Off Topic: BigLaw Massacre and Legal Education

Every week I get an e-mail in my inbox from the ABA which is really kind of like the US Weekly for BigLaw. Even if I worked in such a place, I’m not sure I’d care about the gossip. But since I don’t, I really don’t care. So instead of remembering to unsubscribe, I usually delete it without looking. But this time, I couldn’t help but see the 1,400 layoffs from BigLaw. (They actually count the “little people” not just the lawyers, but that was just for the headline impact, I’m sure.)

One of the links to it was how the professional class is totally unprepared for this, in the Wall Street Journal. It whines about how blue collar workers and fast food workers have it so much better because they have safety nets (?) and we the elite don’t, because we lost everything when our houses went underwater and our stocks tanked…and we don’t have “union protection.” Guffaw!

Ummm. First of all, these very professional elites did the most to ensure that there weren’t any safety nets for anyone. Good or evil, right or wrong, those are the voters that are most responsible for that. As for union protection, something tells me that BigLaw in general and the WSJ specifically would oppose, to put it lightly, the idea of associates organizing.

Aside from these “cry me a river” reasons, I think there is something else that the article touches on that is closer to the truth. It says professionals get very good at their narrow job and not at running a business in general. Amen.

The typical BigLaw employee is someone who worked hard in high school to get into a good college, where she worked hard to get into a good law school, where she worked hard to get into a good firm in 2L fall interviews, and has been working hard to bill a lot of hours. All of that hard work just to become a commodity! Because until they start generating business, or being able to make good business decisions, they are totally expendable, replaceable, and after a few years, entirely not cost effective.

This is because law school more or less is set up for those 10% who follow this path. You learn the core bar exam type subjects, and then you learn how to crank out research memos and maybe a few briefs, just like you would as a first year associate at BigLaw.

Ironically, law schools are full of mock trial teams and mock appeals, which are the last two things most law school graduates will be doing. Where’s the mock case management conference clinic? Where’s the law and motion practice team? It makes law school some weird Frankenstein of BigLaw prep and 19th century general practice solo attorney prep.

But that’s not the only thing that’s missing. Where’s the business education? Where’s the marketing training? Where!? It’s nowhere.

Generating legal work is a fairly simple thing to do once you know how to do it. But if you are totally dependent on a partner to do it, you’re in trouble in times like these.

Running your own business is something that most attorneys, especially pre-BigLaw ones, don’t think a lot about—even though we’ll be giving advice to people who do. We should. We should learn this in law school.

Just by way of example, to get your license to ‘practise’ in England & Wales, you have to take three ridiculously easy tests that make our bar exams look like the labors of Hercules by comparison. But a part that you have to pass is on solicitor’s accounting. In other words, you have to know how to keep the books of your practice. It’s arguably the hardest part of the test.

Here, we might get a question on what we can or can’t do with interest on client money and that’s about it.

As much as the economy is failing us, and these firms are failing their associates, legal education is failing us all. Until it learns to adapt better (as an accreditation-requiring rule, not a shining model somewhere as an exception) and until it teaches future attorneys to regard themselves each as the mini-business they are, it will continue to fail in good times and bad.

I was very, very luck in that I got to be very involved in an entrepreneurial firm when I first started out, and in my present position, I am very hands on with the business side too. But I started my own business in high school, so it wasn’t anything new to me. (I actually had a dialup Internet service provider in 1992. If only I’d hung on with that…) But for attorneys who, through no fault of their own, are basically brief mills who think double entry is something X-rated instead of an accounting method, well, life may be tough for a while.

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