Whitman boys.

A COUPLE OF OBSERVATIONS. First of all, as I was voluntarily leaving my old firm I got used to explaining my decision to people, including with reference to (you know, David Foster Wallce actually abbreviates that phrase “w/r/t” in his fiction?) my frustrations with the legal profession. Most of those have to do with economics, and the economic problems resulting as the economy changes around the unchanging practice of law. In other words, my problems did not and do not lie with the practice of law, but with the business of law. It has helped crystallize some of my talking points on this issue that we’ve recently hired a new legal assistant who actually has as her goal attending law school and being a lawyer. “Bad idea,” we tell her. But why? Well, take just two reasons:

1. Law school is a debt trap. I, like a good percentage of lawyers in Portland, went to the local law school. I went in with no undergraduate debt, and though during school I worked for money far more than most full-time students, I came out $80k in debt. My alma mater also has one of the best environmental law programs in the country, so a lot of my classmates went in thinking that they would emerge three years later with shiny happy JD degrees that would enable them to save the world for the Sierra Club. Not only were they dismayed to find (a) that the e-law program was really tough, they learned (b) that the Sierra Club isn’t hiring, sorry, thanks for playing. So, the position in which a huge number of my previously-altruistic classmates were left was wanting to save the world, but being unable to afford to do so. This is another play on the “there’s a lot of things you can do with a law degree besides practice law” meme. Sure, having a JD opens a lot of doors–low-paying doors. If you can’t service your student loan debt on your public-interest salary, you find yourself tossed into competition for those long-hours billable-slave corporate firm jobs that you swore to yourself you would never take. And then you take one of those jobs, swearing that it’ll only be for a couple of years while you get out from under Sallie Mae, and then ten years later you’ve just made partner, one kid is starting kindergarten and the other is waitlisted at the best preschool, and the thought of sending your resume back to the Sierra Club just doesn’t seem realistic, and besides, you give a couple of hundred bucks a year, which you then itemize as a deduction along with your mortgage interest. Congratulations–you and your s/o are now officially your parents.
1.b. This is all the more frustrating because as soon as you get your first “real law job,” whether that is clerking at a firm during law school, working for a judge, or (god forbid) practicing law after passing the bar exam, you find that what you learned in law school has exactly zero to do with solving the problems that people bring to you. Brooks is fond of saying the law school should be a year-and-a-half trade school rather than a three-year indenture to the Socratic method. He’s probably right. The masochistic introverts (not you, Jack) who want to be academics could then do pedantic L.LM. postgraduate studies.

2. Law firms are a rip-off. This goes back to the economy changing around the profession of law. Law is a very traditional profession–overly so. It prevents the practice from changing along with what is more and more a streamlined, more bang-for-your-buck service economy. Older lawyers are fond of calling law a “calling” and repeating that the attorney-client relationship is a fiduciary one–a bond of trust between lawyer and client. With all due respect, that’s bullshit. Most lawyers feel that way, because we take our ethical obligations seriously, but clients do not. Clients understand that ours is a service profession. They hire lawyers not because they want to, but because they have to–they need a helping hand to get through the Byzantine trap that is the legal system. This applies especially to litigators like me. No one comes to me happy they have been sued, or pleased as punch that they finally get to sue someone. A lawyer is just an unpleasant necessity, a (usually unforeseen) cost of doing business that takes away from the bottom line.
2.a. All this is exacerbated by the fact that law firms, by and large, operate more or less the way they did ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. For example, very few lawyers over the age of 45 do their own typing. My old firm had between eight and ten lawyers at any one time and ten to fifteen support staff. Most of those support staff were not billing units–that is, the cost of those support staffers had to be contained within the lawyers’ billings to the clients. This is not a recipe for efficiency. For example, 90% of my use of support staff time at the old firm could have been eliminated if they had just put a $350 laser printer by my desk. But instead, even if I composed a letter myself on ye olde word processor, a staffer would have to print it on fancy paper and print an envelope. [I should note at this point that at this new job, I have a printer and am largely self-sufficient, like all the lawyers at the firm. This firm is the exception, which is a big reason I am happy.]
2.c. Another way technology is changing the practice is the way research is performed. (For all you non-lawyers, here is the basic premise of legal research: the U.S. has a common-law system, which just means that legislator-made statutes cannot be comprehensive–life is too varied for legislators to think of every possible situation in advance and decide what should happen. In a common-law system, the previous decisions of courts are also a form of law, serving to fill in all those gaps where the legislatures have not spoken. Legal research is the process of figuring out your client’s situation and how courts have treated similar situations in the past.) All law students spend their first year of law school researching “the old-fashioned way”–in dusty books with arcane cross-referencing systems. But with the present ubiquity of comprehensive, searchable databases of caselaw, the margin between a top-notch legal researcher and a bottom-feeder has closed by a few standard deviations. The difference in price between a big fancy law firm and a more modest, competent law firm has not closed to reflect this narrowing of the competence gap.
2.d. Yet another issue is the accoutrements of the practice of law. The collective law firm thinking is that it is somewhere between a mandatory client expectation and a perk that a firm have well-turned-out suites in Class A office space, preferably with nice views. Nothing about my skill set implies this. What does a lawyer require to function? A phone, a fax, a word processor, and a decent Westlaw package. All these things can be provided to a cave, or a storage unit in a backwater suburb. This is the dirty litttle secret of law practice–as soon as clients figure out that lawyers have become closer to fungible, my job will be outsourced to Bangalore. And I guess at that point I’ll have to figure out what to do with that law degree besides practice law.

POST FREQUENCY DECREASING. That’s the what, but the why? I’m not quite at the level of Linda yet, but with seven and then ten days between posts, a pattern emerges.

It has a lot to do with being busy. Uber-sweetie Trina has kept me cracking on home projects, including the not-yet-blogged bamboo floors. And the new job is engrossing. It is what I had hoped–more time to spend on individual cases, with somewhat less of the client cost-sensitivity that once led me to habitually undercut the time I spent on hourly cases. So I spend more time at work working, and less surfing, with the result that I have less to tell the world about. Plus I work with Brooks, so an intercom call or trip to Coffee Plant is a quick venting opportunity with no carpal tunnel risk. And it turns out that employer Jim is a hugely entertaining guy–today we closed the workday with a 45-minute talk about the evolution from hoplite-based infantry warfare to the use of long pikes in ancient Greece. It turns out that my office contains an unlikely concentration of history (classical) BA degrees. In other words, this is good.

And I’m thoroughly dispirited by the election results, so I don’t even want to think about politics.

Then there’s Halo 2, which Brooks already beat. It clamors for my time, and the clamor is driving Trina nuts. The sound effects (mainly gunfire of various ilks and lots of alien death rattles) are such that I pretty much ahve to wait for her to leave the house to play. It’s bad enough that I’m contemplating starting to play World of Warcraft just to give Treen a break from the sweet whine of the beam rifle. I don’t think she understands what that would imply, though.

Floor pics coming soon.

RIGHTO. So I haven’t been blogging. My last few days of no-employment “vacation” were rush as I stuggled to get the bamboo floors finished in our upstairs–I took pictures and will do a bamboo floors-only post later. And now I have completed my first week of work at The New Law Firm, and it is cool, the more so because I get to work with Brooks, whom some of you know. I didn’t blog last week becasue our evenings were consumed with events associated with uber-sweetie Trina’s Green Building conference. These were must-attend soirees because Trina was a VIP on the Entertainment Microcommittee of the Hosting Subcommittee of the Steering Commiittee, which just means that she got to hire the entertainment for the big bash on the conference’s penultimate night. (She hired Do Jump and 3 Leg Torso–a wild success.)

I got Halo 2 on the night it came out (worth a post in its own right) but didn’t even get to play it until yesterday. Anyway, here’s a blood-spattered chainsaw controller for the Gamecube.