The Faculty Lounge

Dacheng Dentons Is A Big Deal, But Is It A Big Deal?

Commanding the headlines in the legal press for the last week or two is the tie-up between the Chinese law firm Dacheng and the international law firm Dentons.  As law-firm deals go, this is a very big one by any measure.  Dacheng is the largest domestic law firm in China, with several thousand lawyers.  Dentons is one of the UK-US leviathans, a product on the model of DLA Piper and Hogan Lovells of a US conglomerate centered on what was once Chicago-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and the UK snowball known as Dentons.  The resulting combination will boast nearly 6,600 lawyers, well over half again as large as what had been the biggest nongovernmental law firm in the world, Baker & McKenzie, with a mere 4,100 or so.

So Dacheng Dentons is a big deal.  But is it a Big Deal?  Is it transformative, an augury of things to come in BigLaw?  Some consultants and commentators seem to think so.  A recent report (link to Lexis) cites various “experts” opining that the combination “mark[s] a new age of megafirms that may leave the legal industry with only firms that are tiny or enormous.”  I think that’s (to put it charitably) doubtful, the vision of naturalists who see a whale and predict that everything in the sea will eventually either become just like it or never outgrow a minnow. 

There are at least three reasons to doubt Dacheng Dentons as a Template for Everything.  The first one is that there’s a lot to consider about how the combination is going to turn out.  Dentons  is a recognizable type in Global BigLaw—as described above, a US-UK combination of high-end international firms whose business model is centered on charging premium rates for complex, multijurisdictional work this class of firms claims is best performed by a single organization with integrated local and international expertise in many places at once.  Dacheng is reportedly something very different, a huge but decentralized network of domestic lawyers that has grown by what one student of China’s legal markets (link to Lexis) calls a “franchise” approach—“Dacheng goes to a province, looks for a local firm, negotiates with them, and then tells them ‘You can use our name.’” 

It is hardly an original observation that the success of a law-firm combination depends on full and effective integration of the constituents' cultures, networks, and economics.  Otherwise all you get is something that is a lot bigger with a lot more overhead and no profitable synergies—something consultants who have not recovered from business school call a lose-lose.  It is also commonplace to observe that differing structures and cultures challenge productive integration.  Dacheng’s “franchise” structure is radically different from, and not easily reconciled with, Dentons' aspirations to be a well-oiled, fully integrated international juggernaut.  Who’s in charge, and how do you draw these thousands of loosely affiliated lawyers scattered across an enormous country into something much more coordinated than they may be accustomed to? 

The economics of the two models are drastically different as well.  Dacheng reportedly generates revenue per lawyer of $78,000 among its 4,000 or so Chinese lawyers—less than one-tenth the revenue per lawyer at Dentons and firms like it.  Do these practices fit together at all?  Remember that Dentons already has traditional foreign-firm offices in China, with partners making traditional seven-figure foreign-partner incomes, and associates paid traditional six-figure US-UK salaries.  The New York Times reports Dentons Chair Joseph Andrews as saying that “the new venture would be more integrated than most, with a unified compensation system across its network of partnerships.”  How are all these people and their practices going to fit together when they are housed in the same offices under the same management?  Which clients get charged according to which constituent’s rate structure?

Aside from these questions about whether and how the combination will work, the second reason to doubt the coming primacy of this law-practice model is how competitive the model will actually prove to be.  Very big firms of this kind are predicated on the theory that a firm with established presence and expertise in a great many places will do a demonstrably superior job at serving global business concerns and handling complex multijurisdictional transactions, and that clients with this need will recognize the quality and efficiency of these services and gladly pay for them.  And that theory may prove out.  But it may not.  One thing we know for sure is that maintaining many offices in many places (Dacheng Dentons will reportedly have 120 offices in 50 nations), and building out the technological and management infrastructure necessary to coordinate meaningfully among them, is enormously expensive.  Less gargantuan international firms with an ability to find skilled lawyers in places where they are not themselves present to meet occasional need suffer far less of these diseconomies of scale.  And early reports of the performance of some of these agglomerations of acquaintances on the Dacheng Dentons model suggest that you don’t always get the best lawyer for every purpose in every market at a single firm, leading to uneven quality in the large international engagements that are precisely the ones in which consistently high quality through one-stop shopping is the signal selling point the huge firms claim to offer.  (For a characteristically thoughtful and vivid exposition of these points, see this essay by Mark Hermann.)

Third and finally, even if the combination works perfectly, and even if it proves to be a winner in the market for legal services, there is no rational reason why the market would force every law firm of any size to be either a Dacheng Dentons leviathan or a mom-and-pop minnow, as some “experts” seem eager to predict.  Law firms serve their clients.  Successful law firms know their clients and what those clients need in services and pricing.  No law firm, or at least no law firm I know of, considers itself all things for all people.  So unless you believe that every business in the world will eventually prove to be either a globe-bestriding colossus like Coca-Cola or Exxon-Mobil, or a corner bodega or hairdresser, you recognize that there is likely to be a very wide range of business sizes and geographical footprints for as far into the future as any of us could possibly see.  In fact, one of the most important developments in the legal services market over the last several years is the demonstrable trend among larger businesses with high-end needs traditionally served by the biggest and highest-priced firms to move significant amounts of premium-priced, complex work to less-large and less-sprawling firms willing and able to charge 10% to 30% less to do it.  In short, firms with different skill and service profiles at different price-points are going to prove more competitive in many sectors of a diversified 21^st-Century economy, both here and abroad, than any one model would prove across all.  And that’s particularly true for the super-premium-priced, super-high-overhead Dacheng Dentons model that is rationally constructed for a particular, relatively limited, category of legal work. 

So will Dacheng Dentons be a force to be reckoned with in the growing market for international legal services?  Maybe.  Is this the end of the world as we know it?  Nah. 

Bernie

New Career-Planning Information for Prospective Lawyers from Law School Transparency

Many of us have become more forceful in recent years in urging prospective and current students to give serious thought both before and during law school to the use to which they intend to put their law degrees. I regularly tell my first-years "You're much more likely to end up someplace you want to be if you think about where you're going."  Others have been rather more pointed.

It turns out that this kind of introspection is difficult for a number of reasons.  Humans are only so-so at predicting what we're going to enjoy doing when we grow up, at least in something as multifarious as a career, and both our preferences and what's realistically available to us change with experience and results over time.  Just as importantly, it's quite hard to get a handle on all the different kinds of things that lawyers do, and the different work environments in which they do them, which is pretty basic to any meaningful reflection about what you might want to do once you graduate.  We impart startlingly little "what do you do all day" information to our students (think about it), and though I can't claim to have searched exhaustively, I haven't found any easy access to resources that impart this kind of information.  Yes, Mark Hermann's "Curmudgeon’s Guide" and Nancy Rapoport and Jeff Van Niel's "Survival Manual" offer many very useful (and admirably practical and accessible) insights into private law-firm life, and you should definitely read them if that's where you think you're headed, but they address only a small slice of the job market, and even there don't really give the outsider looking in any sense of what capital markets vs. M&A vs. tax vs. various kinds of litigators actually do, let alone address the many other kinds of lawyer work graduates find.

To its credit, Law School Transparency is trying to address this gap.  They've announced a series of video [correction:  podcast] interviews with practitioners portentously entitled (with a hopefully ironic backward glance at Sly Stallone in his "Judge Dredd" gear) "I am the Law."  The press release is here, and the first four interviews are available here.

I confess that I have not yet had the opportunity to listen to the interviews, so I hold no views on whether they are informative, accurate or useful.  If you're a career services professional, a law teacher, a law student, or a practitioner, please check out one or more, and post in the Comments how well you think they serve the intended purpose--to help prospective and current law students and recent graduates make informed career choices.  I imagine any constructive suggestions offered to Kyle McEntee and his friends while they're compiling their library will benefit all concerned.  

Regardless of the early productions' quality, hats off to LST for recognizing and trying to address this real and important need.

Again, please share your thoughts about the interviews in the Comments!

Bernie

The VAP Trap

Law schools are moving to a model where the path to a tenure track job increasingly runs through a job as a fellow in a prestigious program such as the Climenko fellowships at Harvard or through a stint as a Visiting Assistant Professor.

The VAP path is the route I took when I finally figured out after a misspent middle age that teaching law was what I had wanted to do all along. For me, being a VAP was a wonderful experience - the work was stimulating, the pay was more than fair, and every time the administrators or tenure track profs could help me, they did.

That said, a conversation I had the other day made me think a bit about whether the shift to VAPs as an entry point is good either for some candidates or for the legal academy. The conversation started with what Brian Tamanaha has skeptically called the “law professor mantra” that law professors should be paid more than other professors because they could make more in law practice. I wondered whether this has any validity given the modern world of practice. I reached out to Larry Latourette, a former big law partner who now is a principal in the legal headhunting firm of LateralLink, to see if law professors these days really have any options in private practice.

Why Institutions Don't Change

One of the curious aspects of modern legal practice and modern law schools is that, despite a lot of talk about how change is needed, not all that much changes.

While the Langdellian model of law school has always had its critics, starting sometime around the 1980s the volume of criticism seemed to rise. Law reviews began to feature a steady stream of articles identifying what was wrong with law schools. Commissions came and went, issuing reports on what needed to change. The post 2008 crisis hit law schools hard, and the volume of complaints went up again (with a fresh problem that the scam bloggers thought they were developing virgin territory).

It would be inaccurate to say that nothing has changed. There has been incremental change, much of it highly positive – additions to the elective curriculum, greater emphasis on experiential opportunities, mandatory or optional lawyering programs, to mention some.

Nonetheless, the model of law school has remained about the same. The first year curriculum would be recognizable to someone who went to law school a century ago, and institutional reward systems for faculty (promotion and tenure for those who publish articles and books about what the legal rules are and should be) are about the same.

The same process can be seen with regard to law firms and law departments. Way back when I was a young lawyer (and that was way back), plenty of clients were complaining about the perversity of the billable hour. By 1993 Fred Bartlit and his core team left Kirkland & Ellis to found an elite firm that would only engage in alternative billing, supported by the latest in technology. Contract lawyers and legal process outsourcers were brought in by outside counsel to take some commodity work away from higher priced corporate associates. Articles with titles like The Death of Big Law and books with titles like The End of Lawyers got published and widely read.

And yet, after all that, young lawyers still go to big law firms and count their days out in six minute increments, with all those minutes tracked and billed (when possible) to clients. Bartlit Beck is still pretty much one of a kind. In house lawyers look at alternative fee proposals and wonder where and how they will be screwed, and push back for billable hour models with caps or reduced rates. Altogether too much of the structure of lawyering would be recognizable to partners who retired while I was still in college.

Why is this?

Machine Intelligence and Legal Services

The level of chatter about machine intelligence and how it can impact law practice seems to be growing.

That makes sense – what with IBM’s Big Blue wiping the floor first with chess grandmasters and then with Jeopardy champions, it seems appropriate to wonder how ever smarter machines can impact legal services.

Watson today is all grown up compared to the baby versions that trumped chess players and game show champions. Today’s Watson has moved on to less structured and more difficult chores such as developing debate arguments, and IBM’s General Counsel claims it could easily pass a bar exam.

 Machine intelligence is already transforming other knowledge industries. One example would be journalism, where some routine forms of news are now entirely created by computers from sources such as securities filings, and where human curated periodicals have been significantly supplanted by machine curated services such as Google News.

LegalZoom and its competitors such as RocketLaw are already very much on the radar screens of consumers and small firm lawyers. Documents that have been staples of small firm practice – simple wills, simple contracts, or residential and commercial leases – can be personalized and printed without a lawyer involved. Even simpler, smart phone apps such as Shake can create simple contracts such as sales agreements or confidentiality agreements, obtaining signatures online and e-mailing copies to all the parties. On the commercial side, most big cases now begin with software driven review of documents via predictive coding, not human review.

John McGinnis and Russell Pearce recently published a piece in a symposium issue of the Fordham Law Review that predicts a bullish future for machine generated legal services. They see benefits for some lawyers – exceptional lawyers will be easier to spot in the machine age, they believe, and consumers now priced out of legal services might find solutions through practitioners who harness machine intelligence. That aside, they see downsides for meat and potato lawyers as machines take on ever fatter slices of the work of document review, document and form creation, better and faster legal research, and outcome prediction based on big data rather than intuition.

More recently, Silicon Valley veteran Paul Lippe and law and data master Daniel Katz have a column in the ABA journal with ten predictions about how technology like Watson will impact the law. Like McGinnis and Pearce, they see an ever growing role for machine intelligence in law.

 One prediction they make that I hope is right is that machine intelligence will drive demands for more readily discoverable law, as opposed to the murky dogs’ porridge of statutes, cases, regulations, opinion letters and more that currently obscure legal duties. As machines do more of the grunt work of digging out rules, pressure will build to make the rules conform to rational and predictable data structures.

Another has to do with the classroom – once all law students have the equivalent of a Watson on their smart phones, the power of the Socratic professor will be undermined. I think Wikipedia already does some of that, but I think the ultimate point is a bit deeper – as it becomes trivial to discover applicable legal rules, law schools will have to rethink exactly what they can teach that is of value and how they need to teach it.

So long as regulatory barriers don’t block progress, I think legal machine intelligence will have another impact – enabling non-lawyers to play ever bigger roles in the delivery of routine legal services. Technology can become a force multiplier for lightly trained technicians, providing not just answers but a vehicle for monitoring outcomes.

MinuteClinic allows non-doctors to provide drugs and other treatment for a range of common diseases. They can do that because technology allows them to reliably diagnosis a defined range of common ailments and then proceed straight to the standard treatment. Whereas back in the day a doctor would use training and judgment to decide what ailed a patient, today a blood or urine sample plugged into a machine provides a faster and more reliable answer, enabling nurses to read out the results and hand over the correct medication. When machine intelligence allows computers, perhaps working off client entered forms, to provide the same kinds of answers that machines analyzing blood or saliva samples can in the medical settings, non-lawyers can help provide and follow through on the standard solutions at a much higher level than now possible with online form services. 

These are fundamental historical and societal changes in play, as significant in their own way as the rise of factories at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Technology now impacts the intellectual professions the way mechanized factories impacted hand crafts. The changes, even for organizations that survive and prosper, will be profound.

The New Hand Loom Weavers

Back in the 1790s being a hand loom weaver was an ancient, inherently inefficient yet freshly profitable craft in Great Britain. Mechanized thread spinning produced a lot of cheap thread, but fabric still had to be woven on hand looms. Weavers made out like, well, like late 20th century lawyers.

Easy money attracted new entrants to the craft and there were no accreditation barriers to entry. The trade grew from about 75,000 weavers in 1795 to about 200,000 in 1812 and on to 240,000 in 1820.

At the same time, the first power looms appeared. Hand loom weavers were no longer positioned in the middle of the only path between spools of thread and finished cloth. Once they appeared, power looms moved quickly to dominate the market – in just 17 years between 1813 and 1830 the number of power looms in operation jumped 40 times from 2,400 to 100,000.

With many more weavers and new forms of competition, hand loom wages fell to a fraction of what was earned in the 1790s, not even accounting for inflation. Factory owners made fortunes, consumers could buy cloth more cheaply, but the traditional hand loom weavers found themselves working harder and harder for less and less.

There were rear guard responses. The Luddites tried to block, or at least damage, the new power looms. Others called for government wage support for the weavers. Riots broke out in places such as Lancashire.

In the long run, it was to no avail. The government took a hands off approach, and by 1861 there were just 7,000 hand loom weavers left, versus 400,000 power looms.

Everyone one of those power looms had a person attached to it, perhaps a child, so in a sense it would have been true to argue that jobs in the weaving sector had been on a steady increase. They were different kinds of jobs from those enjoyed by the independent, profitable hand loom weavers in 1795, however.

Today, law is an ancient yet inherently inefficient industry.

Teaching "The Drill," 21st Century Style

The practice of law, in my opinion and experience, is not ultimately about knowing the law. It’s about delivering a service that solves a problem for a client, in which knowledge of the law is one of many important tools.

The father of the modern American law school curriculum, Christopher Columbus Langdell, had a different view. As Langdell explained in his casebook on Contracts, to him the essence of being a lawyer was nothing more than having a mastery of the principles of the law.

Langdell’s view, not mine, is the one embedded in the DNA of the modern law school, both in what is taught and in terms of the scholarship undertaken by law school faculty. The core methodology taught in most American law schools teaches students how to read and apply cases, developing the mastery of legal principles glorified by Langdell.

Just as significantly, the research conducted by law school professors tends to be inward looking and centered on analyzing rules of law within a largely closed system. While law review articles have moved away from the practitioner friendly compendiums of earlier eras, both modern normative and theoretical scholarship tends to turn on thinking about rules of law.

The real world processes of legal services get short shrift. That should change.

The Threat from JD Advantage

There’s a trope in the kind of low brow movies I tend to watch – a character looks at a friend that he thinks has arrived just in the nick of time to save him, and then realizes that his ‘friend’ brings destruction, not salvation.

I think of that kind of scene when law schools or organizations like NALP talk up JD Advantage jobs as a reason to go to law school, with the apparent hope that filling seats with students headed to JD Advantage jobs will help schools survive. They seem to think that JD Advantage jobs are a friend to traditional law programs.

I tend to think that attending law school to get a JD Advantage job is a poor idea, for reasons others have expressed well. My point here is different – if JD Advantage jobs really are on the rise as the legal services field broadens beyond just law practice, they create an opportunity for disruption of legal education that could create huge new problems for law schools.

JD Advantage jobs can be very good jobs and lead to very good careers. Some legal training helps in these jobs – hence, the moniker, JD Advantage. It’s more than a little vague what the concept includes, but certainly jobs such as compliance fit within.

Here’s the problem: law school provides poor training for these jobs. JD Advantage jobs involve skills and methodologies beyond law – say, statistical tracking of compliance activities or knowledge of how to motivate corporate employees to follow policies – none of which are taught in law school.

Even with regard to the law part of these jobs, the traditional JD training is a mismatch. Law school involves too much common law, at far too great cost, while normally providing far too little education in the complex regulatory fields – say, health care law or employment law – often at the core of these fields.

JD degrees may once have been the best available option but we live in an era of entrepreneurial educators. Both at for profit and nonprofit schools administrators look for needs to be filled and design programs for the gap. Law schools have a monopoly on qualifying students for the bar, but not on teaching law, and certainly not on preparing students for non-lawyer careers.

Today programs for JD Advantage careers are starting to appear, some online, some in other parts of the university. Look for these programs to move offline and into the kind of settings where prestige and networking opportunities are part of the value of the degree. Many of these alternate careers are approaching professional status on their own. History teaches us that occupations that wish to elevate themselves to professions seek educational credentials tailored to the field, and make those credentials a de facto or de jure requirement for employment in the field, in preference to whatever credentials previously sufficed. As that process plays out these new fields will have their own top ranked programs tailored to what they do.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Assume two things happen, both of which are, I think, very likely. First, assume most law schools (trapped by the "think like a lawyer" ideology) offer only JD programs or “use empty seats” subsets of the JD program to people interested in JD Advantage careers, allowing schools with bespoke programs with the full range of methodologies to seize the field. Second, assume that some easing of the accreditation rules for JD programs takes place, allowing schools to offer more diverse offerings than are presently available.

In that setting, the table is set for disruptive innovation. Holding some of the assets necessary to JD programs and with a worldview not beholden to Langdell, and with a regulatory environment open for freshly designed programs, the JD Advantage programs are poised to move up market into JD offerings.

It’s a classic story of disruptive innovation – innovators seize a market not core to the legacy providers, offering solutions that are cheaper and/or better tailored to the needs of those customers. Over time, they are able to improve their offerings, and compete on the home turf of the legacy providers.

We know that for decades there has been a steady drumbeat that law schools don’t actually prepare lawyers all that well for practice. We hear that from students, from law firms, and from clients of law firms. We also know that there’s been an equally steady drumbeat that despite that, most law schools have not fundamentally changed. They continue to offer to students a program unfitted to the task.

Imagine that happening in any other industry. What we have here is a market opportunity for someone able to come in and offer a different product. It’s going to make the entry of Japanese and German car makers into the US market in the 1960s and 1970s look uneventful.

JD Advantage jobs are, I think, the wedge. They have grown rapidly in number, and they will continue to grow. The institutions that arise to serve those markets, assuming law schools don’t come in with tailor made offerings, can build on the expertise they develop in other legal services fields, and provide offerings tailored to the services provided by the modern practice of law.

At that point, just as the movie character eventually realizes that his friend is not really his friend, law schools will see the rise of JD Advantage jobs for the threat it is.

Core Methodologies for Law Practice

Let me clear what I am talking about here.

I’m looking for methodologies that pretty much all successful lawyers use as a core part of their practice. In a larger sense, I’m looking to generalize away from Langdell’s definition of lawyering as mastery of certain core principles and doctrines (modified and carried forward as ‘thinking like a lawyer’), and get to a more complete view of what lawyering involves in all its diverse settings. I’m looking for methodologies comparable to the different clubs in a real golfer’s bag besides the putter, such as the driver, the long iron, and the pitching wedge. In identifying core methodologies, I’m looking to move toward a conception of lawyering that is richer than Langdell’s view of mastering legal principles much in the same way a view of golfing as it occurs with a whole bag of clubs will be richer than a view of golfing as putting.

I’m also looking for methodologies that I think are fit for academic study – methodologies that I think an academic institution concerned with both the occupation of lawyering and society’s need for legal services ought to be thinking about from an academic perspective. 

I don’t mean to make a list of useful, or even essential, specialty specific skills (drafting a complaint, writing a contract). I don’t mean to suggest those don’t belong in a fully rounded JD curriculum, but here I am looking at generalizable and worthy of academic study methodologies that can be used to break down diverse problems across diverse settings.

I’m also not looking for providing an understanding of what other occupations do, so that lawyers can converse knowledgeably with them, but that are not in and of themselves part of the work product of lawyers (e.g., creating balance sheets or econometric models). Again, these have a place in a modern curriculum, and all good lawyers need to understand the goals of their clients, but it’s not the current inquiry.

There are functions that I think all lawyers engage in – for example, discovering and evaluating ‘facts’ – but I’m unable to describe a useful methodology that fits in an academic setting. I’m also looking at methodologies that can be taught at at least an introductory level within the constraints of a three year J.D. curriculum – methodologies that would require a separate master’s or Ph.D. track seem beyond the achievable scope.

With regard to the kind of generalizable methodologies core to all the diverse kinds of law practices, I’m pretty sure I don’t have the complete list. I also think that to do this right someone is going to need to do field research, observing what successful lawyers actually do (not just what they think they do). I do have four methodologies, aside from legal analysis of all kinds and legal writing/speaking, that I think pretty much all lawyers use and that are fully worthy of academic study.

Thinking About Methodologies

If there is one thing all US law schools teach, it is how to ‘think like a lawyer.’

Edward Rubin, in his penetrating article Why Law Schools Do Not Teach Contracts and What Socioeconomics Can Do About It, identifies what law schools teach pursuant to Langdell’s approach as a ‘methodology.’ He explains why methodologies matter in academic institutions:

To teach a body of information as an academic subject, one needs a generalized methodology of some sort. This is not necessarily a theory, and certainly not a theory in the sense of a complete explanation that predicts future occurrences, like quantum electrodynamics. Rather, it is a unified approach to the subject matter that enables students to answer a set of evaluative questions.

He doesn’t say it, but for professional education the methodology and the evaluative questions have to be relevant to the kind of reflective practice that marks the professions – it has to be an approach that professionals can draw on in the context rich, unique situations where they are asked to solve particular problems. Rubin explains how methodologies work in these settings:

Confronted with a narrative of past occurrences, history students using the methodology they have been taught can discuss the nature and reliability of the account, the political, social, and economic causes of the event it describes, and the effects of that event on subsequent events.

Langdell’s pedagogy, even its most narrow original form, provides such a methodology. As Rubin notes:

Confronted with a judicial decision, law students using the methodology they have been taught can identify the facts of the case, its holding and dicta, the doctrine on which the judge’s decision is based, and the extent to which the decision is consistent with other decisions based on the same doctrine.

For all the weaknesses of Langdell’s approach, the methodology implicit in his method has proved powerful and useful. It’s not the whole toolbox, but, like putting in golf, it’s essential.

A methodology is something more than a skill or a competency. I don’t think either of those concepts involve an underlying, explanatory theory. To get back to golf, teachers of a skill might tell a golfer to keep his knees bent when teeing off. Someone evaluating or training for competency might look to see how far and straight the ball goes and give appropriate guidance about what should be happening and some ideas on how to improve performance. Academic scholars of a methodology would try to understand the mechanics of a golf swing and try to share a theory and methodology for deconstructing and improving golf swings with students, a theory and methodology they could draw on throughout their careers if problems emerged in their swing.

An important element of a methodology is that it’s not just a collection of practical tips for those in practice. Neither is it limited to the immediate task at hand. It requires a theory, and thinking about that theory. Langdell’s original pedagogy was tied intrinsically to his theory that law study was a kind of science, with the reading of cases being like the examination of botanical or biological specimens. Scholars could spend their lives immersed in exploring the theory, and students could apply the theory and the methodology to diverse situations throughout a lifetime of practice.

Langdell’s method was tied to his view of what mattered in law, all of which he felt could be found in the reported cases. Even for ‘thinking like a lawyer’ law schools have recognized that his approach is incomplete, if for no other reason it does not really engage with other sources of law such as statutes and regulations. Beyond that, the originating theory – that law is some kind of science – has long ago been tossed overboard.

To a remarkable, even ludicrous, degree, Langdell’s view of what law is about (appellate cases) and what lawyers do (think about the law) has remained dominant in American law schools, despite occasional flashes of recognition (legal realism, law and society) that something else is going on. The Langdellian focus on trying to understand and sort out doctrine continues to hold center stage in both law school teaching and scholarship, and as a result, continues to distort academic understanding of what methodologies practicing lawyers need to know.

I think there are other methodologies applied by successful lawyers of all kinds, and that many of these are as worthy of academic study and thoughtful training as how to think like a lawyer. A few of these methodologies, in fact, are pretty well entrenched in the scholarship and the elective curriculum, while others remain conspicuous by their absence. Some are found in other schools at the university, such as business schools, but can be effectively taught to law students and studied by law professors. A complete professional training would equip students with the full range of core methodologies.

To really set out a proper list of methodologies are used by practicing lawyers, we need to know more about what lawyers do. Someone needs to sit in lawyers’ offices, as John Flood did back in the 1980s, attuned to this question, and try to sort out what methodologies are being used. It’s slow and expensive work, I suppose, but as a foundation for a +-$2 billion annual educational enterprise supporting a +-$150 million a year service industry, it would seem that someone should be willing to fund it.

In the meantime, I have some ideas. Some of these derive from the lengthy experiential learning experience I went through by virtue of being a practicing lawyer and founder of a start up company. Others I have developed unscientifically by polling a few lawyer friends via Facebook and email. Some rely on scholarship in the area. In my next post I will go through a few, and then later dig in more detail to one or two. In the meantime, feel free to weigh in with your own nominations in the comments – I promise to steal all the good ones.

If I were the dean of a law school struggling to define its educational mission with regard to training lawyers in these changing times, I would get past doctrine, skills and competencies, and start with this idea of methodologies. Situation specific skills and competencies come and go, and have an uneasy relationship with the academy. Methodologies for professional practice are generalized and durable, and justify academic thought. (Again, this is not to diminish clinical and experiential education, which obviously can play a key role in teaching methodologies, but rather to fix their role in a broader framework).

Leaving school with the same kind of grasp of other core methodologies that most students have of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ may not, I acknowledge, help students get better first jobs. Based on my experiential learning experience, however, I think being trained in the relevant methodologies will help them be better and happier lawyers, which I view as worthwhile in its own right.

Lawyer Competency and Law School

What do lawyers do? What do lawyers need to do well in order to succeed? These are pretty key questions for legal educators, I think.

The amazing thing is, we know far too little about what lawyers do. In her foreword to the Kindle edition of John Flood’s look at the day to day life of a mid-sized Chicago law firm, What Do Lawyers Do: An Ethnography of a Corporate Law Firm, Lynn Mather notes that the question has “not been systematically explored.”

The lack of information astounds all the more when you stop to think about how large an industry law is. Back when Michael Kelly wrote Lives of the Lawyers Revisited, he noted that law was already a 150 billion dollar a year industry in the US alone, and I don’t think the figures he relied on were able to include all the places lawyers work. By my rough reckoning, just US legal education, which aims to prepare law students for whatever it is lawyers do, takes in somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion annually in tuition alone.

Flood’s look at a midsize Chicago firm in the 1980s provides some of the answer. As he concludes, “In the practice of law one finds very little law.” What lawyers do instead, it seems, is talk, and mostly to each other. Flood’s ethnographic look, taken by sitting quietly amidst practicing lawyers as if he were investigating an Amazonian tribe with access to somewhat better restaurants, makes clear that as lawyers progress through their careers legal research and writing becomes less and less important.

Recently, Scott Fruehwald of the Legal Skills Profs Blog directed me in a comment here to an article by Neil Hamilton that looks at lawyer competencies. Law firm human resources departments, like human resources departments everywhere, have started using competency matrices in staff reviews. Hamilton looks at the forms used by 14 firms in Minnesota and then combines those with earlier studies going back decades to see what people think lawyers ought to be good at. He argues, in short, that law schools should move to a competency oriented curriculum based on what employers value, with a well-developed sense of professional identity as the envelope containing the individual competencies.

It’s difficult if not impossible to force rank the competencies, because different firms and different studies use different terms to describe similar or overlapping competencies, but a look at some of the most frequently used competencies gives sufficient sense of what firms think young to early-mid-career lawyers should achieve.

Practical Law Teaching in an Age of Specialization

It seems curious today, but Christopher Columbus Langdell viewed his method of teaching law as intensely practical. He had, after all, practiced for what today seems a long time, fifteen years, and while he did not for an instant believe that practice experience was essential to or even helpful for law teaching, his own practice experience did inform his view of what lawyers needed. The method he put in place at Harvard – the structured multi-year curriculum, the case method, Socratic questioning, examinations based on hypotheticals rather than reciting back doctrine – was designed to prepare law students for practice better than the lecture and recitation method that had preceded it.

The method took for granted that the core to being a successful lawyer was mastering an esoteric body of knowledge. As Langdell put it in his casebook on Contracts:

[Law] considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doctrines. To have such a mastery of these as to be able to apply them with constant facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human affairs, is what constitutes a true lawyer; and hence to acquire that mastery should be the business of every earnest student of law.

That Langdell saw mastering a common body of knowledge and knowing how to apply it as the core of professional practice should not seem exceptional. Sociologists routinely define professions as involving the application of a common body of specialized knowledge.

What's more, the goal of learning all the important law was an achievable task for students. As late at 1897 Holmes declared mastering the “finite body of dogma” a task that could be achieved within a “reasonable time.” 

Learning doctrine, of course, was not the only selling point for Langdell's method. The case method, by forcing students to experience the formation of rules directly and develop their own ways to categorize and organize doctrine, was also seen as getting students closer to what lawyers did. Armed with the law they needed and facile at applying it, graduates were equipped for practice, a generalized practice that still bore more similarities lawyer to lawyer and office to office than not.

As time went on, the importance of the common body of knowledge faded from defenses of the case method and the importance of knowing how to think about legal issues gained prominence – by 1907, Langdell’s acolyte James Barr Ames was justifying Harvard’s approach on the grounds of teaching “legal reasoning.” That justification – that law schools teach students to ‘think like a lawyer’ – has stayed with us to the present day.

As my last post considered, law practice has changed fundamentally since Langdell reformed law teaching. Today law practice is highly specialized, and rather than roaming across the field of the common law modern lawyers tend to their own narrow patch of expertise. Today, no one can master all the ‘dogma’ that is routinely applied by lawyers in the major law firms or major government agencies. There is just too much. Whatever marks the commonality of the practice of law – and should therefore play into the training of lawyers – it’s not applying the same technical legal expertise on a day to day basis.

Neither does the background knowledge or skill reflected in ‘thinking like a lawyer’ provide a sufficient answer to training lawyers. As practice has evolved, legal reasoning remains important – much as putting is important to golf – but it’s far from the whole game.

Specialization and the Occupation(s) of Law

An eminent member of the bar, carrying all the intellectual prestige of one who has led a venerated Ivy League institution, trained in the time when lawyer-statesmen walked the earth like giants, stood before his audience. Change was afoot, and a valued tradition was about to be lost. This is what he said:

Lawyers . . . have become experts in some special technical field. They do not practise law. They do not handle the general, miscellaneous interests of society. They are not general counsellors of right and obligation. . . . Lawyers are specialists, like all other men around them. . . . [This] necessarily separates them from the dwindling body of general practitioners who used to be our statesmen.

The time: 1910. The speaker: Woodrow Wilson.

In this, as in so many things, Wilson may have been ahead of his time.

Legal Services For The Middle Class? Try Wal-Mart

You can get your portrait at Wal-Mart.  You can get a new pair of specs.  Now, in Toronto, you can also get a will for $99.  The Toronto Star reports that a law firm called Axess Law is now retailing their legal services in selected Wal-Marts.  

You can already get a bargain-basement legal will in the United States.  But finding these attorneys takes a bit more work than stopping by a counter after you've bought a gallon of Miracle-Gro.  (For the uninformed, take a look at ads in your local free weekly.)

The issue, presumably, is finding a price-point that will allow for compensating attorneys and also paying Wal-Mart  rent.  (Until, of course, a state alters its ethical rules to allow Wal-Mart to deliver legal services directly.)  

But while FindLaw says getting legal services at Wal-Mart  might happen in the US, I'm predicting that it will.  It's simply a matter of time.  And once it comes in a Wal-Mart version, look for a slightly pricier version at Target.  After all, price signals quality.

H/T ABA Journal

Race And Perceptions Of Legal Writing Quality

In case you haven't seen this...

A new study by the consulting firm Nextions looks at  the role of unconscious race bias in the assessment of attorney writing quality.   53 partners from 22 law firms were given a legal memo and  told that the author, Thomas Meyer, was a third year associate who graduated from NYU Law.  Half believed the author was white; the other half believed he was an African-American.

The average assessment of the memo was 3.2/5 for those believing the author to be African-American.  It was 4.1 for those believing he was white.  And readers identified significantly more errors in the memos putatively written by the African-American Thomas Meyer.  

Grim but unsurprising.

H/T ABA Journal.

 

Answers to, and Questions for, Professor Tamanaha on Why Now is a Great Time to go to Law School

Brian Tamanaha has asked two interesting questions in response to Steve Freedman’s recent posts on jobs and law school admissions.  Steve has started a series of posts that make the argument that now is a good time to go to law school, because enrollment declines will lead to a very strong job market in just a few years.  So far, he has addressed the supply side of the argument, noting the dramatic drop in law school enrollment will lead to fewer graduates hitting the job market in just a few years.  He just put up another post showing projections of the demand side.

In response to Steve’s first post, Brian asked:

Please address the apparent contradiction in advice like this. Assuming no substantial change in the legal market (for better or worse), the job outlook for graduates stands to improve precisely because fewer students are enrolling in law school these days. But of course, if significant numbers of people take your advice and "enroll today" (thinking three years hence the oversupply of law grads will be eliminated by falling enrollment), then the job outlook will worsen as a consequence because the oversupply will not go down as much. So your prediction will bear out only if most people thinking about law school do not take your advice.

In a later thread, Brian asked (or observed):

What I don't understand is why legal educators think it is right to push so hard: "Enroll today! It's the best time in a generation." Let's wait and see. If the job market is indeed good in three years, that would be great for our graduates, who will have an easier time landing desirable jobs (compared to the devastatingly bad employment results for the class of 2013 published by the ABA a few days ago). The news will then get out that the market has turned around, and more people will apply (including those who delayed, meanwhile working to save money to pay for law school). If we wait a few years before trying to ramp up enrollment again, the current oversupply of law grads will have time to clear and stagnant wages of lawyers in the low end might rise, making the enormous debt they carry more manageable.

To wait and see is the prudent course for legal educators to take.

I want to take a crack at answering these two questions.  The first is the harder and more interesting of the two.  The second is relatively easy, so I will start with it.

What We Might Learn from the Indictment of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Former Management

As the Capitol Steps liked to remark, everyone loves a skicious vandal.  Schadenfreude sprang up like mushrooms in that springtime many of us are still longing for, first as Dewey & LeBoeuf became the biggest law-firm failure ever; then when stories of secret salary guarantees to the Pigs Who Were More Equal Than Others began to proliferate; then when the firm’s bankruptcy spawned “clawback” claims and widespread settlements with former partners who the Trustee contended had received more than their fair share before they left, or had exposed themselves to “unfinished business” claims by taking work and clients with them to their new firms.  Rumors flew that various unhappy partners had taken their displeasures to the Manhattan District Attorney, who was investigating alleged financial improprieties. 

And now the DA, having extracted guilty pleas and cooperation from half a dozen underlings, has indicted Dewey’s former Chair (managing partner), Steven Davis; his deputies, former Executive Director Stephen DiCarmine and former Chief Financial Officer Joel Sanders; and (somewhat puzzlingly) a 29-year-old former Client Relations Manager named Zachary Warren.  The charges include fraud, theft, falsifying business records and conspiracy. The SEC has filed its own civil complaint, naming Davis, DiCarmine and Sanders as well as former Finance Director Frank Canellas and former Controller Thomas Mullikan.  The New York Times’ coverage, with copies of the indictment and related SEC complaint, can be found here.

The widespread glee at the mighty fallen notwithstanding, we would all do well to remember that this is a genuine human tragedy.  Dewey employed over 1,000 lawyers and thousands more staff when it crashed.  All of them lost their jobs in the midst of the Great Recession.  While the legal press has chronicled the soft landings enjoyed by many of the more senior partners, many more were not so fortunate.

All of which should make us want to ask what we might learn here.  There will be the usual rash of sanctimony in the comments (you may consider your points made, and save them for another day), reducing the situation to the obvious, simplistic and therefore ineffectual admonition not to lie, cheat or steal.  These observations are usually coupled with the much less obvious but theologically entrenched creed that BigLawyers are all just Gordon Gekkos with bar cards, genetically predisposed to or trained from day one for greed, deceit and exploitation of their fellow man, so why is anyone surprised? 

Please.  There are hundreds of large law firms today, populated with well over 100,000 lawyers, that are not in bankruptcy, never will be, and are not (in the words by which one of the Dewey defendants allegedly described his activities to some of the others) cooking their books.  They may be more or less well-managed (a great many less, but that’s for another day), more or less forward-looking and responsive to their environments and clients (same comment), and more or less humane employers and community members, but they are not roiling dens of thieves.

So what was different about Dewey?  I want to suggest that, among the lawyers and law firms that have found themselves on the wrong end of criminal and SEC enforcement complaints, there are some unusual and noteworthy things about Dewey, things that illustrate some trends in this sector of the profession and offer a lesson or two more focused than a bare, if emphatic, rebuke of the deadly sins.

Set aside the regrettable population of those who become garden-variety criminals and happen to be licensed to practice.  Most lawyers who commit crimes and frauds as lawyers fall into two general categories:  Some steal from their clients—many by the simple expedient of taking client funds from their trust accounts, but some of the more ambitious and creative by kiting or otherwise perverting client trust accounts in Ponzi schemes and similar frauds.  Marc Dreier and Scott Rothstein are recent rather spectacular examples.  Others assist their clients in stealing from others—for example former Mayer Brown partner Joseph Collins, who is currently in federal prison for developing and implementing strategies allowing his client Refco to conceal devastating losses and omit them from a series of securities filings.  Neither happens all that much at large firms, not least because there is usually enough infrastructure and oversight to keep most rogue behavior in check.

But Dewey is neither of these.  The allegations of the New York indictment are that the defendants, all (except Warren) senior management of a billion-dollar professional firm, developed and implemented a scheme they portentously dubbed the “Master Plan” to manipulate the firm’s accounting records in order to be able to report to their banks and other lenders at a time when firm performance fell well below projections that were probably unrealistic to start with that they had met loan covenants or deserved additional extensions of credit.  The SEC complaint focuses on the alleged accounting fraud the firm, through its management, employed in violation of the securities laws to float a $150 million private debt offering to various institutional investors that supplemented the firm’s $100 million revolving bank line.  In short, Dewey & LeBoeuf defrauded its own lenders. 

This is an all too common story in the business world, but among law firms—whose members regularly rehearse and dispute the details of such stories in which their clients are involved, and put their shoulders to the shovels that excavate the wreckage—it is unusual.  I have little doubt that it has happened before, but it is nowhere near as common among lawyers’ frauds as fraud on their clients or on those with whom their clients are dealing.  And to the best of my knowledge it hasn’t ever happened with anything approaching the scale or dishonesty alleged here.

It’s often enlightening to look behind the fraud to see what the alleged fraudsters wanted the money for.  And that’s where Dewey stands apart from most other lawyer frauds.  As chronicled in the most detail by James Stewart in the New Yorker, management was so concerned about keeping old and recruiting new rainmakers that they gave many partners extravagant salary guarantees, guarantees that exceeded the revenue necessary to support them.  By definition, then, the firm overpaid many of those partners, and then borrowed to cover the difference between what it had promised them and what they generated.  And then allegedly lied to its lenders for the wherewithal to keep the spiral rising.  Some of the partners apparently knew about some of the salary guarantees, and some knew about more of them than others.  All of the partners knew about the shortfalls when year-end bonus time came, as the firm proved unable to meet most of the guarantees management had made, and then had very little left after other expenses to pay the partners not shrewd, or valuable, or (more to the point) institutionally indifferent enough to have extracted one.  How many of the partners appreciated how directly the borrowed money translated to borrowed time is unclear.  Though many were deeply sophisticated observers and analysts of business and finance, few seem to have known or guessed that someone might be lying to keep their own thing going well after the clock had actually run out. 

So what’s new and what’s different?  In an extended time of flat demand for complex legal services—the first in the experience of almost anyone living today—compounded by downward price pressure on the limited pool of available work from (among other things) increasing commodification of much such work in the eyes (and checkbooks) of increasingly sophisticated and aggressive general-counsel consumers, BigLaw managing partners must struggle harder and harder to live within their means.  As Dave McGowan and I noted several years ago (see here at pages 14-18, 70), and Bill Henderson argued more recently (see, e.g.,  here), many law-firm managers today stubbornly cling to the belief that they can somehow earn their way out of an increasingly competitive market by buying revenue (that is, bidding for lateral partners with portable business) for a price equal to or even greater than the profits that revenue will generate.  For an astonishingly long time, the limited efficacy of this strategy was masked by the inexorably rising tide of client demand, which lifted even the leakiest and most ill-skippered boats, and allowed the lucky to believe they were smart.  But in the current market, if you pay a million dollars for a million dollars in profit, you don’t make it up on volume.

Dewey indulged in the errors of the current age to a greater degree than most.  Management hired more laterals at higher prices, and then found themselves forced to overvalue complaining incumbents equally in order to retain them, compounding the problem.  They did so in an uncritical belief that the conditions that had generally prevailed from 1980-2007 would go on forever—after all, in the experience of the senior lawyers implementing what eventually devolved into the “Master Plan,” they effectively had—and allow them to earn their way out of any hole they could afford to dig.  When the music suddenly stopped, it is alleged that they chose to lie about how many chairs they had—imagining, I would guess, as many who maneuver themselves into this position do, that the band would strike up again momentarily, and no one would ever need to count the chairs.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who studies financial fraud.  Management robbed debt (the firm’s lenders) to pay equity (the partners); as owners themselves, management benefited too, though apparently not disproportionately more than their innocent (or ignorant) colleagues.  Ironically, the beneficiaries of the alleged fraud (Dewey’s partners) were among its victims.  Most of that can be said, to about the same degree, about any Ponzi scheme (though I am not suggesting that the Dewey fraud is a conventional Ponzi scheme, just that it shares the feature that its beneficiaries and its victims overlap significantly).  What is unusual here is that the fraud appears to have happened in a large and highly pedigreed New York law firm, the sort of institution people imagine steeped in prudence and restraint.  And it happened in the service of mismanagement of a kind that, while not at all uncommon among large law firms today, was uncommonly carried beyond the practical limits that constrain most firms by what is alleged to have been sustained and systematic dishonesty amounting to theft.

Bernie

Welcome To Dothan, Alabama: Home Of The Highest Paid Attorneys

US News, ever the list maker, has come out with its list of the 100 best jobs in 2014.  Lawyers are #51. The authors report that:

Lawyers earned a median salary of $113,530 in 2012, according to the BLS. The best-paid earned more than $187,999, while the lowest-paid made approximately $54,310. The highest earners worked in the metropolitan areas of San Jose, Calif., Dothan, Ala., and San Francisco.

I'm thinking folks like this are pushing up average  incomes in this town of 65,000.  

The Thrilling Nature of Legal Academia?

On March 1, the sequel to Charles Rosenberg’s legal thriller Death on a High Floor — Long Knives — will be published. Although I’ve not read either book, Death on a High Floor apparently involves the death of a Big Law partner — and the trial of a second partner, Robert Tarza, for his murder. The protagonist is associate Jenna James, whose “untested trial skills” are the only thing standing between Tarza and prison.

Rosenberg, a graduate of Harvard Law, “has taught extensively as an adjunct law professor, including at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles (where he teaches the course "Law and Popular Culture"), the Loyola Law School International LLM Program in Bologna, Italy, the UCLA School of Law, the Pepperdine School of Law, and the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA.” And so naturally, for the sequel, he’s moved his feisty heroine to the (thrilling?) halls of legal academia. From the prologue and first chapter:

Five years [ago], I had decided, let’s face it, on a whim, that I was done with Big Law. And so, aided by a bit of luck and the dwindling memory of my fifteen minutes of fame from saving Robert Tarza’s butt from San Quentin, I left my law firm, Marbury Marfan, and transformed myself—poof!—into a tenure-track law professor at UCLA. I still worked hard, but I no longer spent my nights preparing for trial or my days battling the jerks, most of them of the male persuasion, who seemed to appear like clockwork on the other side of my cases.

. . . Another way to put it is that after lunging at every carrot dangled in front of me from the age of five—the need to ace grade school, stride down the aisle as the valedictorian of my high school, nail acceptance to an Ivy League college and then go on to Harvard Law School and make the law review—I finally had a life instead of a résumé.

Okay, that’s not quite true. There was still one last carrot dangling out there. I was up for tenure. It was November, and the decisions would come no later than April. But with four well-received law review articles published in less than four years—two on civil procedure and two on admiralty law—I was pretty confident I had that final carrot nailed, too, if you can nail a carrot.

Teaching and writing about civil procedure, with eight long trials under my belt, was a natural for me. Teaching admiralty law had come as a surprise; I’d never even been on a sailboat prior to arriving at UCLA. But fate twists your life in funny ways. The week before classes started for my first year of teaching, Charles Karno, who looked the picture of health and had been teaching the admiralty course for more than twenty years, dropped dead of a heart attack while running a half marathon. The dean had prevailed on me to teach it. “You can learn it along with the students,” he said.

I did and found I loved it, and particular liked teaching the law of salvage—who has what rights to ships, and everything in them, when they sink to the bottom of the sea. In order to live the law and understand it better I had even spent the past summer at sea as a lowly deckhand on a treasure salvor ship. And now, instead of my formerly pasty-skinned self, I was bronzed and, well, if not ripped, at least the most toned and buff I’d ever been in my life. . . .

James then heads off to a meeting with “Primo Giordano, a student in my Law of Sunken Treasure seminar,” whom she describes as “nice to look at,” “tall, dark and chunky handsome,” with “a terrific smile.” Alas, poor Primo soon turns up dead. Here’s the publisher’s description of the book:

Jenna James’s life has been smooth sailing since she left the high-powered law firm of Marbury Marfan. She’s happily ensconced as a professor at a prestigious law school, where she’s well liked by her students, coupled-up with a handsome colleague, and on track for tenure. But things take a shocking turn one morning when a student, Primo, comes to Jenna’s office seeking her advice about a treasure map he recently inherited. When Primo turns up dead and Jenna is suddenly the prime suspect in a murder investigation, everyone turns on her. Desperate for help, she calls on two old friends: Robert Tarza, her old law partner from Marbury Marfan, and Oscar Quesana, an odd-duck solo practitioner. The three race to save Jenna’s career—and perhaps her life—in this whip-smart thriller of treasure maps, murder, and law school politics.

With a Big Law partner, an “odd-duck solo practitioner,” and a tenure-track law prof at an elite school as the novel’s leads, the allegorical interpretations practically write themselves.

3L Nuggets: How can lawyers be happy? (Holiday Edition)

Is happiness is a niche practice?

    A couple of nights ago, I played the mega millions with my wife. We discussed what would happen if we won (spoiler alert: we didn’t). She, a dentist, and I, both knew that our respective careers would endure. That was a good sign that the kinds of law I was writing about and considering practicing made me happy.

    I recognize that the legal field is so competitive and the legal economy so uncertain that it would be a great privilege to be able to align one’s personal interests with one’s career. The job market for graduating law students is brutal enough that even considering the pursuit of happiness in a legal career must take a backseat to the more urgent priority of securing employment.

    Nevertheless, the holiday season might be a particularly apt one for considering the question of the happy lawyer. Is he or she a chimera?

    For a student nearing the end of the law school, it can help  to start visualizing the kind of career you want. When you find something you think would survive a win in the lottery, you are nearing the right answer. And you’ve given yourself a goal worth pursuing.

See The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law

    Of course, we cannot always be so lucky. School loans and the realities of buying a home, starting a family, etc. make making money important. Sometimes the job you take is the job you can get. But finding a career that is sustainable in the long term seems much easier if you can find a job you like. This becomes quite clear over three years in law school, when you find out how much better you can do in a class when you actually enjoy the subject. Some classes helped me realize the kind of law I did not want to practice.

    As hard as it might be to believe for some, there are tax lawyers, M&A lawyers, real estate lawyers, et al. who enjoy their work, and likewise would really not enjoy doing another kind of law. The practice of law is not a monolith.

    Unhappy lawyers might share feelings of being underpaid and/or overworked. Many of my friends and family worried when I told them I was going to law school; “aren’t lawyers miserable?” they asked.

    But surely there is a spectrum of happiness among lawyers. Those toward the higher end of that range appear to believe their brand of law suits them best.  Just as all happy families might be alike (hat tip: Tolstoy), have all happy lawyers found their niche?

    Faculty Lounge readers, what say you about the niche/happiness nexus? Have you practiced law in a niche you did not like and then found contentment in another?

    Have a great holiday!