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.

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 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The solution is to be, not protectionist, but (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.

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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.

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

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First, make sure you (more…)

Okay, see that XKCD cartoon up there?

That’s not how law-school academia works.

Law school academia is more like this:

It’s not exactly news that law review articles don’t carry the same weight in their relevant field as, say, scientific papers published in a peer-reviewed journal.  Ask any practicing lawyer how many law reviews he subscribes to, and the answer is likely to be “zero.”  Ask any practicing lawyer how often he cites law review articles in his motions or briefs, and you are likely to hear either “seldom” or “never.”  Ask any practicing lawyer the effect that law review articles have on the practice of law and the advancement of jurisprudence, and he is likely to laugh condescendingly.

It’s not exactly news, but it’s something people have been talking about this summer, after Chief Justice Roberts disparaged the usefulness of legal scholarship at this year’s Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference.

Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.

Law professors, of course, rushed to defend the relevance of their articles.  But pointing out that occasionally a law review article might actually get cited in a footnote, to support an argument that was already being made, isn’t quite the strongest defense of relevance.

And it’s foolish for legal academics to make such a defense.  Nobody expects them to believe their articles are relevant to actual legal practice any more than one would expect a postmodernist paper in an academic literature journal to be relevant to the publishing industry.  Academia and the real life it studies are rarely the same thing.

And it’s foolish for legal academics to even imply that their writings ought to be useful to practicing lawyers.  There are only two kinds of law review articles that are of any use whatsoever to lawyers and judges:  One is the summary or survey of an area of law as it actually is right now this very moment.  The American Criminal Law Review‘s annual survey on white-collar crime is a good example, and there are a fair number of brief summaries of more discrete areas of law as well.  The most useful of these are the ones that deal with areas of law that are in flux, describing recent changes, which can help the practitioner or judge test the wind to see which way things are trending.

The second kind of useful law review article is the kind that doesn’t so much restate the law as explain why it is the way it is.  These are more rare, but can be very valuable for those trying to make a policy-based argument.  A well-done article of this kind takes all the disparate decisions out there and tries to provide an underlying policy that explains most of them.  Such a thesis is useful when dealing with an area of the law that is changing, or that one is arguing ought to change.

These useful articles are not useful as something one would cite as part of one’s primary argument.  If cited at all, it would be in a footnote.  Their value is not as an authority to be cited, but as a guide to help focus or expand one’s own thoughts.

But such articles are few and far between.  The overwhelming bulk of law review publications are of little to no use to anyone besides the author.

This is because law review publication does not serve the same purpose as other kinds of academic publication.

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Law reviews serve two purposes: One is to provide an outlet for career academics to publish something — anything — in order to achieve tenure.  It’s a pointless exercise, as the quality of one’s articles is of no importance; it is the fact of publication that is important.  Having been published often, and recently, is all that is needed to put a check mark in the right box.

The fact of publication is itself no guarantee of the quality of scholarship, that’s for sure.  That’s because of purpose number two: To give better law students a way to further distinguish themselves.  We do that by having law students pretty much run the show.  Students select which articles are published.  Students do the fact-checking, making sure the cited sources actually say what the author claims.  Students check the grammar, spelling and bluebooking.  It’s a lot of work, and shows that one has the ability to juggle responsibilities beyond one’s caseload, and shows an aptitude for the kind of work often assigned to young associates, so it’s fairly prestigious and rightly so.  But it is not peer review, and it is no guarantee that the articles themselves are any good.  Grammar and cite-checking are not the same as substance.

Neither of these purposes is to provide a useful product for practicing lawyers and judges.  So because it is not their purpose, it doesn’t really make sense to knock them when they fail to do it.

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Still, wouldn’t it be nice?  You know, if legal scholars were given tenure based on actually contributing something to our jurisprudence?  If it was the rule, rather than the exception, for law-review articles to be useful summaries of the law or explanations of the unnoticed policies that explain why the law is and where it is likely to go?  Then perhaps one might see them being cited a little more often.  Being read by someone not involved in the publication process.  Making a difference.

Don’t you want to make a difference?

Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics.  Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?”

Leaving aside the freaks and weirdos (and possibly some of their clients), however, it seems that most people find this blog by asking Google the same handful of questions.  The number one search engine query that get people here, every month this year, is something along the lines of “why become a lawyer.”  Number two includes variations on a theme of “can a cop lie about whether he’s a cop.”  The top five are rounded out by queries about what crimes Goldman Sachs may have committed, connections between Adam Smith and insider trading, and what one should say to a judge at sentencing.

We’re not sure that we’ve actually discussed all of these topics here.  Then again, we might have, and just forgot it (which is a distinct possibility — these posts are all written in a single pass, without any real editing, and usually are not given another thought once they’re posted.  If you ever wondered what “ephemera” meant, you’re looking at it right now.)

Still, in the interests of alleviating our boredom public service, here are some quick answers to our readers’ most pressing questions:

1. Why Should You Become a Lawyer?

Because you feel a calling to serve others.  Because you want to make a difference in the lives of others.  Because you are genuinely interested in the rules by which human society functions, why people behave the way they do, and the policies and interests underlying it all.  If those are your reasons, then you belong.

Not because you want to (more…)

The New York Times had an interesting data crunch yesterday called “The Lawyer Surplus, State by State.”  Economic consultants EMSI estimated how many new jobs for lawyers there are going to be each year, in the near future, in each state.  Then they used the actual number of bar exam passers each state had in 2009 to figure out how many new lawyers would be competing for those jobs.  The results were worthy of remark.  Every single state except for Nebraska and Wisconsin is projected to produce more new lawyers than lawyer jobs.  (D.C.’s data was included, but isn’t comparable, as most simply waive in there.)

The results are worthy of remark, but they are hardly surprising.  Back when we were in law school in the mid-’90s, it was “common knowledge” (if uncited) that America had “more law students than lawyers.”  We recall reading that there was a surplus of lawyers back in the ’80s.  We wouldn’t be surprised if the same things were said in the ’70s and even before we were born.  And we’d expect to keep hearing such things for as long as the profession endures.

The number of lawyers at any one time, however, is probably just about right.  It’s simple supply and demand.  A practicing lawyer is only practicing because his services are demanded by someone.  If there is no demand for all the lawyers out there, market forces will ensure that the excess supply finds themselves pursuing other careers — whether they want to or not.  When people say there are “too many lawyers,” they usually mean “too many bad lawyers.”  (Which leads us to wonder how come you never hear that about other professions or occupations?  Nobody ever says there are too many doctors, or too many electricians, though surely there must be too many bad ones out there.)

But “too many lawyers” has a different meaning when spoken by law students and freshly-minted lawyers.  It means there are not enough jobs out there for everyone who’s going to be passing the bar.  Again, it’s a refrain we’ve heard before.  When we graduated from law school, just before the dot-com boom, we knew plenty of smart capable young lawyers who had a real hard time finding a job.  Everyone was bitching and moaning that people were racking up all this debt with no means in sight to pay it off.  Ditto a few years later when that bubble burst.  And now some years later when the finance bubble burst.  The only difference we can see between then and now is that these days the students and graduates are trying to blame everyone (except themselves) for their bad luck.  As we discussed a couple of posts ago, all that happened was a long-term shift in the demand curve, to which the profession reacted late and to which the law student population has yet to react.

Because young adults continue to flood into law school.  There’s been a bit of a dip here and there this year, but the numbers are still strong.  So it makes us wonder what’s going to happen to all of them as they enter a market that has no room for them.

The EMSI numbers seem reasonable.  They predict a nationwide surplus of more than 27,000 young lawyers each year for the foreseeable future.  We’re not talking about people who didn’t make the cut, people who went to law school but washed out.  We’re talking abotu JDs who actually passed the bar, and still won’t have a job waiting for them.

What are 27,000 surplus lawyers going to do each year?

Some of them will hang out their own shingle and (more…)

Where did all the law jobs go?  And are they coming back?

Good questions.  More on that in a second.  But first, we have to say that we’re frankly tired of hearing law students and newish JDs moaning about the dearth of lawyer jobs to be had.  Particularly grating are the complaints that it’s somehow somebody else’s fault that they’ve got all this debt and no six-figure job to show for it.  Most of these put the blame on law schools for hoodwinking them into thinking the job market for attorneys was awesome.  We don’t get that — people who go to law school are grownups, adults with college degrees, but these ones are acting like they’re still kids.  Come on, at some point you have to be responsible for your own decisions.  Childhood ended a long time ago.  Anyway, one would think that someone intending to become a lawyer would have had the basic ability to research what the real job market was like.  A simple Google search would have turned up a plethora of articles and discussions about it, going back to mid-2008.  If they really had no clue what they were getting into, then they really need to re-think whether they’re in the right profession.

And if they’d bothered to research just a tad more, they’d have found that this ain’t the first time law jobs have been harder to come by.  This kind of thing happens every now and then.  It’s cyclical, just like anything else.  Demographics, economic cycles, and the coming and going of fads have all affected whether there’s enough hiring going on.

One need not understand why it was happening.  But for college-graduate adults to not even know that it was happening?  And to make life-changing, debt-incurring decisions based on law schools saying their graduates had good-paying jobs?  (Or worse yet, based on a fantasy that has never been true, that anyone but the top grads from the top schools would be making the big bucks right out of law school?)  That’s just idiotic.  Such complaints call into question the very ability of the complainer to have practiced law in the first place.  It makes you sort of glad they didn’t find a job, kinda.

Although one need not understand why it was happening, however, it’s still worthwhile asking the question.  We’ve had our own theories, but they’re based more on intuition and anecdote than on any rigorous analysis.  So it’s good when, from time to time, someone pops up with an explanation.

With respect to the latest turndown, our basic understanding was always (more…)

In a post on the future of law schools, Josh Blackman predicts that “many legal services that are created today through individualized, customized efforts by toiling associates, will be replaced by information products that can be downloaded on demand, like a commodity.  …  This transform no doubt would dramatically change the skills attorneys of the not-so-distant future will need.”  That’s not quite true.  Automated legal advice is not workable in the foreseeable future.

But he does have a valid point.  A huge amount of the law really is formulaic.  Whether it’s tax law, or commercial law, criminal law, or what have you, a lot of it breaks down to a series of “if-then” statements.  So can software really replace what lawyers do?

Actually, yes.  It can replace a lot of what judges do, too, for that matter.  Rulings, etc.

Software cannot replace the judgment and creativity required for coming up with effective strategies, adapting the law, or persuading others.  Spotting the actual issue from a mess of facts, notwithstanding what the client happens to think the issue is. Figuring out what needs to be done and how best to do it. Coming up with the right questions, to get the most accurate data.  These are all human skills that algorithms just can’t handle at the moment.  These are the high-level functions that you’ll still need a lawyer for.

But a lot of lawyering really can be done by flowchart.  Once the issue’s been identified, it’s just a matter of selecting the correct law to apply, plugging the relevant data into that formula, and seeing what the answer is.  For a lot of junior associates, this is a big part of their job description.  The flowcharts can branch intricately, but that doesn’t make them any less formulaic.

It’s wrong to suggest, however, that people will be able to replace their lawyers with (more…)

The law is an amazing profession, but it’s not for everyone.  In fact, it’s not for the vast majority of people.  And when it’s not a good fit, the downside is awful.  Mismatched lawyers are miserable.  Their lives can really suck.  They may be very good at what they do, but it’s not particularly fulfilling.  Or it’s too time-consuming, preventing them from doing the other stuff that would be fulfilling.  Maybe they can’t stand dealing with other lawyers.  And if they’re not very good at what they do, their clients can suffer far far worse.

But for those who belong here, the law is a wonderful place to be.  It challenges the intellect, inspires ideas, and gives you a chance to really make a difference.  And that is huge.  It doesn’t matter what kind of law you practice; you’re dealing with real people, with real lives, and you’re helping them with a real need.  A life in the law is deeply fulfilling, and a life well spent.

Unfortunately, most mismatched lawyers don’t figure it out (if ever) until far too late, when they’re already practicing.  Some cut their losses and start a new career.  But most don’t.  Maybe they’re in a large law firm and just hate it, but can’t leave the paycheck.  Maybe they feel they’ve invested too much of their lives in law school and advancing through the profession, and so are unwilling to chuck it all and start over doing something else.  Maybe they sincerely can’t think of anything else to do.  And they wind up getting more and more miserable.  It’s no wonder that alcoholism, depression and divorce are rampant among lawyers.

The best time to figure it out, of course, is before going to law school.  Some people wisely drop out (or, thankfully, wash out), but that’s rare.  No, once a mismatched lawyer is admitted to law school, the odds are they’re going to stick it out and become a sinkhole of misery.  Far better to have turned away and pursued a more fulfilling life before ever going to law school in the first place.

But how can you tell if the law’s going to be a good fit for you?  It’s tough, if you haven’t tried it out first.  Whether you’d be happy or not is all hypothetical until you start working.

Fortunately, you know yourself pretty well.  Nothing hypothetical there.  If you’re honest with yourself, you know what traits you have and don’t have.

And fortunately, we’ve known plenty of other happy lawyers, and had the chance to observe what traits we all seem to share.

So if you’re wondering whether you ought to go to law school, you might want to ask yourself a few very simple questions:

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1.  Do you want to be a lawyer?

If the answer is no, then you shouldn’t go to law school.  Sure, lots of people say it prepares you for other kinds of work, and trains your brain to do marvelous things.  But if that’s all you want out of it, go take some continuing ed courses in History, Philosophy and Economics.  A rigorous study of History will give you the same issue-spotting, researching and detail-checking that you’d get from law school — probably better.  Philosophy will certainly give you a better grounding in logic, analysis, and reasoned argument.  And Economics, along with the other two, will give you enough grounding in how people actually work, and why they do what they do.  There is nothing else that law school teaches if you’re not planning to be a lawyer.

Law school serves a single function: it is a (more…)