practicehacker

A good start! But seriously: according to this piece in the Wall Street Journal new law grads continue to enter the workforce faster than Starbucks can hire them. To quote the article:

According to jobs site SimplyHired.com… the hardest-to-place industry [is the] the legal field. Unemployed lawyers now find themselves in the country’s most cutthroat race for a job, with less than one opening for every 100 working attorneys.

But what makes us so hard to employ? Maybe the answer can be found in the 50 (and counting) comments to the ABA Journal’s anemic coverage of the topic, which is all of a paragraph long and is no more than a rehash of the original mention in Above the Law. Or maybe the answer is written into the Economist’s riotously off-target piece Not Enough Lawyers, which posits that we have uh, too few lawyers. But after all is said and done the truth is that lawyers are hard to employ for the same reasons we’ve known about for a good 20 years:

• Law school costs too much and does not teach practical skills
• Grads need to make a lot right away to pay their school loans
• Big Law only hires a faction of grads; the rest are on their own

For the great mass of new lawyers in the market and those displaced due to the systemic shakeup in the law, the odds are lower than newly hatched turtles trying to make it out to sea. And it just breaks my heart to see that happen to such a nice bunch of baby turtles.

As highlighted recently on Shatterbox and in my discussions with Richard Granat of DirectLaw back at the 2011 ABA Tech Show, LegalZoom is coming into its own big time. Then again, what else would LegealZoom do with the money raised in its IPO but siphon business from competitors; lawyers?

And that’s exactly what it’s been doing and what it continues to do. Even the bell-weather Missouri class action that some thought might slow the LZ juggernaught has fizzled and instead, as Shatterbox points out, LZ is probably even savvier for the experience.

All of which begs the question: Is LegalZoom unstoppable? Is it inevitable? Is it the future of law practice? Is it the end of sole practitioners? Not that I know. I’m just putting it out there.

Before you answer think about this it looks as if we lawyers are in the pot while the water is getting hotter, but we refuse to acknowledge that our collective goose is being cooked… and probably won’t until it’s too late. That sounds just  like a lawyer’s reaction to and impending calamity: waiting until it’s over to react, conduct a post-mortem, and find someone else to blame. Posted via email from practice (redux)

Posted via email from practice (redux)

Today Richard McManus of the influential blog RreadWriteWeb (RWW) asked if we are in the midst of a technology bubble like the one that arose in the early 2000′s as copious sums of money chased the illusive dot-com IPO, driving prices ever higher in a cyclone of speculation. When that bubble burst it left thousands of businesses in ruins, threw tens of thousands of people out of work, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars to evaporate. Equally influential blogger Om Malike weighs in here on his blog GigaOm; and I’ve read several pieces around the Web in which authors are cock-sure that we are not in a bubble.

So, are you thinking what I’m thinking? That the the financial crapfest of the last few years makes the fallout from the dot-com hysteria look like a week in Cabo? Ole! As for me, I say we’re in the midst of an unustainable bubble that will hurt the economy even more.

Unless I can make some money speculating on up-and-coming companies. If that happens I’m sure we’re experiencing a true economic force for good.

Posted via email from practice (redux)