I’ve been reading with great interest Paul Campos’s Inside the Law School Scam recently. Campos is a law professor and so, as the title indicates, most of his writing is about the problems with legal education. Some we are all too familiar with (such as: how does an issue spotting exam help you be a lawyer) and some that are new, related to law schools not reporting employment numbers the right way and escalating tuition very rapidly.

But I don’t think the problem stops there. There is a mention of how some corporate clients are refusing to pay for beginning associates’ work. I would say, the problem is the entire business model, not just education.

Lawyers get their revenue from hourly fees. These can be extremely high and generally do not vary based on the type of work. Furthermore, in a litigation case, the number of hours that are involved are only partially under our control. In this model, the client bears the risk of the matter taking a lot of time, while the lawyer (assuming he has other work) bears no risk either way. Theoretically, all of this should be “built in” to the hourly rate.

But the not so secret secret is that billing rates are almost completely arbitrary and not part of a rational arms’ length transaction. $400 per hour attorneys do not get twice the results (however you would measure that) that $200 per hour attorneys do, nor do they necessarily do the same work twice as fast.

In reality, value is no where near this transaction at all. For some $400 attorneys, their fees go into expensive office leases, tons of support staff employees, leather chairs, catering, conference room tables made from the timbers of one of the partner’s skulling boats, and so on. Once it comes out of that partnership overhead, it goes to the law partner’s fancy mortgage(s), fancy cars, ex-wives, private school tuition, and golf courses.

But then you have to fit in a $150,000 per year associate that, sure, is going to work 18 hour days, but produce only about 1-2 hours of anything worth anything. And if you don’t take that person, she’ll be at your competitor and in 5 years your firm we be known as a place with a bunch of idiots losers people from second tier law schools and then you might have to lower your rates and move down to an E class. NFW.

So you grudgingly enter into this transaction vowing to drum anyone out that doesn’t keep the star power of the firm out and laugh as they spend the rest of their lives at a firm in a suburban office park! (Ha!)

On the other side of this transaction you have someone who needs to make that money to pay off the loan debt so that perhaps by the time they’re 30 they can consider buying a house and getting married (shh!! I promise I’ll deliver my baby in the copy room and go right back to work). Etc.

But what if this wasn’t how it worked?

Campos suggests that law schools did the same shitty job preparing lawyers to be lawyers in the 80s for far less (yes—inflation adjusted) money. I don’t know if he noticed that in 2007, the Law Society of England & Wales stopped letting US lawyers in to practice on a test without a year of apprenticeship and that for as long as I’ve been aware, Canada never has.

Unlike Campos (I think), I don’t think a bachelor’s degree is too much to ask of future lawyers. I also tend to think that if someone with an Ed.D. is referred to as “Dr.” then I should be too, outside of the legal profession at least. (I would much prefer this to the Dickensian snobbery of .esq.) But I agree that practical training is absolutely necessary.

If not for my externship in a court and my trial practice class taught by an actual trial lawyer (thank you, University of Hawaii!) I would have been so ill-equipped to be a lawyer after the bar exam that I probably would have been fired within a few days of being hired.

All of the supposedly holy curriculum of law school can be taught very quickly. A strong legal research class should enable students to learn any other area of law rather quickly. Criminal law should be an elective. Professors should not spend a month on their theory of causation.

I could go on.

But a one year version of what currently is “law school” followed by an apprenticeship would be great for everyone.

But here’s my biggest beef of them all:

Why does anyone hire a lawyer? To advance their legal interests. People hire doctors to advance their health. So, how would you feel about hiring a doctor who works at a medical practice where everyone smokes and does heroin without clean needles? How would you feel about paying them $600 an hour?

Well, when you hire a law firm made up of people who struck a bad deal to go work there, because they struck a bad deal to go to law school, and whose bosses struck a bad deal of their own—how do you expect these people to strike good deals for you? Sure, they might be great at their job. The best heart surgeon in the country might be a smack freak too. But is that ideal?

The fish rots from the head.

In California, there are cases that state that even the act of signing someone to an illegal contract is actionable under B&P 17200. Without seeing the contract and knowing more, I’ve often wondered about the contracts of sports stars and Hollywood actors that keep the details of their compensation private. Of course, many of these folks, including Keith Olbermann have corporations set up to do this that may mean don’t have an employment relationship as such, but…

The National Labor Relations Act  at 29 U.S.C. § 157 gives all employees the right to discuss their terms and conditions of employment with each other. 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(1)  makes it an unfair labor practice to deny employees their Section 7 rights.

In Current TV’s Cross-Complaint against Keith Olbermann, it states (at ¶¶6 and 21 et seq.) states that

Paragraph 16(a)(i) of the Agreement makes clear that the financial terms of the Agreement were confidential. Specifically, the Agreement requires that ‘the economic terms of this Agreement shall not be disclosed to any third party… Mr. Olbermann deliberately breached this provision almost immediately upon joining the network… On or about May 13, 2011, Mr. Olbermann asked Mr. Hyatt for permission to disclose financial terms of his employment … The request was denied.” (Emphasis added.)

Did Current just make a judicial admission that it violated the NLRA in its haste to file a quicky Cross-Complaint? I don’t know if the NLRA even applies here, of course.

Here’s my debut at Kveller.com, a blog about Jewish parenting.

Alice G. Walton of The Atlantic summarizes a European study about the effect of managers on their employees.

Here’s the abstract from the actual article ($):

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of the present research was to examine the relationships between perceived organizational support, perceptions of supervisor’s interpersonal style, psychological need satisfaction and need thwarting, and hedonic and eudaemonic well-being.

Design/Methodology/Approach
In Study 1 (n = 468), we tested a model in which workers’ perceived organizational support and their perceptions of their supervisor autonomy support independently predicted satisfaction of the workers’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which in turn predicted aspects of hedonic and eudaemonic well-being. In Study 2 (n = 650), workers’ perceptions of supervisor controlling behaviors and need thwarting were added to the hypothesized model tested in Study 1. Scales of work satisfaction and positive affect were used to assess hedonic well-being, and a scale of psychological well-being was used to assess eudaemonic well-being.

Findings
Perceived organizational support and supervisors’ interpersonal style related to basic need satisfaction (Studies 1 and 2) and need thwarting (Study 2). In turn, need satisfaction predicted higher levels of hedonic and eudaemonic well-being, while need thwarting was negatively associated with hedonic and eudaemonic well-being.

Implications
The present results underscore the importance of understanding the mechanisms through which organizations and managers related to workers’ hedonic and eudaemonic well-being.

Originality/Value
This is the first research to provide evidence for the mediating role of need satisfaction and need thwarting in the relationships between perceived organizational support, perceptions of supervisor’s interpersonal style, and hedonic and eudaemonic well-being. The present results were obtained in two samples of employees from various small to large companies.

Bottom line: making employees happy has its costs, but so does making them unhappy. Do employment lawyers talk enough about this? Aren’t subjects like this just as important as whether Justice Baxter sniffed during an oral argument on the status of wage premia?

“From Moses to Madison: Jewish Influences on American Law”

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If you’re in the San Luis Obispo area or if you’re interested in something a little different for MCLE this time around, please come to this one: