Career Change?

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>Some of you offered some great feedback a few days back when I posted a question regarding my chances of admission. Thanks, and keep it coming. As I mentioned before, I am an engineer thinking about law school. </p>

<p>Here is why I want to leave engineering for law: </p>

<p>The best way I can sum it up is that I loved engineering school because it was about finding elegant solutions to complicated problems. It was about understanding the nuances of a problem and racking your brain to best balance all of the factors that go in a design. That got my juices flowing. I do not love my engineering career. I feel that the trill of finding that elegant solution is lost. I sense that the general perception of the customers of my services is that what I do should be done as to not cause any problems and nothing more. </p>

<p>My perception, based on limited experience and speculation, is that legal services are (or have more potential to be) less of a commodity; clients want their attorney to find the best solution that exists. I like the idea of that.</p>

<p>I’m not scared of starving as an engineer, I’m scared of how cynical I’ve already become. I am working part-time toward my PhD in hopes that I will be able to increase my chances of starting a company and practicing in areas a little more appealing to me. That will be a long, hard road, with no guarantees. Am I foolish to think I would be happier in law? I am (or at least try to be) a realist. I know the path to a rewarding career in law will not be easy and that every job has its detractors.</p>

<p>I have to accept or decline my first offer for a funded research project within a few days. I’m inclined to decline it. </p>

<p>"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."
Steven K. Roberts, Technomad</p>

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<p>
[quote]
t was about understanding the nuances of a problem and racking your brain to best balance all of the factors that go in a design.

[/quote]

I know what you mean - and that is really what I miss about engineering. Try finding a different type of engineering - maybe mechanical in a high-tech company? - before leaving entirely.</p>

<p>Law is about finding cumbersome, inefficient solutions to problems that correlate imperfectly with the problem at hand. I can't help thinking that there are easier solutions - and I see them, too! - and just wonder why lawyers think in those circular, deductive paths. It absolutely makes me mental.</p>

<p>Permit me an example. There is ample evidence that police line-ups are heavily biased. The officer may, consciously or subconsciously, direct the witness's attention to the person suspected of the crime. They will ask the witness if he is sure; ask the suspect to stand up straighter. They will often show the suspect's photo in a "photo line-up" first - and the suspect looks familiar to the witness, because the witness saw his picture a few days prior!</p>

<p>What's the legal solution? Some judge comes up with a zillion different things - like taping the proceedings so a lawyer can reconstruct bias; not allowing the witness to see the defendant standing with the police officers, in handcuffs, before the line-up; not having a photo line-up and then a real line-up.</p>

<p>Sounds good? Any decent, self-respecting scientist knows that those solutions stink. Try a double blind study! The officer can't influence the witness if the officer doesn't know who the defendant is. Simple, elegant, and it isn't the gold standard. Grr.</p>

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<p>AA, when writing this post, I had in the back of my mind that you would be for making the jump. Not so? Point taken about the nonsense though.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
My perception, based on limited experience and speculation, is that legal services are (or have more potential to be) less of a commodity; clients want their attorney to find the best solution that exists. I like the idea of that.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>One of the greatest misperceptions that prospective attorneys have, I think, is the impact cilents will have on their practice. Law school is about figuring out legal problems - can be really intersting. Legal practice is about doing what your clients want when they want it. Who your clients are will dictate the nature of your life as an attorney.</p>

<p>Some big clients with deep pockets will pay you to exhaust all possibilities finding the answer they want you to find. Some more cost conscious clients (probably the majority of clients out there) will be more interested in quick answers they can rely on, rather than funding the billable hours necessary to find the "best solution." </p>

<p>Don't be misled to think that the practice of law is some pure intellectual pursuit. To be honest - your description of why you are unhappy with engineering, sounds very similar to why many lawyers get that same type of unhappiness.</p>

5

<p>unbelievablem
Thanks for your input. Your point is well taken that one just can’t get away from economic realities. I guess what I think might be better in the legal profession is the ability of the client to see a tangible value in good service. Now I find myself needing a strong earthquake to hit a building I designed before a client can understand the value of the service. Until that happens, they will simply resent the extra cost associated with making a building safe for some nebulous earthquake.</p>

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<p>the same people who you think are being unreasonable as clients now are also somebody's law clients. clients don't always want to see all the possible legal pitfalls anymore than they want to envision what mother nature may have to throw at them. clients pay their professionals to do what they want done so that they can get about the business of their business -- they can be just as impatient with legal advise as with engineering advise. you may want to assume that there is a difference - i am trying to warn you that there often isn't. in both situations you have a business person (or other client with their own self interest) paying a professional for their expertise -- the fact that the professional has an expertise in a specific field does not mean that the client is just going to step back and say, do what it is you are trained to do the best way you were trained to do it. you are their hired gun.</p>

<p>i suggest you have a very clear understanding of what that means before you spend 3 years in law school to try to enter a profession that may duplicate some of the same problems you have with your current profession.
i don't know why you have chosen law as the next career to examine. i would suggest you start by asking yourself what factors would make a career you would be happy in - and then look for one that meets those criteria. if one of the criteria is not having to worry about clients who have their heads in the sand or are impatient for answers, law may not be the best choice -- or at least if you do choose law, you should realistically think about what field of practice you want where you will minimize that issue.</p>

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<p>one more thought -- personally, i think many potential legal pitfalls will seem more abstract to a client than the possibility of a building falling down. the latter is a very clear concept to understand - they are just apparently willing to assume that it is unlikely to occur. with the legal issues, often the client may not even be able to assess the likelihood, but the issues themselves are much harder for them to "wrap their brain around." - i don't think though that this translates to a deferense to the attorney being allowed to go off and "do their best." - if anything, it can just increase a client's impatience with a lawyer's claim that there are issues to be explored.</p>

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<p>Undelievablem, what are your thoughts on how fee structure plays into this. I think a lot of my angst stems from the fact that we do a large percentage of projects on a lump-sum basis. Given the common case that a client does not know the difference b/w a good product and poor product, the sums must meet or beat companies producing a poor product. Given low sums, the pressure is to do the minimum and stay in business. Aren’t most legal services contracts hourly? Are hourly “not to exceed” contracts common? I know it is a lesser of two evils, but I prefer doing the best job as quickly as possible over profiting the most from doing the least. Basically, my perception is that lawyers have done better than engineers setting up a profitable business model. </p>

<p>I respectfully disagree that legal concepts are harder than engineering concepts to “wrap their brain around.” I find that when a lawyer friend and I are having a conversation with a person not associated with law or engineering, the person is more likely to trivialize the engineering (assume that it is cut and dry, black and white, and just a step, with little affect on the outcome, in the process of building something) while they believe the lawyer has the ability to make or break people’s lives. Maybe this person watches too much TV. Nevertheless, the perception is real.</p>

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<p>there are many different fee structures - i don't claim to be an expert on them. some clients i worked for had a retainer agreement that covered some work and any additional work was hourly. some clients were strictly hourly. some clients were given a choice - with a retainer, the hourly rate would be lower because the firm was guarenteed some money up front. sometimes, depending on the nature of the work, a choice wasn't offered.</p>

<p>VERY often, clients have trouble understanding why something will take as many hours as a lawyer will bill for a job -- they seem to think that because you a lawyer, you should just be able to know and answer their question without having to spend so much time researching it.</p>

<p>i once had a partner tell me he felt more freedom to do a thorough job when there was a retainer for a flat fee for the job so the client wasn't hovering over every hour he spent on it, whereas when the billing was hourly, the clients often questioned why so many hours were necessary. </p>

<p>i don't know how much different fee structures affect this - certainly there are different dynamics in the engineer-client relationship; as opposed to the lawyer--client relationship. but the common factor is in both the professional is being paid by a client whose judgement is influenced by the cost of the professional service and not necessarily by all the nuances of the professional service that the professional may consider relevant.</p>

<p>i'm not in a position to challenge anything you are saying about engineering - i'm just trying to keep you from having unreal expectations of what a legal career would be like.</p>

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<p>unbelievablem , thanks for your feedback. It makes a lot of sense. I am not the smartest guy around, but I recognize the value of looking at what the smartest people I know are doing, why they are doing it, and whether or not I should also be doing it. I see that each and every one of my peers who were ahead of me in engineering has left the field. A few MBA, a few MD, and a few law. This is not so much true of the guys a few years ahead of me in engineering, but it seems to also be true of the guys a few years behind me. You couldn’t pay me enough to be a doctor; sickness depresses me. I don’t see that an MBA really suits my inclinations. Law, however, has been appealing to me for some time. I worked closely with lawyers for a while, in a forensics capacity, and that didn’t scare me away. </p>

<p>I also look at what people do who have the option to do both. I have come across one or two JDs who are back in engineering. But, by and large, JDs with engineering backgrounds are practicing law.</p>

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<p>One thought...</p>

<p>If you're in an engineering field where you bill your time (I was), you'll have a better sense of what unbelievablem is talking about. It's a bit different in law, however. We used to estimate our time to the half-hour or quarter-hour (increments were in tenths of hours, but never used). Many law firms and some judges (when awarding attorney's costs) require 6-minute billing increments.</p>

<p>I personally prefer the engineering model for economic reasons. Basically, at the end of the day, you've made something for your client. Your client has a building, a bridge, a fuel cell prototype - something tangible. You've gotten paid. I call this "pie creation;" you increase the amount of wealth and charge for it.</p>

<p>The practice of law is all about taking a big piece of the same pie for yourself. In most instances, esp. in litigation, you're not giving your client anything of value. You're allowing them to avoid legal trouble, but there is no tangible product. In extreme situations, you end up taking a large part of the pie and leaving the clients with the crumbs. Consider that it is not unusual for litigation to cost more than the value of the fight. I know someone who spent six times the amount of the dispute in a court fight. For him, it was worth it, because he had the money and could use that to encourage people to settle with him later. However, in most cases, once you're stuck in the fight, no one backs down. I have divorcing family members who have currently spent more in attorney's fees than there are assets in the marriage. To think that either person would have been better off just handing every marital asset to the other spouse, up front, and not litigating. The judge even asked why it couldn't be settled - and one party wanted to fight just for its own sake, and the other would like to settle, but the attorneys, billing out at $500/hour, aren't going to want to settle it out.</p>

<p>In America, each side pays their own attorneys (except in rare cases). This leads to some interesting results. Even if your client has a good case, they aren't going to want to pay you $20,000 to make a $2,000 problem go away. Likewise, if your client was improperly named in a lawsuit, you're going to have to charge a few grand to fix the problem - a problem that only happened because someone is lazy. So your client did nothing wrong, but is out a bunch of money. </p>

<p>That is certainly not how all law works... you can be in-house, where you work for a salary and do the work that comes across your desk. Some of the reason that I like the idea of patent prosecution is that, at the end of the day, your client has a patent. The client can use that to invest in assets, license to someone else, or even just have as a show-and-tell to get investors interested in the company. At the end of the day, you've gotten paid for that. Although most patents lack economic value, there's still something to be said for having the ownership of IP rights. </p>

<p>If economics and profit are a big concern to you, I would suggest that you focus on areas that have billing practices that you like.</p>

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<p>AA, two thoughts:</p>

<p>1) You cleared up any doubt I had about your intelligence by the amazing length of your “one thought”!!
2) I have had the experience of chopping up my life in 6-minute increments. It made me laugh to think about it. The engineering joke part of it was I never would have imagined we were working in 6-minute increments until I eventual heard a lawyer refer to it that way. It was abundantly clear to all of the engineers I was working with that we should be working in 0.1-hour increments and not bother dealings with a number like 6. Of course I remain angry to this day at the time system inventors for not doing something like 10 hours in a day, 10 minutes in an hour, and 10 seconds in a minute.</p>

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<p>LOL.</p>

<p>I was contemplating recently that it's odd for us to have a 12-month, 24-hour, 60-minute system (dodeca-based, not decimal based). The Romans had a better system of 10 months (hence the reason why we have Septa, Octo, Nov, and Dece). Somewhere along the way, they added in two months - cannot, for the life of me, recall why. With four seasons (esp. solestially) it makes sense to have a system that is divisible by four. </p>

<p>In engin., I always worked for 1.7 hours or the like; I guess in law, you work for six minutes at a time. Of course, in engin., I always disliked the fact that we only had one decimal place - so hard for those 15-minute increments.</p>

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<p>One more thought (they come in increments of one, not any fraction thereof):</p>

<p>One example of lawyers not always being able to do the best for their clients is in the criminal context. At least 95% of cases are pleaded out; jury trials are very rare. Granted, the plea bargain can be a huge asset for the guilty client, who will get a lighter sentence (this incentive is tremendous in death states - a good defense att'y will try to get his client to "plead to life"); however, there's a substantial amount of evidence that innocent people sometimes plead guilty. </p>

<p>There's a lot of similar calculated risks in the law.</p>

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<p>The only instance in which the 6 min /0.1 hr system was insufficient was unanswered phone calls. Those were an automatic 15 min. Boss would pump his fist and say “yes, got credit for the call.” The fact that people don’t answer their phones sure helped my billable rate.</p>