I. PREPARATORY WORK
To prepare the class, prior to the first day of classes:
A. Assign all class members to five to six person study groups.
[If study groups have already been assigned to the students, assign different ones for this class.]
Study groups:
B. Syllabus, Textbooks.
Encourage each study group to each have one class member buy one text and to share the text with the other members (that way instead of each student buying all six texts, four or five will buy one each and at most one student will buy two -- saving money and practicing sharing resources).
The proposed textbooks are:
C. Syllabus, Essays (photocopies).
The Syllabus should contain the following essays:
II. SUBSTANTIVE LESSONS, NON-LAW
Weeks 1-2
A. Time Management (cf Making Partner, review the chapter on time management, lead discussion on the time requirements of different legal alternatives -- also refer to Changing Jobs and the descriptions there of time requirements of different alternatives).
B. Task Management (how to organize and do work).
C. Group Politics (how a group works, how to avoid trouble). Half of success in a job is avoiding trouble from political matters.
D. Individual Politics (verbal violence, career advancement, cf Elgin and Making Partner).
E. Survival (cf Selected Essays).
III. CHOICES
Week 3
A. Small office practice/solo practice.
--what it is, why so many lawyers are in it (they had no choice, it was their choice).
--when, not if. 95% of you (which really means all of you) will be in a small office or solo practice at some point.
--boutiques -- small offices by choice. (Consider if your firm's overhead is 60% of billables and it bills $240 an hour.
--hybrid practices (law & something else).
Consider these points:
If your litigation group leaves and has a new 20% overhead with the dead weight pruned out, how much can you drop your hourly rate and still have the same net income?
What if you no longer transfer some of the money to partners? If you've been a senior litigation associate doing insurance defense for the same adjusters/company for the last ten years, who will they hire? The old firm at $240 an hour or you -- their real lawyer the last ten years -- at $120 an hour. When layoffs are coming and senior associates find themselves targeted, what choices do you have? Run the numbers.
Consider alternatives as well.
B. Civil Service.
Legal (prosecutor, legal service corporation, etc.).
Non-Legal (diplomatic corps, INS, Forest Service, etc.).
Many civil service programs acknowledge that legal training provides employees with a definite edge. Many law schools will have one or two students a year who have no intention of practicing law, but who want the benefits of a legal education in their civil service career. Further, many civil service jobs have rigid point systems and tests that determine who is hired and who is promoted -- and a doctorate is a definite plus rather than a minus.
C. Traditional Firms. As a lawyer. As a paralegal ($35,000.00/year).
Many paralegals make more than the average lawyer. Consider if your law degree wouldn't be better hidden behind a paralegal certificate. Case & White might not even have the time to snub you as a lawyer, but they might hire you as a paralegal.
D. Judicial Clerkships as a transition to practice, and as a career.
Staff attorneys or briefing attorneys for many courts are now full-time career track positions paying $40,000.00 a year or better. Pools of staff attorneys serve most federal courts and most state supreme courts.
E. Academics.
This means not only the few law school positions, but teaching at Junior Colleges, High Schools, etc. Your children's school teachers average $38,000.00 a year. Often high schools pay their teachers better than colleges do and they average a good deal more than many attorneys.
F. Starting over.
It is becoming impossible for many law graduates to find a place practicing law after they pass the bar. While the national statistics differ on a state by state basis, Texas is illustrative.
In Texas there are three thousand new lawyers a year and employment for only five hundred of them. (cf An Alarming Equation, Texas Lawyer November 27, 1995). The bottom 84% has to start over.
You may want to ask yourself if you want to start over after your first semester grades come back or if you want to wait until you've spent an additional two and a half year's time and money.
Your options include becoming a P.A. (27 semester hours, two years, paid for part of it, $50,000.00/year to start), becoming an R.N. (two years, average pay over $40,000.00), becoming a counselor (an extremely overcrowded career field), business (a previous Vice President of the Bank of America was a law school graduate), government (legislative aide, etc.), banking, investments, etc.
G. Quasi-Legal Employment.
Court clerks, paralegal (see above, below), legal secretary, bankruptcy paralegal (this is a specific, statute defined service), hearing officers, parole officers, police officers, FBI, CIA, probation officers, Child Protective Services, etc.
Often a year of law school will provide you with a valuable edge in understanding and succeeding in such a position.
IV. PRACTICAL SKILLS
Week 4-12
These are the skills you need to survive in a small office.
[To be reprised again, and again, and again].
A. Reading [i.e. research]
B. Writing [i.e. briefing]
C. Arithmetic [i.e. time sheets]
V. OTHER NOTES
Week 13-15
A. Interviewing skills/dress for success.
Dark blue or charcoal suits, white shirts, conservative ties, short hair. Practice the interview process to overcome your twirks, quirks and weaknesses. Practice makes perfect.
B. Facing reality.
Current placement statistics for JRC.
Current placement statistics for law schools generally.
[The entire placement picture is on a downward trend. The elite institutions are merely a few years behind the top 40 which are following the trend established by the middle deciles. Relative statistics reflect not so much what you can expect as where your placement efforts sit on the scale of top to bottom.]
C. Second chances -- they do exist.
--As a lawyer.
--As something else. An MBA, a Physician's Assistant, a Nurse Practitioner, INS employee (or other bureaucrat). See above.
D. Law and another career at the same time.
VI. POSTSCRIPT
I have given the elements of this syllabus a great deal of thought, much
of it while giving younger graduates advice on what they can do and how to
do it. I consider what is happening to young lawyers to be one of the great
tragedies of our time.
Literally thousands of young people (2,500 a year in Texas alone) are graduating, passing the bar and then finding themselves with no useful skills and no possible employment in their chosen field. At the same time they have crushing levels of educational debt. They have often expanded all of their emotional and mental reserves.
At that point there is no one to advise them or to help them. What do you say in Texas to the 2,500 kids who don't fit into the 500 jobs? $60,000.00 in student loans (not dischargeable in bankruptcy), wife and kids, and a mortgage described the caller of November 28, 1995 who dialed me up in despair just to talk. The median for student loans from law school alone is $40,000.00. Add in undergraduate student loans and $60,000.00 is just an average guy.
This average guy had been a CPA, talked with a law school admissions office and decided to improve his life. He will have lost everything by April of 1996. Law school was the single most devastating thing he encountered -- and he did relatively well. But he was not in the 16% that found employment. Going to law school destroyed his life.
This syllabus is barely a scintilla of help. There needs to be more. Your input is welcome.
Copyright 1996-1998 Stephen R. Marsh All Rights Reserved Return to Central Index for Reform of Legal Education and the Law
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