While it's not really law porn, only for lack of glossy pictures of naked lawprofs, the content of Mitchell's opus would make any marketeer blush. It was shameless. Rather than rush here to expose this nonsense, I waited for Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam to deconstruct it, and I was well rewarded with gems like this:Case Western Law Dean Lawrence Mitchell in @NYTimes op-ed: Do these hotpants make my butt look fat? http://tinyurl.com/crdcwgd
But then, why bother to post here what Campos has already posted? When I stopped by his blog, I found another post, one that reminded me a great deal of this post, that demanded wider airing. It's an email from a young lawyer, and it reflects things I've heard far too often.Taking potshots at unnamed critics is fun.
The hysteria has masked some important realities and created an environment in which some of the brightest potential lawyers are, largely irrationally, forgoing the possibility of a rich, rewarding and, yes, profitable, career.
Translation: Getting people to spend $200,000 for a 50/50 shot at a legal job of any kind is getting harder every day.
The starting point is the job market. It’s bad. It’s bad in many industries. “Bad,” in law, means that most students will have trouble finding a first job, especially at law firms. But a little historical perspective will reveal that the law job market has been bad — very bad — before. To take the most recent low before this era, in 1998, 55 percent of law graduates started in law firms. In 2011, that number was 50 percent. A 9 percent decline from a previous low during the worst economic conditions in decades hardly seems catastrophic. And this statistic ignores the other jobs lawyers do.
If we define “law graduates starting in law firms” in the broadest way possible, by counting every single job any law graduate in the class of 2011 got at a law firm, 41 percent of law graduates whose employment outcomes were recorded (this data is missing for 4 percent of ABA law graduates in the 2011 class) got a job with a law firm. If we define “starting in law firms” to mean “got jobs as lawyers with law firms,” which is surely how readers will interpret that phrase – that is, if we don’t count people who got jobs as secretaries, paralegals and clerks, i.e., jobs they could have gotten without acquiring a law degree first – that percentage drops to 34.7 percent. If we limit the phrase to full-time lawyer jobs, the percentage drops to 32 percent. If we exclude new grads who listed themselves as members of “firms” consisting of one lawyer (themselves) that figure becomes 29.5 percent. Statistics here.
Then reality really hit when I entered the job market. It was not good. You could find jobs but for $40,000 to $50,000. At first I thought that it was me, that I had not done the right things, ie kiss up to the right people, done unpaid internships, etc. So I decided to hang up my own shingle. I opened my own office, and tried to make a go of it. It has been an incredibly difficult five years. For many of those years I would blame myself for not doing better; I began to believe that there was huge mistake that I was making or I had made that had alienated clients, or that I wasn't advertising properly, or any number of things that could be attributed to an office that produced income, but not that much. I worked long hours by myself trying to satisfy clients that could not be satisfied. I panicked at little mistakes, and thought the worst case scenarios for every misstep. It was a miserable existence and it put me in a depressive state with bouts of anxiety that were difficult to control. For us old guys, like me and Mitchell, we're debating the virtues of a profession. For the writer of this email to Campos, it's his life. Mitchell waxes vague. The writer lies awake in his bed at night wondering how he will feed his children in the morning. I'm damn angry about this.I started law school in 2002 and graduated in 2005. Prior to going to law school I had heard rumblings about how being an attorney was not as profitable as the schools made it out to be. I was also warned by other attorneys that it was very stressful. Unfortunately that information did not sink in and I bought the hype that [average-ranked law school] offered. So I spent three good years of my life working on a degree that I believe should have only taken two.
It's not that making the decision to go to law school, to become a lawyer, has no virtue. It is, or at least used to be and can be once again, a worthwhile and important profession. It's that the marketeering, the law porn, reflected in Mitchell's empty prose is designed to do one thing, and one thing only: obscure the downside and deceive the unduly optimistic.
As much as I may rail against deceptive legal marketers for pushing their naive, ignorant or scummy lawyer-clients ahead in the race to the bottom, their smiling faces have nothing on this law dean. His words will comfort parents who remember lawyers as being prominent members of the community, with fine houses and manicured lawns, who want nothing more for their children than to be secure in a comfortable life, guaranteed by generations of vested Solomons.
And their children, unclear of where their life should be and seeking refuge from a troubled world, assume that following the crowd will assure them that they will get that BMW and corner office. All those smiling faces on law school websites can't be wrong.
Yet the email to Campos reflects the brutal reality. The writer concedes the depression his choice brought him, and later in the email, admits to thoughts of doing harm to himself. Would it bother you greatly, Dean Mitchell, is you found out some kid read your op-ed, became a lawyer, and took his life? Or would that just be collateral damage to the more important cause of filling your law schools empty seats?
It's time to make it plain. Cut the crap. These are real people's lives you're screwing with. Law deans don't get a free pass on bullshit any more than anyone else.
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