<p>Incidentally, as a one-man data point, in the past 20 years or so most of the lawyers I’ve encountered in my practice were pretty good - with one huge exception - a guy who took on a case that shouldn’t have been litigated (zero possibility of success and zero moral basis for his client’s position) then appealed the loss and managed to have the appeal dismissed because - after multiple warnings over a period of several months - he never managed to fill out and file a simple form that was required.</p>
<p>Harvard Law grad.</p>
<p>On the other hand, some of the best trial lawyers I’ve come across were graduates of a local 4th tier law school – Golden Gate University. And graduates of a local 2nd tier school - Santa Clara - have always been very successful in the Bay Area. There are so many different avenues for having a profession in law that it’s hard to analyze what will be a route to a successful career and what won’t - particularly if you can tear yourself away from a myopic focus on the Supreme Court Clerk/6-figure starting salary track. But those options are severely restricted if you start out $150K in debt. And that really angers me. </p>
<p>For the “middle class” lawyers we’re creating a generation of indentured servants, forced to work only for the highest bidder, and forced to adapt themselves to that role and the belief system necessary to thrive in that environment. While I could roll out of law school and set up a practice representing normal people and small businesses with routine issues they needed help with and evolve a practice into the areas it turned out I was most suited for over the years, that practice arc is simply not available for current grads. And I think that’s a shame.</p>
<p>"Legal aid lawyers are the scavengers here in NYC. They have their name of the lists are are assigned cases whenever their names makes make to the top. This does not happen enough to make a living wage here.</p>
<p>^^^^ You’re talking about assigned counsel (called “18b cousell”), attorneys in private practice who represent indigent defendants on a case-by-case basis on the county’s dime. </p>
<p>In NYC, legal aid (criminal) and legal services (civil) are institutional providers (ie: major players) and responsible for much of the law in NYC and thus, a fair amount of the legal authority in 2nd Cir. Competition for those jobs is quite keen; many of the successful applicants have attended T14 schools (most often NYU and Columbia – duh) and clerked in EDNY, SDNY, 2nd Cir and 3rd Cir. The attorneys are unionized workers, with wages set by contract; law grad salaries are about $50K (plus loan forgiveness) - - not at all a bad gig.</p>
<p>Agreed, Foolishpleasures. All of my experience has been with the former. Not a job I would want to have. The latter, is a whole different situation. But It is not easy to get on the list for the latter.</p>
<p>S got his JD in May of 2009. We are not that far away from his two year anniversary of that graduation. He has a well-paying job, but not in the legal field. He had/has a very specialized law interest, and has obtained additional certifications in the field even after law school. But the more narrow the interest, the fewer the jobs. He has absolutely no desire to become a “lawyer.” at least as I would understand it.</p>
<p>I think there are many lawyers who help society, and some of them do so in the charitable sense in addition to the honest-businessman sense. Certainly legal aid lawyers who serve poor people in need; prosecutors and public defenders who keep the justice system operating; those in government agencies who write regulations and try to enforce them fairly; wise judges (all of whom are lawyers); those in public interest organizations on the left and right who try to bring about desirable social change through the courts; etc., etc.</p>
<p>All these jobs are more or less hard to get, in the sense that they all have a ton of applicants for every open position. That’s much truer if you want to be a federal prosecutor in NYC vs. a county prosecutor in Oklahoma, but it’s pretty true across the board. Some public interest jobs (U.S. attorney’s office; ACLU; successful plaintiff-side civil rights firms) pay quite well if you can get them. It’s less than big firms pay, but you can live in a big city and have kids and so on.</p>
<p>“Incidentally, as a one-man data point, in the past 20 years or so most of the lawyers I’ve encountered in my practice were pretty good”</p>
<p>Wow, that’s the opposite of my experience. As a clerk in a big-city federal district court, I was appalled by the low quality of the average lawyering and the abysmal quality of the worst lawyering. At least once a week, I saw lawyering bad enough that I wished I could tell the client to fire the attorney. Several times a year, I saw lawyering bad enough that I thought the attorney ought to be sued. It was pretty common to see pro se prisoner work that was better than the worst work from licensed attorneys.</p>
<p>The thing is, for the past 20 years I’ve been handling fairly complex civil litigation, civil appeals, and a limited but regular diet of criminal appeals (where my opponent is the AG’s office.) So I’ve been spared some of the colossal jackassery I remember from my earlier years.</p>
<p>There’s still been some screamers and some “why on earth did he do that!?!?” but for the most part the real losers are practicing in another part of the courthouse. :)</p>
<p>Legal aid jobs are probably going to be even harder to get in the near future. In most states legal aid is funded by IOLTA—Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts, which means whenever a lawyer sets up an escrow account for a client, the interest on that money gets siphoned off into a special fund to pay for legal services for those who otherwise can’t afford them. With interest rates approaching zero, IOLTA funding has dried up, and many states are in such bad financial shape that they can’t (or won’t) appropriate money from their general fund to make up the difference. So there’s lots of talk about legal aid lawyers being laid off and offices closing— at a time when demand for free legal services is soaring due to the high unemployment rate, home foreclosures, etc. It’s a big mess. In many legal markets, legal aid jobs were already very difficult to get. Competition for the remaining jobs will be that much more fierce.</p>