I Should Be Optimistic Because . . .

This is from Larry Ribstein, who has written previously about the slow collapse of biglaw and the future of the legal profession in general:

"I think the horizon for what you can do with a legal education hasn't shrunk, but has actually expanded," said Ribstein, the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair in Law. "Change can be bad for some people, especially for those who have a stake in the current system, but it can also be good, and I think the future is going to be much more complex than envisioned by some critics."

When you say "those who have a stake in the current system," are you looking the mirror at all, Larry?

Regardless, I'm really intrigued by this idea that legal education is now opening more doors than it has in the past, what those doors are (I'd love to find one), and how the educational industry created those doors.

Unfortunately, none of those pesky details made it into the article. They must have been left on the editing room floor. Instead, the writer gives us a rather incoherent stream of reasoning including the following in an unconnected fashion:

• Law schools should focus on meeting global demand.
• Legal education hasn't changed much in the last century because of rigid accreditation standards.
• Biglaw is dying.
• Outsourcing is just a temporary stop-gap until the machines improve efficiency domestically and lawyer work becomes more exciting ("I think this is going to lead to an era of lawyers doing even more interesting things than they're doing now.")
• Most of the professors working now will be dead or retired when these changes really change the profession (as opposed to them being affected by the scores of unemployed recent graduates).

But, yeah, there's room for optimism:

"The plus side for entering law students is that their future is much more wide open than that of their immediate predecessors," he said. "So that's a cause for optimism."

In the future, I hope we have law professors who actually back up their ridiculous statements with actual proof. Frankly, I think a law school graduate in 1960 had it much, much better than a law school graduate of 2010. That is, unless Ribstein can actually show us where these mystical doors that make the J.D. a versatile instead of a one-way ticket to attorney licensing.

The caption on the picture instructs the reader to be skeptical that the future of the legal profession is dire. If baseless statements like "you can do more with a legal education now!" are cause for optimism, I find my healthy skepticism is best used in the opposite direction, especially since people like Prof. Ribstein the marketers with the vested interest in keeping the system pumping.

In the meantime, I'll continue to consider statements like "the horizon for what you can do with a law degree hasn't shrunk, but has actually expanded" no better to the crap spewed by liberal arts advisers selling sociology degrees to future retail workers. Way to aim high, legal education.

Yes, Sally, the Mechanization of White Collar Jobs Can Be Easier than that of Blue Collar Jobs

From Paul Krugman's article today on education in the New York Times:

Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate....

And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers.

This makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? Most white-collar jobs have historically been premised on knowledge. Anyone can move boxes around a warehouse or change the oil in a car, but only a select few could navigate a personal injury claim or handle accounting books because of the specialized intellectual abilities involved. But computers are better at storing and retrieving knowledge than they are at making physical environmental adjustments.

A few months ago, I got into an argument with someone who claimed that the answer to the U.S.'s future was more intensive education, to essentially out-school the Chinese, Indians, etc., by promoting math and sciences education. I asked him point-blank what he would do if he were starting out at 18 today rather than at 58. Without hesitation, he said "engineering, just as I did back then."

The problem, of course, is that economies change and what "worked" 40 years ago doesn't necessarily work today. Although engineers seem better off than young lawyers, I know many an engineering grad my own age who was told to get a master's after believing a B.S. would land them a set-for-life job. And given that much of engineering is following explicit rules to produce well-designed products, I imagine we'll see computerized engineers long before we see computerized janitors.

Education is a fantastic normative goal, but we have to collectively realize that it has finite (and shrinking) returns economically. Because it benefits our democracy to have educated and hard-worked people, even if they can't all have jobs that require education, we also have to take steps to prevent citizens from being penalized for their intelligence or education, but that, I believe, is a much larger issue deserving of another entry entirely.