ADDITIONAL NOTES AND COMMENTS

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Law Offices of
Stephen R. Marsh
Attorney and Counselor at Law _________________________________________________________________________________

1401 Holliday Street Suite 316 Union Square Wichita Falls, Texas 76301-7193 (817) 322-3624

December 19, 1995

Setting the Record Straight

Small law office practice can be incredibly satisfying. You meet with real people. You actually help your clients. You solve problems. People love you. Clients send you flowers and gift baskets and small presents and cards and smile at you on the street. You touch lives and make the world a better place.

If you have other attorneys (especially in a good office sharing arrangement or a Fegen Suite) and friendly staff people, a small office is a warm, rewarding and supportive environment.

You can work reasonable hours, you can take time for a family and hobbies. You can be involved in your community and in helping the lives of others.

The down side is revenue.

In Texas, ten to fifteen years ago the common wisdom said that the general practice office was dead. Lawyers specialized in narrower and narrower areas. Then the boom ended and the glut began. Now every criminal law attorney I know will take a divorce if a client asks him. Every divorce attorney will handle a personal injury claim. Every business litigator will also incorporate you. (I've had potential paying clients just about go into shock when I suggested that another attorney might be better for their needs. And I've seen a number of attorneys wander off in strange paths and become lost.).

The economic cycle is going to be long and hard. Economic corrections, because of the lack of a perfect market and the cost and time of obtaining accurate information, take substantial time to come to pass. We may well see a return to the historic days of the 1920s through the 1940s when law clerks worked for free for several years prior to being paid.

But to the extent that it remains possible, the freedom and satisfaction of small office practice in smaller towns (250,000 people or less) is substantial. Too bad there isn't anyone to tell the normal law school student about it.

Sincerely yours,

Stephen R. Marsh

ADDITIONAL NOTES AND COMMENTS

Part Two

One

Tony Alvarado, Executive Director of the State Bar of Texas noted in his October address to the Auxiliary that in Texas approximately 3,000 new graduates enter the work force every year.

Texas has approximately 500 positions open every year. While some of the 2,500 extra graduates fail the bar exam or find employment in other states the vast majority lack any other employable skills or options other than the practice of law.

Most begin to attempt to practice out of their parents' homes or the back seats of their cars.

According to those who listened to Alvarado, legal education has three major matters it needs to face.

First, teaching the yearly 2,500 "extra" graduates how to practice law without their receiving any "on the job" training. Currently law schools are not preparing them for practice and they are not finding employment to train them.

Second, adjusting the education and graduation process prior to the bar exam (some programs are passing at a 40% or 20% rate or lower) to improve the quality of those in the programs -- especially in the bottom half where there are no realistic legal employment opportunities.

Third, providing these graduates with guidance as to other ways to make use of their law degrees. After all, Japan graduates just as many people with law degrees (per capita) as the United States. It places 90% of them in non-lawyer positions to the benefit of the graduates and society. The United States should be able to do as well.

Two

I've talked with a lot of lawyers who wanted out of the profession. What almost all of them really wanted was job security and reasonable work hours. If they could have found those two things, they would have had no problem staying with the law.

But, they were working themselves to the bone and going broke while doing it. Which is why so many lawyers leave the profession.

Consider, the average teacher makes $40,000.00 a year. In comparison, we all know that the average lawyer makes less. In fact, more than half of the teachers in this country make more money that half of the lawyers.

Why go broke practicing law with alternatives like that? Teachers (even in grade school) get tenure (job security where you can't be fired), reasonable hours (three months of vacation -- and during the work year they work no more than lawyers) and an average pay higher than half the lawyers are making.

Three

A really interesting social flow that is going on right now is the number of "other" professions that are dealing with influxes of lawyers. Take junior colleges for a good example. It used to be junior colleges ("JC"s) had their business law classes taught by guys who had bachelors degrees in business.

Now, every business law class has a guy with a J.D. shooting for a chance to teach it. But I was there before the change. I remember dealing with a group of JC professors who taught business law -- all of whom had only BAs. I substituted a few classes. As was their habit, they gave quizzes to see what the students had learned.

Generally, scores on weekly quizzes dropped about 5% to 10% after a week with a good substitute. For all of my classes, the grades were up 5% to 10%. The kids learned better from me than from the regular teacher I was substituting for (in spite of the need for the classes to adjust to a different teaching style, etc.).

I made the mistake of putting in an application for a potential job opening at the JC (I liked the location a lot and was beginning a job search). I was never called back to substitute teach again. The entire group saw me as the tip of an iceberg that would sink them out of their jobs.

As far as I could tell, for a salary that is now in the $40ks, these guys worked twelve hours a week. With a little planning (as one teacher did) they could work only Tuesday to Thursday with a four day weekend every week. As I saw it, that is a lot of skiing.

Well, they closed me out, but it didn't work for them. While they kept me out, in the long run they lost. Every business law class I know of is now taught by a J.D. This outward trend isn't limited by the obvious "downward" career moves (remember, socially, teaching outside of law school is seen as downward from lawyering). Lawyers are moving into just about everything.

McDonalds (and other fast food) managers are an example (they work only 65 or so hours a week, good managers make as much as $70k a year and the potential to move up is good -- they are competing mostly with high school graduates).

Not only every area that touches on the law (traffic court judges, justices of the peace, small claims court judges, case workers, juvenile probation workers, etc.), but any area where people work less than 70 hours a week. Karate instructor/lawyer. Beautician/lawyer. Insurance agent/lawyer. Construction worker/lawyer. Lumber mill worker/lawyer.

All of those are real life examples.

The key is that law work can be worked into a schedule around other things -- including a normal full-time job.

In a way it reminds me of the rash of massage therapists we had in our local community. Everyone who had an entrepreneurial streak was suddenly a "xyz" and a massage therapist. Your taxes done and a massage therapy visit while you waited. Your hair cut and your back worked out.

The trend with lawyers gives people a really different view of the profession. This is especially true as placement starts to get really tight. In most smaller communities many of the older lawyers in the "big" (it is a relative term in cities of less than 450,000 people) firms probably were in the bottom half of their classes at graduation.

If you check LSATs and college class position (not GPAs -- remember inflation) they couldn't have gotten into the law schools the associates are from.

But, in today's market, no hires go out to anyone not in the top 25% (and many of communities are suddenly hiring only law review graduates).

If I'm a normal person, when a kid who was co-curricular is offering to mow my grass (and write me a will if I need one) and can tell me that he graduated 50% better in his class than my current lawyer, I'm going to have questions. Not surprisingly, people are starting to ask those questions.

When they ask what you do and you tell them that you are a lawyer, (as you forgive the rudeness of the question for the chance to market yourself) the reaction that normal people have has changed.

No. There isn't a bottom line to this essay. I'm looking for one, but so far all I can see is that there is change coming, I have not figured out yet how to sum it up.

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