Bernoulli, Bearnaise, and Statistics for Lawyers

I’m no statistician, but I do like mathematics, statistics, and quantitative methods in general.  That’s why I hate to see lawyers use confusing language when writing or talking about these subjects.  Take this recent quote from an article on the US News website about lawyer salaries.  Here’s the part that’s troublesome (emphasis added):

Law school graduates “can expect a starting salary in the range of anywhere from a low of $50,000 all the way up to $205,000, and those are median salaries,” says NALP executive director Nikia Gray.

Is that wrong?  I’m not talking about merely being misleading.  That's another matter entirely, as only the very top students at the most “prestigious” law schools will have a realistic chance of making a $205,000 salary upon graduating and passing the bar.  Rather, I'm wondering if that quote is wrong.  Here’s what I mean:

Ready to pass the bar, not to practice law

The above headline could apply to most new law school grads.  (Not all new grads, of course; not all new grads can pass the bar.)  But I’m using the headline to describe an A.I. named Chat GPT.

A few years ago, I was convinced that A.I. had taken over legal tasks (if not entire legal jobs).  Not all tasks; you can’t send A.I. into the courtroom to try a case, for example.  But certainly it had taken over things like legal research and writing legal briefs, I thought.

And then I got an email from my state bar touting its seminar on how attorneys can put A.I., in the form of Chat GPT, to work for them.  I then researched it and learned that Chat GPT recently passed a bar exam.  Based on that, I signed up for Chat GPT and gave it a spin. 

Look to your left; look to your right

Back in the days of The Paper Chase, there was a little speech that, at least according to legend, the Dean made during law school orientation.  “Look to your left; look to your right. One of you won’t be here next year.”  The message, of course, was that law school was not only tough to get in to, but would also be tough to complete.  And one out of every three of you will fail.  But in today’s softer, gentler world, the calculus has changed.  Well, sort of. 

Today, almost everyone gets admitted to law school, and even students with a mere 2.0 GPA in college can get scholarship money at some law schools.  Several forces have conspired to create this state of affairs.  Law schools have expanded in number to over 200, the student applicant pool has shrunk due to sliding demand and plummeting pay for lawyers, and a greater number of law schools are therefore competing for the smaller number of student loan conduits prospective students.

An open letter to our next state bar president

I recently received a mailing from Jon P. Axelrod who is running for state bar president.  He provides a bullet-point list of some things he wants to accomplish.  I have an opinion on three of those things.  First, Axelrod wants to “provid[e] money to forgive student loans” to encourage law school graduates to practice in “underserved areas of Wisconsin.”  I’m not sure where this money would come from, but this debt-forgiveness frolic had better not be funded by our bar dues.  As the Irreverent Lawyer has shown us, Wisconsin’s state bar bureaucracy is already one of the most expensive in the country.  Also, there’s simply no need to encourage new lawyers to take jobs.  There is a glut of lawyers in Wisconsin already, and they’re scrambling to find work. Only 64 percent of UW grads and 62 percent of MU grads from the class of 2015 found long-term, full-time legal jobs.  

A Tale of Two Schools

I just read a Boston Globe article about DeVry University agreeing to pay $100 million to settle a lawsuit.  (Hat tip to “the Chow.”)  The suit alleged that DeVry provided misleading employment data to prospective students.  The school had boasted a 90 percent employment rate.  However, “DeVry was counting students who found jobs outside the fields they studied” including “a graduate who studied in the health care field but found work as a restaurant server and another who worked as a car salesman[.]”

On Writing, Publishing, Making Money, and “Making a Murderer”

Photo by Brenda VanCuick

I was searching the web to see if Prometheus Books had posted any type of announcement about my forthcoming book, Convicting Avery: The Bizarre Laws and Broken System behind "Making a Murderer".  But before I could find anything, I came across a website called Reddit.  (At least I think it’s a website; it really just seemed to be a string of comments.)  There was a discussion of my recent Wisconsin Law Journal article about how the Denny rule prevented Jerry Buting and Dean Strang from putting on a third-party defense at Steven Avery’s trial.  Most people in the thread liked my article.  And so did a guy or gal who wrote “not a bad column.”  (Given there is a lot of bad writing out there, I’ll take that as praise.)  However, he or she also wrote “$$$” and indicated that the dollar signs “were a criticism over the fact that a random lawyer out of Kenosha with no ties to the case is writing a book with ‘Making a Murderer’ in the title.”  I tried to post a response, but couldn’t figure out how.  (The problem, I’m sure, lies with my technological ineptitude; for example, I’ve never snapchatted or pintrested, I’m not even on facebook, and I don’t even know what Reddit is.)  So instead, I decided to write this post to dispel some myths and offer some tips to would-be writers:

The lawyer advertising double standard

Unemployed and under-employed law graduates have sued several law schools, claiming the schools used false or misleading employment data to induce them to enroll and spend $150,000-or-so of their yet-to-be-earned dollars.  One law school advertising tactic, for example, was to label jobless graduates as “not seeking” employment; this allowed a school to hide the abysmally high unemployment rate of its graduates.  Another, more common tactic was to count graduates as “employed” even when their jobs had absolutely nothing to do with law (e.g., working at Starbucks), or were only temporary jobs created by the law school to artificially boost its employment statistics.  Another was to say that, for example, 92 percent of all grads were employed, when in fact only 92 percent of the 40 percent who responded to the survey were employed.  In sum, law school advertising at many schools took tremendous liberties in spinning the facts.    

ABA and Wisconsin Bar combine efforts to solve lawyers’ problems (but not really)

Many new law grads are saddled with staggering debt loads and have limited job prospects.  While six-figure debt is now commonplace, just over half of new law grads have been able to land full-time, long-term employment as lawyers.  And, thanks to the bimodal salary distribution, most of those “lucky” new lawyers aren’t even paid enough to make a dent in their student loans.  On the other hand, for established, practicing lawyers, things aren’t much better: fees have been stagnant or even falling — not only in real dollars, but often in nominal dollars as well.  But don’t worry.  A grinning bureaucrat from the ABA teamed up with the Wisconsin Bar to discuss the “great opportunities facing lawyers today.”  That’s funny; I thought we “faced” obstacles but were “presented with” opportunities.  But I’m not writing this to nitpick word choice, so let’s get to the real question: what exactly are these “great opportunities”?

The lawyer job market (revisited)

I recently wrote about an advertisement for a Racine County advocate counsel position.  Essentially, the job would require the victim newly hired attorney to handle as many as 80 case appointments, including the defense of serious felonies, for $25,000 per year without benefits or even expense reimbursement.  I suppose that I knew this was outrageous, or I wouldn’t have written about it in the first place.  But as a criminal defense lawyer for the last twelve years, I’ve kind of become immune to governmental and bureaucratic outrageousness, so I didn’t expect that the post would garner such national attention. 

The lawyer job market

The scam blog and law school transparency movements have exposed the JD as a flat-out bad decision for many (if not most) would-be law students.  That is, many graduates won’t find lawyer jobs, and those who do might not be able to pay back the debt they had to incur to graduate.  That will lead many new law grads to consider hanging out their own shingle, i.e., self-employment.  And most of these new solo practitioners will have to take whatever work that comes through the door, which typically includes criminal defense, juvenile, and traffic cases.  (Sorry, new solos: maritime law, sports law, space law, and international law will be nothing more than fond law school memories.)  But how lucrative is this bread-and-butter type of work?  To answer that question, I will quote an email I recently received advertising an “advocate counsel” position in Racine County, Wisconsin (located between Milwaukee and Chicago and just north of where I practice).  Here’s the scoop:

The “public service” mantra

I try to remain ignorant about local politics, happenings, goings on, news, and events of every kind.  Normally, this is easily accomplished by substituting a national newspaper for the local rag.  But despite my modest efforts, I’ve been subjected to a lot of chatter recently about who is going to be running for Kenosha circuit court judge when one of the sitting judges retires.  And when election time rolls around – actually, I suspect that it’s always election time for those with a political bent – the voters will be hearing a lot of talk about why the candidates want the job.  I can predict that every candidate’s answer will be that he or she wants the job to “serve the public,” or “serve the community,” or some variation of that phrase.  My advice to the voters: don’t buy it.  Most (if not all) candidates want the job for the huge pay raise that comes with it.  Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Law schools implement the mirror test

In the early 2000s, the real estate industry was booming and money was cheap and easy.  In some cases, a prospective buyer could even qualify for a “no doc loan” without giving proof of stable employment.  During these boom years the mortgage brokers joked (as they raked in their commissions and led us to a housing bubble) that a buyer only had to pass the mirror test: if they stuck a mirror in your face and you could fog it up, then you would get the mortgage.  And now it looks like the mirror test has jumped industries and made its way to law school admissions offices across the country. 

French-poetry reading pig seeks employment in large, national law firm

Most law school courses test only two things: a student’s ability to spot legal issues and then apply the relevant law. Granted, the “relevant law” in law school is usually fictional, i.e., an impractical mishmash of case law drawn from numerous states and collected in overpriced casebooks. But at least students are tested on spotting real legal issues and then applying a body of law. And what law schools are really good at is ranking students according to their ability to do this. In addition to a GPA, schools also give out class ranks. And when students apply for law firm jobs this information is placed front and center on the resume. Are you first, second, or third in your class? Are you in the top ten percent? How about the top quarter?

Introducing The Irreverent Lawyer

I am pleased to introduce Legal Watchdog readers to The Irreverent Lawyer—a gun-slinging civil attorney out west who brilliantly criticizes, among other things, mandatory state bar associations and continuing legal education (CLE) requirements.  (And he does it with wonderfully illustrated posts.)  Now, I always knew that, notwithstanding my state bar’s hyper-positive spin, I wasn’t getting anything for my nearly-$500 check that I sign every year.  And I always knew that after taking most CLEs I was frustrated and drained of money, time, and energy.  But I was never angry about any of this until I started reading some of his posts. 

State bar recommends new lawyers do free legal work to reduce their anxiety from not having money or legal training

In November, 2013, a “special task force report” by the State Bar of Wisconsin concluded that a large number of new law grads can’t find jobs to pay off their staggering student debt loads.  In addition, many of those who were fortunate enough to be employed (or underemployed) were afraid to practice law because they didn’t know how.  Here’s a nice excerpt of a summary of the report from the bar association’s e-newsletter: 

“My debt is higher than a mortgage for a nice house. It’s all I think about. And I know I will be strapped in a job I don’t want paying debt for the rest of my life,” said [one new lawyer]. 

“I’m buried under debt. I’m terrified that this is what the rest of my life is going to look like. I’m also scared to start my own practice, because I don’t have the practical litigation experience. I can’t afford a pet, let alone kids. I live paycheck to paycheck. It’s very, very scary and disheartening,” was another response from a new lawyer.

Another lawyer said the job search left the lawyer feeling “suicidal” and “terrified.” The lawyer also feels alone and scared of making a mistake in practice but is hesitant to tell anyone about these mental struggles for fear of being disbarred. 

. . . [A] task force member and past president of the State Bar’s Young Lawyer’s Division[] said the lawyers who made these sorts of comments “are fast becoming your average member of the State Bar.”

So, in short: lots of stress due to high debt loads, no jobs, and the fear of practicing law because of the lack of training and the related risk of disbarment.  So what is the state bar’s solution?

Legal academia shakeup

Nearly one year ago, I wrote a blog post titled Law School Management 101 (or how to deal with your school’s looming fiscal crisis).  In it I reminisced how, by the time I graduated in 1999, law school tuition had risen from about $13,000 per year to nearly $20,000 per year.  Sitting there in my cap and gown with tuition payments behind me, I then wondered, “who would want to go to law school at these prices?”  In that post I conceded that my price-sensitive way of thinking back then was at least ten years premature.  Why?  Because between then and now, tuition continued to rise (eventually into the $40,000-plus range at many private schools), yet the number of applicants rose right along with it.  In other words, applicants were willing to pay those prices and a whole lot more.  But as it turns out, I may not have been ten years ahead of my time after all.  Today, the market for legal education has corrected, and some schools are now lowering tuition back to 1999 levels.

Lies, damned lies, and the statistics that expose them

Sometimes, numbers have an uncanny way of exposing lies.  Consider this tale of two groups: police officers and law school bureaucrats.  With regard to the police, one famous study on police-officer behavior revealed that, before the Fourth Amendment was imposed on the states, the police would simply write in their reports what really happened: they stopped people on the street for no reason, searched them, found drugs, and arrested them.  In fact, the police admitted to this in 33 percent of their police reports.  Only in 14 percent of their reports did they write that the drugs magically fell out of the defendants’ pockets.

Lawyer salaries: going, going . . . gone

A couple of years ago, some members of the Wisconsin Bar were putting up a stink about the low hourly wage paid to appointed attorneys who represent indigent citizens accused of crimes.  I wrote about it on the MU Faculty Blog, and made the prediction that the state government would not raise this pay rate, which has been unchanged for decades.  And not only was that prediction correct—I’m not taking credit for reading the future; the prediction was easy and obvious—but since that time, lawyer wages have fallen even further.  Many employers, including the government, are now advertising lawyer jobs where the salary is—you guessed it—zero.

The difference between doctors and lawyers

A law degree is really just a second bachelor’s degree.  Sure, you need a B.S. or B.A. (or B.-something) to get admitted to law school, but there are no other prerequisites.  In other words, a B.F.A. in puppetry with an emphasis in children’s theatre from the University of West Virginia will get you into law school just as easily as a B.S. in bioengineering from Cal Tech.  (In fact, the law degree used to be called the LL.B., or bachelor of laws, but its name was changed to J.D., or juris doctor—probably in an effort to gain respect and prestige.)  But medical schools, on the other hand, require very specific and rigorous coursework before an applicant can even be admitted, let alone graduated and licensed.  (Puppetry majors need not apply.)