Can’t lawyers just hang out their own shingle?
“Can’t lawyers just hang out their own shingle?”
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Very risky. Like many other small businesses, most fail. And it’s much harder than working for a firm. As a sole practitioner, you have to do all the work and take all the risk. You don’t have others to spread it all around.
“Can’t lawyers just hang out their own shingle?”
Many do, but only after a bit of experience. One aspect that is never addressed in these types of articles is that few law schools make much effort to produce competent, practice ready attorneys. Indoctrinated in every self serving systemic shibboleth, most definitely; networked, a little bit; actually able to carry the simplest case from intake through trial? Hell no, and don’t even think about appeals.
What there is, and will probably always be, is a shortage of disciplined, effective litigators. These are people who actually relish the formal and ritual evisceration of their adversaries in court. It is high pressure, stressful, often joyless and often leads to a lot of substance abuse, frustration, anger and bitterness. Tests have indicated different hormonal proportions between office lawyers and their more aggressive (and generally unpleasant) trial counterparts.
Personally I think there will be a rising demand for bankruptcy attorneys and Constitutional liberty oriented criminal defense attorneys in this nascent totalitarian, socialist state, at least until they are rendered utterly ineffective via statist diktat and bipartisan collusion.
Anyway, in all of this there is a sort of economic Darwinism at work. An attorney who cannot find or generate work will win no cases either.