practicehacker

There isn’t much about this infographic we didn’t know. After all, law school is becoming more expensive and riskier all the time. But as long as the number of applicants to law school continues to increase, young people continue to be gullible, school is easier to handle than real-life, and there is money to be made, law schools will continue to mass-produce graduates.

Ironically, lawyers are blame for this crater in the market. But which lawyers really brought on problem? I published my answer here in connection with the ABA’s Legal Rebels project. Enough said. You can make up your own minds, but I think I made my case.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

This is the second really good practice hack that I’ve come across in a week, and it incorporates all the best things about the new, new Internet (Web 2.1?): crowdsourcing, naming your own price, friction-free transactions, and cheap labor.

Cheap labor, you say? You bet. Instant Law Clerk uses the cheapest, most plentiful resource in the world – law students – to deliver research to practicing attorneys faster than they can do it themselves, and at a fraction of the cost. The idea is so simple, it’s a wonder law schools haven’t monopolized the market themselves. The recipe is compelling: take one practitioner short on time and resources but in need of research to make it to trial or to meet a briefing schedule; add a law student in need of cash and real-world experience; and you’ve got a match made in Internet heaven.

So now the only question you need to answer is: Are you still doing your own research? Why? When you can simply enter a question to be answered and name your price at www.instantlawclerk.com? Their team of 2^nd and 3^rd year students from around the country is ready to do the research so you can analyze, review, and ultimately use the results in your pleadings, letters, and memoranda.

Leaving you with more time to play golf … er … prepare for trial.

Posted via email from practice (redux)

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.