P.S. I know this may seem like a strange question but after scouring forums it seems like by far your the one online who knows what they’re talking about, and will tell it like it is. I’ve tried talking to personal injury attorneys, but they always give me some bullshit like “It’s not about the money, I do because it provides me with a deep sense of satisfaction, you shouldn’t get into this if its all about the money for you” Yayaya whatever LIAR!!!…. I’m just asking you because I’m trying to get a sense of what its like out there, how much room is there for a dude like me who isn’t very complicated with his language, but is down to hustle every god damn day?! Thanks in advance, I really appreciate it, some advice to a kid like me trying to figure out how to get rich and give his family things they never had would be great!

I don’t care if I’m selling pencils on the streetcorner or, to quote Ron White, shrimp out of a van. If I’m happy and making a better living, anyone who looks down their nose at me can fuck off.

Seems to me that Phil A. Lawyer should be handing you and your coworkers business cards… Phil, I think I’ve found your new nitch.

Rosie, I’ve had a similar thought for a few years. Most white collar workers don’t want anything to do with a union in terms of all of the bullshit with paying dues, the politics of it, and the collectivization of a group of people that all individually think very highly of themselves as eventual power players.

But what if there was something like a rogue negotiator a labor pool could hire that could temporarily represent a small group of employees that only collectively could have leverage over management?

“Could you imagine what would happen if a bunch of lawyers decided a months or so before a huge trial or deal to hold the firm up for extra cash? Be pretty amusing.”

I’m in the process of interviewing out of my job and my current employer would be ripe for what you guys are talking about. It’s a group benefits broker with 25 employees total – take out the 6 admin people and we’re left with 3 owners, 3 Managing Directors under them that each lead a team to service clients, and 13 employees under the MD’s that do the vast majority of the intensive day-to-day work.

Here’s the bottom line: two years ago, the 3 owners sold out to a large company for millions. The sale was a 3-year agreement with millions more at the end if our firm could maintain a certain level of profitability, revenue growth, and compliance with the large company’s internal systems over 36 months. We’re in the last 9 months of the agreement and morale is at an all time low. There are 5 (including me) of the 13 that are willing to leave and we could bring the firm to a halt if we all stopped working unless we received X, Y, and Z.

A rogue negotiator would be perfect for us. None of us have the balls or gravitas to represent the other 4, it would be awkward as hell if our demands are met enough to stay when every day we bump into the 3 owners who we were just across the table from, and we don’t have a leader out of the 5 who knows exactly what to say and has the backup support (i.e. outside job offers for all of us) to maximize our leverage.

Are there instances of the above happening?

PL: I don’t know, but what you have just described is labor’s last hope of fighting against the private equity takeovers, which buzzsaw through redundant labor and wring the blood out what’s left.

It’s not labor vs. management. It’s workers vs. the investor class. The tricky thing is, as workers age, they become dependent more and more on investment for income, so it really winds up being the old vs. the young.

One more thing I found amusing and disturbing, recently inquired about job with biggest and most presitgious of biglaw and they sent a questionaire screening form asking not only for my race but “What gender do I consider myself?” WTF! If I decide to consider myself female, does that make me female? I thought this question was settled at conception. What happens when my obviously non-female self shows up to interview. This is the craziness that is law firm diversity and for those of you for whom it is not too late, find a career where who are you matters more than what you are.

PL: True as the day is long, particularly in our newly enhanced regulatory climate. Get to learn the inside handshakes at some agency and you’re set.

As to the diversity thing, how else would robots attempt it? I’m glad I basically live in a compound now. Too much time around people like that can permanently damage a person. What hope in anything’s left sitting in the midst of so much clueless, wasted intelligence?

PL: No non-hitter, no story. That’s what makes the thing so great. Is there a narrative out there it doesn’t stand on it’s head? Or maybe I’m just a sucker for anything that takes a long beer shit on revered totems.

PL: I view it as The Illusion of Entropy. Everyone thinks things spreads out endlessly, all things degrading as they splinter from the center. I think that’s an illusion. As you progress along in this extended sitcom of ours, it starts to get tighter, and you realize the splintering effect was you thinking it was all going out of control. In fact, everything’s always been fairly compact, with minimal deviations… It all goes nowhere on a very tight track.

“How did this country get away from us?!”

If you’ve been looking, we’ve been driving down a very narrow ditch for a very long time.

PL: I had a “Holy Shit!” moment the other night. I was watching some Robin Williams’ special, drunk as hell, only half listening and reading the paper, when all of the sudden, Williams says, “Do you know who Dock Ellis is? Dock Ellis, for those of you who don’t know, is a pitcher who threw an entire baseball game, and not only an entire game, but a no-hitter, on L… S… D.” He then went into a lengthy routine on it.

I’m not a man of faith, as you know well. But sometimes the Will of the Great Magnet causes me to rethink the absence of the light at the end of the tunnel. Not enough to consider there’s a form of earnest karma, anything approaching a plan, or an active governing entity involved… But just enough to think, Maybe there’s a huge cosmic drain, and as we all surf the whirlpool toward Infinity, shit we’d never expect to collide starts doing so. The circle gets a little tighter. And maybe that’s a form of Greater Wisdom, or luck… That our filters become overwhelmed by the contradictory strands of nonsense slamming together from our fragmented memories and in the absence of any ability to coordinate the stuff, we’re just left to pleasantly note there are a lot of other people around us, all without a prayer of aim. A Confederacy tied together with nothing but punchlines and esoterica.

Your article could not be more timely. I am a 7th year assoc at a big firm in Atlanta (or what passes for big firm in Atlanta). I went to a top 15 law school and feel like I am going to make partner at my present firm. I bill 2000 hours each year. I am married and expecting my first child soon.

My problem is, there is no way I am going to be anything other than a service partner at my firm (even if I make equity and they give me a piece of the pie – I would still be working for other corporate partners with an even bigger piece of said pie). There just is not enough big time commercial litigation in Atlanta for a commercial litigator to have regular, repeat business (unlike L&E, products, etc). I am drawn to jumping to the other side and doing personal injury work because, as you said, it is the only way for a lawyer (expecially a litigator) to earn F You money. My biggest fear about doing PI work is not the “law” part, but the client origination part. The PI lawyers with whom I speak say to not worry about that, that when other PI lawyers realize you are a capable lawyer and can go to court and win, the work will come to you. The possibility that it will not scares the sh*t out of me.

Any thoughts on the subject? Advice? Is it all a question of balls?

PL: They’re right. Origination is only limited by the local population’s litigiousness. You might not need to jump all the way over to PI trial work. There are other “split the baby” options:

1. Go to a smaller firm that does comm lit, but is open to the idea of doing the occasional PI case.
2. Open your own comm lit shop and target the smller business market.
3. Invest in a “referral shop” with other lawyers.

As to #1, boutiques and smaller firms are soaking up all the small to mid sized companies’ business right now because the big firms have priced themselves out of the market. Also, there are so many disputes with lenders, vendors and the like caused by the credit crunch that the pipeline of work is going to stretch on for years. And doing workout stuff is cookie cutter. There’s minimal paperwork and none of the discovery bullshit or dicking around with a pack of eggheads on esoteric issues. It’s a bluffing game usually, and all you really have to know is numbers. The other thing is, you can’t get sued for fucking up because if represent someone who’s getting hammered under a note or an agreement, it’s all contract law. With an event of default, they couldn’t win in the first place. If you save them from execution, it’s a win.

On the PI part of #1, the way you pitch this to a small firm is to say, “Let’s invest in a phone/Internet/phone book ads, etc… buildout to attract clients. I’m willing to take less in salary and allocate the difference to the project in exchange for a piece of the action.” Do loads and loads of client interviews, keep the sure wins (It’s not a high percentage, so don’t expect too much there) and refer most of the stuff out to trial lawyers. You don’t want to be on the trial side of that deal because that’s serious work. The referral fee side is 1/3 of the trial lawyer’s take with 1/20th of the effort. So you give up 2/3 of the fee. You easily make that up in volume. Here’s the model (from the trying counsel’s side… reverse it for purposes of this discussion): http://www.bitterlawyer.com/index.php/site/columns_detail_comment/five_steps_to_being_a_plaintiff_lawyer_machine/?sort=desc&cat_id=13 Just be careful. Some states limit who can get referring fees to discourage this business from growing.

As to #2, that kind of speaks for itself. If you can share office space with someone and you can hustle, you can build a stable of clients who want value (read: not large or mid firm staffing and “unit maximization” billing) and get yourself up to a decent in salary in a couple years. Just be smart about it. Keep the overhead next to nothing. The guys who who fail there are the ones who do the buildout then sit around waiting for clients to come in. Do it in reverse, and if people ask why you don’t have a glorious office space, tell them, “That’s the difference between my fee and what you’ll pay the guy with the oak-lined conference rooms.”

I know the next question: “But how do I live in the interim?” Get a line. The SBA backs those loans at decent rates. Or just suck up a few years as a service partner, bank a pile of savings and use that.

As to #3, it’s a variation of #1. Instead of going to a firm where you work on business disputes and do some plaintiff’s work, just find a lawyer in a bad part of town (I don’t mean to offend with this, but generally, lower income people get hurt a lot more, and tend to sue a lot more) and financially back his firm using the same business model described in #1. I don’t think there’s any preclusion on his sharing fees with you. Basically, use the license as something akin to a “qualified investor” status that allows you to invest in certain funds. Keep your job and let the referring business return additional income for you passively.

Why not just try PI cases? Well, because not everyone can do it. Even for the best plaintiff’s firms, the model involves bringing a lot of dubious claims and living off the two or three out of five that turn out to have serious merit. Unless you can really detach yourself from a case, it’s hard as hell to put on the emotional act required to beg a judge or jury for compensation for a claim you secretly think is a frivolous piece of fluff. Not everyone has that skill set, and it’s not exactly compatible with a business litigator’s purely rational approach. You could find yourself doing something you really, really aren’t wired to do.

Second, there are the NALP guidelines for hiring summer associates and making offers of “permanent” employment to 3rd year students. Though, this year has shown that when push comes to shove, law firms will ignore the guidelines, but for the most part they’re followed.

Finally, there’s social media. Abovethelaw.com posts tons of information about salaries, hiring practices, law offs, and any generally dickish behavior law firms engage in. Add to that other blogs that run stories about what goes on in law firms, often naming the firms (I post stories on firms screwing associates, and then edit their wikipedia pages) and firms get pressure to keep bad news from getting released. So far most of the efforts have been to clamp down on people leaking information, but I think eventually the media will be so sophisticated that the only option will be to stop being such assholes.

PL: True, but that’s all soft unionization. Nothing’s a real union as that animal is understood in economic terms until it can mobilize labor and impact the the production of the company in which its members work.

There are loads of stealth lay-offs and shove-outs of partners going on neither Abovethelaw.com nor any other website will ever learn about. Firms around Philly have been de-equitizing partners on the sly for more than half a decade now. But as part of an agreement, the victim gets cash in trade for his silence. If it’s happening there it’s happening everywhere else, and yes – it’s a whole lot bigger than the numbers or the massaged press releases would have anyone believe.

In the end, the press won’t “out” the truth about the industry because it’s not that interesting to the general public. And though it’d be amusing, and I won’t count anything out, I doubt lawyers would form actual unions. The closest they’ll probably ever come to that is getting together in groups, stealing clients and jumping ships, which they pretty much do all the time now. But then, I’m no oracle. Here’s to hoping for some entertaining craziness.