Law And More

To live outside the law

It's a time when unemployed associates need role models for how to live outside the law.  Here is one. 

As this former attorney states on Craigslist, he or she exited practicing 10 years ago to become a full-time journalist and is again looking for a full-time job.  Until now - journalism also hit the wall recently - this path seemed to have worked out just fine.

Of course, partners hanging in, associates dropping like flies

To my surprise, Abovethelaw.com devotes space reporting what THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL reports.  And that's that partners are mostly hanging in, while associates are dropping like flies.  That non-development should be obvious to anyone following legal trends.

Partners have experience.  Associates don't or not enough.  So, clients want partners on their accounts, not associates.  That's not only more cost-efficient but can improve quality.  In addition, partners have the network to bring in new business.  If they don't do just that - bring in fresh catches - they join associates out on the breadline.  Associates usually lack that network and usually are clueless how to sell to close.

Demand for associates will remain low.  Law firms can no longer afford to train talent right out of law school.  Anyway for what needs to be done at the bottom of the food chain can be done by contract lawyers or outsourced. 

Reed Smith: Guess It Was a Bubble

Forget the official confirmation by legal or economic consultants.  If, upon bursting, "it" looks, smells, and behaves like a bubble, maybe it was a bubble. 

By all those markers, even lawyers who would debate any point to death and resort to myriad approaches to defining the entity, the profession and business of law had been in a bubble. And that bubble did indeed burst.  The ramifications are hitting new entries to law hard and will continue to hit them hard.  Currently, with the glut of young legal talent, the very slow increase in litigation, and the pressure from clients for only seasoned help on accounts and lower fees, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.  The exception might be those who consider leveraging their knowledge base and skills to migrate into another career or start an enterprise.

Reed Smith has cut the compensation for first-year associates 20% and simultaneously cut their billing rates by that same 20%.  In THE LEGAL INTELLIGENCER, Gina Passarella reports that will happen in all U.S. offices of Reed Smith.  For the Philadelphia office that would be a downsizing from $145,000 to $117,500.  There is no guarantee or indication that will be the end of strategies and tactics to run a business post-bubble.

Top 250 down 5259 lawyers of 4% in '09 [Source: NLJ]

THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL presents the grim statistics of lawyer cuts in 2009.  With 4% or 5259 lawyers sent packing it's the worst year for this sort of thing since NLJ began tracking three decades ago.

There's no light at the end of the tunnel.  The industry is going through a paradigm shift which in itself will lessen demand for lawyers.  Throw in the impact of technology as well as in-house doing more complex work and outsourcing.  In addition, if this downsizing in legal follows the pattern of downsizing in corporate beginning in the early 1980s [think how Jack Welch eliminated 100,000 positions at GE], it will become an ongoing practice.  On a clear day, you can't see many humans working in the Fortune 1000.

Burn Bridges - or, jobless lawyers, you'll never work again

Those 5800 jobs lost in the legal sector in October [Source: BLS], are not coming back.  Even if some kind of Golden Age returns to the profession and business of law post-bubble burst, it will take place in a downsized industry.  The manpower demand, at least at the associate level, will never match that of the boom years.

So, that leaves jobless lawyers and those who have yet to laid off with the necessity of moving toward What Next.  Fortunately, there are plenty of precedents.  Generations of doctoral candidates sidelined from college teaching, dotcom entrepreneurs whose enterprises tanked, middle managers made redundant by technology, and journalists who couldn't afford to hang out around the ink showed the way of career change. 

The first step is both a mindset and behavioral one: Burn bridges.  What got us into those now-obsolete sandboxes and what gave us a shot at success are unlikely to help us making a living doing something else.  Those bridges include our mindsets or values, persona, decorum, and contacts.  Those will only hold us back as we struggle to penetrate new territory.  See, as W.B. Yeats put it, you can't separate the dancer from the dance.  The professional in X becomes X.  To make the leap into Y, X must be left behind.

For example, I could have had a smoother transition from academia to business had I burned bridges - just cut off all ties, be they emotional or human, to my former world.  It's tough enough to adjust - and expect it to be tough - without the baggage, in our heads, hearts and contacts, from the past.  The past won't earn a living in the present.

Here is an ebook on some of that Download SavingSoulsJaneGenova.  It's had more than a million downloads.

"Finding a new job is extremely difficult," David Leonhardt, THE NEW YORK TIMES

The jinx of joblessness is severe.  There's that Catch-22: Legal headhunters only will deal with the employed.  Skills atrophy.  Contacts fade.  Confidence, always an unstable entity, falls of the cliff.  David Leonhardt sums it up in THE NEW YORK TIMES: "Finding a new jobs is extremely difficult."

How to stop this spell cast on a career?  Often, the solution is radical.  That is, set up one's own enterprise practicing law or leveraging legal background in another way such as a web service or explore what other career path is a fit.  The latter requires extraordinary self-awareness and willingness to fail, many times. 

Getting Experience: The New Holy Grail

The 125 to 140 deferred new JDs in New York City are on that new quest: Getting experience.  It's the new Holy Grail and not only in law.  As industries and technology both change, just about every professional is being forced to almost "start over" in their fields.  And as they are doing that reset the ground could again be shifting under their feet.

The attorneys whose start dates at law firms have been delayed are usually doing pro bono work.  Frequently their future employer, if the delay doesn't morph into a cancellation, has paid them a stipend of about $60,000 to gain that experience.  Even if the stipend hadn't been in the cards they would still probably jump at the opportunity to learn. 

For that opportunity, those in my field of communications, those wanting to career-transition into it, and new graduates are:

• Taking internships, paid and unpaid.
• Billing at lower rates.
• Pursuing and accepting full-time employment below their expected pay level and title.
• Volunteering in an informal way.
• Picking brains, or at least attempting to.
• Reading more and taking courses and workshops.

Recently, I fell into a learning gold mine.  A new client requires that I use a custom-made wiki, write scripts for the interactive sales technology of JellyVision.com, and assist in organizing an online community through Ning.com.  It doesn't get better than that.  To ensure I would be chosen for this assignment, I bid low.  At the time, that was exactly the right move.  The good news:  Some of that new knowledge and the new skills has been immediately marketable to another prospect.

Learn and earn.

Halloween over, Ghosts Haunt Online MBA Program [lawyers might be considering]

It isn't the online part that's making folks giggle about the MBA progam about to be launched at Chancellor University System.  It's that ghosts of Success Past seem to be in charge of it.  Think once hot former GE head Jack Welch, once hot management consultant Noel Tichy, and once hot model of GE's in-house education center at Crontonville.  When a program is front-loaded with the past, the odds are not good for the present. 

This program is starting when the content, ethical underpinnings, and the marketability of the MBA is being hammered globally.  As for the content, so much of it is the models of the past.  The values got us into the pickle of the Great Recession.  And, as BUSINESS WEEEK reports, percentage of members of the Class of '09 not getting even one offer is in the double digits.  For less than top-tier programs it's about 16%.  For Harvard B,  it's 8.8% vs. 3% in '07.  Median starting salary is down 1K, to $114K, from $115K in '07.

Unemployed, underemployed, and unhappily employed lawyers confide their "dream" of getting an MBA.  That added pile-on of yet another degree has never been more of a risk.  A more promising tactic, long term, is to get a job at a big box, any job, and observe their potential liabilities in customer service, safety, and employee relations.  Then start a firm specializing in those legal issues or become a journalist writing on them.  The Wal-Mart/Target/Costco model is the present and perhaps the future. 

MBAs not doing too hot either

Three months after graduation 16.5% of MBAs from the top 30 programs remained without a job.  Those who did get jobs were offered less.  In 2008, they got around $98,000.  This year it was $96,500. 

That's what Anne VanderMey reports in BUSINESS WEEK.  And since BLOOMBERG took over BW, VanderMey herself and many of her colleagues at BW might end up jobless in yet another glutted market: Business journalists.  The WALL STREET JOURNAL just shut down it Boston bureau, axing nine. 

One business program which fared better in job placement has been Olin's at Washington University, notes VanderMey.  Only 8% don't have jobs. That's because the program encouraged this year graduates to reframe their goal from a job on Wall Street to jobs in other fields such as biotech, BigPharma, and healthcare.   To do that they had to redefine the skills they could pitch to employers.  Lawyers might consider doing the same.

Just as predicted: Newbie JD salary at $60K, caste system

Some law-firm trend consultants have predicted that eventually starting salaries for even BigLaw would downsize to $60K to $75K.  Since that is at $145K to $160K, not many expected seeing that forecast playing out any time soon.  In addition, legal watchers anticipated the forming of caste systems within law firms.  Eventually, there will be the top tier of partners, a few star associates who had a shot at partnership, and at the bottom and most numerous would be contract attorneys, with no hope of upward mobility and no job security. The forecasters were very wrong about the timing.

At Kaye Scholer, one half of the first-year hires will be receiving $60K.  The incoming associates have been divided into two groups - or castes.  The group with the $60K compensation, reports Elie Mystal in Abovethelaw.com, are assigned to Kaye Scholer's Public Interest Group.  They will, just like Alicia on "The Good Wife" did for her first case, be handling pro bono work.  They will receive the same training and developmental opportunities as those in the other group.

The other group will be serving paid clients and receiving the normal first-year-associate's salary.

My prediction: Big trouble coming from the unexpected slashing of compensation and this caste system.