Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?
bloomberg.com
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The school has a total unemployment rate of 12.3%, and an underemployment
Yes, that unemployment rate is worse than the national average for all workers. This is typical of law school grads.
Brooklyn's Median LSAT score has dropped 7 points in four years. It's 25th percentile LSAT score has dropped 9 points in four years, from 162 to 153.
Those are massive drops. I work in the LSAT field. At 162, students will avoid making mistakes in formal logic. E.g. "All cats have tails" can be drawn as C --> T. You can also say "not T" --> "not C".
At 162, students will almost always get this right, even with harder sentences. At 153, students will repeatedly make logical mistakes and come up with things like Tail --> Cat.
(They wouldn't make that error on a simple sentence, but they would with different subject matter)
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Post-2008, legal employment went south, and law school tuition costs soared. To study law now you're looking at $200,000 in debt.
So most smart students avoid law school unless they get a full ride scholarship to a T14 school.
Meaning that a larger and larger portion of remaining students are....less analytically capable, to put it gently.
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People ask: if there's a glut of lawyers, why are legal services not getting cheaper. But there's a certain minimum standard you need in a lawyer.
A bad lawyer can do a LOT of damage, and the damage won't show up for years down the road.
I wonder when that started.
If strikethrough is available, students use that instead quite often.
I've often wondered about the disconnect: How do we have too many lawyers, and yet legal services are still too expensive? To a degree, there IS a correction underway - prepaid legal services are far more common than they were. In another way, the burden new grads face (massive debt, limited job market, basically no employment during law school) means that many people choose NOT to pursue employment as actual lawyers, so the supply of law school students !== supply of lawyers.
If a lawyer is entitled to the same work schedule (40 hours/week) as everyone else, then those 40 billable hours must be paid enough to support those outlays. That is why legal services are expensive. You are not just paying for a unit of work, but rather, subsidizing a lawyer's entire lifestyle.
In addition, a 40 hour work week probably translates into something more along the lines of 20 billable hours given the inevitable variation in case load, personal time off for whatever, ongoing education, etc.
Basically, it's the same reason that any consultant-type job (which a small law practice effectively is) has to charge hourly rates that at first blush may seem pretty high just to translate into the equivalent of, say, a $100K salary at a typical corporate job.
Probably similar to your outlays.
Then, depending on your area of work, you've got issues like software to record and cite websites, continuing legal education requirements, etc.
Not the most expensive profession in terms of base costs, but not cheap either.
*Some programmers have insurance but not to the extent that lawyers are required to have it.
Please don't downvote without explaining why, responding, etc. I'm not asking you to debate the OP which you desire to downvote, but to simply explain why. Feel free to preface it with "I'm not going to debate you, or even reply to you, but here is why i downvoted you:"
My reason for wishing this is, in areas that another viewer (myself, in this example) is unfamiliar with the topic at hand (law, lawyers, and etc) - a downvote can often be confusing. Is what the OP said non-factual? Are they bending the truth? Or is it simply a hot topic?
Anyway, i could go on, but i'll likely end up wandering. Thanks for reading.
As income rises so do outlays, outlays that can get tied up in ongoing obligations (mortgages, utility bills, car payments, telecommunications services, investment schedules, etc.). The supply side of the market (lawyers) quickly have incentives to be paid more for the same or less hours of work: so that they can support more outlays (kids, hobbies, greater projected retirement fund returns, etc).
Of course, clients can just take their money and cut off the inflow to lawyers as you suggest; it is a definite risk.
A good 50% of law students are out of law within a couple years, and large number of those never work as a lawyer. It's tough to create your own job because nobody trusts you.
And even if you do work as a lawyer, not all lawyers are fungible. They guy who spends all day at Immigration court can't litigate a contract dispute over a rail line. The guy who writes patents doesn't know how to handle a bankruptcy.
So you can get a guy to do your DUI for 500 bucks, but my firm would charge you 550/hr just to talk to you on the phone.
Another big reason is that law is a very prestige and pedigree heavy industry. Why would a firm hire a Duke grad for 160k, when you can get 4 Brooklyn law school grads for that? Rightly or wrongly, the Brooklyn grads are seen as incapable of doing the job.
Clients then hire the well known firm for their big cases and matters because they have a good reputation.
That is sort of changing. Big companies use smaller firms for smaller matters and cases where spending 700 an hour for legal work doesn't make sense.
Some would argue legal rates aren't even too high. For example, for transaction lawyers, their fees are a fraction of what the investment banker takes on a deal.
But the biggest reason that legal services are expensive is that legal service is man-hour heavy and essentially doesn't scale.
Look at even blue collar services that are manhour heavy like mechanics. A car mechanic costs 80-100 bucks an hour.
What is really need is for the legal system to streamline. As long as it takes 20 hours to do your divorce, it'll never be cheap.
The problem is that it's an adversarial process surrounded by politics. As long as human judges and juries are deciding high stakes outcomes on a case by case basis, people who are good at rhetoric and persuasion will be in demand.
What streamlining implies is making outcomes more deterministic so that everybody knows what will happen ahead of time and there is no room to argue about it. But that is fundamentally a political problem. The laws need to be clearer and less complicated.
Winning cases has little to do with rhetoric, or conventional persuasiveness. Almost nothing goes to trial, so the audience is almost always a judge and his or her staff, who aren't persuaded by rhetoric. What they are persuaded by is clear, straightforward application of what is almost always pretty simple law to extremely complex factual scenarios.
Imagine a couple breaking up, and your being asked to decide whose fault it was. Think of the extended, factually-intensive drag-out fights two people can have over something as simple as a relationship gone sour. Two years ago, he got her a gift for her birthday, but did he pick it up on the way home from work because he forgot to buy it ahead of time? Did he remember her birthday or did he forget? Is he really an uncaring inattentive boyfriend? That's litigation, except with many more people involved, much more complicated scenarios, and potentially a lot of money at stake.
If the law requires consideration of extremely complex factual scenarios then it isn't simple law. Laws that look simple because they use words like "reasonable", aren't.
Creating simple, just laws is hard. But progress can be made by not attempting to adjudicate intractable quagmires like "fault" in a divorce.
Civil courts are primarily tasked with deciding the most just disposition of assets. But the most just disposition of assets is not giving them to the lawyers. To have a just outcome the amount spent on resolving the dispute has to be much smaller than the amount in controversy. If the law doesn't do that then it would be more just to flip a coin or split the difference.
But splitting the difference isn't "right" either, it's only better than the "very wrong" we have in many cases now. You can get closer than that to the ideal outcome of perfect dispute resolution at zero cost. There are rules that produce significantly-better-than-random outcomes at low cost, and those are the ones the law should use, even if the decisions are somewhat less optimal than the ones that come at unjustifiably high cost.
What people want to change are the areas where the law is a mess. Divorce, patent litigation, etc. Laws that criminalize innocuous behavior and allow prosecutors to overcharge defendants at whim. And a common characteristic with these messes is that spending a lot of money on lawyers will significantly improve outcomes, so that people who can, have to -- or they get screwed. Which is what happens to the people who can't.
The following is not particularly a disagreement with the overall intent of your comment; it's largely a tangent.
Perhaps, as a non-lawyer, I'm missing what's actually going on in that conversation, but it seems to me that just in those 10 minutes, a lot of airtime is being spent on rhetorical manoeuvring and persuasion.
The main example here involves the very idea of using a dictionary as some kind of authority. It's nonsense to suppose that a dictionary is anything but alphabetized preposterous oversimplifications. With application to that deposition, we all know that that definition of "operating system" is the sine qua non of what is usually meant by an academic, but that no consumer who goes to buy an "operating system" is expecting to get only resource-management functionality. They expect a shell (CLI shell, GUI shell, or whatever), for example, which by those academic definitions is clearly an application and not part of the OS. It might be a bit silly to next-century-quarterback someone as smart as WG3, but it seems to me that perhaps he dropped the rhetorical ball under pressure here; I think a more persuasive reply would be something like "there exist contexts in which that's what those words mean, and there are contexts where that is NOT what those words mean". I suspect that'd have been a better rhetorical manoeuvre.
Why does Boies keep mentioning that dictionary is by MS Press? Does he think the audience missed it the first time, or the second time? I suggest it's for some reason involving "conventional persuasiveness".
Once again, I suspect I shoulda gone into law. It just seems so fun. Shitty dress code, though.
He mentions the MS Press not for the audience, but for Bill. It makes it harder for him to deny the definition on the spot when it's in Microsoft's own book. Maybe that's conventional persuasion, I don't know. It's not persuasion through stirring oratory.
Also lawyers have no incentive to streamline the process. They are all billing by the hour, so the lack of efficiency is passed onto their clients.
My fiance is a divorce lawyer, and she basically says this all the time. She's able to work much faster than her much older colleagues simply because she knows how to use Google to look up things and she doesn't depend on a secretary for transcribing things on their PC (I'm not joking). There are so many aspects of the industry that are still in the stone age.
Additionally, the actual score to pass both the State Bars and Multi-State Bar has generally increased state by state in order to keep the number of licensed lawyers artificially low. Example, in Florida the passing score is 136 but 10 years ago would have been 131. Those 5 points are not arbitrary they keep a lot of people out and/or force them to retake the bar at a substantial cost. Some failure can be attributable to the historical increases in the passing score, but not in significant drops in average score.
Really? When and where? In fact, the opposite is true. Traditionally, law school classes have little to no relation to the actual bar exam (or to the actual practice of law, for that matter - unless you do constitutional appellate litigation).
In recent years, some (many?) school have begun teaching to the bar, so to speak - so as to raise their bar passage rate. This has happened primarily post-crash (and the resultant contraction in the market of high-paying legal jobs), to (1) help their students look somewhat more marketable and (2) just as important to them, make the schools look better (both to prospective students and prospective employers).
Subsequently, "here has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching." But I don't think the same people who disapprove of teaching to the bar are those behind the movement to teach more real lawyering (workshops, etc.) - I think those who dislike the trend are professors and other legal academics who refuse to admit that they are teachers in (what should be) a vocational school - not philosophers.
All too many law professors are wannabe PhD's of economics, policy and/or philosophy who believe they missed their true calling.
HN-pertintent question on #8 -
The test question describes a scenario in which a businessman's location is broadcast on TV against his wishes. The possible answers for why he doesn't have a claim are "because he did not suffer harm" and "because it was newsworthy".
Meanwhile, given the current trends of (face recognition, phone cameras, wifi tracking, license plate readers, and even credit bureaus themselves) I would have expected the actual answer to be closer to "because the TV station can record and broadcast whatever the fuck they want" (phrased more appropriately for a bar exam, of course). At least this seems to be the general principle referenced whenever private sector mass surveillance is discussed.
Each of these activities does have its own confounding factors (commercial/non, business relationships, governmental support, public/private broadcast), but essentially creates a similar situation where an individual is broadcast against their wishes, and whether their activities are newsworthy is questionable. And the only goal of much private surveillance is to cause financial harm to the surveilled.
What exactly gives? The only plausible resolution I've thought of is that since the case law is not settled, these two opposing concepts are actually fighting and it's not as cut and dry as we think (which would imply that stating it as settled is supporting anti-privacy). But I'm interested in any other explanation.
My question is not about whether this answer is the right choice, but about the creation of the answers. Bar exams focus on abstract concepts, so if the general lack of privacy in public spaces is such a thing, I would have expected it there.
I was confused more about the first question (a school board restricting public schools to those who had been resident one year), because I was trying to reconcile my answer with "well, I know state colleges can charge different rates to in- and out-of-state students" and "well, I can see [this level of] education being a fundamental right in a state constitution, I don't know if being one at the federal level".
But is this actually true? (I interpreted you as meaning "successfully sued", as anyone can be sued for anything)
We're not quite at the point where location surveillance companies are selling data B2C directly to the boss. But it's only the mechanism of harm that differs - influencing subjects to make suboptimal decisions and overcharging consumers are these companies' explicit goals!
Agree though -- I still don't see why you need a legal defense for "filming people as they leave a plane".
Instead we're left with only the possibility of regulating the large-scale behavior, which is a political non-starter in the US.
Importantly, let me be more clear:
* The definition of "newsworthy" in this case is a term of art, not a matter of "it is not newsworthy in the same way that stories about the hulk are not newsworthy." Newsworthy, in this instance, does not mean meritorious as a subject of news, but merely of public interest. In this case, yes, it is newsworthy. This is the way courts use this word in this context.
* Case law is very, very resoundingly settled on this matter. Activity you conduct in public can be recorded and broadcast for a huge variety of purposes - end of story. The only really restricted purposes, in fact, are those that imply sponsorship or endorsement, or are injurious as a matter of libel - meaning there is a material falsehood. This question is structured, specifically, to see if the reader knows about the laws of libel and publicity - truth is a defense to libel (this is a true recount of facts occurring in the broadcast of the footage) and newsworthiness is an exception to violation of rights of publicity (which are typically only violated when implying sponsorship or endorsement).
The reason the questions don't make sense, then, is for the very reason that a lot of people don't respect what lawyers do (note: I am in now way implying you do not - you have put time and thought into your response and I found it very stimulating! I am talking in general) - because though we use english as the language of practice it does not mean we use the commonly used english definitions of those words in the legal context. Here, in this context, without knowing a fair amount of law, you wouldn't know that there were specific privacy rights being dealt with and that "newsworthy" is a term of art. In other words, the question being asked is absolutely no less technical than the question on mortgages - except that mortgages are so esoteric no one accidentally mistakes understanding mortgages for the mere fact that they are explained in english words. If I could go back in time, I'd write laws in camelcaps to make it clear that the legal definition of newsWorthy is different than the lay meaning of newsworthy.
How would one's answer change if they had never heard of these concepts? For this question, these topics only come up to be ruled out. I can see these things tripping someone up if they know enough about the concepts to involve them, but not enough to see that they don't apply, and perhaps this is the only point.
> not mean we use the commonly used english definitions of those words in the legal context
IMHO "newsworthy" as a term of legal art doesn't seem far off from "newsworthy" in the common vernacular, just a bit more formalized and specific. I think the problems arise when someone attempts to stretch the lay meaning of the word to justify something (say equating newsworthy with gossip-worthy).
On the other hand (and this is opening up a whole nother can of worms), I would say that there is merit to idea that words in laws should be interpretable as plain English instead of being defined arbitrarily by previous cases. The law should be written such that the average person can read and understand it themselves with a modicum of effort - being forced to hire a professional and expend considerable resources to answer fundamental questions about what one is permitted to do is itself a violation of equal protection and an erosion of the very idea of the rule of law.
I am not sure who 'they' are, but ignorance of the law is no excuse - especially in the bar exam.
That line sums up the entirety of law. I say it all the time and it should be a saying every potential client should be familiar with...the correct answer to any legal question is always: maybe. If a lawyer tells you anything but, they are selling you on something/telling you what you want to hear/etc...
The bar exam is not necessarily composed of 3 wrong choices and 1 correct answer. A bar exam question is typically comprised of 2 wrong answers and 2 right answers, then it becomes a question of what is the best answer out of 2 correct answers. It is not uncommon either for the bar to ultimately void a question and/or revise the scoring to reflect multiple answers as correct, and this is after countless lawyers vetted these questions...it is not easy.
But a major purpose of written law is to attempt to get everyone on the same page ahead of time so that decisions are predictable (otherwise it would be a lot simpler to just have "judges" that resolved each dispute without regard for precedent).
What you've said is very practical - a lawyer can't really guarantee some arbitrary action is fine but can only recommend the most prudent course of action. But this conservatism arises from the legal system's limits, not an ideal to strive for - a person deciding what to do really does want to know the individual merit of each action, so that they can choose according to their personal utility function.
If you average the score with those that don't pass, you get incomparable results because you are counting both lawyers and dropouts.
To me, that screams data mining. The average score of the 25th percentile is a very strange statistic. Why not use something more conventional like the median of the entire population? Then you could honestly say: the majority of people at this school are getting worse. The use of an obscure statistic makes it seem they went hunting for a statistic to spin a story upon.
The school in question had a significant drop (9 points) for the average score of their lowest quarter. So a corresponding drop on the bar exam, in Moeser's analysis, is a natural consequence.
So reporting the 25th is a way of showing what happened to the whole bottom quartile of a class. They're the group most likely to fail the bar exam.
Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school mentioned in the article: http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/
The median score dropped 7 points in four years. The bottom score dropped 9 points in four years The top 75th score only dropped 6 points in four years.
Those are massive drops for such a short time. I'm an LSAT instructor, and there is a vast difference between a 162 and a 153.
http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/
She picked 25 because that's roughly the population of the students who failed (i.e., the weak students at the school are much weaker than they used to be, so they are now failing.)
So a school having the class drop from 170 to 160 shouldn't have much of an effect on the passage rate. But if they start letting in a large number low LSAT scores (below the 150 threshold) you'll really decrease the passage rate. Even if the median is still the same.
I work in the field, it would be good to have a hard number to present to students.
Anecdotally, I notice a big difference in those who can't break 150 vs. other students.
So the people left will be....the sort of people less likely to pass a bar exam.
Why only software engineers?
Maybe point Watson to all the case history and see what he can do.
It is funny how we read the article yesterday about the "New Aristocrat" class. Maybe automation will replace the Aristocrat class at some point for a change...
I think legal technology,[1] explains very little of the glut of lawyers. Mostly because it's really not very useful so it doesn't get used that widely.
The real answer is that the job situation for lawyers isn't much different than nearly any other white collar profession. The amount of legal work per unit GDP is pretty steady, GDP isn't growing rapidly, and schools graduate way more students than the industry can absorb.
[1] Obviously lawyers use the same technology that has helped everywhere else. PDF instead of paper copies, email, outsourced IT, etc.
That said, I'm also imagine part of it is just the same technology that is helping everyone else, albeit in a particularly paper-intensive field that requires enormous amounts of searching and checking.
You have a corpus of knowledge that you need to dig through. Cases are interconnected by footnotes (i.e. case X referenced precedent set in case Y [and succeeded]). The relative strength of referencing a case is predicted by the number of references made to it [successfully].
The biggest use of highly-paid, entry-level law grads was to run from case book to case book, chasing down all those footnotes and getting photocopies of them.
Digitizing them (i.e. OCR, make them searchable) and turning footnotes into hyperlinks basically negates the entire point of those entry-level grads.
So, no use of predictive algorithms or fancy ML - just PageRank applied to a set of case books.
Meanwhile, West/Lexis went electronic in the 1970's, and electronic research has been standard at business law firms probably for the last 20-30 years. In any case, the process of legal research was probably faster than you think pre-computers, because cases were all indexed by West/Lexis on the basis of their content. So even back in the days of book research, the primary use of young associates was, as it is today, discovery, not research.
And it's funny you mention PageRank. Google Scholar has gotten better for legal research, but it's still vastly inferior to old-school search queries in WestLaw. PageRank is pretty much useless for legal research. The strength of referencing a case has nothing to do with how often it's cited, but the similarity in the factual/legal scenario in that case compared to your own.[1] A case nobody cites that addresses the specific wrinkle of the law your situation falls into is infinitely more authoritative than one that's highly cited for some generic principle of law.
[1] PageRank is pretty good at finding seminal/controversial cases in an area of law, but that's rarely useful. You already know what those are, because you paid at least a modicum of attention in law school and/or you started your research by reading a chapter in the relevant treatise, which lays those cases out for you.
Because at least one app that turns legal aid into a blackbox service exists, in S.F. at least:
There's several for medical services, as well. http://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-vie-to-build-an-uber-fo...
I don't want to ignore the likely real emotional impact of the technical snafu, but considering the extreme stress the students are already under, I doubt it would explain the degree of difference. Getting actual reliable metrics one way or the other would be difficult, but essential, I think.
Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.
Or law school. My law-school experience was probably 1/3 learning the rules and 2/3 trying to understand or critique the moral underpinnings of those rules. This relates to a common misunderstanding about lawyers. A good lawyer's real skill is not knowing the rules--there are too many of them. Our skill is in rapidly learning and applying the rules to new situations, and understanding how the relevant power structures will react to our client's situation with respect to these rules. An understanding of the moral and policy underpinnings of these rules is key to doing this effectively.
People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these attitudes as a defense mechanism.
How many public defenders have you had similar conversations with? You might get different results.
And rather I don't think they are bad people, just realistic about the nature of the system they work in.
You should find some different people to talk to. This attitude is not only not the norm among my friends, colleagues, and classmates (virtually all of whom went to good law schools), this attitude is almost totally unknown to me.
It's true, of course, that lawyers have to understand and accept that legal outcomes are not always moral outcomes. So it's true that "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" in the narrow sense that when law and morality conflict, law typically carries the day in court. But don't mistake this practical understanding for a lack of moral awareness more broadly.
Believe me, nobody knows better the injustices perpetrated by our legal system than lawyers. This, after all, is why many people become lawyers.
But also consider that some of the injustices widely believed to be generated by our legal system (though certainly not all, such as racially-biased mass incarceration) are, in fact, not injustices but are simply widely misunderstood. I would say that legal reporting is about on par with science reporting in terms of the misinformation and half truths that get spread around.
Also remember that a lot of the injustices widely attributed to the U.S. judicial system (and here I am talking about mass incarceration) are not primarily products of the judicial system. They are products of the legislative system (i.e., Congress), which the judiciary is constitutionally bound to obey. Lawyers and judges have very few tools to minimize this damage while also performing the job that our system of government assigns them.
The vast majority of our cases are settled through plea bargains; this is in essence a coerced (we must assume false -- if we are to accept innocent until proven guilty, none of these cases are proved) confession, little different from in banana republics where your signed confession is required for the authorities to recall their torture or confinement. Once a prosecutor has you in his sights your choices are to fight back, demand a trial, and have the prosecutor throw the book at you and ask for the maximum most extreme sentence, try to lock you in a cage for years to be repeatedly beaten and raped and destroy your ability to succeed in society for having the audacity to demand your rights, or accept the punishment the justice system has decided to dole out to you with a plea. So we trust prosecutors to only push cases they truly believe are just. But the promotion scheme for prosecutors is such that those prosecutors who believe any winnable case is a just one get the most convictions, and therefore the most power.
And consider juries; as a juror you are instructed (falsely) that you are required to judge a case simply on the facts and that you must leave your ability to be a human being and do moral reasoning at the door (hence, morality has no place in a courtroom -- the jurors, who decide the case, are explicitly told they may not use it), and lawyers are even legally prevented from informing the jurors of their rights.
I think you're very right about the source of these problems -- they come from lawyers in so much as almost all of our legislators are lawyers, trained into this profession and having gone through all of this before they create laws. But it's not the trial lawyers or judges who created these issues, and many of them get into the game in order to make things better. But I think to succeed in a system requires acceptance of the system; it changes you. I'll concede that it's likely there are many, many people in the legal profession for whom my analysis isn't particularly accurate and I'm encouraged by your vigorous repudiation of my pessimism (I don't want to be right), but I think there's some truth there to what I'm saying. And I'm not suggesting that there is an easy solution; the problems are emergent, systemic, and very deep.