Stanford Law Launches Another Study of the Legal Profession. YAWN.

Does anyone believe that Stanford Law School with research support from the Sidley Austin Foundation will produce anything that will rock the boat in the legal profession? Here is a description for our non-lawyer readers who have never heard of Sidley Austin and its foundation (i.e. tax relief and marketing tool) :

About the Sidley Austin Foundation

In 2006, the international law firm Sidley Austin LLP formed the Sidley Austin Foundation. The Foundation was created to provide organizations in need with the means to support their philanthropic goals. Since the creation of the Foundation, the Foundation has made donations to such organizations as Legal Aid Society, Equal Justice Initiative, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, among other legal interest charitable organizations. The Foundation also supports a range of nonprofit activities throughout the nation.

Back to the what they plan to learn from the study:

The objective of the multi-year study is to describe and understand the state of the profession, including trends and emerging developments. The study will seek to develop policy recommendations to help law firms adapt their business models to better meet the needs of their clients and of a rapidly changing legal market. It will also consider the implications of these changes for legal education.

This sounds like another biased Biglaw study in conjunction with a top 3 law school to look for ways where Biglaw firms and top law schools can adapt (i.e. continue to make their millions while ignoring deferred and laid off lawyers with $200k student loans) to the imploding legal market rather than find solutions to stop the bleeding. Their findings will likely not reflect the broader legal market, the offshoring of legal jobs, and the implications the changing market will have for the thousands of unemployed attorneys, current law schools students, and recent graduates.

Some of our unemployed readers may also be all too familiar with Sidley Austin as they laid off 229 of their employees last year. Sure sounds like a great firm to trust to produce unbiased, statistically accurate numbers and recommendations to build a better business model, right?

Big Law Puts a Positive Spin on Paying Associates Less...

I love mainstream Big Law brown-nosing media manages to put a positive spin on paying associates less.  It's no surprise that the lock-step model is not longer working, especially with the downturn in the economy. The biggest problem with lock-step is the mandatory increase in salary every year.  So law firms are deflating salaries by making it "merit" based:

Olswang is the latest firm to change the way it treats associates, and to set out a more modern, merit-based career path for them. Under its new scheme, which will come into effect on 1 September, there are three levels for associates, and four bands within those levels. Progression to the next band or level will depend on performance and ability rather than the number of years served.

Don't get me wrong.  This definitely makes sense and it was dumb to give salary increases based on time to begin with.  But, I can see where this is going:

The reason for changing to this system was to make sure that we can provide a career path that suits all our associates. People develop at different rates and have different career goals. This way of doing things gives them the opportunities and support to get there. It’s all about flexibility, and giving lawyers a career path that they can understand, and which they feel they have some control over. 

I'm going to take, what some may view, a huge leap. I think that this type of system will keep women associates at "low" salaries.  Well, not all women, but women who want to slow down for limited amounts of time to have children. Well, the proof of my hypothesis will materialize in the next 10 years when women associates are not becoming partners.  We'll see.

I love this nonsensical bull-shit line:

The move towards a freer, more flexible and merit-based system is inevitable in law firms. The legal industry is slowly coming to understand this and in doing so will improve its chances of attracting and retaining the best talent. 

We all know that law firms have nothing to fear regarding attracting and maintaining the best talent out there.  There are no jobs and Big Law is still the most coveted type of legal job out there.  So, this is not about attracting talent.  It's about not paying the talents as much as yesteryear and getting the most out of the talent because nothing will be taken for granted.  You could be a fourth year associate with a first year associate salary, unless you but your hump and waste your twenties to get out of that level.

Like I said before, I'm not mad about this.  But the ceiling on what you can earn as a lawyer is dropping. It was bound to happen.

Top Law School Grad Sells Movies and Music On-Line From Parent's Basement!

I love mainstream press covering the Black Death of the Legal Profession... but they are so late to the Party. I cannot say it enough, people that decide to go to law school in the next few years are total idiots. Idiots!

Fabian Ronisky thought he was on track last summer to become a high-powered corporate lawyer. He was an intern at a leading firm in Los Angeles, earning about $3,000 weekly. But the firm didn't offer him a permanent job.

So Mr. Ronisky, a 25-year-old student at Chicago's Northwestern University School of Law, spent the fall sending 50 resumes to law firms and government agencies, to no avail. Now, just days shy of graduation and with $150,000 of student loans, he plans to move back to his parents' home in San Diego and sell music and movies online.

I really feel for this guy, because he didn't know this was coming when he was a 1L. Now the mainstream press has jumped on the story that I could have covered 5 years ago.

Part of the problem is supply and demand. Law-school enrollment has held steady in recent years while law firms, judges, the government and other employers have drastically cut hiring in the economic downturn.

Large corporate law firms have been hit particularly hard. The nation's 100 highest-grossing corporate firms last year reported an average revenue decline of 3.4%, the first overall drop in more than 20 years, according to the May issue of The American Lawyer magazine.

I am wondering what the 3.4% decline in revenue would have been if they hadn't fired so many associates? Anyone venture to guess?


I think that the whole model has been screwed for many years. People/Lawyers have always focused on landing that big firm associate position right after law school. What no one ever talks about, and what was always true regardless of the economy, is that one's days are numbered when working for BigLaw. It's just a matter of time before it's obvious that MOST of the associates are not "Partner Material" and they have to go on their merry way to other pursuits. Many of these pursuits are not nearly as profitable as BigLaw--non-profits and government positions, mostly. So many of these BigLaw associates never see it coming either, so they live high on the horse and DO NOT make headway on their loans. They don't see the end of the tracks for the gravy train, and they have to downsize drastically when it stops. This is when things were good. The reason for all of this? There has always been an overabundance of attorneys--at least since the dot.com bubble burst and maybe before--so it's always been a wiser economic choice to hire in a new flock of attorneys than pay the older ones more.
So, that's reality in a nutshell.