<p>I wholeheartedly agree that one should consider the source of all advice-especially when that advice comes from someone who is full of opinions but has zero facts to back those opinions. I’m still waiting, patiently, for a factual rebuttal to how dismal the job market is for the average law grad. The service practicing lawyers owe those who are considering entering the field is an honest factual appraisal of the market.</p>
<p>You’re missing the point Cranky. I am not saying the job market is not dismal for the great majority of law graduates. I am saying that a person who chooses to go out on his own can likely do well if he works smart and hard and if he becomes good in trial law. That’s where the money is, and if you can be effective in a Courtroom, you WILL get cases and will make a nice living.</p>
<p>^
or he can go out to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. </p>
<p>BTW, Would you be more specific as to what you define as a “nice living”?</p>
<p>That’s a lot of ifs, particularly when you’re recommending that a debt saddled new lawyer take on the expense-and enormous risk-of starting his or her own practice.</p>
<p>The expense can be managed and there is no enormous risk unless giving a job to go out on your own. For many lawyers without jobs, there is no risk, other than not making it.</p>
<p>Just a couple of questions for you guys regarding the current discussion of going out on one’s own in law (esp. trial law). </p>
<p>i.) How much start-up costs does a lawyer have in those cases? </p>
<p>ii.) How will that lawyer know how to practice? </p>
<p>iii.) What is the failure/success rate of people doing this? (I know in small business it’s something like 85% of all small businesses fail in the U.S.)</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>Well in my opinion a Lawyer should atleast work for somebody else to figure out how to practice. Barring that, there are online courses, seminars, and my opinion for learning trial law is to watch trial from the best lawyers. There are also lots of lawyer groups to join, like Inns of Court to figure out how to do things.</p>
<p>Going out on your own is relatively cheap. You can gain access to a law library, online for free in Florida or for a relatively small amount with a company like Loislaw. </p>
<p>Other than that, you can rent office space for use only when you are going to meet with clients and work out of your home until you can build up your business.</p>
<p>The ability to make it depends on how much time it takes to get your own cases, but I think if you help other lawyers with their cases and get known, the cases will start coming in.</p>
<p>And there is always advertising to get work, both yellow pages and online. This can be surprisingly successful depending on how much time, effort and sometimes money you put into your add campaign</p>
<p>I would also look into the various courses or books they have on networking and getting your name out there to build up a practice.</p>
<p>David offers many, many opinions without the complications of any evidence whatsoever to back up his opinions. Bottom line: per the The Wall Street Journal, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US is graduating 44,000 new JDs every year, and creating 21,400 JD required jobs per year. Do you want to enter a field where less than one half of the graduates obtain jobs that require the 150K degree they just got?
That’s on top of any undergraduate debt.
Regarding failure percentages for small law firms and costs, there are no verifiable statistics. But read the companion thread on the law section of CC about law schools hiring their own graduates. In my day this was unheard of-it never happened. And now schools such as ND, with a national reputation, hire over 20% of its graduating lawyers. Why? There is no other answer: to puff up their employment stats for the US News rankings. Take a long look at that list-it goes a long way to clarifying how terrible the market is for newly minted JDs.
So if you want to go to law school, go-but only go if you want to be a lawyer; get good grades and a good LSAT score. That will give you options. But let’s not kid anybody. Going to any but the top schools(and I didn’t go to a top school, that’s just today’s reality) will mean that obtaining employment will be a challenge-one that can be met, but it will be a challenge.<br>
And don’t trust our opinions; get the facts. Start with law school transparency and the scamblogs and decide for yourself.</p>
<p>Ok, I have another question about biglaw re: partners. 
</p>
<p>How much power does a single partner in biglaw have? I know some firms have over 100 partners. I’ve read that in some firms the partners don’t even know each other (not everyone I mean). </p>
<p>How does “control” and decision-making take place in biglaw? </p>
<p>Very curious about this and thanks again everyone!!</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?src=me&ref=general[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html?src=me&ref=general</a>
</p>
<p>Hi everyone,</p>
<p>I actually just saw this in the NYT today. Check it out on the benefits of sleep towards work and other types of performance: </p>
<hr>
<p>"Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance. In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity. </p>
<p>The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent. </p>
<p>Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time. </p>
<p>Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.</p>
<h2>MORE vacations are similarly beneficial. In 2006, the accounting firm Ernst & Young did an internal study of its employees and found that for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings from supervisors (on a scale of one to five) improved by 8 percent. Frequent vacationers were also significantly less likely to leave the firm. …" </h2>
<p>I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately actually. I have lots of thoughts about biglaw swirling around in my head from this thread.</p>
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<p>Yay! I’m back! 
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<p>I think what I meant by inefficient is that the biglaw workers don’t work optimally and produce X amt. of work for Y energy spent. </p>
<p>I read a lot of literature on becoming a top performer at something and there is no literature or science that would support the way biglaw treats associates (in terms of producing top-notch performance/work). Loss of sleep, using monetary rewards as the primary underlying motivator/incentive for performance enhancement, a sacrificing of family/relaxation time, etc. all have deleterious effects on work. </p>
<p>I think biglaw may be “efficient” in creating a system in which great rewards go to the people at the top - the partners. But it comes at an expense (probably to everyone at some level). </p>
<p>I read that whole article by P. Schiltz. But I also read everyone’s comments here too and have read and researched a lot since I first started coming here, so I think I have a reasonable sense of what biglaw may be like even though I’m not working in it. lol</p>
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<p>That’s the thing!..there’s a difference between working hard and to the brink or even passing over to the point of your own health endangerment b/c you absolutely have to vs. doing it because you want to squeeze out a little extra money (greed, in my opinion). </p>
<p>I’m not saying everyone’s intentions in biglaw are motivated by greed, but that the system in place, at least, reallllly seems like it is based on that value assumption. Biglaw’s model still seems kind of crazy to me. You don’t have to sacrifice so much and work 80-100 hours/week for survival purposes (to say nothing about whether or not that type of work schedule actually produces the highest level of performance in people). It’s done because of wanting to generate greater profit beyond both survival and reasonable comfort and security needs.</p>
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<p>Hi unbelievable,</p>
<p>This is interesting…Would that at all be considered cheating the client though? If the biglaw partners know that they had completed an assignment or part of it before the due date and refused to turn it in and stop billing, would that be possibly considered defrauding the client? </p>
<p>I hope I’m not misunderstanding!!! Many apologies if I am! 
</p>
<p>Just sounded a bit odd to me the way you phrased that.</p>
<p>Billing isn’t done on a per-day basis, but rather on a per-hour-actually-spent-working basis. Defrauding a client would only occur in a situation where an attorney claimed to be physically working on a case (or a document or a filing) but was actually doing something else.</p>
<p>Billable hours at a firm are self-reported, but you’re expected to keep VERY detailed logs, generally billed in six-minute increments. “I was on the phone with a partner discussing this case from 10:12 to 10:22. Then I began writing an email to the client on this subject from 10:23 to 10:30. Then I began actually drafting a memorandum, from 10:33 to 12:26, which required using an online database from 11:15-11:26.”</p>
<p>What you’re suggesting is a pretty basic principal-agent problem. This is where the lawyer keeps working on a product to make it EVEN BETTER when quite frankly it’s good enough already. It’s not defrauding the client, because you still are working on it for them, but society would probably be better off if it didn’t happen.</p>
<p>(Real estate, in which the agent is paid based on the number of deals he/she closes, experiences the same problem in the opposite way: agents might tell the buyer it’s good enough when actually they should wait for something better.)</p>
<p>Anyway, occasionally clients will specify that they wish for no more than $X to be spent on a project. The difficulty is that these things are typically pretty hard to predict in advance, so their estimates will often prove to be too high or too low.</p>
<p>As inhouse counsel, we have a lot of ways of controlling fees and costs from trying to negotiate limits or fixed fees, contingency fees, restricting assignment of staff to our matters without preapproval, getting discounts, demanding the use of particular external support services with which we’ve negotiated other rates or discounts, using cheaper co-counsel and separating work, having firms compete for projects, shared risk (return of fee if a project is not successful), etc. </p>
<p>Fee management has been going on ever since the first client hired the first lawyer, on both sides of the invoice.</p>
<p>Something else to keep in mind is that we don’t just get a bill for $1M and pay it without looking at it. At least for every company that I’ve worked for, legal invoices are required to be itemized. They are reviewed by the inhouse attorney managing a matter, who is always an experienced person who has his/her own view of how much time something should have taken. Getting an invoice is often another step in the dialogue. We will raise inefficiency (refusing to pay or demanding someone be taken off our files if we feel timesheets are padded). We’re accountable internally for managing legal expenses. </p>
<p>Law is a service business. We all know it.</p>
<p>brownug – its not at all defrauding the client – its trying to do the best possible job possible. its not a matter of running up the bill just for the sake of running up the bill – its a matter of striving for perfection in the end product. </p>
<p>you say - “If the biglaw partners know that they had completed an assignment or part of it before the due date and refused to turn it in and stop billing” – but the point isn’t that they feel its complete and keep going – the point is that they DON’T consider it complete if there is more time available to make it more perfect!! </p>
<p>i’m not saying this is true of everything - if an associate is asked to research a point of law and turns in a memo on the subject, a partner may or may not ask for follow up work depending on how thorough the memo is or if there are other questions he/she has thought of. but especially, if it involves an important court or government filing, often (at least in my personal experience) a partner just had trouble believing the item was as good as it could be if there was more time available to perfect it. </p>
<p>i will say that my experience was many years ago - i don’t know if economic times and the increased cost sensitivity of clients has changed this. but from my experience, partners got to be where they were because they were perfectionists and willing to put in enormous hours – saying, “ok, that’s enough” was just really hard for them.</p>
<p>and remember also the other point of my comment – even if you can get something done early – in my experience, it just meant you were available to take on some other work. there was never really a sense that you had “finished” your share of the work for the week and could kick back.</p>
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<p>I think it has more to do with busy people procrastinating. It doesn’t matter if the associate gets his/her part of the assignment to the partner in charge weeks before the deadline. There is nothing that associate can do to make that partner look at it prior to the weekend before it is due. Part of my job involves reading many, many documents prepared at the top firms in the country. Perfection is not the word that comes to mind when I read them.</p>
<p>Brownug – its not at all defrauding the client – its trying to do the best possible job possible. its not a matter of running up the bill just for the sake of running up the bill – its a matter of striving for perfection in the end product. </p>
<p>When I worked for a large firm years and years ago, I used to be amused by the fact that some lawyers only worked eight hours a day and never on weekends and still managed to bill more than 300 hours per month. The partners of course closed their eyes to this practice. With all of the pressure to bill, creative billing became a byword, and billing two clients for the same research project was not at all unusual. I came to the conclusion that many timesheets were potential Rico actions. Of course the clients understood what was going on, and I suppose tolerated it as a cost of doing business.</p>
<p>As for research, years ago, sending a clerk to the stacks was necessary. He would drag out the digest and case after case, shepardizing each one until he would come up with a point of law that his partner already should have known. By the time a partner is a partner, he should have a level of expertise where he knows the law cold in his specialty. He should be able to get on his computer, look up Westlaw, Lexus or Lois Law and have the latest significant case in a nanosecond. Assigning a project to a clerk today is just a waste of the clients money since the Partner should be able to far more easily do the research.</p>
<p>When it comes to all of these briefs etc., the bottom line is that in State Court, many of the Judges dont bother reading them anyway before a hearing and in Federal Court, it is usually the Judicial Clerk reading the brief and advising the Judge as to the facts. They dont care about perfection. They care about efficiency, getting to the point, so they can make a decision in a timely manner. Perfection simply means time consuming projects to keep the staff busy and billing. Are there very complicated matters such as patent disputes, tax issues, mergers and acquisitions? sure. But I suspect that the majority of what the Judges review is mundane, standardized stuff over and over and over again.</p>
<p>Must admit, reading online the blogs dedicated to Law School being a scam for the great majority of students these days, I might think twice about going to law school myself were I re doing this. If these sites are even half way accurate, there are a lot of hurting law graduates out there. Add those to the poor, miserable, exploited graduates toiling away in big law, maybe its not such a great deal after all.</p>
<p>davidg, you should come and meet the temp attorneys warehoused in the basement of the Manhattan high-rise where I work. Some of them make as little as $20 per hour with no benefits, no future, no respect, working in a dank, cluttered, filthy basement with many others just like them. And are grateful for it because at least it’s something.</p>
<p>I am jumping into this thread quite late but I feel I need to provide some support to davidg’s position regarding the opportunity in law for entrepreneurially oriented individuals.</p>
<p>I can’t comment on the pros and cons of BigLaw but I can comment on starting up your own law practice from scratch, especially in a very difficult economy. Unlike david, I didn’t even have the benefit of working for another firm to learn the ropes. I just went out and did it. </p>
<p>I have disagreed on that point before with several posters on these boards, but I don’t believe that attending a top law school is especially important to your ultimate success as a lawyer. Drive, motivation, marketing skills, competence, legal expertise are far more important. I actually went to law school at night at UConn, the CT state flagship law school, which I was amused to find showing up on one of these “every law school outside of the Top 10 is a toilet” blog. As a state resident, tuition was very manageable even if it took me 4 years to get my degree. Frankly, with hardly any Yale grads practicing in Connecticut, I found the local legal scene pretty much dominated by UConn grads. I am still in touch with a number of my former classmates and most are gainfully employed in the legal field and doing just fine, a number even doing great. </p>
<p>Now looking back, I am not sure why I even went back to law school, in my mid-40s. Half my law school class was about the same age as my eldest daughter! I was trained as an engineer and had started several high tech companies, blowing through a lot of VC money along the way. Several companies I had started came close to hitting the jackpot but somehow the timing was never right! In 2004, I was running a medical business part-time and had some extra time while I was waiting for the venture capital industry to start doing deals again. So why not go to law school! I thought a law degree could be helpful if I needed to repackage myself as a business or IP consultant. I graduated from law school at the peak of the financial crisis in 2009. I never even considered BigLaw or joining any law practice for that matter. I was completely incapable of keeping track of time, and never like that business model anyway. I had not worked for anybody else in 30 years and never even written a resume. I considered getting into business or IP litigation but felt the outcome was often too unpredictable. I knew everything there was to know about tech startups, so I decided I would get into corporate law advising small tech companies.</p>
<p>I opened my law practice the day after I was admitted to the CT bar and had my first client the next week. They clearly needed my services, and everything they were going through I had gone through many times before. The problem was it had no money to pay me! No problem! If I knew one thing, that was how to write business plans and sell them to venture capitalists. The great thing about attorneys is that they can be paid with equity, so I would get a piece of the company for getting the company started and raising money and a retainer once I had funding in place. In effect, I cost the company nothing as I was bringing in the money that would pay me. Within 90 days I had a steady revenue stream and that first company is still paying me a flat monthly retainer three years later. Six months after starting I passed the patent bar and turned the practice into a pure IP practice. I had obtained some patents myself in the past and found most patent lawyers quite limited in the services. They were fine with basic patent filing and prosecution but very poor at setting up a real IP strategy that a small company could leverage in the marketplace. With my background, I felt I could bring an entirely different dimension to the practice. </p>
<p>Fast forward three years, I now have over ten clients, an equity stake in most of them, a book of business in the mid six figures with virtually zero overhead. I only do retainer work, no billing by the hour. I am hiring another patent attorney, also a former scientist, as I just have way more business than I can handle. Competition is very limited as patent work is extremely technical. BigLaw is not even a player in the field and I am of-Counsel to several mid-size law firms who outsource their IP business to me. They often hire me to write non-infringement or FTO legal opinions, as a company they represent is being threatened by some competitor. It is very specialized work and they simply can’t or won’t take the risk themselves, so they outsource it to me. If you know what you are doing it is very profitable work. I had to get a massive malpractice insurance policy as a screw-up on a patent infringement opinion can cost companies millions. </p>
<p>I don’t know how helpful my own experience can be to a future lawyer who wants to get out on his own. While it is true that I brought 30 years of prior business experience to my practice, I had no prior legal experience and fairly easily found a niche where I could be successful, to the point I have no interest in going to my prior life of starting my own companies. Now I can instead help others avoid the mistakes I made 30 years ago. And frankly, it is exhilarating working with other entrepreneurs and adding value to their businesses (and potentially sharing in the upside). Had I just been a consultant to these companies, I could never have delivered the full range of services I now provide them. The legal practice provides me with a licensed and recognized framework to deliver the services. Patent law is not the only area where small or even solo-practitioners can compete with or even outperform large firms; business litigation, IP litigation, tax practice, banking law, private placements, estate planning, bankruptcy, international transactions, athlete and performer agency are only some of the specialties where small is often better.</p>