I’m a humorist, a social critic. I never intended to be a repository of career advice. But considering the number of emails I’ve recently received from people asking whether they should go to law school – whether it’s a good idea given the awful job market – one final piece on this subject, debunking all the myths that drive college kids to the profession in difficult economic times, is in order.
Myth No. 1: You can “time” you way around a rough job market by getting a law degree.
I’ll go to law school, wait out a terrible job market and when I get out, things will be better and I’ll make serious bank. Win/win! If this is your thinking, let me ask you a couple questions. How long did it take you to reach that conclusion? And how general and broadly disseminated was the knowledge on which you reached it? And more important than that, how many other college kids with identical limited information are thinking exactly the same thing?
Here’s the first law you ought to study: Supply and Demand.
You and the other 100,000 college kids following this “escape route” will graduate en masse in three years. Just as the protracted recession we’re in starts easing and firms start hiring again you’ll create a glut of new associates in the market, tanking the value of the degree. A wave of thousands of like minds will find themselves in triple digit debt, fighting like wild animals to work for 2008 level wages. You want to be one of them?
Myth No. 2: Law is recession proof.
Wrong. Law is a business and every business depends on credit, particularly at a time like this, when bad debts and unpaid receivables are mounting. The current crisis forces firms to contract just like any other corporation – to jettison under-producing departments and slash salary increases and bonuses. And no, the spike in litigation that tends to occur in recessions will not offset the overall loss in revenue accruing from a bad economy. The corporations that hire billable firm lawyers are sophisticated buyers. They know their leverage in an adverse cycle and will aggressively shop counsel by price, negotiating payment structures less lucrative to the firms. And given the reality that some firm will always do the work more cheaply (some at “loss-leader” rates to grab new clients and clip the competition), lawyers have little power to avoid fee depression. So no, law is not recession-proof. Over the coming years of economic malaise, law firms will be reorganizing, going out of business and laying off workers at a rate similar to that of every other industry in this country.
Myth No. 3: Recessions are good times to go into plaintiff’s litigation.
Again, wrong. Because of their often erratic cash flow, plaintiff’s firms are even more dependent on credit than billable hour shops. As lending tightens, they’re compelled to settle more cases at discounts to fund operations, shrinking margins. They also have less money to throw at the enormous costs of discovery, expert witness fees and trial preparation involved in prosecuting their inventory, compromising their bargaining power in those actions. Simultaneously, insurance companies – the primary source of plaintiff lawyers’ income – grow less inclined to settle cases, preferring to hold onto their money. This can all but break a personal injury firm’s business model, which depends on a predictable number of actions settling on a regular basis. The firms are suddenly forced to try a sharply increasing percentage of their cases with decreased funding and thinly spread manpower, negatively impacting the quality of their results. And the size of their associates’ bonuses.
Myth No. 4: Bankruptcy and regulatory work will be huge growth areas.
This statement is true. With Democrats in office, it will be a good time to get into regulatory work, and bankruptcy is an obvious growth area in a bad economy. The problem is both are minor markets. Bankruptcy is a small fraction of most firms’ service platforms and regulatory work is a broad term for a variety of disparate niche practices, the most lucrative of which are concentrated heavily in Washington DC. And both are difficult areas to gain expertise in as a young lawyer, requiring years of hands-on experience with the strange creatures bankruptcy courts and regulatory agencies can be. This is why regulatory practices are usually staffed with lawyers who once worked for the government agencies with which the practices are involved, and you’ll never find a thirty three year old bankruptcy specialist at any firm paying enough to cover your law school loans. Neither area provides the type of work a green associate will find himself thrown into.
Myth No. 5: Law will never be outsourced abroad or commoditized to the point where the skill set is not among the most lucrative in the economy.
Over the coming years, as Corporate America faces shrinking revenues, it is going to become less and less willing to pay the outrageously inflated cost of legal services. Though billable hour firms refuse to admit it, everybody has heard rumors or seen articles about corporate clients forcing them to bid against each other for business by offering discounted fees, flat rates or “blended” structures (giving the firms a percentage of the award in any action where they represent a plaintiff). This trend is going to continue, much more aggressively, to the point where, in ten or so years, the overwhelming majority of billable hour litigators are going to be compensated like generic middle management.
In a not too distant future, the litigation divisions of most large law firms, usually described as “commercial litigation” practices, will resemble a sector of the industry known as “insurance defense” law. “Insurance defense,” for the ninety percent of readers unfamiliar with the term, is a practice area in which lawyers are paid by insurance companies to defend against negligence claims brought against insured defendants (slip and fall cases, automobile accidents, etc…).
A few decades ago being an insurance defense lawyer paid quite handsomely, almost, if as well as, any other practice area. Then insurance companies smartened up. They noticed a glut of lawyers coming into an increasingly attractive profession and responded. On one hand they aggressively shopped for the cheapest labor, creating a race to the bottom on hourly rates. On the other, they used their enormous leverage as the largest consumer of legal services to compel minimal year-to-year fee inflation. Consequently, today, where the average commercial litigator commands $250-400 per hour, the average insurance defense lawyer gets $90-175.
Additionally, as the price the market will bear for legal service decreases, the current industry trend toward converting firms from true partnerships to corporate “pyramid structures” will also accelerate. In this shift, a smaller slice of rainmakers at the tops of firms will take greater shares of profits, spreading the remainder in smaller increments among non-equity partners and associates below.
Stated simply, for you, the soon to be college graduate, getting a law degree now is paying $100,000 for the privilege of working as a nominal vice president at any “ACME, Inc.” With twice the aggravation and stress… Well, at least in litigation.
Just Say No
Look, I know where you are. I’ve been there. I got out of college in the early nineties and the economy was mess then as well. I remember being scared, having no direction and thinking law school was the perfect solution to all the career-searching I didn’t want to undertake.
I was a fool. Unless you’ve worked for a couple years, you don’t have the maturity to go into law school. And unless you really, truly want to be a lawyer and understand what goes with the job, law school shouldn’t even be on your radar.
Taking on six-figure debt to jump into a cut-throat field of fading margins to escape a bad job market or because you can’t think of any better career to follow is insane. You’re young. You’re debt free. You can afford to make a few mistakes trying out different careers. Cash those mulligans in now, while you can. The bad times will pass and if you keep looking, you’ll find a path that fits. Don’t kill your options before you even start the game.
If I didn’t feel so bad for the poor kid who thought his only options were “it is a question of shitty job v. shittier job” of cubicle vs. law, I’d laugh at him. The myriad opportunities out there offer so much more if a person just spends a bit of time looking.
I spend my days playing scrabble, sorry, candyland, blowing bubbles, coloring pictures and generally playing with kids. I make 80K doing it. Sure, it isn’t 160K, but then I’m not drudging through my life trying to accrue enough money to finally quit my hateful and boring prison of a job. Oh yeah, and since I work in a school I can pick up another 20 – 30K over the summer contracting out my services (though I tend to be happier just living on my pay from the county and enjoying a nice long break every year). I also have excellent retirement and benefits (75% of pre-tax salary, so the day I retire I essentially get a raise).
It’s not all fun and games, I put in a few hours a week writing reports and having meetings, but it is supposed to be work after all, and at 3:30PM my workday ends and I bring nothing home.
I’m really not trying to say my job is the best out there, I’m just making the point that if you look hard enough you’ll probably find something you really like to do. For me it’s spending my day playing with kids and helping them overcome speech and language impairments, for someone else it may be being a part of an explosive demolitions team, or raising rare plants, or even being a lawyer.
If you focus on how much a job pays you monetarily, you might miss how much it pays you in other ways. The best advice I can give is to spend some time widening your horizons. I spent 10 years before college learning about a ton of jobs I did not want to do, and when I found the one that I did want to do I walked into college with purpose, motivation and the maturity to be able to walk out at the top of my class.
PL: You’re the rarity. I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. Well, except for “everything.” I think it’s horrible that we have to choose and stick with one thing. What an awful existence.
“PL: You’re the rarity. I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. Well, except for “everything.” I think it’s horrible that we have to choose and stick with one thing. What an awful existence.”
So do everything. What exactly is stopping you from getting excited about something, learning about it and applying for a job in the field? I got into jobs I really didn’t have the qualifications for because the interviewer could see my obvious excitement about the field and because I impressed him/her with my knowledge from learning a lot about it on my own. I’ve written software, designed electronic fuel delivery systems for dual-fuel vehicles, wrote book reviews for a local paper, worked on small budget films and a variety of other jobs I thought I wanted at the time. All during the time between finishing high school and going to college. Sure, I had to do a lot of reading and take some tests for some jobs, sometimes I had to prove my worth with samples of work but if you’re genuinely excited about something then the learning is fun.
You get one chance at life, make it count. Decide if you want to define winning at life as accruing money or as having had as much fun as possible. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to get it wrong. The paradigm of getting an education, a job in the field, and working at the same place until you retire is valid, but no more valid than multiple career changes as your life changes. If you’re like me and you know that change is something you thrive on, then make sure you get an education in something with a large umbrella of jobs under it.
For instance, as a Speech Pathologist, I can work in private practice, nursing homes, schools, hospitals, doing research, etc. I can work with post-stroke aphasics, kids with articulation disorders, fluency disorders, dysphasia (feeding and swallowing), degenerative nerve disorders, primarily cognitive work, primarily neuro-motor work, deaf kids with cochlear implants, etc.
You’re probably going to say “but I don’t have the education for that”, of course you don’t, so throw 2 years at it if it sounds like your life will be far happier. You have a bachelors, you just need the grad component, which you can get while still working. You’ll probably work about 40 years, can you afford to invest 1/20th of your life to make the other 19/20ths far happier?
Are you too old? How old is too old to do something fun? If you’re not finding learning the skills needed for a job fun, you probably won’t find the job fun. Hence, if you’ve chosen something you really enjoy, the additional education should be an enjoyable activity. There were people in my masters program who were in their 50s and 60s, several like me in their 30s and 40s. We all have to work, but we don’t have to hate our jobs. It’s about 1/3 of your day, you might as well make sure that third of your day isn’t awful.
Redefine your terms. decide for yourself what success and failure mean, don’t let society decide for you. Years ago my mother had a mouse in her house which she could not get rid of. Her cat couldn’t catch it, traps didn’t work, it ignored poison. She asked me what to do. I told her that if she couldn’t get rid of it then she had two choices: Live with vermin or live with a pet. She named the mouse Mickey. Did the reality change? No, her perception of the reality changed, and therefore the situation was different. Is going back to school scary, unsettling and risky, or is it exciting, fun and an opportunity for freedom from your old life?
No offense, but it sounds like you’re trapped in a job you can barely stand, you despise most of your colleagues and you’re afraid that abandoning it for something else will make you a failure. When you were a toddler you were great at crawling, but you switched to walking even though you could barely do it, because it was a better fit. Sure you got bumped and bruised as you learned, but would you rather still be a great crawler who can’t walk?
So are you a 30 year old failure back in school because your previous job was a bad fit for you, or are you a 30 year old success who learned and grew and found a way to be happy while still paying the bills? Are you a 40 year old failure since you took a pay cut, or are you a 40 year old success who found a way to love working?
The choice is yours. The choice may be yours again in 5 years if you get it wrong this time. Who knows? Maybe I’m dead wrong and you love your job, I’ve been known to read too much into words before. In any case, I wish you the greatest of joy in your life, since I fully believe that happiness is success and you come across as someone who truly deserves whatever definition of success you choose to use.
As to me being a rarity, I almost have to laugh. I don’t know what I “want to do with my life”, I just know that what I’m doing right now is a lot of fun. I decided a long time ago to avoid massive questions like “what do I want to do with my life”, because they’re unanswerable by me. Maybe there are people out there who can answer that, but the best I can do is answer “what job can I have fun in”. The best way I can explain my view on this is in the way we do not call a person who stutters a “stutterer”, because that is not their defining characteristic. We say person who stutters because we recognize that it is one part of who they are. So I am not a Speech Pathologist, I am a person who practices Speech Pathology. It is one of my characteristics, but not my definition. So are you a lawyer, or a person who practices law? If you change jobs are you changing your definition or changing a characteristic of it?
PL: Have you read my book?
PL: Have you read my book?
Nope, but I’ll bet from that answer that it tells the story of how you figured all this out for yourself just like I did. *grin*
In the hopes that it does, and that by buying it I’ll be helping to make whatever makes you happy also make you financially successful, I’ll get a copy. But if you go back to law you have to buy it back from me! *grin*
PL: I’ll never work under another lawyer again.
I am in my first year of law school now. I came straight out of college. I took some law classes in undergrad and thought hey I like this and lawyers make a decent living. Now I realize though that the people are more douchey than most, the law is so boring, and the whole system is run on mix snobbery and mild insanity. I was also really scared about my job prospects when I get out. I realize that I am probably going to have to work like a madmen with no job security. I wish someone had been a little more real with me when I applied. I am switching to library school next year and am really excited about it. Its less expensive and less time. Librarians get paid less but they also can get jobs more easily and don’t have to work like crazy. I would suggest if you are in school and unhappy to think is about what is important to you and look for other options. Your advice is spot on!
PL: Nothing to add here but good luck and thank you.
I am in a 1L in law school now. I am not at a top tier school, and the people here are psychotic (the professors and staff). The school, staff, and students suck! They haze their students. Why do they have an arrogance about themselves and ego issues? If finishing law school is the best thing that has happened to them, and their greatest accomplishment, I truly feel sorry for them. I have been in the real world, and have survived some horrible things and overcome so many others. I feel like to come to law school and put up with this b.s. is ridiculous. I’m wondering how realistic it is to be in law school, and possibly not be able to find a good job. Probably won’t be able to do what I planned to do with my degree anyway. As stated above in this article, my performance is measured by others, and it varies, so there is no guarantee that I will do well enough to transfer to another school. I am really considering leaving, but I know finishing law school will help me be able to handle my own business affairs. Yes, I want to be a lawyer, but unlike the other people here, becoming a lawyer is not going to make me who I am. I was shaped and molded long before I came, and will be that when I leave. I’m just pissed I did all of this, and this is it. It is crap; I should have gotten my Ph.D. I contemplating should I leave, or are there any certainties other than debt and hell and chaos?
PL: Serenity now… You’ve laid out some cash. Run the numbers and if it makes sense to leave, leave.
As to misfits running around in your school, ignore that shit. Stay away from the place. All you really need to do is show up for exams anyway. Get a job, have a life away from the place and never interact with the students. It’s not like college. Of the people I knew in law school, I liked about ten. One remains a close friend today. And if you asked him, he;d relate similar numbers to those I just provided. Make a couple good friends, but stay the hell out of the social scene. It’s an ugly, demented world.
This is awesome. I read this piece months ago but only recently have I begun treating a number of college upperclassmen. Those that even suggest law school for inelegant reasons get a copy of this post to read and discuss at their next session. Thanks for this.
PL: You realize you’re giving up future patients doing that. Nobody needs more therapy than lawyers.