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JustinPurtleFirstPaper 4 - 26 Mar 2009 - Main.IanSullivan
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It is of course difficult to say how these changes could be brought about or implemented given the stubbornness of the system and the willingness of most to accept the status quo. However, the current economic crisis might expedite or even force such a change to occur. Surely law schools will no longer be able to swindle students if they can no longer offer lucrative firm jobs upon graduation. Instead, they might have to offer their students a different promise – the promise that attending law school is more than just jumping through hoops on the way to the rat race, the promise that, with the requisite effort and will, one can be a competent professional at the end of their education. | |
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- Ranting is okay, but you have to know what you're talking about. Your view of law firm economics, which assumes that first-year associates are unprofitable, is wrong. If there is enough work to employ the firm's more senior hours, there is work on which first-year time turns a handsome profit. Your use of the word "leverage" to imply something more than the attraction of $165k/yr for a twenty-something who doesn't know very much was not, unfortunately, well-advised. Similarly, the myth of "training" makes your points about the educational system hard to follow: the firms don't make their associates into people who could be solo practitioners; they turn them into specialists in large-firm activities. Nowhere in the world are lawyers produced by a school system that makes practical training via apprenticeship unnecessary. Most systems have required apprenticeship periods; the US is as usual particularly hospitable to personal reinvention in allowing graduates who pass the bar to practice on their own from the beginning, should they so choose. There's no explanation in the essay about how to achieve what no other system achieves either, so it's hard to judge what the consequences of an attempt would be.
- I think we need to figure out what you really wanted to write about. I don't think it was law firms or how law school should work, because those weren't things you wanted to spend time finding out about or you'd have been more accurate about them. The identification of being a lawyer with being rich probably should be more thoroughly considered, too. It doesn't strike me as obvious that being a lawyer means being rich. But it does seem obvious to you, so maybe that's the real subject here. What does being rich mean, and what are you willing to do for what kind of money?
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-- JustinPurtle - 27 Feb 2009
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