ABA Journal

Solutions, right.  Expressed in this instance in parts of gin to parts vermouth.

By B. McLeod on 2012 07 18, 7:15 am CDT

Solutions: more clients, fewer lawyers, fewer law schools, more jobs in the USA in all other fields.  Meeting adjourned.

By Lee on 2012 07 18, 9:44 am CDT

The report of the task force should be easy to write:

1. Reason for poor decling job market for law grads: Too many graduates, too few jobs.

2. Solutions: Go into an entirely different line of work.

By Yankee on 2012 07 18, 2:37 pm CDT

Yet another committee composed of only attorneys with no client or advocate representation.  How can they hope to analyze a “problem” if they’re only looking at it from one angle?  :)

If these lawyers looked at this from “outside the box”, they’d see that this is indeed a long-term situation.  Just like the Arab nations, the legal world has changed - permanently.  The explosion of the internet and social media has enabled smarter litigants and clients who have quickly learned that most legal work is merely “paper shuffling” and motion filings are nothing more than a “find and replace” Word document exercise (take a similar case, white out the prior client’s name, and replace with the current client’s).  There is now a proliferation of Pro Se litigant groups who share their case info and reuse it for their own filings (just like their lawyers would have done, except at several hundred dollars an hour).  Many Pro Se litigants have achieved considerable success, even at appellate levels, and have changed law - such litigants are more than willing to share their knowledge with others facing similar battles.  For those who fear going solo, there’s always CraigsList where an unemployed law school grad, or a disgruntled associate, can earn extra money.  And who needs to pay a lawyer to do legal research on Lexis any more when Google Scholar will give you the same citations (along with full copies of the decisions to annex to your filing) for free?

In the current economy, businesses are unwilling to pay exorbitant law firm rates and are now demanding line-by-line audits of the legal bills.  Internal auditors love such audits because they inevitably uncover undocumented and unsupported expenses, incorrect time-reporting, sloppy and incomplete work descriptions, and other elementary accounting and operational errors (legal bills are easy prey for a financial whiz).

The bottom line:  clients are smart and they now have an easy way to educate each other.  The legal profession is behind the times by at least two decades.  Our courts need to embrace technology, including the use of electronic conferences - why should a client have to take a day off from work to sit around a courthouse all day for a lousy 10 minute hearing when they could simply stay at work and sign on to Skpye instead?  Why should a spouse have to wait months for discovery hearings and filings when seven years of financial information can be downloaded from a bank/investment firm/insurance company in minutes?  Why must a client pay for nine copies of a case file to be manually delivered to the appellate courts when the file could just as easily be PDF’d and electronically transmitted in one click?  Heck, some courts and lawyers still use Word Perfect - no one in business has used that program since the 1980’s!  The entire system needs an overhaul - the students are being trained for a profession that is out of touch.

By NYS court ex wife on 2012 07 21, 8:16 am CDT