“I spent $134,918 and I don’t even get a lousy law degree?”

I hate it when lawyers mindlessly jabber about "public service" or "giving back" or our alleged duty to "serve the community," as if we have some moral obligation above that of medical doctors, corporate managers, accountants, or truck drivers.  As I’ve written here, this nonsensical blather often comes from highly paid bureaucrats at state bar associations who are trying to put a good face on the legal profession.  And as I’ve written here, other times it comes from judicial candidates who are vying for incredibly high paying judgeships, but need to offer up a more palatable reason for why they want the gig.  But now it’s graduation time, and the law school industrial complex is minting thousands of new JDs.  And along with the graduation ceremonies comes commencement speakers who spew out creative new twists on this worn out public service mantra.  The most creative twist this year goes to the Northeastern University commencement speaker who told the graduates that their degree doesn’t really belong to them; instead, it “belongs to our whole community.”

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”?

Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies: Community and the Law (Part 2)

I realize that law school deans need to “sell” their product and industry to a variety of groups, including would-be students.  But sometimes, dean-speak is so bizarre you have to wonder if the dean gave even minimal thought before spinning a particular yarn.  To continue with my new field of interdisciplinary study, Community and the Law, let’s begin with our baseline dean: Community’s Craig Pelton, Dean of the fictional Greendale Community College.  Dean Pelton recently bragged that his school is “now ranked fifth . . . on Colorado’s alphabetical listing of community colleges.”  That claim pretty much speaks for itself.  And unfortunately, some real-life law school deans appear to be using Dean Pelton as their role model.

Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies: Community and the Law (Part 1)

Despite its comic intentions, the television show Community — season 6 now available on Yahoo! Screen — has been surprisingly accurate in its portrayal of higher education and, more specifically, of law school.  For example, the show, set on the campus of Greendale Community College, did a great job of explaining the importance of law school: “Anyone can be a lawyer; you can even represent yourself.”  And through its character Jeff Winger, the show essentially proved that the J.D. degree is really nothing more than a dressed-up associate’s degree.  But in season 6, Community is becoming eerily prescient, and it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate the fictional Greendale Community College from real-life law schools. 

California Bar outdoes Wisconsin Bar with mandatory pro bono requirement

The Wisconsin Bar recently conducted a dues-funded study demonstrating the obvious: (1) many new lawyers were drowning in debt and couldn’t find law-related jobs; and (2) many of these new lawyers were afraid to hang their own shingle because they were never trained to practice law and feared committing malpractice.  I then mocked the Wisconsin Bar when, shortly after its study, it sent out an unrelated email suggesting that new lawyers reduce their anxieties by doing unpaid legal work for real clients.  But as clueless as the Wisconsin Bar was, the California Bar may have just topped it.

State Bar Bureaucracy: An Obvious Conflict of Interest?

Throughout my legal career — including at Quarles & Brady, as a solo practitioner, and especially as a writer — I’ve pondered a wide variety of “conflict of interest” scenarios.  And while attorneys are conditioned to run scared from any situation that could conceivably be construed as a conflict, there is one huge conflict of interest sitting right under our noses.

The mandatory, integrated state bar is such an obvious conflict that it needs little explanation.  In a nutshell, the bar forces attorneys to become members, takes their dues money, and then actively works for “the public” and against its membership.  Some state bar associations still pretend to serve their membership, when actually they are nothing more than Great Public Protection Perpetual Motion Machines: “The [attorney] members of the State Bar might still be stakeholders in the discipline system but that stake has shrunk to the size of the steak you order in a trendy restaurant, the one hiding under a stalk of asparagus.”  But as the Irreverent Lawyer informs us, some state bars might do away with this pretense altogether.  The State Bar of Arizona, for example, proposes clarifying the issue as follows: You, attorney, must join our ranks and pay your annual dues, and we will serve you only if it doesn’t conflict with our “mission . . . primarily to protect and to serve the public[.]”

On the absurdity of law schools and law reviews

I’ve written several times about the low hours and great pay enjoyed by law professors (many of whom can’t appreciate their situation because they’ve never experienced the intense stress, crazy hours, and low pay enjoyed by most lawyers).  Add on the usual law prof benefits (e.g., health insurance, sabbaticals, summers off, research stipends, etc.) and its no wonder that “law professor” has appeared near the top of several “best-jobs” lists.  And I’ve also written about how some profs launched themselves into the financial stratosphere with creative benefits called “forgivable loans.”  But there’s yet another benefit that, although I had never heard of it, turns out to be relatively common for those in the academy: spousal hiring.

Legal news from around the world wide web

The legal profession is rife with nonsense, and I can't possibly write about all of it.  So here are some great posts from around the www to keep The Dog's readers up to date.

First, prosecutor misconduct.  For me, outside of not-guilty verdicts, some of the sweetest moments in law practice came when prosecutors hid evidence, but then accidentally disclosed it anyway.  (One example is the smoking-gun memo that gets mistakenly placed in my discovery packet.)  But prosecutor misconduct is a serious problem, and we can't always count on their ineptitude to serve as a self-correcting mechanism.  For a great post on prosecutor misconduct (with courtroom video at the bottom), check out The Irreverent Lawyer.

Second, law school shenanigans.  Sure, law profs make a lot of money for a short work year and a 3-4 class per year workload.  That's no longer shocking.  For shocking, visit Outside the Law School Scam to learn how an unkempt dude who went straight from law school to a professorship, and then to a deanship, collected hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and other creative payments like "forgivable loans," and then still kept his professor job (though not the deanship) when it all came unglued.  

And third, law review publishing.  I once wrote a law review article with about 100 footnotes.  Then the editors sent it back and wanted 200 footnotes, including footnotes for sentences so basic they required no citation.  For example, if I write that "sometimes defendants will defend battery cases claiming self-defense," I don't need a footnote because the claim is obvious and undisputed.  After much battling of our own, we ended up settling on about 150 footnotes.  For more on the intricacies of law review publishing, including how the journals select their articles -- finally, an explanation for why the Harvard L. Rev. has thus far refused to publish my work -- visit Class Bias in Higher Education.  

Enjoy! 

Knock-knock game replaces warrant requirement

I don’t know how, logistically, this would work, but someone needs to put the Fourth Amendment out of its misery.  Actually, it’s too late for that.  It is already dead.  We just need to bury it and quit talking about it as if it still exists. 

I’ve been down this road before, but let’s briefly recap.  Assume the police believe that you smoked pot in your home, or possessed a medication that wasn’t prescribed to you, or visited an illegal website from your computer, or owned an adult pornographic video to which a child was exposed, etc.  Further assume the police claim their belief is based on “probable cause” (e.g., an accusation by your neighbor that he smelled pot smoke coming from your apartment, an accusation by your kid’s friend that he saw “naked people” on your TV when he slept over, etc.). 

Another gem from the state bar

The state bar has been serving up a lot of softballs.  Its most recent came in the form of an email, asking me to donate thirty minutes of my time for its latest dues-funded project: a survey on how to improve law schools.  “This survey,” the bar promises me, will “undoubtedly advance the profession.”  That’s a bold claim, and one that I seriously doubt.  But I might have participated were it not for an even bolder claim: the bar tells me to donate my time because “educating tomorrow’s lawyers is a shared responsibility.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not true.  Instead, I’m pretty sure that law professors are responsible for “educating tomorrow’s lawyers.”  Let’s take a look at some numbers to support my novel claim: