Wow, this is the wordiest I've ever seen someone be about their STAT-101 material.
Also, "Second, while most startups do not succeed, I have reason to believe that this one—Amicus Labs—will succeed." totally fails to account for the fact that this is true of everyone with a failed startup. No one starts a company thinking it's going to fail.
Totally agree - I don't know why this was explicitly stated. I mean, how many founders would do a startup in a serious manner with a vision for failure? Every founder _will_ believe that they startup will succeed.
A whole ecosystem of startup-support companies built around helping you fail even faster would be good to have in the parody. "site sinker", "business buster", etc (but of course with more clever web 2.0 names).
It's not clear to me whether the author has much experience actually working with lawyers, in law firms or otherwise. It would seem that experience, even a few years, would vastly improve the odds of building successful products and services.
He probably realizes that a few years of making 160-200k/yr will make dropping down to a startup salary afterward a lot harder, particularly with parents, girlfriend, etc.
According to what I've read, the current employment prospects for law school grads in the US are the worst they've ever been. Considering that law students as a whole were far stronger undergrads than their peers, a nearly 15% unemployment rate is pretty brutal.
And at the same time legal services are still horrifyingly expensive. This is partly because law students have unreasonable amounts of debt. Somehow there's too much supply keeping jobs scarce and too much demand keeping prices high.
There are a couple of factors behind this. One is the accreditation process law schools need to go through. It's backed by all of the major schools (because it protects their interests), but it's pretty expensive to get accredited.
Another point is the cultural position the legal profession has. The old cliche of money-grubbing soulless lawyers has died down somewhat - if you have a bad experience with a lawyer it will resurface, but most of the time when someone says they're a lawyer (at least for me) the immediate associations are professionalism and prestige. Add to that the fact that it's about the only "safe bet" career for graduates in the humanities and there's an obvious glut of labour.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but think I part of it has to be making starting up a new legal practice a more attractive and more approachable option.
> And at the same time legal services are still horrifyingly expensive. This is partly because law students have unreasonable amounts of debt. Somehow there's too much supply keeping jobs scarce and too much demand keeping prices high.
Price is the equilibrium of supply and demand. Cost (the expense of educating each student at an accredited school) doesn't influence the price.
The problem is that people are defining "supply" incorrectly. Firms don't want to hire just any of the 45,000 law students. They want to hire one of the 1,000 Harvard, Yale, or Stanford students, and then depending on the market one of the 4,000 students at the top regional schools like Duke or U Chicago. The enrollment at these top schools has grown only very slowly over the last century.
The price of an associate at a big NYC firm is determined b how much it costs a top Columbia graduate to go to that firm as opposed to a competing firm. Associate salaries thus exploded in the 2000's as the demand for legal services far outstripped the enrollment at schools like Columbia, while they have effectively been cut substantially (due to reduced bonuses) in the last 5 years as the demand has dropped while enrollments have stayed constant.
Given that most law grads I know are buried in debt and thus really can't think about joining a start-up, I find myself wondering whether the author is unique in that he has no debt and therefore has this choice in the first place. For most people in this position, I would argue, there isn't much of a choice.
He does raise good points about raising a family - start-ups can definitely give you more flexibility. But, on the other hand, going home and telling your wife that the start-up you joined has failed and you're out of a job isn't easy. Granted, that can happen at any job.
This post will likely come off as way too negative, but I certainly do wish him well in his path - the legal profession could certainly use the overall.
"In economic terms, the worst outcome (forever making $40,000 while trying to “fight the good fight” while trying to stay on top any of various loan forgiveness programs) can be pretty brutal."
Interesting - when did making 40k a year become "brutal" ? There's people doing fine on much less. Sounds more like a case of "hey I made a big scary decision - so now I'm going to blog about it so that people can validate my decision for me. In the process I'm also going to point out how even in the worst case I'd be better off than 75% of the worlds population is. ".. come on...
I think 40K could be pretty brutal when you've given up years of potential wages for law school to take on 150-200k of debt. And then most of your classmates are making at least 4-5x your income.
A lot of studies have found people's perception of wealth is relative, right? Making 25% what your pee/friends make would really suck.
I try and keep perspective that there's way, way worse things than having over 200k debt and making 40k a year while working and living in a modern, Western, industrialized country.
I think the 40k number is worth emphasizing though, not as some terrible torment but as a data point that casts light on the financials of attending law school. In terms of objectively looking at the merits of law school as an investment, a 40k salary outcome is pretty awful. The opportunity cost and direct costs (in loans) are enormous and the risk of getting the low-end outcome is pretty high. There's way, way less risky ways to make 40k, and way less costly ways to position oneself to one day have a chance at a six figure salary.
"Just getting by" and "the only way you can afford your loan burden is by taking advantage of government income-based repayment and loan forgiveness programs" is not the outcome most people expect going to a decent law school, so it's important that people hear that this happens.
After having some involuntary contact with law, I found that I love to read laws and jurisdiction. I'm finishing my MsC in computer engineering and would love to try to pursue a career that would intersect technology and law. I've just found a LLM, a masters in Law, that doesn't requires a Law degree in the University of Edinburgh, they even have the possibility for distance learning. (http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/teaching/llm/llminnovationtechn...)
Can you tell me what should I expect to do with such degree? I was thinking something like paralegal work on technology related cases.
Besides that, what could I do to prepare myself before entering the LLM? I'm almost completely ignorant on most Law concepts/theory.
Thanks, and good luck for your startup. I had thought of something like that but for the government decrees, to increase state transparency.
I'm sure plenty of firms would be interested in a candidate who has a good grasp of technical concepts so why not look to convert to become a lawyer by applying for training contracts with law firms? Many firms like candidates who have done a first degree and will fund you to do the conversion course. It's obviously a very competitive space but then due to the excess of law grads, so is the paralegal space.
Your course provider is best placed to advise on some good introductory texts to the subject you are studying. Some general introductory books along the lines of 'How to study law' may be of interest however.
Speaking as a lawyer, many of the legal concepts you will come across are relatively straightforward, it is the subsequent process of applying them to the facts where problems arise, but if you have a logical mind (which is likely to be the case coming from a computer engineering background) then you should be ok.
"Generally speaking, legal practice is fairly inefficient and anti-technological. My cofounders and I are not the first to notice; there is a veritable graveyard of failed legal technology companies."
The issue, in my opinion, is that law firms have a direct incentive to be inefficient and bill more hours. Why would a firm invest in time-saving technology when it will literally mean sending smaller bills to clients? The firm would have to raise their rates or work even harder to drum up business in order to maintain revenue.
This is a really unfortunate situation, but it's reality. I hope Amicus Labs has a strategy to address this.
To be fair, the author is a fresh law school graduate. What does he know about whether legal practice is inefficient or not?
I was a summer associate at a large New York law firm, and the level of technology was fairly typical for corporate America. We had a centralized document management system that integrated version control and generation of deltas. We had a centralized, searchable repository of every document generated for every client, which we could use to avoid duplicating effort when doing new work. We did everything via Blackberry e-mail and Outlook calendaring.
Beyond the generic "you can always have better document management" I'm not sure what else there was to do. The major legal research databases (Westlaw and Nexis) have god-awful interfaces, but there isn't much law firms can do about that, since there is a huge barrier to entry in that market (the proprietary databases).
The fundamental problem is that nearly everything you do for a client is a one-off. It's 90% similar to what you've done for a previous client, but that remaining 10% is not very amenable to technological automation. Can you write some software that will cross-reference an SEC disclosure against the client's big pile of haphazardly-assembled internal documentation, which are handed over in God-knows how many formats? If so, then you're going to make some serious money. If not, then well that's how that graveyard of failed legal technology companies builds up.
The big recent advance in legal technology has been software to speed up document review, which leverages document search technology that has really improved (and obsoleted a large number of discovery attorneys in the process). Law firms have been quick to embrace such software, as well as services such as "in-sourced" discovery centers in places like West Virginia. To date, legal technology hasn't advanced much beyond that, largely because computer technology for working with documents hasn't evolved much beyond search.
In a previous job I worked for a firm that provided services to law firms and I can say that your assumption is missing some important information.
Law firms actually do spend quite a bit on technology to improve their practices. Many cases these days include so much documentation provided during the discovery phase that it's very difficult to process.
Some of the technologies that I personally oversaw implemented at law firms include, 1) document scanning and indexing, 2) electronic document conversion, 3) native file metadata extraction and indexing, 4) document culling (filtering large document sets based on metadata and extracted keywords), 5) document review (to find document relevant to the case), 7) electronic searching of legal records (like Lexis-Nexis), 7) fax servers (true, law firms use a LOT of fax)
While I agree that there are areas in which law firm technology can be improved, there is a fairly healthy market for software solutions to improve productivity at law firms (though much is aimed more at secretaries and paralegals than attorneys).
Law firms also have a direct incentive to win. Working more efficiently doesn't necessarily mean you have to work fewer hours. It just means you can get more done in the hours you do work.
"Mapping the legal genome" brings to mind visualisation of case law in diagram form so dependent on search terms you could see a visualisation of relevant cases incorporating the precedent cases and then below them cases which have relied on them.
As a lawyer, this would be interesting for me to see and would definitely be more interesting and helpful than current search methods from which it isn't immediately clear the hierarchy of case law is.
Whether this is an idea which would be attractive enough to monetise successfully is another question entirely...
This person hasn't experienced the hopelessness and defeat that comes with a failed idea. Getting a summer associate position that brings about a 160k job is "winning" the protocol for law school success. There is no such protocol path for startups. Also, Amicus Labs, which maps Legal Genome, better have a good plan for attacking the high barrier of entry into these BigLaw firms.
Many of my friends, some just graduated in Law and others starting in other fields, are making more than that. Especially in NYC. Many hedge funds, for example, are still shelling out 300K+ salary for people 2-3 years out (considering you had to go through law school its apples to apples)
Where did you find that quote? (Or are you ironically summarizing / was the article changed?)
The article says "Practicing law is safe and probably fairly lucrative" and "Practicing law is an honorable profession. Indeed, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting professions there is."
its what i got from reading the article, ie my own summary
i probably wouldn't call it honorable. law is based on honorable concepts. but.. past that, stuff has been corrupted beyond recognition
Contrary to the impression media and movies have created, lawyers get paid VERY LOW salaries now, at least in NY. We have overproduced so many lawyer graduates who thought they would be making 100K+ at their first job, it's just insane.
Just start browsing craigslist or monster listings, it's very revealing.
Just start browsing craigslist or monster listings, it's very revealing.
Craigslist and Monster give a very accurate impression of the legal employment market for clients who are so catastrophically incompetent that they would source legal representation from Craigslist or Monster. Similar to programming.
I don't really have a dog in the fight of "Production of legal talent adequately meeting market demands for legal talent: yay or nay", but it is an observable fact that a particular type of student has a very achievable career trajectory into being a BigLaw associate at a six figure salary in their first job. You can plot out that career trajectory, to the month, the day you receive an offer of admission to one of several undergraduate institutions.
People overestimate the opportunities for lawyers.
If you go to Yale Law you're OK. Maybe even top 3. If you "only" go top a top 14 law school, you need to beat a lot of your classmates, there are quite large numbers of losers. If you do not go to a top 14 law school, it gets a lot worse, fast. And there's 200 law schools...
People assume it works less strictly than that, but the legal job market recently changed so just doing well at a top school isn't enough anymore.
In other words, the "particular type" of student is a narrower category than people think.
I did the traditional path -- Ivy League undergrad, Top 10 law school -- with the expectation of the traditional big firm job outcome. Got shut out from the big firm jobs due to a below median 1L year performance (I put in lots of effort, but it wasn't good enough). Just graduated. Hugely massive debt.
Grades improved second and third years but only first year grades seem to matter very much.
Law school was an epic mistake. It's also a very tracked profession -- once you're not on the BigLaw track its very difficult to ever get back on.
Now the likely best-case for me in terms of my legal career is that after 10 years of working 40k-a-year public interest, i'll no longer have six figures in debt. So after 7 years of very "prestigious", expensive, and time-consuming education, and 10 years of hard work, I'll have finally broken even, and be looking forward to a flat and low income potential.
I don't know your situation, but have you considered going to one of the developing markets in Asia?
One: there's a lot of legal work flowing to that part of the world
Two: As those economies grow and mature there's more room for businesses (and individuals) to need legal assistance
The legal work I've seen in Asia tends to 1) involve getting a big firm job and then you can perhaps rotate into their Asia office, and 2) tends to want you have some language fluency.
I'd love to go to Asia, and I'm footloose and fancy free -- nothing tying me to the States. Maybe you know something I don't -- did you have a particular market or type of position in mind? Lemme know.
What's really funny is if i'd just worked any random job -- food service, shelf-stocker -- instead of getting all this "elite" education, my financial situation would be way better than it is now right now.
And if I, say, decided I wanted to go to school, then, knowing what I know now, I could major in something serious like computer science or one of the engineering disciplines.
I'm too lazy to look for a cite, but I think Peter Thiel has commented on part of the problem of the legal market being the "prestige" that is associated with being a lawyer vs other jobs, and how people are willing to make flawed financial decisions in part due to this perceived prestige.
People overestimate the opportunities for Yale graduates too. I've received resume from Yale and Harvard grads for legal-related unpaid internships.
The problem is not an oversupply of lawyers; there are just about enough lawyers to satisfactorily satisfy the legal needs of the market (taking attrition into account).
The problem is that most lawyers are unwilling to do the solo/small-practice gig like doctors and dentists do, and consequently chase the firm and government jobs. The number of new firm and government jobs has dropped by more than half in the last 3 years, leaving a glut of "unemployed" lawyers.
But that's the thing about lawyers--they're not supposed to be employed. They're "professionals", so they're supposed to be their own bosses. I wish lawyers would at least try setting up their own shingles. Most of my graduating law school class did (at least, the ones without massive loan debt), and they've all got respectable, self-supporting practices. They won't make filthy money, but they will definitely be comfortable supporting a family within the next few years.
The top tier firms still pay $160,000 as starting salary, same as since 2007, but they are hiring a lot fewer people. New law grad salaries have been more and more binodal over the last few decades, with the other local maximum at around $55,000, and an increasing share of the new grads getting stuck at the low end.
After graduating in the middle of Lawmageddon, craiglist was very useful in finding jobs. I managed to cobble together enough work through Craiglist to start paying off my student loans and gas. If I'd kept at it for an entire year, I could definitely have made enough to at least reach the bottom peak of the bimodal curve (~$50,000) just through craiglist-related work.
Second-chairing trials was the most lucrative work. This mostly involved helping the primary attorney on the matter with pretrial hearings, jury selection, presentation of evidence, and cross-examination of expert witnesses.
Courtroom appearances was a distant second. For about $100-$200 a day (depending on the court and number of cases), I would appear in court on behalf of other lawyers to file various motions and paperwork.
Yet because of the licensing and laws and regulation, most law firms are still charging > $150/hour (from what I've seen), because there's still few choices. While there's more lawyers than there have been in a while, it hasn't at all brought the pricing down. I suspect it ends up as simply more profit for the larger firms. Because there's more competition for jobs, they can pay less, but because of the regulations (barriers to entry) the prices can remain high. It seems an odd paradox, but I may be over simplifying.
Legal salaries are bi-modal. You either work at a big firm paying the market big-firm rate ($160k+ bonus in NYC, Chicago, etc) or you work at a small firm making $45-70k.
There are some weird market dynamics in the legal field. Law firms create an artificial shortage of lawyers, and thus a corresponding explosion in associate salaries, because they refuse to hire substantial amounts outside the top 15 schools or so. They'll hire anyone at Stanford and most people at Duke, but only the very top of the class at say U Washington.
Exactly, I know a Columbia law grad who works in NYC. His firm hires nothing but Harvard, Columbia, and Yale grads.
He said that it's not because a Berkeley or Texas grad isn't just as good it's because they have a certain culture and in case one of the new hires messes up a case no one wants to be the partner who gave that "public school kid" a chance and lost the firm a lot of money and prestige.
Law is also a pretty insular and regionalistic field. E.g. at one of the most selective firms in the country (Susman Godfrey in Texas), a UT Austin grad has a much better chance than a Columbia grad. They think UT = Harvard down there.
It's all very strange. In most fields such blatant regionalistic favoritism isn't so encouraged.
In most fields the rules do not vary so much by state and to a lesser extent a small collection of states. But in law your state law matters, and even on federal law the precedents can vary according to which circuit you are in.
Law school graduate salary distributions are really an interesting thing. I suggest a quick gander at this chart of the distribution from 2006-2011: http://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib .
Indeed, I now may make in legal-related market than I would as a lawyer doing the same work. It's very bizarre...
Worse (well, not from my perspective), I work fewer hours than any lawyer I know but make more than all of them except for the ones working for BigLaw (i.e., the "premier") law firms.
Also, "Second, while most startups do not succeed, I have reason to believe that this one—Amicus Labs—will succeed." totally fails to account for the fact that this is true of everyone with a failed startup. No one starts a company thinking it's going to fail.