No, of course this isn't the bottom.
The next step: Law schools themselves placing graduates in positions that require the graduate to pay a fee for the privilege of the experience, taking a cut of the fee from the employer, and then counting the graduates as being employed full-time in positions requiring bar admission.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Everyone make sure to send this douchebag an email.
ReplyDeleteyea that will happen. Externships are already almost that.
ReplyDeleteThis is nothing new. A year ago, I ran into a law school buddy of mine in court. He had two young lawyers with him. When I remarked "business must be good if you hired two new associates," he replied: "These kids are paying me $1,000 a month each to be my errand boys and pick up tricks of the trade. At a minimum, it pays my office rent and the part time receptionist."
ReplyDeleteAt first I thought this must be illegal but then again, my friend is probably teaching those kids more practical skills than they learned in 3 years of going over retread and trite common law BS and the model penal code. I could teach my niche practice to newbies but tuition will run $50K for 9 months. After all, I am training my future competition.
I know some 3Ls would pay for this too. If you are a person who is so desperate you consider getting an LLM have coming face to face with the scam, you would certainly pay the school to just straight put you in a job. It probably looks better on your resume then a LLM too. It just shows how hard it so for people to admit the scam, because ultimately it means accepting a service job which they worked all those years and went into debt trying to avoid.
ReplyDeleteNo, the bottom would be applying for this position, and being rejected.
ReplyDeleteThis comment made my day.
DeleteThe bottom would be having indebted law graduatesbid for the position.
DeleteThis is crazy.
ReplyDeletePaying someone to work is not going to change the lack of ongoing jobs for more experienced lawyers. To put it differently, people are throwing out money. They are going to wind up unemployed most likely whether they pay to work, or do not pay to work, because of the vast surplus of lawyers over jobs.
900,000 unemployed lawyers is a sobering number. Anyone doing this is throwing good money after bad.
No, this is not the bottom. The bottom will be when the Federal government gives away nondischargable loans to anyone who has a pulse to pay for this "real world" experience.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't take this opportunity, you probably have an "entitlement" problem.
ReplyDeleteYou know there are lots of rural areas where the legal job market is great. If only these entitled JD's were willing to look outside of major metro areas like Stratford/Waterbury.
DeleteAnd anyone who doesn't take this opportunity clearly just entered law to make a bunch of money.
DeleteIf you serve a million poor people paying $1 each in a year, you'll make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than a new associate at Cravath.
DeleteThere are only 500 lawyers listed in Martindale in Stratford/Waterbury. They have an aggregate population of 160,000. That makes one lawyer for every 320 people. I guess every 320 people in this country would flood a single lawyer with work. We need more lawyers in Waterbury/Stratford with the shortage that already exists.
DeleteThat's nothing. Most rural counties have lawyer-to-population ratios in the 500-to-1 or 700-to-1 or 1000-to-1 ratios. And many of the practitioners are decrepit and retiring, so it's about to get a lot friendly.
DeleteIt's seriously easy money. I mean, I'm not moving to go pick it up, but trust me, it's easy money. So get over yourself and move to Podunk, kids.
This person is repulsive.
DeleteI live in this area...Stratford is actually metro NYC. Quinnipiac and Pace (in neighboring White Plains) have been pushing out so many grads, that the market is beyond saturated--and it has been for 20+ years. UConn and Yale, alone, push out more grads than CT needs, and both of them are tiny, in terms of law school entering classes (UConn is 130-180, for both day and evening, and I think Yale is 180. And few Yalies stay in CT after graduation).
I sincerely hoped this person is outed, shamed, tarred and feathered. The CT Bar should take his license.
"I mean, I'm not moving to go pick it up, but trust me, it's easy money."
DeleteDoc I hope you are kidding. I don't know if you've ever practiced in Podunk but I have. Yes there are fewer lawyers, but also a lot fewer paying clients. There are some specialized AgriBusiness and immigration attorneys that do well, but retail family, crim, PI, and small business? FORGET ABOUT IT, especially if you are an outsider.
Sarcasm. Now serious:
DeleteI have experience in Podunk as well. There are no golden opportunities there. Attorneys have a practice radius of a hundred miles or more. "Everyman" retail type law (Bankr., PI, family, crim) does not have the volume to sustain a single-topic practice, and usually there are large, sprawling firms in the nearest big-ish city that handle much of those. Plus, the firms that do bankr., immigration, employment law, etc., are all located in the larger city where the federal courthouse is located.
The county I know best is a rural county of around 8k total. Last year there were less than 15 big trial-type cases filed in the county, like balances over $50k. 15. And the med mal cases were all being handled by imports from larger cities.
The only areas that are even remotely close to active are criminal defense, family law, and estates. Small businesses either don't have the money to hire or prefer to go with a more established firm two hours away. The attorneys I know who made it all seem to focus on whatever walks in to get by.
I would never recommend someone go to a small town where they know no one to set up a practice. In most places, you will get run out with invisible pitchforks.
"The next step: Law schools themselves placing graduates in positions that require the graduate to pay a fee for the privilege of the experience, taking a cut of the fee from the employer, and then counting the graduates as being employed full-time in positions requiring bar admission."
ReplyDeleteYou forgot leaving them out of the salary data, which is what I suspect they are doing with all those in volunteer positions.
The only solution for this is for law school placement offices to help in getting their surplus grads into non-legal jobs. There could be bridges to human resources, bridges to compliance positions, and bridges to actuarial positions. If the law schools could just get their grads interviews for these positions or start them networking, it would be a help. Problem is that it is not clear that any of these areas have room for the unemployed lawyers. All of these areas have their own unemployed due to the recession. However, they do not have the huge surpluses of people over jobs that law schools created by way of lawyers. For someone who actually has the skills in some of these areas, and has applied to many of these jobs and NEVER GOTTEN A SINGLE INTERVIEW, even with top schools and substantial BigLaw experience, maybe all of these areas actually are oversaturated.
ReplyDeleteMaybe also discrimination is working against you.
DeleteThe bottom line, just to be clear, is that the surplus lawyers may really not be readily marketable to any non-legal area where a law degree is useful All of the areas where law is useful may be oversaturated with excess of supply of labor over demand.
ReplyDeleteIt seems Leiter is butthurt over not being selected on the most influential people in legal education. Must particularly burn that Campos made the list, and that three of the top five are heroes of the "scam" movement.
ReplyDeletehttp://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2013/01/national-jurist-asked-350-people-who-the-most-influential-individuals-are-in-legal-education.html
He is such a crybaby.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHe demands full 'transparency' on that poll....
DeleteEveryone should send in a bogus app to this jackass.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIf you hadn't already borrowed and spent over a hundred thousand dollars of non-dischargeable loans, this wouldn't be such a bad deal. Since that excludes just about anybody who would consider this opening, it looks much worse.
ReplyDeleteIt's just amazing that people accept offers to work for so much less than they're worth, when after all, any law graduate can fill in the Interstitial Details of Mere Practice after spending three years learning the Bigger Concepts at the feet of true masters.
lol. The new bimodal salary distribution for newbie lawyers: the fortunate few who work for free and the rest who have to pay their employer.
ReplyDeleteActually, arrangements like this might work as a substitute for law school. Practitioners and firms would be encouraged to offer fee-for-training apprenticeships to qualifying college grads, and a series of such apprenticeships would allow one to sit for the bar exam.
dybbuk
Arrangements like this already exist in some states. Vermont, for example, allows a four-year apprenticeship in lieu of law school.
DeleteIt is important to understand how saturated the legal profession is. Maybe 15 years ago, I was a member of some groups of non-lawyers where I actually could get into the group, not pay a lot of money, and make connections that would help my practice. Today, every nook and cranny of opportunity has a lawyer in it. Committee as to an industry? Sorry your competition is already there trying to get business. Worse yet, the big firms have sent their marketing people to infect the situation.
ReplyDeleteYou want to go to a meeting of the American Corporate Counsel Association? Get what? Only lawyers from BigLaw whose firms pay ACCA a hefty fee are allowed into those meetings.
Same with National Retailers Association. BigLaw has bought these organizations in zn effort to cut the throats of the newbies and non-BigLaw attorneys who might be able to compete if they could network as part of these groups.
It was only a matter of time. Can't say I blame the jerk who's charging the scam victims to serve as his errand boys -- er, I mean fellows.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, so long as this creep agrees to play ball and refer to the victims as "associates," it's probably beneficial to them.
The arrangement is testament to two things: 1. there is no legal employment market; and 2. law school is as useless as tits on an old bull and graduates are wholly unprepared to do anything even resembling the practice of law on their own.
Welcome to prestige finishing school middle class children. You've been scammed!
I'm very curious how the NALP/ABA reporting forms and associated median & mean calculations will handle negative salary data points....
ReplyDelete"Pursuing further education/not seeking employment."
DeleteWhy not count these people as "working" at the law firm?
DeleteAn old-style barrister system might be borderline tolerable, so long as students had lots of notice of the reality of the situation.
ReplyDeleteUnder that system, a newly minted lawyer would be invited (based on grades or connections) to join a law firm. The youngster would pay an amount each month to cover rent and overhead. In exchange, the more experienced lawyers provided the young-un with work, training and the luster of the firm's name.
What is collectively referred to as the "law school scam" seems to have many facets or aspects that are part of the larger or overall problem.
ReplyDeleteThe situation discussed in this post is a classic result of one aspect: the overcrowding the profession.
An at this juncture may we recollect that the biggest problem or horse that drives the entire cart is the student loan gravy train.
Then we can proceed and go down the checklist of other problems, as we have been doing, over and over and over; and as we will be doing for many years to come.
Because by now I am convinced that ten years from now one will read about the same old stuff and not much will have changed.
Just as a commenter not too long ago ironically pointed out a 20 plus year old article bemoaning the so called profession of law, that could have been written today.
A few lucky young kids will be warned, heed the warning and turn away and avoid financial and life disaster by not going to LS if it means taking out student loans.
The rest will be blogging about their debt in the 2020's.
Unless........ some sort of student loan financial bubble bursts before that point and it trumps all.
But financial collapses of that type happen suddenly and with few warnings as to when or how or to what extent.
Have I mentioned buying gold?
I want to build bridges. So, I go to bridge building school and graduate. I take the bridge building exam and pass it. I then have to pay to a bridge builder to show me how to build bridges and maybe someday I will be paid to build bridges. Sound fucked up?
ReplyDeleteYes but did you learn to think like a bridge builder?
Delete343 - Comment of the day.
DeleteDon't piss on a law grad's leg and tell her its raining. What this attorney is doing is shameless!
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, if this guy was willing to take on anyone who was willing to be a lawyer (law school grad or otherwise) for the very same deal, it could be a hugely beneficial opportunity for everyone involved.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, if this guy was willing to take on anyone who was willing to be a lawyer (law school grad or otherwise) for the very same deal, it could be a hugely beneficial opportunity for everyone involved.
ReplyDelete