The Marble and the Sculptor Keith Lee American Bar Association, November 2013, 180 pages, $24.95 I don’t like self-help books. They usually contain a single insight, repeated fifteen different ways, and padded out with anecdotes to fill a couple hundred pages. What might have made an excellent magazine article...
Keith Lee posted an interesting chart on his blog today, comparing how fast the number of lawyers is growing to how fast the general population is growing. The U.S. population has grown at a slow and steady pace since 1945. The lawyer population, however, has grown at a much faster...
The other day, the Charleston School of Law was kind enough to invite me to speak to its student body as part of its Professionalism lecture series. My theme was, of course, professionalism in the law. But in the context of why we practice law. If you’re interested, have a...
It’s an intriguing notion: that one can objectively assess the relative effectiveness of a given lawyer. With hard data, and sound analysis. In the real world, it’s nigh impossible to tell how good a lawyer really is. You can look on Avvo and see what people here and there may have...
Google analytics is a great tool. Among other things, it shows the search engine queries people use to find this blog. Which is a good way of figuring out who its audience is, and what they need to know. The queries aren’t as entertaining as they are over at Popehat,...
The call came, as they always do, at the last minute. “I’ve been charged with a crime, and I have to be in court in two days, and my lawyer isn’t doing anything, and I’m scared.” The caller came in to meet with me in person, as they always do...
When people complain that “there are too many lawyers,” what they really mean is that there are too many bad ones. There is always demand for good lawyers to deal with the intricacies of modern life. If anything, people need more good lawyers than ever before — smart, wise, honorable...
On the New York Times op-ed page today, Clifford Winston asks the question “Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?” The writer, an economist with the left-ish Brookings Institution think tank, answers with a resounding “no.” They only increase the cost of entry into the profession — and thus the...
Technology freed art to transcend itself. After photography took on the job of realistic imagery, art was free to explore new forms of expression. New ways of visualizing things. New things to visualize. Using technique or color or shape to fire the viewer’s neurons in new and unexpected ways. Art...
(Our last couple of posts about law school and recent graduates were a bit negative, focusing on those who are entering the profession for the wrong reasons. But what about those who are doing it for all the right reasons? They are in the majority, after all. Well, this one’s...
Okay, see that XKCD cartoon up there? That’s not how law-school academia works. Law school academia is more like this: It’s not exactly news that law review articles don’t carry the same weight in their relevant field as, say, scientific papers published in a peer-reviewed journal. Ask any practicing lawyer...
Real nice, Google. Because we were bored out of our skull this afternoon, we checked this blog’s stats on Google Analytics. Browsing through the various keywords people have used to find this blog over the past year, all we can say is “The hell is wrong with you people?” Leaving...
The New York Times had an interesting data crunch yesterday called “The Lawyer Surplus, State by State.” Economic consultants EMSI estimated how many new jobs for lawyers there are going to be each year, in the near future, in each state. Then they used the actual number of bar...
Where did all the law jobs go? And are they coming back? Good questions. More on that in a second. But first, we have to say that we’re frankly tired of hearing law students and newish JDs moaning about the dearth of lawyer jobs to be had. Particularly grating are...
In a post on the future of law schools, Josh Blackman predicts that “many legal services that are created today through individualized, customized efforts by toiling associates, will be replaced by information products that can be downloaded on demand, like a commodity. … This transform no doubt would dramatically...
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