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Lawyers out of law school have a pretty hard time practicing on their own. A lot of these broke lawyers never get a substantive job and never really become lawy

Lawyers out of law school have a pretty hard time practicing on their own. A lot of these broke lawyers never get a substantive job and never really become lawyers. You can hire these people but you need someone to manage and train them. You need an expert. The cheaper fields of law pretty much do that. Personal injury, traffic and dui, immigration, insurance defense etc. will take broke lawyers and pay them shit. They bill out at ~200 dollars an hour, but don't collect anywhere near 40 hours a week. The associates are getting paid in the 50k a year range. There are good reasons most companies don't try to do litigation in house. Litigation comes and goes and isn't steady. I'm defending a medium sized company on a patent case. But they have a patent case maybe 2-3 times a decade. During certain parts of the case we'll need 2-3 associates working full time. But a year ago they had no need for even one patent litigator. Plus certain parts of the case are hard to handle with in house lawyers. They might be forbidden to see certain confidential documents. Another big difference is that law is specialized. A guy who does DUI defense doesn't have the slightest idea how to do a patent troll case. And a patent lawyer can't do a DUI case. Once you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore.

chii 10y ago
> you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore. so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.
- ajkjk 10y ago
  That's pretty common. Doctors don't really learn to be doctors in any sort of independent way until after their residencies. Certainly not from med school alone. And I can attest that as an entry-level engineer with a CS degree, I was a totally useless person to assign a project to. It was several years before I could be handed something and expect to do it well at an enterprise level.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- punctilio 10y ago
  That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice. I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).
- rhino369 10y ago
  Sure. Most degrees don't give you pratical skills, but law is particularly egregious. Law schools go almost out of their way to teach impractical stuff. The only writing class usually teaches appellate writing. Total joke.

chii 10y ago

> you gain that experience you aren't a broke lawyer anymore. so basically you're saying they are broke because their education isn't actually adequate for the sort of work they would be undertaking.

ajkjk 10y ago
That's pretty common. Doctors don't really learn to be doctors in any sort of independent way until after their residencies. Certainly not from med school alone. And I can attest that as an entry-level engineer with a CS degree, I was a totally useless person to assign a project to. It was several years before I could be handed something and expect to do it well at an enterprise level.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
punctilio 10y ago
That's essentially right. Law schools have generally not focused on providing any sort of training for the actual practice of law. The model of education established by the elite law schools and imitated to a large extent by most of the non-elite ones is focused on teaching how to "think like a lawyer", which is probably better seen as how to think like an appellate judge. The elite law schools for the most part offer little in the way of practical training. Some schools have electives, taught generally by adjuncts or lower-status "clinical" professors, that are aimed more at practical skills, though these tend to focus on aspects of litigation or administrative practice rather than various sorts of other areas of legal practice. I don't think things are too different as you get to the less elite law schools, though some of them may attempt to prepare students to pass the local state bar exam. One reason for this is that even at the lower tier faculty tend to be drawn from the top graduates of the top schools, who excelled in the traditional program of elite legal education and thus are disinclined to see anything questionable about it (I suspect).
rhino369 10y ago
Sure. Most degrees don't give you pratical skills, but law is particularly egregious. Law schools go almost out of their way to teach impractical stuff. The only writing class usually teaches appellate writing. Total joke.