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You know, I actually think we do. I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think about it - there's a huge number of unemployed

by geebee 13y ago

You know, I actually think we do. I understand your response (there are so many law school graduates), but think about it - there's a huge number of unemployed or underemployed lawyers, legal costs remain sky-high, and most Americans can't afford a lawyer for very basic needs. We force all lawyers to graduate from college without acquiring any particular background that is strictly necessary for the study of law, then force them to go through three years of very expensive graduate school, and in spite of that, many of them are almost completely incapable of practicing law or even finding reasonable employment when they graduate. It's a 7 year education path that results in an unemployable person while a substantial need for affordable services goes unmet.

rayiner 13y ago
It's a strange market, but it makes sense if you consider two points, neither of which is really related to education: 1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord-tenant dispute is slightly different. 2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers (this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers). Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals with the desired experience. The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law: http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-spring-semester http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-....
- geebee 13y ago
  I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense at the upper level. My guess is that eliminating the requirement of a 3 year law degree at the state bar level would have almost no effect on yale law school graduates. Your analogy to management consulting is an apt one - genuinely (top 3) elite MBA programs aren't legally required for anything, but they are in demand. That said, I think you could knock that third year off yale law school with no discernible loss of quality, and in the absence of a government-enforced 7 year educational requirements, I do think that you would see the emergence of a tier of very elite lawyers who haven't done the 3 year JD as well. Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale. We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases, drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate person who can research things for them without getting threatened with charges of "practicing law without a license". I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in (I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less (then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it). I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her 4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep offering these services).
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I would support letting anyone with a college degree take the bar exam. That said, I don't think it would make a big impact. At the low end, the sporadic nature of legal work makes it difficult to charge much less than lawyers already do. If you're doing divorces, child custody, DUI, etc, it's very hard to fill 40 billable hours a week because any given matter is so small. You spend most of your time just finding work or waiting for work. If your utilization is 50%, then a billable rate of $50 per hour translates to probably $20 per hour worked when accounting for overhead, or less than you can make working at Costco. If your utilization is 35%, you have to charge $100 per hour to beat working at Costco. To make this work,bayou have to drive volume, taking on very large numbers of cases and closing them quickly, which requires expensive advertising. At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices. Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000 new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the ranks of experienced lawyers.

by geebee 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

It's a strange market, but it makes sense if you consider two points, neither of which is really related to education: 1) Legal services is a product that's hard to mass produce because each job is idiosyncratic. Plumbers and mechanics, jobs which have similar characteristics, charge $80-100/hour. Nearly everyone fits in one of a dozen sizes of shoe that can be cheaply manufactured in China, but every landlord-tenant dispute is slightly different. 2) At nearly every level, there is a limited supply of experienced lawyers (this is true for plumbers and mechanics and also consultants and bankers). Compare with management consulting. The field has zero educational or certification requirements, as far as I know, but McKinsey doesn't charge less per hour than a high-end law firm. Corporate clients in particular don't want to hire professionals that don't have prior, real-world experience with corporate matters. There are a limited set of opportunities to work on a real litigation or real merger, and so there is a limited supply of professionals with the desired experience. The educational system can't really remedy either problem. There are schools that put a huge emphasis on clinical, real world education, and yet firms and clients still focus most of their recruiting on schools that offer classes like Ethnoracial Identity in Anthropology Language and Law: http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-spring-semester http://abovethelaw.com/2013/12/6-ivy-league-law-classes-for-....

geebee 13y ago
I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense at the upper level. My guess is that eliminating the requirement of a 3 year law degree at the state bar level would have almost no effect on yale law school graduates. Your analogy to management consulting is an apt one - genuinely (top 3) elite MBA programs aren't legally required for anything, but they are in demand. That said, I think you could knock that third year off yale law school with no discernible loss of quality, and in the absence of a government-enforced 7 year educational requirements, I do think that you would see the emergence of a tier of very elite lawyers who haven't done the 3 year JD as well. Another big question is the effect this has on the lower end of the scale. We're talking about the daily grind of law, divorces, child custody cases, drunk driving charges, and so forth. My guess is that a lot of people dealing with these issues would benefit simply from having access to a highly literate person who can research things for them without getting threatened with charges of "practicing law without a license". I don't think that these needs are well met by requiring someone to major in (I'll go with Obama here) "art history" for four years simply because they have to get a BA before they can go to law school, followed by three years of very expensive graduate education. A much shorter course in law, with perhaps some apprenticing, might yield lawyers who can afford to charge much less (then again, many of these folks have so little money that there really is no difference between $20 an hour and $700 an hour, they can't pay it). I've heard cynics say that state bars are mainly concerned with preventing paralegals from hawking cheap wills in strip malls, providing assistance with immigration forms, that kind of thing. I'll admit I don't really know, I'm not involved in this sort of thing. I read about a case a while back (I really wish I could give you a link, it was an interesting article) where a judge did issue an injunction against a woman who had a law degree from another country who was providing immigration council in texas. The judge went out of his way to mention that her work was of high quality, but she clearly hadn't done her 4 years of art history + three years of JD, so she wasn't allowed to take the bar exam an was ordered to stop (like, you will be imprisoned if you keep offering these services).
- rayiner 13y ago
  I would support letting anyone with a college degree take the bar exam. That said, I don't think it would make a big impact. At the low end, the sporadic nature of legal work makes it difficult to charge much less than lawyers already do. If you're doing divorces, child custody, DUI, etc, it's very hard to fill 40 billable hours a week because any given matter is so small. You spend most of your time just finding work or waiting for work. If your utilization is 50%, then a billable rate of $50 per hour translates to probably $20 per hour worked when accounting for overhead, or less than you can make working at Costco. If your utilization is 35%, you have to charge $100 per hour to beat working at Costco. To make this work,bayou have to drive volume, taking on very large numbers of cases and closing them quickly, which requires expensive advertising. At the high end, I do think you'd see a class of non-JD lawyers, probably MBA's. However, I don't think you'd have larger supply and thus lower prices. Supply is already quite elastic. The Chicago market used to hire about 1,000 new lawyers at large firms per year, and is probably down to 350 today. The elasticity of the supply comes from firms going more or less deeply into the class at the schools from which they hire. If you open the pool up to say MBAs at U Chicago and Northwestern, what happens? The job market becomes more competitive, but supply doesn't change. At the end of the day, there are only so many M&A deals happening in Chicago and only so many lawyers are needed to work on them. Indeed, the trend has been in the opposite direction. Over the last decade, technology and an intervening recession have reduced the need for entry level lawyers to perform say due diligence. However, rates have gone up over the decade and have held steady even after the recession, because the reduction in entry level positions has resulted in a reduced supply in the ranks of experienced lawyers.