Law And More

Lawyers: Give recovery shot, if Elton John can be your sponsor?

We all know that lawyers have a higher rate of substance abuse than the general population.  What we don't know is what could motivate you to stop all that before it took away your career, family, and self.

Well, I have a hunch that one factor could be access to a famous sponsor.  In a number of recovery programs, including the 12 steps, having a sponsor or recovered person with a track record is recommended.  The ROLLING STONES interview with Eninem mentions that his unofficial sponsor is Elton John. How about if you could have some brandname judge or feared-by-all-opponents equity partner in a law firm?  Hopefully, those kind are making themselves available as sponsors.

Associate Ghetto

The associate position in law firms seems to be slowly marginalized to a ghetto.  That marginalized existence is well paid, at least so far, but continually reduced in number, sense of being of value, and status.

On the numbers front, a survey by the NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL found, reports Leigh Jones, that associates make up 48.1 percent of attorneys at law firms.  In 1987, that percentage was 60.2.

In addition, as we all know, clients increasingly balk at having associates, particularly those without three or four years experience, on their accounts.  The partners come to get the business and the partners should be there to transact the business.

The perception of associates seems to be that they are a sort of necessary nuisance.  After all someone has to do the grunt work. However that work could be done more efficiently and cheaper by legal personnel around the world. Process re-engineers are seeing to that.  They have been dividing up legal tasks into what can be farmed out to the lowest-cost vendor.  It's easy to maintain quality control, especially since there is a glut of lawyers not only in the U.S. but also in India as well as China.

Opening India Legal Market to Foreign Firms: No way did Obama go near it

No surprise, President Barack Obama did not introduce the subject of India's opening up its legal market to foreign firms.  That's what Brian Baxter tells us in AM LAW DAILY.

What a can of worms that would have been to open.  LIke the U.S., India has its own lawyer glut.  So does China, incidentally.  Guess it's the in career track for ambitious middle class youth and middle class wannabes.  No way is the nation going to allow in competition.

Also, India has developed a brisk business in not only outsourcing.  It has expanded that into process re-engineering.  In process re-engineering, a legal task is analyzed.  As much of it is divided up into parts which can be farmed out to low-cost vendors, perhaps even outside India.  Clearly, this could well result in U.S. law firms being shrunk into the role of strategist and project director for the case that's assigned to legal experts around the world.

The clear danger here for enterprises in India which control the re-engineering market is that U.S. law firms, if allowed in, would grab a piece of re-engineering.  Then, it's possible they could grab the whole enchilada, with the help of some smart aggressive MBAs.

Lawyers As Performance Artists: Therefore they make great panhandlers

Sure, success in the practice of law involves brilliance at strategy as well as tactics.  Also a necessity is an unusual sensitivity to language. Unfortunately for President Bill Clinton, he overestimated his skills in the latter category.

However, that's not enough. Lawyers who become the brandnames in the practice of law are the skilled performance artists.  Examples include Steve Farese who got "Preacher's Wife" Mary Winkler off the hook with his tableau of the hooker heels and wig.  Other adept thespians are Bill Marler who implores Congress and the meat industry to put him out of business, John Tarantino whose earnestness matches the characters played by Jimmy Stewart, and Elie Mystal [former lawyer] who positions himself as sacrificing his very livelihood writing for law students in order to stop them from making the six-figure economic error of entering the legal profession.

Incidentally, fictional attorney Atticus Finch wasn't all that good a performance artist.  After all, he lost because he wasn't able to allow his sense of self to take on the role needed to persuade the jury. And, the legal team from Motley Rice such as Jack McConnell and Fidelma Fitzpatrick were excellent performance artists at the Rhode Island lead paint trial because they had down cold their working class jury. Often thespian ability trumps legal.  The jury gave Motley Rice, representing the plaintiff, three convictions, only allowing one acquittal - for Tarantino's client.

That as background, it's reasonable to conclude that lawyers would be naturals as panhandlers, some of who do quite well for themselves.  Also in centuries past, it was a noble profession. Even today, creatives embrace the role of panhandler. The core competence of panhandlers is the ability to leverage the tools of persona to reach another human being, quickly.  The art falls into the genre of street entertainment.  Here are the details of a career path in panhandling, as I deconstructed them on AOL Jobs.

"The Good Wife" - Game's On

During the trial, the handicapped lawyer played by Michael J. Fox passes Alicia a note.  It says, "Game's on." 

That could be the theme of tonight's episode of "The Good Wife."  Everything, ranging from law to politics to lesbian romance to teenage angst, is depicted as a raw game in which total self preservation rules. 

The trial is a test case before a class action suit against BigPharma regarding an antidepressant.  Alicia has joined the team in becoming a shrewd aka tricky lawyer.  No more girl scout.  So she is jubilant when BigPharma agrees to settle the whole class action for $35 million.  Then her opponent, who tried to use his disability to impress on the jury the miracle of medication, informs her that BIgPharma was prepared to settle at $90 million but hoped he would get it at $50 million.  Not only does Alicia not see herself as all that clever.  The whole team at the law firm seem like jerks.

In politics, Wendi who likely leaked the notes from the deposition with Alicia's law firm, is running against both Peter and Childs.  One of her supporters is Grace, daughter of Alicia and Peter.  This being a female candidate along with Grace's anger at the sins of the father could turn Grace against her family.  Alicia already has forbidden her to support Wendi in public.

Kaldinda got caught up in brutal self preservation.  She couldn't handle the emotional demands of her lesbian lover who is a public defender.  She drops her and then comes back for a favor when Blake starts snooping around if she's gay.  The former lover doesn't buy into Kalinda's scheme and shows up at the law firm celebration with Blake.

Anyone watching tonight's episode who had a vestige of school boy or school girl values grew up fast.  "The Good Wife" is exposing the shadow side of just about every profession you can name.

 

Trial vs. Defense Lawyers: The Two Cultures in Law

When Cate Edwards, daughter of John Edwards and Harvard Law JD, announced she was going to work at a plaintiff firm, the world gasped.  Those with pedigree just don't do that.  The reasons why are described comprehensively and eloquently in last Sunday's THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE.

In that article "The Other Oil Cleanup," Douglas McCollam deconstructs how trial lawyers represent a whole different culture in legal practice.  He captures what many of us have noticed in passing but might have assumed we were force fitting into a category.

In general, asserts McCallam, trial lawyers tend to be loners. They aren't tribal like defense attorneys who will do anything to get on a reservation such as Jones Day. 

They arrive at law as first generation entries, "poor boys made good." Unlike the white shoe defense lawyers, they likely attended third-tier schools and are marked by their hustle.

Incidentally, at the Rhode Island lead paint trial, defense attorney representing ARCO John Tarantino stood out because of his raw hustle as well as fierce passion.  His client was the only one of the four defendants which was acquitted.  When I talked to the jurors, they sang his praises.  My hunch was that they found a reason to let his client off the hook.  Defense lawyers, like football coaches, should study tapes of Tarantino in court.  They could learn plenty about the power of bypassing the iconic defense lawyer's persona.

In addition, like the great characters from art, be it Shakespeare's drama or the fiction of Herman Melville, plaintiff lawyers can hold onto a grudge.  In arguing their cases, this tends to come across as extreme energy as well as brilliant interrogation tactics.  There's nothing like a sense of mission to keep a pursuit going, no matter how tedious the legal system is. Also, it makes for terrific performance art.  One master in that is specialist in food-borne disease law Bill Marler.

With the paradigm shifts taking place in law - on both the plaintiff and defense sides - perhaps the two cultures will move closer together.  Clearly, trial lawyers are under the gun for a bit too much obvious hustle.  Defense lawyers, if they want business, have to present themselves less as caricatures of lawyers of some golden age and more as down-in-the-trenches problem-solvers.  As I recommend to those I coach: think like a lawyer but present yourself as a human being who cares about the client.

Truck Driver: With 1 million openings, job description resonates in America

More Americans are sucking it up: their former industry is over.  Therefore, they are ready to move on, including to hitting the road as a truck driver.  Today on AOL Jobs, my post describing the one million openings in truck driving over the next 15 years and the 400,000 ones from now to the end of 2011 has been resonating. 

Both in page views and in comments, men and women across the nation are showing their enthusiasm for a line of work where there's demand, lots of opportunity for travel, and a fresh approach to earning a living. An out of work teacher is considering it.  A woman tells us that her father always encouraged her to drive a truck.  A man reflects about the quiet heroism of the road warrior.

Will this ability to think out of the usual job box spill over to unemployed and underemployed lawyers?  Will 1Ls who don't have that much invested yet, go over to the local truck company instead of their contracts class?  And will partners who have been forced out check out if a truck company would maybe consider hiring them, even past 50 years old?  It could happen.  Will It? Time will tell.

SCORPIONS: When civilty didn't rule U.S. Supreme Court

The book SCORPIONS by Noah Feldman makes the juicy tidbits uncovered by Jeffrey Toobin seem tame.  Today in THE NEW YORK TIMES, Adam Cohen reviews this analysis of a U.S. Supreme Court which didn't view civility as necessary.  The time period is that served by FDR's appointees.

Those justices, ranging from Felix Frankfurter to Hugo Black, were no better than the ill-tempered clients divorce lawyers have to deal with.  Some of the hostile opining was due to diverse interpretations of the Constitution. Some was the nature of the beast.  Four ot the biggest feuders were self-made outsiders.  As we know, those types carry Idiosyncrasies, strength and that chip on their shoulder everywhere.

One of the most interesting, at least as presented by Feldman, is Black.  No slouch at being ambitious, he joined the Ku Klux Klan to get a Senate seat.  After that, he got it that he could make it on his own and dumped the Klan. This approach mirrors how what's being called the shadow elite manage make a good living and acquire lots of power.  They do that by being totally opportunistic and not loyal.  Janine Wedel wrote an amazing book by that title.  The game is to pick up experience globally and then leverage it to the max.  The way the shadow elite put that together is both bold and creative.  Civility is irrelevant.

Perhaps the model of SCORPIONS and SHADOW ELITE is what's shaping up to the ethos of our age.

Law Schools as Public Nuisance: Of course, law profs pushing back on ABA

It's getting clearer that law schools may constitute a public nuisance. 

Way back in the late 1990s, Fidelma Fitzpatrick, attorney with Motley Rice, applied the concept of public nuisance - that is what contributes to or causes harm to the public - to the traditional category of product liability.  That had a good run and is still running in the utility industry.  Here is my ebook on public nuisance Download Publicnuisancevoodoo.  And here is the Rhode Island Supreme Court decision ruling that the former lead paint companies such as Sherwin-Williams didn't cause a public nuisance in that state Download Statev.LeadIndustriesAssoc.,Inc.

As the glut of lawyers continues and is likely to only increase in number and desperation, more legal game changers might consider filing a class action lawsuit against law schools as constituting a public nuisance.  Law professors, who have well paying jobs carrying some status, might already anticipate that.  For example, as Karen Sloan reports in THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, they are pushing back at the ABA's spotlight on legal education.  However, there was that University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson who whined that he could barely make it on $250,000.

Essentially, law schools are a mechanism which seem to be creating a new lost generation.  They seem to be overeducated for the overall marketplace as it is.  After all, how much formal education do you need to apply for and perform the job of security guard, a position I, who did attend Harvard Law School, was thrilled to get in 2003 [Download Geezerguts.] I also had matriculated and passionately pursued excellence at the University of Michigan's graduate studies in linguistics and literature.

JDs also seem emotionally and socially ill equipped for other kinds of work.  For example, are they flexible enough to zigzag the ups and down in compensation, job tasks, status, and mobility of the current marketplace? 

And they are usually in six-figure debt. Not a sweet spot, is it.

There is that whiff of entitlement also.  That is a sense of feeling special, the very primitive belief which did in Bernie Madoff victims.  Such an assumption of being a breed apart does not sit well with the rest of us struggling wage slaves and entrepreneurial hustlers.  Our mantra has become: don't cry for the unemployed/underemployed JD. 

Those attorneys who do secure employment seem to, in the process, make a nuisance of themselves chasing opportunities for internships, summers, and actual jobs.  Then when they are terminated from jobs they are not easy to redeploy to other modes of making a living.  And, let's face it, their marketing efforts are often, in themselves, nuisance to the nth degree. Can it be possible that law schools have unleashed upon the nation a kind of plague that will require decades to even manage, never mind eliminate.

Motley Rice could take a shot at putting together a class action lawsuit against law schools.  The pool of plaintiffs is large.  For example, there was the Boston law student who didn't want to sue but just get his tuition back.   Now he might be receptive to a lawsuit.

Been Hired? The new etiquette

You don't just get hired any more, not in this grim market.  You also have to play the new etiquette game.  Here it is, as I lay it at on AOL Jobs.