The last days of Big Law

Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have a job are constantly reminded of their expendability. “I knew people who had month-to-month leases who were making $200,000 a year,” says an associate who joined a New York firm in 2010. They are barred from meetings and conference calls to hold down a client’s bill, even pulled off of cases entirely. They regularly face mass layoffs. Many of the tasks they performed until five or ten years ago—like reviewing hundreds of pages of documents—are outsourced to a reserve army of contract attorneys, who toil away at one-third the pay. “All these people kept on going into this empty office,” recalls a former associate at a Washington firm. “No one introduced them. They were on the floor wearing business suits. … It was extremely creepy.” Still, any associate tempted to resent these scabs should consider the following: Legal software is rapidly replacing them, too.

The greed of the law schools has contributed to this. They kept expanding their class size and raking in tuition (not to mention the addition of multiple new law schools over the years). Likely, they lowered their standards along the way, and you wind up with a glut. The glut just adds to the willingness to become an ambulance chaser etc. It’s very sad, really. Even sadder is that it’s still often very hard for the average person to find representation they can afford.

... and it's going to get a lot worse!

Stock and bond markets are about tank ... killing off their securities practices and with it a huge source of profits.

Commercial litigation is about to become uneconomic thanks to falling currency values (i.e. evaporating damage amounts) combined with rising litigation costs ... eliminating another huge source of profits.

Real estate is in a bubble that's going to burst. Many banks are undercapitalized. Insurance companies are going to have troubles liquidating their reserves. More and more municipalities are running out of funds.

That leaves ... taxation, bankruptcy and criminal law ... not especially lucrative practices even in the best of times.

I dunno. I used to have a union job, and they had real make work, useless things for us to do, just so we could claim overtime hours. I quit that job. I’ve also wroked in a state agency, wehre there’s lots of good people, but there’s also the union mentality that certain people, being more equal than others, can do next to nothing for their taxpayer-provided wages.

Yes, I am an attorney, so my view is biased. But as it turns out, my main line of income is software, not law, because the lawyer glut has put a lot of lawyers standing in line for cases, inventing cases out of thin air when necessary, or otherwise shopping for work through various forms of case brokers.

In any event, I do not dispute that an excess of legal meddling has been damaging to American culture. I do dispute the idea that lawyers do not create a valuable “product.” The Zimmerman case is just one example of what good lawyers were meant to do, helping an innocent man escape a brazenly political persecution. Being outside a jail cell isn’t exactly a widget coming off a factory line, but it is still a thing of great value. At least some of the clients I’ve had seem to appreciate it. And there are many other such examples.

But is the system diseased? Yes it is. And you can track it back, at least in part, to legal training. Young lawyer wannabe’s are trained from the first day in law school to create a dichotomy between their moral thinking and their legal thinking. You can’t successfully live in a divided mind. One side wins and the other loses. The shifting sands of postmodern, deconstructionist legal belief replaces the reliable old anchor of Judeo-Christian morality as the measure of right and wrong. Subjective chaos become the rule. Nietzsche’s will to power becomes the model.

BTW, did I mention our Harvard-trained Constitution-Wrecking-Lawyer-in-Chief was a fan of Nietzsche? It was one of the things that sent tingles down the legs of the academic class in the 2008 election. They had been training their young minions for this power struggle for decades, and now they could have one of their own in the WH directing the attack. Understand Nietzsche, and you will have no trouble understanding how Obama views the law and what he is likely to do with it in any given circumstance. And this he learned at Harvard Law.

I have used the following example in the past to show that were it not for people in conflict, there would be no need for lawyers.

If there is only one person on the planet—no lawyers needed. Two people, the same result, as long as these two people do not meet, or if they do, they get along. Once people start coming into contact, disagree, live near each other, the need for the lawyer or mediator begins to increase.

For a civilized/uncivilized group of people to exist, rules eventually are created to maintain order, whether savages or not. Then rules may be broken, and the penalities may be severe, especially in the uncivilized group, and perhaps to a lesser extent in the civilized group. There will always be explanations as to why a rule was broken, and some advocacy needed to help the agrieved and the rule breaker. The bigger the groups, the more rules, and the more possible misunderstandings about a rule(s), the penalties, reasons, etc. It is inevitable that lawyers are needed at some point in time because of all the PO’d people who can’t get along. The attorney’s are the victims!! :-)

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