Tuesday, October 18, 2011

The professor's apprentice

The WSJ has a story ($$, free summary here) about how more than 20% of corporate clients are now refusing to be billed for big firm work done by first and second year associates "in at least some matters."


A combination of the legacy of financial crisis and higher rates for junior associates — $200 or $300 for an hour’s work, which typically includes research, proofreading or culling important documents from boxes of paperwork — appear to be driving trend. The line is simple: Chief legal officers don’t want to absorb the costs of training newly minted lawyers.

“Training someone on putting together an asset-purchase agreement shouldn’t be done on our nickel,” David Brill, the general counsel of American Stock Transfer & Trust Co., a stock-transfer agent based in Brooklyn, N.Y., told the Journal. ”Younger attorneys can be fine on less complicated matters, but we draw the line at anything with any complexity.”

So what’s to be done?

But R. Bruce McLean, the chairman of Washington, D.C.,-based Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, said that if the trend continues, firms will have to find a new solution, perhaps a new billing model or intensive training programs similar to those in the U.K., where prospective solicitors take a one-year course on legal practice followed by an apprenticeship.

Peter Kalis, the chairman of K&L Gates LLP, said that when the issue arises with clients, he tells them “it’s their dollar, and they’re free to do with it as they wish.” But he said he also tells them to “step back,” and take a longer view. “It’s a bargain made throughout the generations that has served democracy and capitalism well.”

Peter Kalis seems to have missed the memo announcing that any and all social bargains made through and between the generations are now considered null and void if they fail to maximize the current bottom line.  But really, it was inevitable that the logic of contemporary global capitalism would determine that there's something absurd about paying people hundreds of dollars an hour to "cull important documents from boxes of paperwork" (i.e., to perform secretarial tasks) just because they've acquired law degrees.

Bruce McLean's suggestion -- that law firm associates undergo intensive vocational training followed by an actual apprenticeship before they're paid to do legal work -- would result, holding all else constant, in a nine-year post-high school educational model for lawyers, which under current circumstances sounds like a high price to earn the privilege to practice law.

Of course law schools are coming under pressure to absorb at least some of the costs generated by three years of professional education that, whatever other value it may have, teaches people very little about anything that lawyers actually spend their days doing.  Their response to that pressure has come in two forms: trying to do more skills training inside of law schools themselves, and allowing students to get academic credit for unpaid work they do while still in law school.

The disadvantages of classroom-based skills training are well known.  In order to learn how to practice a profession it's necessary to practice that profession. Practicing at practice -- that is, engaging in pretend lawyer work in an academic setting -- is by contrast an extremely inefficient way to learn how to do practical things.  Legal clinics are a response to this, but have their own problems: they're very expensive, and they tend to teach only a narrow range of basic skills in regard to a small subset of litigation issues.  A huge amount of legal work has nothing to do with litigation, and in any case legal practice changes quickly enough that attempts to teach aspects of it in either classroom or clinical settings are of dubious value, especially given the current cost structure of American legal education.

An increasingly popular response to these facts within legal academia is to attempt to capture the advantages of an apprenticeship model while not letting go of the benefits (to law schools) of requiring students to pay for three years of classroom education.  Hence the recent wave of semester-long externship programs for credit, which have been adopted by several schools, and which are being considered by many more.  These programs allow students to spend a semester doing full-time unpaid work for a government agency, a judge, or in some cases a non-governmental non-profit, and to get something approaching a full semester's academic credit in the process (the typical model allows a student to receive credit equivalent to around 80% of a regular academic load).  Students like these programs a lot for, it appears, three reasons:

(1)  They feel as if they're learning to actually practice law.

(2)  They believe such programs create future employment opportunities, either with the employers themselves or through the networking the students do while on the job.

(3) They get to spend one less semester sitting in law school classes.

I'm very much of two minds about these sorts of programs.  On the one hand, a more rational model of legal training than the current one would be largely apprentice-based.  On the other, there's something more than a little disturbing about flooding an already-saturated market with unpaid workers, while at the same time requiring them to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 for the privilege of working for free. (Naturally these programs come with various trappings that are supposed to ensure that they're still "academic experiences," but I doubt anyone takes these gestures too seriously).

But of course from the students' perspective a very large number of them are already working at unpaid internships during law school (although heaven knows for no more than the 20-hour per week maximum allowable under the ABA rules).  To these students, such programs give them an opportunity to at least get academic credit for what they're doing already, without the additional hassle of attending classes that they often consider something approaching a complete waste of their time.

Ultimately, if it makes more sense for law students to spend a semester working rather than in law school classrooms, then it would make much more sense to simply eliminate that semester (or more) of law school altogether, rather than outsourcing the professional training of lawyers-to-be, while continuing to charge them increasingly large amounts of money for the privilege of not coming to class.

76 comments:

  1. Prof. Campos:

    Your posts tend to overlook the very human motivations of students and 0L's. They're not as pure as you make them sound.

    One major reason students like clinics is that (at schools where they are graded) they tend to be graded very easily and take up a lot of credits. So, instead of having a semester of Corporate Tax, Securities Regulation, Corporations, and Evidence, where you'd be lucky to do well and would have to do a lot of work, you can have a semester of Corporations, Family Law Clinic, and Fun 1 Credit Seminar, where you are almost guaranteed to do well overall and will have far less work for the same number of credits.

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  2. 7:03 - Paying tuition for a semester is a very high price to pay for a menaingless grade. Don't you think it would be preferable to do an unpaid internship, or even earn a low wage for performing these tasks and eliminate the hand-out to law schools for the "privilege" of grade inflation?

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  3. You write that "Naturally these programs come with various trappings that are supposed to ensure that they're still "academic experiences," but I doubt anyone takes these gestures too seriously."

    To the contrary, any number of externship directors, law faculty, students and field placement supervisors take these gestures quite seriously. Recent trends include doctrinal classroom components in focused practice areas tied to the externship experience.

    Students come out of these experiences with high quality classroom training contemporaneous with practice experience supervised by seasoned attorneys and judges.

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  4. Protip: Google the title of the article, "What's A First-Year Lawyer Worth?", in a separate browser and you can read the entire article for free when clicked from the results page.

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  5. The oddity of paying to work outside the school is part of the reason I didn't do any clinics during my time at law school. During the summers, at least I was able to receive a small paycheck for my labors (about 10 dollars an hour). But, I thought it strange to avoid classes while I was paying for them. More fool I, as once I was out in the job market, I wished that I had gained at least some practice experience.

    A friend of mine, a fellow '10 grad recently laid off after his first year of work, told me about an unpaid job he applied for. The job required at least one year of experience. One year of experience for an unpaid job! The treatment of our labor as valueless has taken a toll over the last few years.

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  6. "You write that 'Naturally these programs come with various trappings that are supposed to ensure that they're still 'academic experiences,' but I doubt anyone takes these gestures too seriously.'"

    To the contrary, any number of externship directors, law faculty, students and field placement supervisors take these gestures quite seriously. Recent trends include doctrinal classroom components in focused practice areas tied to the externship experience.

    Students come out of these experiences with high quality classroom training contemporaneous with practice experience supervised by seasoned attorneys and judges."

    Obviously I was mistaken.

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  7. Had four financial services sector internships during law school (plus 2L summer at a regulator). They are the only reason I now have a (non-JD required) job. Basically I paid $140,000 to get four internships, a summer job, and a worthless piece of paper.

    Oh, and when I cold called my way into an internship at a federal agency, the clinic office tried to block me for going outside protocol.

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  8. "Obviously I was mistaken."

    Hahaha. Zing.

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  9. My good friend is straight and popular with the ladies(good looks or so they say). He attended a Lamda Law Event and, I kid you not, gave one of the lawyers for a respected firm a blow-job in the bathroom to secure a summer position at the firm for the following summer. His grades were definitely not the caliber of what the firm normally hires. He is now a second year associate at that firm; no word on whether he is still giving blow-jobs. This is what job market is like folks. Fairness is a human construct that, while a laudable goal at some point, is increasingly no longer relevant in surviving in country. Flattery, flirtation and straight-up sex along with pre-existing wealth have far more power and pull in today's economy. Disgusting, but true.

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  10. In breaking news...your good friend is gay.

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  11. "In breaking news...your good friend is an employed homosexual w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ attorney."

    FTFY

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  12. Mistaken, perhaps, but the flippant response suggests to me that you don't see any value to efforts by those within the law school community to address the real need for apprenticeship-like experiences. Odd for someone looking for solutions.

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  13. Nope, he definitely isn't gay, but he will give a blow-job for a cushy, 160k/year job in an economy where intellect, connections, and accomplishments, increasingly, aren't doing a damn thing for job seekers. He said he hated the experience, but he said he focused on the money the entire time he was performing the act because it was the only thing that could get him through it. He now lives a very comfortable life, and I am the unemployed one from a T4 with over 160K in debt.

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  14. 8:29: I'm all for apprenticeships. "Apprentice-like experiences" sound like apprenticeships that people have to pay large amounts of money to law schools to undertake, for no better reason than that law schools are in a position to extract that money. Apprenticeships are not academic experiences, and all the bureaucratic bluster and "oversight" in the world isn't going to change that.

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  15. 2 days ago the NY Times had a story about captive foreign students being wholly taken advantage of by various institutions. Reminded me so much of my time in the law: http://is.gd/JaSsUi

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  16. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/14/business/la-fi-gap-downsize-20111014

    It seems that the universities, like the gap stores, are expanding their "outreach" into China---YET the universities don't think that the student should assume any CONSUMERIST mindset despite the fact that these same schools are actively adopting a BUSINESS-LIKE plan for future growth. So they can play the role of a BUSINESSMAN and tell the rest of us that we can't play the role of CONSUMER???? Yeah, RIGHT!

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  17. The problem with any sort of apprenticeship experience is that it is very time consuming, labor-intensive and not billable to the client. When I worked at a plaintiff's firm, I was able to do the sort of things you would expect from an apprenticeship -- invite first years and interns to sit in on depositions and discuss why the lawyers did what they did, go with a first-year to the first deposition and act as a backstop if necessary etc. Externships are probably the cheapest way to provide this kind of experience, but the value largely depends on how the lawyers at the placement work with the student. I've been trying to think of a way to scale up the clinic experience to make it less expensive and available to more people. I like the law school/law firm idea, except that I don't see how it could be self-supporting (ie not need tuition dollars) without taking paying clients/cases from the bar. I've tried to come up with a hybrid externship/clinic where the supervising lawyer would be an employee of the law firm and the law school and be expected to train 3Ls and new associates to work on the firm's cases, but I see a lot of conflict problems opening up and again, who would pay for it. Providing this kind of training while keeping student costs low is a real challenge.

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  18. Basically firms have to teach graduates how to be lawyers, on the client's dime, because law schools taught them bullshit philosophy and other useless humanities crap (I'm looking at you Leiter).

    It's completely unfair to the clients and the firms and of course there will be a backlash.

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  19. @9:09 - as has been demonstrated here time and time again, law school is almost totally bunk - especially after you add the current cost to the equation. The study of law should be an undergraduate degree with some sort of paid apprenticeship upon graduation and a reformed set of bar exams that reflect what a working lawyer needs to do/know.

    That doesn't really deal with the fact that student loans (of all kinds) need to include serious reform but its a start. Law school is an enormous waste of time and money all wrapped up in a shit sandwich that we end up eating for 30 years. And everyone knows it.

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  20. Why can't law school be like a first year associate job? One class of theory where you teach all the courses (torts/crim/con law blah blah) at once, barbri style, and four classes of practice. You pick the practice class that matches what you want to do and there's a lottery system if there's too much demand for one class and not another. In these classes, your tasks are no different than that of an associate working for a partner, or a junior attorney working for a public defender and so on.

    THERE ARE SO MANY SIMPLE SOLUTIONS TO THIS PROBLEM!

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  21. lawprof at 8:49. You make two claims. First, that "Apprentice-like experiences" sound like apprenticeships that people have to pay large amounts of money to law schools to undertake, for no better reason than that law schools are in a position to extract that money."

    What better reason would you like? As I see it, the private firms won't pay for an apprentice-like system, the public wouldn't support an expanded, taxpayer financed apprentice system, so some law schools are taking the time to try and meet this need by developing high-quality externships, while still allowing students to seek paid or unpaid internships. What is it you don't like about this and what is your alternative, ready to implement solution?

    Second, you claim that "Apprenticeships are not academic experiences." Weird. You seem to want law schools to be more responsive to the actual needs of the students, but then want to create a definitional barrier to meeting these needs by declaring the proposed response "not academic." Talk about living in the clouds. What, in your world, meets the definition of academic?

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  22. This blog evokes the UK apprenticeship model a lot, but without an understanding of how that is changing.

    We will soon see what happens to the UK legal market now that tuition at UK universities has skyrocketed from about $4500 a year to about $14000 virtually overnight. I realize these numbers are below US standards, but no one in the UK saves for university the way they do in the States and financial aid packages are far less generous and common, so sticker is closer to actual price.

    Making $50-60K a year as a trainee (apprentice), living in London, paying almost half your income to various taxes, may make less sense when you have 3-4 years of university debt plus some debt from law school (they do 1-2 years of law school, some of which tends to be paid for directly by the firms, some not).

    In other words, training professionals is expensive and shifting to an apprentice model is too. Who will bear the cost if clients and firms are unwilling to? In medicine, the answer is the taxpayer (there are millions of forms of government subsidies to hospitals, doctors, employers providing health insurance, etc.). Unclear if that would be politically palatable in law. But in any event, shifting towards clinics or an apprentice model where an apprentice earns peanuts while servicing huge debt misses a lot of the problem, which is just cost.

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  23. @9:26 AM But those SIMPLE SOLUTIONS cut deep into the profits of the law schools. Every aspect of this profession has a cottage industry of entrenched self-interested players....from the LSAT, LSAT Prep Courses, LSAC, Online applications fees, Professor Salaries, Tuition for 3-4 years, Annual editions of the same Casebook, numerous Thompson-West Outlines for what the case books don't explain well, private loans for living expenses during those UNPAID internships, Barbri courses to finally explain what you need to know for the bar exam, Bar application/examination fees for the states, and bar dues which follow thereafter. These players don't want the system to change, and as long as they can have the government pay them upfront in the form of student loans, they are not going to move one inch.

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  24. *invokes UK apprenticeship model, not evokes

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  25. @9:35 - that is exactly right. But I think everyone understands why these simple solutions are not put into place.

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  26. "We will soon see what happens to the UK legal market now that tuition at UK universities has skyrocketed from about $4500 a year to about $14000 virtually overnight."

    Isn't that a damn shame? This is another problem with the American educational scam, it causes others scumbags in other countries to think, "hey, why aren't I making money like those Deans in the states? I must be a sucker. In the states a TTT law school Dean pulls half a mil per year and here I am living on a pittance. Raise those tuitions!"

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  27. "Peter Kalis seems to have missed the memo announcing that any and all social bargains made through and between the generations are now considered null and void if they fail to maximize the current bottom line."

    Does the word opportunism even mean anything anymore in our society? It's the norm now, so I doubt anyone even understand the idea that there could be something wrong in achieving short term gain at the expense of long term harm.

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  28. There's obviously a missed business opportunity here.

    Create a school of Experiential Learning. Give people credits for going to work (paid or unpaid! We don't care!) Charge them a de minimis amount per credit hour ($50 or so). Offer financial aid in the form of student loans. (Thank you, federal government!)

    Have multiple degree hierarchies. (Associates in Experiential Learning up through Grand Master of Experiential Learning).

    Thus allow people to defer student loans indefinitely because they are "enrolled" full time. It's brilliant. You collect money from the feds so that people don't have to repay the feds, and it costs society less than having someone go and get another degree they don't need.

    It's like IBR, but without any need to ever repay anything!

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  29. Am I missing something, but why isn't legal education like education? Over-priced, undergrad degree in Finance/Econ/Marketing, whatever, go directly to work as an anlyst/first year, whatever, spend a few years, and, if your industry/employer requests/demands, after 4-7 years or so out of college, you get a 2 year (max, some programs 1 year) MBA, and now you're an associate, veep, whatever. Doesn't law work EXACTLY in the same fashion - 4 year undergrad (you get the doctrine, mixed in with all of the other classes), a few years working, developing a specialty or like for something (really, imagine the cost-effectiveness of paying a 22 year old college grad to do doc review instead of a first year associate), pay them less, and after a few years go back and get a "JD" or "LLM" in whatever law - real estate, criminal prosecution, securities offerings, aviation financing, etc. - where the student is already exposed to a specific specialty, and he can get 1-2 years of doctrinal learning *in that specialty* as well as practical, clinical experience if requried (since now the student knows what a law firm looks like, the clinic/practicum can more resemble and behave like, you know, a law firm, instead of an obscure wing of the law school).

    What am I missing? Oh yeah, what 9:35 said.

    Fucking asshead, baby-boomer institutional heads are destroying the social structure. They should be slowly put out to pasture . . .

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  30. 11:03,
    There's a fair share of people that do that by being paralegals for a year or two.

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  31. 10:14 -- wrong. UK universities didn't finally wake up to charging more, The Tory government did. Almost all universities there are public, and the government lifted the ceiling on the amount universities can charge in tuition from 3K pounds to 9K pounds a year, effective this year.

    This is my point: one should not lightly cite foreign examples without understanding them. They have their model, and it has its problems, and we have ours (and ours). Don't expect that incorporating one piece of their system (e.g., apprenticeships) into ours will magically rectify the situation here, or even improve it at all on net; their system is just structured differently. We would need to ask more broadly, what is the new business model for an apprenticeship in the US legal system?

    The overarching problem is the high cost of education, and law schools are bit players in that story in terms of percentage of overall graduates now facing very high debt to income ratios (or zero income and lots of debt). The pace of tuition hikes in general over the past generation is unsustainable.

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  32. Apprenticeship would not work because there are no where near enough apprentice positions for all of the graduates.

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  33. LOL. Cute:

    "Columbia faculty statement: NEW YORK, NY, October 10, 2011. – Today faculty from Columbia University released a petition signed by over 300 professors expressing their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Signatories to the petition come from across the faculty of Columbia University and Barnard College. In their petition, the professors join the Occupy Wall Street movement in condemning the growth of economic, social, and political inequalities. According to the petition, claims that the movement lacks focus are inaccurate and ignore the many important issues that the Occupy Wall Street movement has raised. “I understand the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement clearly,” said Columbia professor and former University provost, Jonathan R. Cole. “The movement speaks to the growing economic inequalities in our society: 1 percent of the population holds almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; as inequality has increased taxes on the wealthy have plunged; often wealth rather than merit determines who receives educational opportunities; and millions of citizens have lost their homes while those on Wall Street, who are responsible for much of the economic crisis, are rewarded rather than punished.” Many professors expressed admiration for the movement’s ability to refocus public debate to include discussion of equality and economic justice. “While my generation of scholars focused on the important issues of civil rights and women’s rights, it has been said we did not do enough to draw attention to the growth in economic inequality. There's just enough truth in this for me to be very moved in a personal way that so many people from all walks of life, old and young, are uniting now around a platform of basic economic fairness,” said Bruce Robbins, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities. Professor Hamid Dabashi said, “We owe it to the generations of students we have taught to oppose the systematic erosion of the common good, of the inalienable rights to a decent healthcare, to public education, and to a dignified life.” The professors also believe that the movement provides an opportunity to address these issues with students. "As a law professor, I feel a particular responsibility in speaking out in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests," said Katherine Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. "Lawyers have played no small role in providing legal cover for the overreaching and irresponsibility undertaken on Wall Street. My hope is that Columbia Law School will see these protests as an opportunity to remind our students that legal ethics require that lawyers be bound to represent not only private, but also larger societal, interests."

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  34. 12:40, can you provide me an email because I would like to thank Columbia for this letter.

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  35. 11:20, does the UK at least limit the number of law schools so the supply of graduates matches the number of lawyer jobs? As long as you do that everything will be more or less fine.

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  36. This looks a whole lot like the problem with the bar exam.

    Law students don't graduate with the knowledge needed to pass the exam, same as they don't graduate knowing how to practice, so they pay some third party provider to give it to them.

    But, in an ultimate move of "fuck you, pay me!" the people hired to provide these lessons are none other than the very professors who failed to teach the material the first time around. It won't be long until professors start offering "Law Camp," a 4 week long skills class that sets you back another $15k.

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  37. 1:03 --

    I don't think the UK limits the number of law schools; it's a different system altogether. Most who become solicitors "major" in law in undergrad and then go to "law school" for basically Barbri-type crap for a year (or two, if they did not "major" in law) before their training contracts. Barristers are few in number, and I believe the system is similar. It is possible they limit the number of what they call law schools, but it does not appear to be a significant restraint on supply of lawyers, like here.

    Of course in the US, we limit the number of accredited law schools, which graduate 85% of lawyers today.

    There is a significant surplus of lawyers in the UK. The job market for lawyers is probably worse there than here (though, in fairness, their overall economy is worse too -- headed for recession if not already there). Contract-lawyer jobs in London are hard to get; many work as paralegals. I realize it's not all roses here, but it seems worse there. And more firms here pay something resembling BigLaw market (say, within 1/3 of BigLaw pay). There, the drop off from the Magic Circle and its competitors on down is huge. And again, cost of living and taxes are significantly higher.

    I'm not sure it's a better system from the standpoint of lawyers generally, young lawyers in particular, or clients. With the coming explosion of UK educational debt, it will get worse.

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  38. well if tuition in the UK was only 3k per year as you wrote, I think it would be much better there.

    what percentage of law grads, who want training contracts (i.e. they still want to be lawyers), do not get training contracts? how much do these contracts pay and how long do they last?

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  39. I wonder what Professor Franke is doing for her unemployed students with $150000 in debt?

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  40. 1:59 --

    It's 9K GBP a year now (about $15K). Multiply by 5-6 for all of your education. So, like $60-75K. Yes, better than here. But then a training contract pays like $45-60K for two years while you are living in London.

    As for competitiveness, I think a lot of ppl do not get training contracts right now. And then a lot of ppl who do, don't get normal lawyer jobs afterwards. Trainees are truly grunts -- not even like first-year associates. Turns out searching for typos and the other paralegal work they do gets them used to the hours, but does not prepare them to practice. Sound familiar?

    I'm telling you, there is no easy solution, and simply embracing apprenticeships -- whether in law school clinic form or trainint contracts -- isn't going to help. We would need to reimagine how we pay for education and training more broadly.

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  41. *oops, $75-90K. If you get a training contract at an elite firm, though, they will pay for at least one year of British "law school," so that reduces the effective cost. But that's like saying getting a summer associate job defrays the cost of going to a US law school -- i.e., assumes you can get it.

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  42. "I wonder what Professor Franke is doing for her unemployed students with $150000 in debt?"

    I doubt there are many out of Columbia.

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  43. "I think a lot of ppl do not get training contracts right now. And then a lot of ppl who do, don't get normal lawyer jobs afterwards. Trainees are truly grunts -- not even like first-year associates. Turns out searching for typos and the other paralegal work they do gets them used to the hours, but does not prepare them to practice. Sound familiar?"

    First of all I didn't ask what you thought. I was hoping for an objective answer.

    And no it doesn't sound familiar at all because in the UK you only have to do one year of law school, for 9k, after which you earn 45-60k doing first year associate work where as here you have 3 years of law school after which you don't even get a job, any job, even one doing paralegal type work.

    I think you need to go back to the UK and thank your lucky stars before you see what a hellhole it is in this country.

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  44. 2:24 --

    Sigh.

    First of all, you have failed to do currency conversions. I said 9K GBP or about $15K a year followed by crap salaries in expensive cities.

    "In July 2011 the [Solicitors Regulation Authority] minimum salaries for trainee solicitors was £18,590 (recommended £19,040) in central London and £16,650 (recommended £16,940) elsewhere. In practice, the larger commercial firms in London and the other major legal centres such as Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol will pay considerably more than this; at a major London firm you could expect to start on a salary of between £25,000 and £35,000." http://www.lawcareers.net/Solicitors/TrainingContract.aspx

    Second, as you get about half-right, law school is just 1-2 yrs in the UK. However, most lawyers there go to university first and "major" in (study) law. So, total cost of a legal education is about $75-90K. American lawyers go to college too, of course, but in the UK most university degrees are 3 years. So that is an additional $45K to become a lawyer followed by salaries that are actually a little lower than what I estimated -- about $24-40K a year for two years -- if you get that job, followed by a law firm salary lower than here, all while having a high cost of living. I'm not sure that is the system we should aspire to, is what I am saying.

    Third, I'm American, just used to live in the UK. Don't call my country a hellhole just because you can't get a job, and don't lionize other countries' systems just because you read something good about them in the New York Times. Both systems are imperfect and are far harder/more expensive than they were five years ago.

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  45. @2:41 You are not an American.

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  46. @2:47/2:24 -- want to see my birth certificate? (long-form)

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  47. "in the UK most university degrees are 3 years."

    In the US they're four years. So there's another year the UK saves. And you still haven't answered any of my questions from 1:59. Finally, there's no way you're American.

    Thanks for contributing nothing but confusion.

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  48. Yes we do. Imageshack it.

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  49. 2:52/2:52/2:47/2:24 etc. -- you need to read more carefully.

    "what percentage of law grads, who want training contracts (i.e. they still want to be lawyers), do not get training contracts? how much do these contracts pay and how long do they last?"

    Yeah I answered all of these. I don't know the percentage (nor even if it is available), but as I said, many ppl seeking training contracts do not get them. Similarly, I don't know the pertcentage of people seeking BigLaw gigs in the US who don't get them, but I would also say it is high.

    I also listed the pay ranges above. And as I said in 2:16, training contracts are two years long.

    I don't care if you think I am British; my dental health says otherwise.

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  50. 2:52/2:52/2:47/2:24 etc. -- you need to read more carefully.

    "what percentage of law grads, who want training contracts (i.e. they still want to be lawyers), do not get training contracts? how much do these contracts pay and how long do they last?"

    Yeah I answered all of these. I don't know the percentage (nor even if it is available), but as I said, many ppl seeking training contracts do not get them. Similarly, I don't know the pertcentage of people seeking BigLaw gigs in the US who don't get them, but I would also say it is high.

    I also listed the pay ranges above. And as I said in 2:16, training contracts are two years long.

    I don't care if you think I am British; my dental health says otherwise.

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  51. "I don't know the percentage (nor even if it is available), but as I said, many ppl seeking training contracts do not get them."

    Why would you say the latter after saying the former? Do you see the incongruity?

    I think you're way way off base in comparing the plight of british lawyers to american ones. Seemingly, they get (a) a total of 3 years less education (1 year less UG and 2 years less of law shool), (b) they get training contracts (i.e. paid internships) because the UK limits the number of law schools and (c) their education is like 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of american education.

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  52. * their education is like 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of american education, per year (cumulatively it's much less).

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  53. At 3:02. Damnit, If I wanted to read closely and try to use reason instead of emotion, I woulda become a lawyer. Oh wait....

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  54. 3:07 --

    As to (a), I would say British lawyers average 5 yrs of school -- either because their undergrad studies take 4 yrs (some "majors" are) or because they don't study law and need to do what is called a conversion course for law school, which is 2 yrs instead of 1. So, it's 4-6 yrs total. Yes, this is shorter than the minimum 7 here, but it's only a full 3 yrs shorter for a subset of people.

    (b) is not quite correct. They don't necessarily get training K's and I don't know if the UK limits the number of law schools, but like here, they have a ton of lawyers (i.e., whether or not the number is "limited," supply is too high).

    (c) Their education is much cheaper per year. But again, keep in mind tuition was tripled overnight (1 yr's notice) nationwide. Ppl simply were not saving for this, so they have to take out debt. It is less debt, but the training contracts pay crap and are hard to get.

    All I'm saying is we should think twice before adopting the UK apprenticeship model. It is flawed, but moreover, it assumes an inexpensive education. Now the UK has abandoned inexpensive education, so we will see soon enough whether it can work there. If it does, perhaps we could import some of its better aspects here.

    --Allegedly British guy

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  55. " a subset of people. "

    A subset whose size we don't know. Could be 99%. Could be less.

    "They don't necessarily get training K's "

    We haven't established that at all.

    "All I'm saying is we should think twice before adopting the UK apprenticeship model."

    I'm saying you should research facts before stating them because otherwise it confuses the conversation.

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  56. "As a law professor, I feel a particular responsibility in speaking out in support of the Occupy Wall Street protests," said Katherine Franke, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. "Lawyers have played no small role in providing legal cover for the overreaching and irresponsibility undertaken on Wall Street. My hope is that Columbia Law School will see these protests as an opportunity to remind our students that legal ethics require that lawyers be bound to represent not only private, but also larger societal, interests."

    And now she can go back to business as usual and her six-figure paycheck.

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  57. come on let's be fair. she's at columbia not some TTT. we need some law professors, after all.

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  58. 3:35 -- by your insistence on statistics in areas where there are none, the most generous interpretation I can think of is that you are a troll.

    Precisely how many US law students fail to get jobs in BigLaw? Small law? Gov't?

    What percentage of US law graduates from the past three years who want to practice law, do?

    One could of course apply your "Could be 99%. Could be less." criticism to all that, but of course we have a sense of things without waiting for the transparency movement to reach its conclusion.

    Similarly, I gave you my impression of how common the outcomes I referred to are. In the absence of statistics, interpretation is required. I have given "facts," as in statistics, where available.

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  59. PS I am done responding to the troll, but glad to answer other q's about the British legal education/training system before we give it our full-throated endorsement (and would of course welcome English lawyers' views, which would be far more informed than my own).

    --Allegedly British guy

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  60. If you're going to come on here with the claim that the british system (in which you can get a law degree with as little as 4 years of total post highschool education, and in which law graduates get apprenticeships after law school) is bad because neither of the aforementioned statements are true, even though you admit that you don't know whether they're true or not, then you should have some facts. otherwise you're just confusing everyone for no good reason.

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  61. Forget the British system. We need the Canadian system.

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  62. @5:00 be careful what you wish for. If you can't get an articling job, you degree is worthless. This happens to a sizable percentage of graduates.

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  63. @6:44. Agreed. For years, the merits of the articling system have been questioned. See, for example, http://www.slaw.ca/2008/02/01/the-inconvenient-truth-about-articling/

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  64. From the above link:

    "(b) set up or certify a parallel Practical Legal Training Course that provides law graduates who could not obtain articles the chance to earn an equivalent certification in practical legal skills training."

    This exists in Australia (well for sure in Victoria and the ACT anyway:)

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  65. I'm actually a current Canadian law student and long time reader of this blog (and by "long time" I mean I've been reading it for the past couple of months that it's existed).

    Our legal employment market, while significantly better than the clusterfuck you guys have, is hardly desirable, and it's gradually being compromised by the same pernicious market forces that have been eating away at you guys (i.e., growing class sizes and new schools despite a lack of market demand, skyrocketing tuition, offshoring and automatization of low-level legal tasks, etc.).

    Some 12.1% of students fail to obtain articles, according to the latest figures, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, because the current employment rate for students immediately post-call (i.e. after the articling year) is actually below 50%. For some this surely just amounts to temporary unemployment; they're able to bounce back within a matter of months and obtain a new position, but I suspect for a growing and substantial portion this turns into long-term systemic unemployment and ultimately flight from the profession.

    Yes, our tuition rates tend to be lower than yours (typically 10 to 20k as opposed to the 20 to 40k you guys generally pay), but then our salaries also tend to be lower (even at top firms, starting salaries are 75k max, compared to 160k at top US firms).

    I'll be graduating this year with over $60,000 in debt and I'm still struggling to find an articling position, and even if I find one, I'm not sure whether I'll actually have a future in the profession. Needless to say I take some solace in reading US scamblogs like this one and hearing stories from people in situations even more difficult than my own.

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  66. A is better than B. But I can find something wrong with A. Therefore A is worthless.

    This is the the same rhetorical trick law professors use all the time to shoot down practical ideas for change that would impact their bottom line. We need to do something because the American law school system is about as bad as it gets.

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  67. "For some this surely just amounts to temporary unemployment; they're able to bounce back within a matter of months and obtain a new position, but I suspect for a growing and substantial portion this turns into long-term systemic unemployment and ultimately flight from the profession."

    "For some"? "I suspect for a growing and substantial porition?"

    so you don't know whether or to what extent these are true. these are not facts. without facts, you're just confusing everything. mr. canada is just as bad as the british non-american.

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  68. @3.18 -

    a) Nonsense. My conversion course took one year, my BSc. 3 years, the vast majority of English lawyers are the same. All that's needed after that to become a solicitor in England and Wales (assuming you can get a traineeship, which only ~50% do according to the SRA) is the one-year LPC course, after which you start work as a trainee. The total is therefore five years for non-LLBs and four years for those who studied law at undergraduate level.

    b)There is not so much an over-supply of lawyers per se, since it is not possible to qualify as a solicitor (or a barrister) without getting a traineeship (or puppilage for barristers). Law firms themselves control the number of lawyers on the market through selective hiring. What there is is a glut in the number of people who want to become lawyers and who are willing to pay good money to law schools who are quite willing to take their money in the full knowledge that only 50% of those who study the LPC go on to become trainee solicitors. The situation is even worse for barristers (only something like 30-40% of people who take the BVC gain pupillages).

    c) This increase did not represent so much a rise in cost, but a shifting of the burden of that cost from the tax-payer to the student. The government also increased the student loans offered by the Student Loans Company to cover the additional costs, these loans do not need to be paid back until income exceeds a certain level.

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  69. "Law firms themselves control the number of lawyers on the market through selective hiring."

    Wow, so the supply of new lawyers is controlled by the demand for new lawyers.

    What an interesting way of regulating production.

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  70. "Our legal employment market, while significantly better than the clusterfuck you guys have, is hardly desirable, and it's gradually being compromised by the same pernicious market forces that have been eating away at you guys (i.e., growing class sizes and new schools despite a lack of market demand, skyrocketing tuition, offshoring and automatization of low-level legal tasks, etc.). "

    Sad. American law schools are like some kind of zombie, slowly infecting other legal systems throughout the world.

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  71. "I'll be graduating this year with over $60,000 in debt and I'm still struggling to find an articling position, and even if I find one, I'm not sure whether I'll actually have a future in the profession. Needless to say I take some solace in reading US scamblogs like this one and hearing stories from people in situations even more difficult than my own."

    LOL. At least you're honest and thank you for teaching me about the concept of "articling."

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  72. @10:46

    You're demanding specific statistics for everything, but the reality is they don't exist. Following the end of the articling period, nobody bothers to continue collecting employment data for new lawyers, so everything else I know is based purely on anecdote, but if you honestly believe that an unemployment rate can just jump from below 50% to near full employment, then I have some inflated swampland derivatives in Florida I'd like to sell you.

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  73. sorry 5:26. Everyone, please feel free to make up whatever you want and no one will ever ask for any evidence whatsoever, no matter how wrong your statement seems.

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  74. @9:29. 2007 data from Ontario can be found at http://www.lsuc.on.ca/media/licensing.pdf.

    An excerpt:

    "The Gap. Therefore, it is estimated that in the 2009/2010 licensing year there may be as many as 400 candidates [out of 1733, or 23%] unable to find articling placements. This assumes that the economy remains stable. If there was a downturn in the economy that number will increase. Unplaced candidates will be entitled to continue to look for articling positions into the following years to fulfill their requirements, but the problem exacerbates itself year on year as the candidates bump into one another in their efforts to secure a placement."

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  75. Our legal employment market, while significantly better than the clusterfuck you guys have, is hardly desirable, and it's gradually being compromised by the same pernicious market forces that have been eating away at you guysstock market adviosry

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