This week's contestant was Rutgers Law Dean John Farmer, who has come up with the idea that new lawyers should apprentice after law school, an idea that many have suggested and has some merit along with many problems. In the process, however, Farmer reveals that he has no clue what the problem is.
Consider this: Nearly half of those who graduated from law school in 2011 did not quickly find full-time, long-term work as lawyers.
Quickly? How about not at all. Not long-term. Not short-term. Not slowly. As for the ones who did, how about at salaries that can't carry the debt-load while feeding themselves, no less their families, or terminal positions that run dry when the case is over, or dead-end positions that will never provide a future?
Yet the need for legal representation has never been greater. In New Jersey, where I teach law, 99 percent of the 172,000 defendants in landlord-tenant disputes last year lacked legal counsel.
Might that have something to do with the fact that these are non-payment proceedings, as in they can't afford to pay the rent? And if they can't afford to pay to put a roof over their head, do you think they're reluctant to raid their trust fund to pay for counsel to fight the non-payment proceeding? Or perhaps they can cut the kids down to one meal every three days so that a Rutgers Law grad can get paid?
Nationwide, judges decry not a surplus of lawyers, but a lack of competent representation for those who aren’t rich individuals and corporations.
Judges focus on what comes before them in a courtroom, and it's no surprise that they sit on the front line of people lacking counsel. Law deans, on the other hand, sit in the Ivory Tower and apparently don't see much of anything.
Lawyers cost too much in part because of rates established during the economic bubbles of the past 15 years. No less than in the dot-com or real-estate or derivatives markets, the cost of legal services became unsustainable.
Ignoring the wiggly caveat, in part, the choice of highlighting "rates established during the economic bubbles" is Dean Farmer's way of saying that law is Biglaw. The lawyers who represent tenants in Landlord-Tenant court didn't set rates based on the real-estate boom. The rates of lawyers who work for corporations in Biglaw have zero to do with what small firms and solos who represent individuals charge, and never did. It's not that they wouldn't have loved to charge anything remotely approaching Biglaw rates, but that fantasy never happened.
Lawyers cost too much because people can't afford to spend anything remotely close to what a solo lawyer needs to earn to pay for his office, debt and leave a little over to feed the kids. Lawyers cost too much because people's wages are stagnant while the cost of living has skyrocketed. Lawyers cost too much because people are unemployed. Lawyers cost too much because they want to earn a living just like the people who might otherwise retain them.
Except the lawyers have given away three years of opportunity and over $100,000 for the pleasure of being a lawyer, a burden that other people don't necessarily share.
The recession worsened, but did not cause, the predicament now: a mountain of student debt and dearth of legal jobs, even as there is a crying need for legal services.
Why yes. How nice of you to notice.
That disconnect relates to how lawyers are hired. Big firms have been hiring a few graduates from a few select schools, and paying them exorbitantly.
This is where Dean Farmer's motives reveal themselves. While the vast majority of law school graduates never saw the inside of Biglaw, he wants to get his Rutgers Law grads a chance to cross the East Hudson River.
Let’s scrap this system. We need, at its entry level, the equivalent of a medical residency. Law school graduates would practice for two years or so, under experienced supervision, at reduced hourly rates; repaying their debts could be suspended, as it is for medical residents.
Gee whiz! So who would be the teaching hospitals for law grads, where they could be taken under wing "at reduced hourly rates"?
Law firms would be able to hire more lawyers, at the lower rates, and give talented graduates of less prestigious institutions a chance to shine. The firms, at the end of the residencies, could then select whom to keep. Even for those who don’t make the cut, the residency will have provided valuable experience. The law firms should be required, under this proposal, to offer stipends to help those residents who don’t make the cut but have debt burdens.
Less prestigious institutions? Like, oh, I dunno, Rutgers? And these firms, because they're rolling Dewey dough, would be essentially nationalized for the benefit of law students, even to the point of providing a stipend to further support the debt incurred by law school tuition?
Every form of legal practice could benefit, not just pro bono work. The largest firms would use the legal residents on large institutional matters and use the savings to lower hourly rates for clients. Large and small firms could afford to serve people who can’t afford legal services but don’t qualify for pro bono aid: the middle class.
Well, that would certainly benefit those poor, maligned large institutions who are suffering foreclosure and eviction. Oh wait. And large and small firms, well really small firms because large firms don't tend to represent tenants facing eviction very much, should be part of this scheme, obliged to take in your debt-burdened students "at reduced hourly rates," spend their days teaching and supervising them, dealing with the mess they leave behind, the personnel issues, the cost of real estate to warehouse these younguns, and when they don't hire them on a partnership track, pay them a severance?
And this does what for the 172,000 tenants who can't pay the rent?
In fairness to good Dean Farmer, I can't blame him for trying to get his grads into jobs, even if he's compelled to write an op-ed in the New York Times as utterly inane and bizarrely unrealistic as this. Maybe he's not being disingenuous, but really has no clue what it costs to survive, as a lawyer or as a human being on the bottom rung of over-educated society. Small firm economics may not be his strength, and chances are pretty good that he's never spent time with poor people in need of legal representation.
What compels this dissection is that the legal profession is near implosion, and yet the New York Times gives space to such nonsensical approaches as this, as the academy perpetuates self-serving solutions that seek to shift the problem onto practicing lawyers so that they can offer the promise of a financially rewarding career to their students without addressing the growth of tuition they charge and the debt their students take on. Law schools want lawyers to shoulder the cost so they can continue to charge with abandon.
But what is really insulting is the attempt to justify this by publicly suggesting to the unwary that it will provide legal services to those who can't afford a lawyer. Putting aside the giving them lawyers who don't know their ass from the elbow, the premise is false to begin with. Biglaw doesn't represent indigent tenants or mom and pop start-up businesses. They don't do simple wills for new parents. Give Biglaw 1000 baby lawyers and they may have document review nailed down, but nothing else.
But as law schools continue to churn out tens of thousands of grads every year, there aren't enough desks in Biglaw hallways to subsume these grads. Where would they go? How many solos have an extra desk in their office, time to spend overseeing a n00b who is thrown into the deep end, and the extra money to finance his law school mistake.
This is why we can't have nice things, but that doesn't stop the Times from giving space to law deans who will write anything to protect their turf. Are lawyers ready to get involved in this discussion, or would you rather find out about the new rule requiring you to take on baby lawyers at your expense? Because you don't have enough problems already? Hope your malpractice is paid up and your kids don't need dinner every night.
So if Dean Farmer really wants to play the Apprentice, then I'm going to play Trump. You're fired.
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