look:

P.S. – If you want to skip the dean’s kind introduction, just go to the 5-minute mark.

It’s an intriguing notion: that one can objectively assess the relative effectiveness of a given lawyer. With hard data, and sound analysis. In the real world, it’s nigh impossible to tell how good a lawyer really is. You can look on Avvo and see what people here and there may have subjectively thought about him, but that doesn’t tell you whether any other lawyer would have done as well (or been just as dissatisfying). You can ask around and get a sense of what other lawyers generally think of him, but that’s just as subjective. There’s really nothing out there to tell you for sure whether that lawyer gets better-than-average results or not.

So Wake Forest professors Ronald Wright and Ralph Peeples — to their great credit — tried to see if it could be done. In their recent paper, “Criminal Defense Lawyer Moneyball: A Demonstration Project,” they conclude that it can be done. They may even be right about that. But not from the data they gathered, sadly.

[Warning: The internet’s gonna (more…)

Google analytics is a great tool. Among other things, it shows the search engine queries people use to find this blog. Which is a good way of figuring out who its audience is, and what they need to know.

The queries aren’t as entertaining as they are over at Popehat, but then again neither is this blog.

Nor are they all that varied. In fact, just looking at the top 2000 searches so far this month, almost every single one is a variation on a few basic themes. These are the questions people apparently want answered right now. So I’ll address them briefly — very briefly — here.

1. Should I become a lawyer? / Do I have what it takes to be a lawyer?

To answer questions like these, you first have to understand what lawyers do. Once you know that, it should be (more…)

The call came, as they always do, at the last minute. “I’ve been charged with a crime, and I have to be in court in two days, and my lawyer isn’t doing anything, and I’m scared.” The caller came in to meet with me in person, as they always do when they’re legitimately scared and not merely irritated or price-shopping.

Most of the time, after hearing them out, we tell such folks that it’s probably not wise to change horses in mid-stream. Much as we’d love to help them, it doesn’t sound like their present lawyer’s doing all that bad by them, and there’s not enough time for us to catch up. But once in a while, the emergency is legit, and it sounds like we might be able to help. The client signs the agreement, forks over the retainer, and we get to work. There isn’t a minute to lose.

(Before they go, however, we sometimes half-jokingly ask why they didn’t just call us first. The answers vary, but it always boils down to money. There’s nothing wrong with that — price is a legitimate concern. And our services aren’t exactly cheap. So it makes sense that we wouldn’t even be considered an option until other things suddenly became much more important. Unfortunately, people often don’t realize it until the last minute, or until it’s too late.)

There isn’t a minute to lose, and we’re going to spend the next couple of days trying to accomplish all the things that should have been done already — gathering evidence, analyzing data, speaking with prosecutors, etc. Usually, of course, the first call is to the original lawyer. Nobody likes to get those calls, but it’s usual enough in the criminal world — clients jump ship all the time for various reasons, it happens to all of us — and the lawyers are usually collegial and gracious about it.

But not this time.

This time, the lawyer was outraged. Couldn’t believe that this was happening. This wasn’t mere shock, as from a new lawyer experiencing it for the first time. It was anger and betrayal. We began to wonder if perhaps we’d mis-read the facts, and maybe this lawyer had invested a lot into this case.

That thought didn’t last long. “Can you shoot me a copy of your files?” What files? The lawyer only had the accusatory instruments. “What’s the prosecutor’s take on the case?” Who knows? The lawyer hadn’t called to ask. A few questions more, and it became obvious that zero work had been done on the case, and the client’s fears were fully justified.

Our silence must have been eloquent. The lawyer started protesting that the client couldn’t expect ass-busting in a case like this.

-=-=-=-=-

Ah. Yes. Of course. No client could expect their lawyer to be busting their ass on a routine little case.

Except that’s absolutely wrong. Clients can — and should — expect their lawyers to be out there busting there asses on every single case.

It doesn’t matter whether the client’s looking at a murder rap or a farcical summons. The lawyer’s job is to give 100% to defend that client. The client paying next to nothing gets the same level of care as the one who’s carrying your practice for the year.

That means putting in time, of course. And if one has a high-volume-lowest-fee business model, there probably isn’t any extra time for that. There’s barely enough time to just show up on the assigned court date and take whatever plea gets offered. Any more work than that would mean one has no time for taking on all the other cases required to pay the bills. So too bad, so sad, but that time is not going to be invested.

And so here’s another client who’d hired a lawyer, thinking the lawyer would protect them and defend them the way lawyers are supposed to. And instead got a lawyer who saw the client as just another routine widget to be processed through the machine. A lawyer who isn’t there to protect and defend, but to grease the wheels of the machine that destroys reputations and lives. And now the client is starting to realize that, and the client is beginning to panic. For damn good reason.

-=-=-=-=-

The lawyer didn’t end the call graciously. But it ended. And then we got to work.

Over the next couple of days we got the alleged victims’ stories from the prosecutor, fleshed out the prosecutor’s assessment of the case, located and interviewed three eyewitnesses, and helped the prosecutor dramatically reassess the case in the client’s favor. From a heinous incarceration case to essentially “go forth and sin no more.”

This is not self-congratulation. It didn’t happen because of any particular skill or ability we have. It took no brilliance whatsoever. This is precisely what would have happened anyway, had the first lawyer done his job right. Any lawyer who had bothered to take the time would probably have gotten the same result. It really was a no-brainer at the end.

No, this is not self-congratulation — this is a complaint. A complaint about lawyers who don’t feel like a particular case deserves 100%. Every case gets it. Every client deserves it. If you don’t have the time, too bad — that is not your client’s problem. Every client gets 100%. Period.

And if you don’t agree, then what the heck are you doing here?

When people complain that “there are too many lawyers,” what they really mean is that there are too many bad ones. There is always demand for good lawyers to deal with the intricacies of modern life. If anything, people need more good lawyers than ever before — smart, wise, honorable people to help navigate the increasingly byzantine regulations, to make sure the complex business deals actually work, to represent all the non-lawyers who keep suing each other in our litigious society. And of course to prosecute and defend those accused of crime.

The problem is that it’s way too easy to become a lawyer. If you’re not picky about where you go to school, you can get a J.D. despite having little aptitude for it. And the bar exam is a very low bar, believe it or not — you only need the equivalent of a “D” and once you get that “D” you never need to take it again. There are a lot of misguided people out there who go to law school for the wrong reasons, and graduate to keep filling the ranks of the “too many lawyers.”

So it made us uneasy to learn that people with high LSAT scores are significantly less likely to even apply to law school these days, while those with lower scores are still applying almost as much as before.

It’s not surprising, of course — obviously, smarter people are going to be more likely to realize that it’s harder to get a job as a lawyer these days, and decide to go elsewhere. But the upshot is that the proportion of “good” lawyers is only going to shrink, and the “too many” will become even more numerous.

The solution is to make the profession more picky about who can and cannot become a lawyer. The problem is how to do it.

-=-=-=-=-

Back in the bad old days, of course, the problem was that the profession was more picky. Just in a bad way. Minorities were not welcome, women were not welcome. Hell, folks who needed to work for a living were not welcome — we didn’t want their kind, or their night schools. (Many of the ABA’s more bizarre accreditation requirements are holdovers from these bad old days.) So there are some historical negative connotations to making it harder to be a lawyer.

Nowadays, though, people who get upset at barriers to entry don’t really cry racism, sexism or classism any more. Instead, they cry protectionism — that those who have the jobs want to protect them from competition. Or they cry up the free market — let anyone try it who wants to, and let market forces shake out the chaff.

The protectionist argument is one of the stupidest arguments, ever. Increasing the number of sucky candidates isn’t going to have much of an effect on the hiring of qualified people. Seriously, nobody is afraid that sucky JDs are going to come along and take their jobs. Letting more of them in will only cause more competition for low-tier jobs, making the complainers’ problem worse. This argument tends to be made by dissatisfied law grads who find themselves unable to compete in the modern market, and making it kinda demonstrates why.

The free-market argument isn’t so much stupid as unwise. Those who make it tend to see the law as a business rather than a profession — they fail to realize that we have clients, not customers. Clients don’t just drop in, pay for a service, then leave; clients entrust lawyers to handle important life matters. Lawyers don’t sell commodities; they put aside their own interests to serve their clients, and the client’s interest comes first. We are fiduciaries, advisers, confidantes, and we are trusted to make decisions on our clients’ behalf.

This is not a relationship that free-market forces can regulate. Clients of bad lawyers suffer, but there is not much the market can do about it. In a free market, it’s nigh impossible for clients to tell a good lawyer from a bad one — asking around is only as useful as the people one knows to ask. Bad lawyers sometimes thrive, simply because their name is known. The way real people find lawyers in real life is essentially random. A free market also needs quick reaction to bad service, but bad lawyering may not have consequences until years too late to make a difference to the lawyer’s reputation. And clients who are unsophisticated enough to hire a bad lawyer in the first place aren’t as likely to realize that they got shafted. The free market just cannot work to price out bad lawyering very efficiently, if at all — and in the meantime what about the clients who suffered? It’s not like they can return their counsel like damaged goods — they’re stuck with the consequences. Relying on the market to price out the bad and reinforce the good is a recipe for injustice, and would make things even worse.

-=-=-=-=-

The solution is to be, not protectionist, but (more…)

Judgment is the criminal lawyer’s stock-in-trade. The ability to assess the risks of a situation, and choose the better course of action, is the value that lawyers bring to the criminal justice system. It doesn’t matter if they’re defense attorneys negotiating a deal or fighting it out at trial, or if they’re prosecutors deciding whether and what to charge — their value is their judgment. The better the judgment, the better the lawyer.

It’s therefore critical that criminal lawyers have some understanding of how and why people take risks. In advising a client inclined to take a bad risk, the lawyer can’t really change that perception without knowing what’s causing it. And such an understanding also helps one spot one’s own inclinations to error before it’s too late.

This is not common sense. (In fact, common sense is usually the enemy here.) It’s insight. The ability to see how people act, and realize — aha! — why.

Fortunately for the rest of us, there are amazingly smart people out there who do that all day. When you find one with real insights about why people take the risks they do, you’re probably gonna want to listen.

That’s why we’re taking a moment to point you to Danny Kahneman (that’s his picture up there).

Who is Danny Kahneman, you ask. You’re not alone. If you’re not an economist, you can be forgiven for not knowing he won the Nobel Prize for basically inventing the field of Behavioral Economics. If you’re not a psychologist, you can be forgiven for not knowing he’s considered “one of the most influential psychologists in history, and certainly the most important psychologist alive today.” If you’re not a foreign-policy wonk, you can be forgiven for not knowing of his significant ideas on the evaluation of risks in wartime. He’s one of the most insightful and relevant people nobody’s ever heard of.

As it happens, a lot of his insights are directly relevant to the practice of criminal law. Trying to decide the likely outcome of that trial? You’re probably (more…)

Hey. Gen-X lawyer here. Could those of you whining about your law schools and sucky job market please shut up? Thanks.

There’s something about the gripes of new and rising JDs that’s not unlike the same bleats we’re hearing from many “Occupy Wall Street” types: It’s the complaint that they did everything they were supposed to, and now instead of getting a living they’re getting fucked. They went to school, took out loans to pay for it, in the expectation that the payoff would be worth it. That there would be a job out there — more than a job, a lifelong career path. A secure income. But that’s not what they’re finding in the real world. The dream jobs aren’t out there — at least not for them. They’re starting their adult lives with an insane amount of debt, and no conceivable way to pay it off. They feel betrayed. They were promised all this, they did their part, and now society isn’t doing it’s part. So they rant online, some take to the streets to complain, and a few have even sued to enforce the deal they thought they’d made.

This is nothing new to those of our generation. When we graduated from college, the job market sucked big time — only the engineering students seemed to be in high demand, much to the chagrin of those of us with History (cough), Art and Philosophy majors. It was pretty bad when we graduated from law school, too — we knew many bright, talented young JDs who had to work as bartenders, online marketers, and the like before landing a lawyer job (and the ones who persisted, by the way, did wind up getting cool law jobs and are doing quite well).

It sucked, but we knew it was coming. We had no illusions about the economy. We didn’t expect Social Security to even be around any more by the time we’d reach retirement. The Baby Boom generation had spent their lives focusing on how awesome they were, and fucking things up for the rest of us, and we knew it very well. A Washington Post article from 1991 began:

Now adulthood looms, like a cookie jar that somebody else already picked clean. Will the busters [the phrase "Generation X" had yet to be coined, we were called lots of things] ever be able to match their parents’ standard of living? The cost of starting out in life — college and a first house — has been racing ahead of inflation and wages ever since they were born. Meantime, adults have rung up nearly $3 trillion in national debt in the busters’ brief lifetimes, virtually all of it on consumption for themselves. The busters will get stuck with the tab.”

Another article from the Atlantic in 1992 (calling us the “thirteeners” — the 13th generation of U.S. history) described us thus:

After graduation they’re the ones with big loans who were supposed to graduate into jobs and move out of the house but didn’t, and who seem to get poorer the longer they’ve been away from home — unlike their parents at that age, who seemed to get richer. …

In them lies much of the doubt, distress and endangered dream of late twentieth-century America. As a group they aren’t what older people ever wanted but rather what they themselves know they need to be: pragmatic, quick, sharp-eyed, able to step outside themselves and understand how the world really works. From the Thirteener vantage point, America’s greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again.  Others don’t yet see it, but today’s young people are beginning to realize that their upbringing has endowed them with a street sense and pragmatism their elders lack. Many admit they are a bad generation — but so, too, do they suspect that they are a necessary generation for a society in dire need of survival lessons.

When they look into the future, they see a much bleaker vision than any of today’s older generations ever saw in their own youth. Polls show that Thirteeners believe it will be much harder for them to get ahead than it was for their parents — and that they are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the long-term fate of their generation and nation. They sense that they’re the clean-up crew, that their role in history will be sacrificial — that whatever comeuppance America has to face, they’ll bear more than their share of the burden. It’s a new twist, and not a happy one, on the American Dream.”

And you know what we think when we hear Millenials whining? The children of those self-absorbed Boomers, who gave them awards just for showing up, who slathered them with praise and “self-esteem” without actually making them do anything to earn it? (more…)

On the New York Times op-ed page today, Clifford Winston asks the question “Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?” The writer, an economist with the left-ish Brookings Institution think tank, answers with a resounding “no.” They only increase the cost of entry into the profession — and thus the cost of legal services — while doing nothing to ensure the quality, honesty and accountability of the lawyers performing said services.

His diagnosis is on the nose, but his prescription is bad. He is right that simply graduating from an ABA-accredited law school and passing the bar are not sufficient quality control. But his solution — eliminating such barriers to entry — is the exact wrong approach. If anything, the barriers to entry need to be higher.

-=-=-=-=-

Law school, as experienced by most law students, is an enormous investment with little application to the actual practice of law. The first year is great for teaching how to spot issues and do the necessary legal research to answer questions, and for instilling core principles that underlie our jurisprudence. But beyond that first year, the time spent in class after class could be better spent in an apprenticeship where one learns how the law is actually practiced — and more importantly, acquiring the experience and judgment required to advise and deal with clients. Apart from the exceptional few who truly get a lot out of their continuing studies as preparation for real life — in particular, those who take advantage of clinical programs — law school after year 1 is a bit of a wasted opportunity for the run-of-the-mill students

The cost of law school is staggering, but only in part because of the requirements of maintaining ABA accreditation. These costs could be trimmed. The law library is the single greatest mandatory expense, what with the required accumulation of endless paper volumes of statutes, regulations, case law, treatises and their myriad pocket parts and updates. It’s a required expense, but not a necessary one, especially as everything’s been available digitally since forever.

Most of the cost of law school is not mandated, but the result of simple supply-and-demand. Tons of people want to go to law school, either to fulfill a calling or to make money or get status or just kill time until they find themselves. The demand drives up tuitions. Add to that the subsidy of student loans, and the price gets driven ever higher. Costs, on the other hand, remain fairly low. Staffing is not an enormous cost, considering. The ratio of students to professors is huge. When you figure 400 students in a section, each paying however many tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, the salaries of the handful of professors teaching them account for a minor fraction of it. Because of this, and the apparently endless supply of prospective students, law schools are a veritable cash cow — which is why so many have popped into existence in recent decades.

One byproduct of all these new law schools is a dilution of the quality of legal education, and thus the quality of many graduates with a JD. This is not to denigrate those with degrees from lower-tier schools, many of whom provide better services than some top-tier grads after gaining greater experience in the trenches. But whenever someone complains about “too many lawyers,” what they’re really complaining about is “too many bad lawyers.” Making it harder to get into law school, and then making it harder to actually get one of those JDs once there, would weed out many of the incompetent and misguided before they can do any damage to a real client.

The solution is not to abolish law school, but to make it harder and more relevant. Change the accreditation standards away from expense for its own sake (which, like several other such ABA standards like those for evening students, are actually holdovers from an earlier time when they existed to discourage minorities and those who needed to work for a living from joining the profession), and instead make the accreditation turn on selectivity of admissions and the quality of education provided. Require clinical courses (another astronomical expense, but one which makes sense). Require a uniform grade curve, so that performance can be measured accurately across multiple schools. Require practical courses alongside the general and theoretical, especially in the second and third years. Require more rigorous training in practical ethics, not just the bare-minimum survey everyone’s been doing since the ’70s.

Don’t eliminate the barrier; make it meaningful.

-=-=-=-=-

With respect to the bar exam, as we’ve said before, nobody in their right mind believes (more…)

Every now and then, a lawyer will get a call from someone in desperate need of help. They’re being stalked, spied upon, wiretapped and harassed by the government. They don’t know why, there’s no reason for it, but the fact remains that every time they turn around, they catch a glimpse of agents tailing them. Watching them from a window. A familiar face in a passing car. Words overheard on the subway that the victim herself just said on the phone the other day. They’ve gone to the police repeatedly, only to be ignored or rebuffed. They’ve sent countless letters to their elected representatives, only to get polite empty letters in reply. It’s clearly a conspiracy, and they are suffering from it.

And indeed, they are suffering. It’s making their lives miserable. They’re desperate for help. Everyone they turn to seems to be in on the conspiracy. They’ve amassed heavy files over the years, documenting their failed attempts to make it all just go away (which they sometimes FedEx unsolicited to various lawyers, trying to find someone, anyone, who can help).

This is rarely something that lawyers can help with.

The human brain is marvelous in lots of ways. One thing it’s awesome at is spotting patterns. Pattern recognition helps you navigate through a complex world and make sense of events. Spotting patterns helps you evade predators, figure out social situations, drive in traffic, and analyze complex scientific data. It’s something a small child can do that the best computers are still a long way from doing. But not all patterns are meaningful. Any set of random events will throw out something that looks like a pattern, every now and then. So another awesome thing the brain does is filter out the meaningless patterns, so you only have to take notice of the important ones.

But in some people, the part of the brain that filters out the meaningless from the meaningful is broken. Apparent patterns are thrust upon their consciousness with the same force as real patterns requiring action. It can manifest itself as (more…)

Technology freed art to transcend itself.  After photography took on the job of realistic imagery, art was free to explore new forms of expression.  New ways of visualizing things.  New things to visualize.  Using technique or color or shape to fire the viewer’s neurons in new and unexpected ways.  Art evolved, for a time, to a place where art itself was no longer the point.  The greatest artist could be one who created no art, but only his persona.  As James Salter put it, “an artist freed from the demands of craft, an artist of concepts, generosity; his work is the creation of the legend of himself.  So long as he is provided with even a single follower he can believe in the sanctity of his design.”

A fair number of lawyers seem to think the same way about the law — that the technology of the internet has allowed us to transcend experience and craft, and create a superior facsimile online.  Success comes not from hard work done well, but from connecting with people online.  Reputation comes not from the results earned for one’s clients, but from the number of Twitter followers one has.  Praise yourself online often enough, and get enough other similar artistes to praise you, and you too can be great.

Just so you know, it doesn’t work that way.  Other lawyers aren’t going to refer their next big codefendant to you based on your Klout score, but on whether you’ve got the real-life skills and experience to do the job well.  Clients who retained you based on your self-puffery aren’t going to recommend you to others once they find out (and they will) that you were out of your league.  Lawyer referrals and client references are the two biggest sources of new business you’ll ever have.  If you’re investing all your time on building a killer online presence and maximizing your social media, you might want to reconsider.  A better investment of your time would be (more…)

(Our last couple of posts about law school and recent graduates were a bit negative, focusing on those who are entering the profession for the wrong reasons.  But what about those who are doing it for all the right reasons?  They are in the majority, after all.  Well, this one’s for them.)

There’s plenty of talk around the blawgosphere these days of fresh young law graduates looking to start their own practices.  Some are hanging out their own shingle because they couldn’t find the right kind of job out of law school.  Some are doing it because that’s what they always wanted to do in the first place.  Either way, it’s a decision that takes a certain kind of entrepreneurial mindset.  Most lawyers we know would rather not own their own practice, because at least working for someone else you’re making steady reliable money with which to pay for such things as rent and debt.  When hearing of someone starting their own practice, they often say nice things like “how brave” or “that took some guts,” to which the new solo typically responds (in his head) “really?”  The kind of person likely to go solo isn’t the kind of person who thinks it’s a brave thing to do; they do it because it feels right for them.  Maybe they’re happier being their own boss.  Maybe they’re risk-takers by nature.  Whatever the reason, it’s what they’re comfortable doing.

So if you’re one of the newly-minted JDs thinking of going solo, hats off to you.

That said, however, there are some things you probably ought to be aware of.  There’s been a fair amount of foofaraw online about the ethical and disciplinary pitfalls out there.  All the warnings are true.  Read them and take heed.  These warnings are not threats.  They are not the crazed jabber of old farts trying to keep you out of their territory.  Ignore those who say otherwise; they are displaying poor judgment.

Lawyer ethics is not a trap for the unwary.  It is not a minefield of hidden dangers.  It’s pretty much common sense for anyone who has a sense of the law as a profession, rather than a business.  The rules are very simple:

1. The client comes first.
2. Know what you’re talking about before you open your mouth.
3. Only take on a case if you can actually handle it competently.
4. Never misrepresent anything to anybody, ever.  This includes what you say or imply about yourself online.

It’s not hard.  If you think these are scary rules, or that they’re designed to make it harder for you to make a buck, then please do not practice law — you have missed the whole point.  If you understand that your role as a lawyer is to protect the interests of your clients, who have entrusted to you matters that are of great importance in their lives, then these rules should elicit nothing more than a “duh, of course” from you.  You should wonder why such rules even need to be mentioned.  They are obvious and self-evident.

So enough of the rules.  We’ll presume that you have the necessary mindset to go it alone, and practice ethically.  What more do you need to know?

Although the practice of law has changed a bit over the past 15 years or so — with the rise of the internet, email, computerized research and all that — you don’t care about any of those changes because you’re just starting out.  The last thing you need is someone telling you how things work in the digital age.

What you probably don’t know, however, are some of the nuts and bolts of building a successful law practice.  So here are a few things to get you started:

-=-=-=-=-

First, make sure you (more…)

If you’re trying to market your law firm online, no doubt you have a blog.  You know how important a blog can be for building your brand, and maximizing your SEO.  You’re doing everything right — loading up on keywords, submitting your posts to social media sites, and asking visitors to bookmark you — but when you look at your numbers each month, you’re still not getting all the hits you deserve.  What’s going on?  And how can you fix it?

What’s going on is that every law firm and solo out there has a blog these days, and it seems like everyone is doing the same thing.  After all, there are only so many ways to optimize your site if you aren’t constantly generating fresh content.  So if you’re like most blawgers out there, you’re getting lost in the crowd.

One way to stand out, of course, is to write lots of original content about topics that interest you, so that your interest draws in others similarly interested, and engage with your audience as it grows over time.  But this can be time-consuming, and who has that kind of time? Anyway, you don’t want potential clients to think you have this much time on your hands — they might wonder why you’re not busier, instead!  Furthermore, let’s face it, not everyone is a Kurt Vonnegut or Dave Barry.  We’re lawyers, not essayists.  In a way, it’s unfair that the essayists are drawing hits away from you, the lawyer.

Fortunately, we here at the Criminal Lawyer have learned a few secrets of maximizing blog traffic with a minimum of effort.  And now, for the FIRST TIME EVER, we are going to share with you the 5 easy techniques you can use to DRAMATICALLY INCREASE YOUR BLOG TRAFFIC RIGHT NOW:

TIP #1 — Lists, Lists, Lists!

Holy mother of God in a sidecar with rainbow sprinkles and a lobster bib, if you aren’t using lists, then you’d better start.  Articles with names like “The Top 5 Ways to…” or “The 10 Most Badass…” are proven to grab more online attention than anything that isn’t porn.

Online readers don’t stop to chew over ideas and digest careful arguments.  They nibble; they graze.  Give them bite-sized nuggets of pithy observations, and they’ll come back for more.

A bonus of the list is that it can automatically double your hits, by the simple method of breaking the post into two pages.  By spreading the list across three pages, you can even triple your hits WITH A SINGLE POST.  (But don’t get too crazy — studies have shown that online readers lose patience if they have to click through to every part of the list.  Don’t make it a slideshow.)

TIP #2 — Don’t Write for You; Write for Your Audience!

So you’re super-interested in this nifty case that just came down, and you think you have some ideas about why the court ruled that way and what it might mean for other similar cases?  Good for you.  Make a note of it for your own files.  But unless it’s a case that’s been all over TV news this week, I’ve got two words for you: BO RING!

How many people do you think share your interest in this little bit of legal arcana? A couple dozen?  Maybe?

Well, if you want a couple dozen hits, then by all means, knock yourself out.  But if you want MAJOR BLOG TRAFFIC, my friend, then you’re going to have to knock it off.

Write instead for the masses.  Don’t be a snob about it — what, are you too good for their attention?  Are you too good for their money if they decide to retain you?  Didn’t think so.

Look, if a topic is (more…)

Courthouse News reports that “a $200 million class action claims the New York Law School misrepresents post-graduate opportunities for lawyers and subjects ‘the overwhelming majority’ of its graduates to ‘years of indentured servitude’ after ‘saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay off.’ ”  The plaintiffs accuse their school of ”a systemic, ongoing fraud that is ubiquitous in the legal education industry and threatens to leave a generation of law students in dire financial straits.”

Oh, for crying out loud.  This again?

Look.  Nobody forced you to go to law school; it was your own choice.  Nobody forced you to go to that particular school; it was your own choice.  Nobody forced you to take on more debt than you could reasonably afford; it was your own choice.  After your first year, and it became clear that someone with your grades from your school wasn’t likely to be making the big bucks, nobody forced you to keep going and to take on even more crippling debt.  It was your own choice.  You were a college graduate, an adult, presumably capable of making your own life decisions.

The school did not “saddle” you with debt.  You did it to yourself.  And now you regret it.  Frantically trying to blame anybody besides yourself for your own foolish decisions only makes you look… well… foolish, at best.  At worst, it’s almost like the girl who regrets her drunken orgy and accuses her fellow partiers of gang rape.  Either way, you certainly don’t come off as someone with the requisite judgment and brainpower to make it as a lawyer.  Are you sure it’s the school’s fault you’re not making it on the outside?

Here’s some more from the complaint:

[The] school consigns the overwhelming majority of them to years of indentured servitude, saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay off. New York Law has done this while blatantly misrepresenting and manipulating its employment statistics to prospective students, employing the type of ‘Enron-style’ accounting techniques that would leave most for-profit companies facing the long barrel of a government investigation and the prospect of paying a substantial civil fine. These deceptions are perpetuated so as to prevent prospective students from realizing the obvious – that attending NYLS and forking over nearly $150,000 in tuition payments is a terrible investment which makes little economic sense and, most likely, will never pay off.

Specifically, NYLS, through both its print and internet marketing materials, commits two basic written, uniform misrepresentations. First, the school during the class period claims that the overwhelming majority of its graduates – roughly between 90 and 95 percent – secure employment within nine months of graduation. However, the reality of the situation is that these seemingly robust numbers include any type of employment, including jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal industry, do not require a JD degree or are temporary or part-time in nature….

Second, NYLS grossly inflates its graduates’ reported mean salaries, by calculating them based on a small, mostly self-selected subset of graduates who actually submit their salary information….

There are so many things wrong with this.

The biggest problem is that, if you really were defrauded, then you had to be basing your decision on whether to go to this particular law school based in large part on how much money its graduates make.  If that’s not true, then none of this is material enough to be fraudulent.  Fraud basically means that, but for the misrepresentation, you wouldn’t have spent the cash.  If that is true, then you have no business being a lawyer in the first place.  You’re in it for the money, and don’t belong here.  You selected this law school not because you thought it would help prepare you for a life of service, but because you thought you’d be able to get “a job” and make “good money.”  Those are the wrong reasons, entirely.

Even if one were to concede that these were material considerations to the plaintiffs in this case, it is hard to imagine that anyone would have thought they really were all that material.  Would law schools really think their students are so mercenary that the main reason why they chose one school over another was the average alumnus salary?  That’s absurd on its face.  But it’s a prerequisite of the complaint.

And where is the deception, in the first place?  The complaint does not say that the school made up numbers out of thin air.  They only allege that the school honestly reported information which the plaintiffs then misconstrued.  Perhaps one could throw the plaintiffs a bone and say post-graduation employment figures would reasonably be expected to refer to legal employment.  But the salary information was what was reported.  There is no deception in reporting the numbers they got.  The school did not “inflate its graduates’ reported mean salaries” — it simply revealed them.

From what’s been reported — here and elsewhere — there just doesn’t seem to be any merit to this case.  We don’t see how it could possibly survive a motion for summary judgment.

As a work of chutzpah, however, it’s pretty good.  It’s not the same as killing your parents then seeking mercy because you’re an orphan, but saying your school owes you a fortune because you shouldn’t have chosen to go there?  It’s up there.