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DeathofGiantFirms 21 - 27 Jan 2008 - Main.AndrewGradman
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The marginal return to transactional work of an investment in legal education will certainly diminish. Ivy-educated lawyers will be only slightly more valuable, and much more costly, than graduates of third-tier schools, lawyers in India, and software. | |
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< | But lawmaking by litigation, unlike transactional negotiations, does not produce value that is easily measured and compared to the costs of production. When the case creates a precedent, or when the lobbyist or appellant proposes to reform the law for the indefinite future, it implicates the very existence of a stream of value for the indefinite future. It rallies powerful opposing interests. It is war by other means. War leads to arms races, and arms races get out of control. | >
> | But lawmaking, unlike transactional work, does not produce value that is easily measured and compared to the costs of production. When litigation creates a precedent, or when the lobbyist or appellant proposes to reform the law, it implicates the very existence of a stream of value for the indefinite future. It rallies powerful opposing interests. It is war by other means. War leads to arms races, and arms races get out of control. | | | | |
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< | In an arms race, "better than the competitor" is all that’s needed. Corporations with immeasurably large interests in changing the law will continue to pay unconscionably large sums to keep the “better” sources of creative legal ideas away from their competitors, even if they're downright bad. Columbia Law School has no incentive to educate its students for the new economy, as long as no other "top tier" law school does. | >
> | In an arms race, "better than the competitor" is all that’s needed. Corporations with immeasurably large interests in changing the law will continue to pay unconscionably large sums to keep their competitors away from the “better” sources of creative legal ideas, even if those ideas are downright bad. Columbia Law School has no incentive to retool its curriculum for the new economy, as long as no other "top tier" law school does. | | | But other schools will. It's what we comfortably call "second tier" schools--schools whose teachers are practitioners instead of scholars--schools that compete with each other to break their students into firms--that will produce the lawyers that will outstrip us. |
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