More Leach Entrepreneurship, Woman Getting Screwed As Much as Men, and Lawyers' Poor Predictive Abilities

1. Meet "Adam Smith," Capitalist Leach

It seems that the last few years have brought a rash of legal software gimmicks designed to pull money out of the bubble. There are multiple e-mail resume bombing platforms for recent graduates to throw money into an electro-abyss. Now the completely unintentionally-named Adam Smith, a "management consulting firm to the global legal industry," has launched JD Match, which will supposedly help large law firms better match with 2Ls during the "flawed" OCI/associate recruitment process.

Law students from any accredited U.S. law school can create a profile on JD Match for the inaugural fee of $99, which covers the 2011 2L recruiting season. Law firms joining JD Match pay an annual subscription fee based on their lawyer headcount, a common pricing structure for the profession. Membership for law schools is free.

Great, so now third-tier graduates can pay $99 to find out that big firms aren't hiring like they used to and that median-level law students at "prestigious" institutions will likely trump them, no matter how hard they work or how highly they are ranked or how good of future lawyers they actually are. Sounds like a winner.

2. Women Getting Screwed as Much as Men

From mlive.com:

Recently released Census figures confirm that for the first time, U.S. women surpassed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees.

...
When it comes to finishing college, roughly 20.1 million women have bachelor’s degrees, compared with nearly 18.7 million men. Women passed men in bachelor’s degrees in 1996.

Viva equality! Although the article phrases this as an unqualified positive, I'm not sure women being disproportionately burdened with student loan debt is any kind of a good result. There are already reports of couples refusing marriage and relationships over student loan debt. And not to sound non-PC, but I'm skeptical women have the same earning power as men if they're unable to find employment in their chosen educated field.

3. Lawyers' Poor Track Records

As Demosthenes pointed out yesterday, a recent study looking at the accuracy of predictions by pundits noted that "prognosticators with a law degree were more likely to be wrong."

This shouldn't be a surprise, but I imagine if you asked attorneys if they were good at predicting things, they would likely be more confident than others that their perception was correct. After all, a key part of lawyering involves predicting how a court would rule on something.

But the trick is that the real world is not a court. The real world is dynamic. Technology constantly changes the process of how things are done efficiently, while resource imbalances and shifts cause actors' values to subtly change over time. The real world has an infinity of variables that interplay and create a system that is chaotic and fueled by self-interested actors with very limited information.

A court attempts to provide certainty by removing the real world elements. Allegations of wrong are reduced to long-established causes of action. Evidence is reduced to that which the judge finds relevant and reliable. Despite the complexity of modern litigation, cases are presented simply, in a point-by-point manner with each side having an opportunity to bundle its case neatly. In contrast the to real world, the system is static and conservative. For example, American attitudes towards promiscuity have changed radically over the last century. But libel per se (assumed damages for falsely calling someone a whore) persisted regardless of dynamic social changes. There are numerous areas of law such as this, both substantive and procedural.

The point is that much of the law is about looking backwards, putting controlling weight on what authority figures did five years ago, what causes of action are already established, etc. The lawyer is not trained to predict how the world will change. The lawyer is trained to predict how the world will be if what happened in the past happens exactly as it did in the future. However, this is not realistic. History, hackneyed phrases aside, does not repeat itself. General rules of human behavior may develop, but any idea that the "rules" of the 1970s can be applied to the 2010s is so silly I shouldn't have to debunk it. And yet, attorneys regularly find themselves giving undue weight to overstated cases from the 70s and 80s in determining what will happen in their little sphere tomorrow. And if you find something dead on-point, then you have a very easy case and the world will not change.

There are merits in how the common law decides winners and losers, but attorneys and judges (and prospective law students) should be aware that it's a very artificial system that has no real-world application in how to "think" better than others'. If it did, lawyers may be more successful at starting businesses and investing than other people. But they're not; lawyers are regarded as notoriously bad businessmen, likely because they spent years of their lives thinking in very narrow, constructed boxes.

Yes, law school may teach you how to break something down piece-by-piece and argue variations on each piece against conflicting evidence. Often, sound policy determinations are emphasized. But the policy revelations are almost always retroactive, realized after some actors have started abusing the system. I fear as much as the law makes one "think" in a rational and isolated matter, for all the good that may bring, it seems like it might damage one's ability to see the big picture and think dynamically about how variables interplay with each other in a chaotic system. We really need people who can do that (e.g. invent things, propose new political ideas) and not more people who can pick the elements of a products liability claim and analyze them to death using reasoning from the pre-digital age.

Sordid in the Steel City? Gender-Based Suits in Pittsburgh

Non-equity partner JoEllen Lyons Dillon has filed a gender equity suit against her current firm, Reed Smith, LLP. Reed Smith is the second-largest firm in Pittsburgh and has twenty-two offices across the globe. Interestingly enough, their motto is "The Business of Relationships." I think they might have taken it too literally. From the first article linked:

Attorney Samuel J. Cordes, who represents Ms. Dillon, said he found "that there is a pattern here of a male locker room, and it includes sexual favors," adding that his client didn't participate in that part of the "games guys play."...

She brought in millions of dollars of business annually, and sought a promotion from non-equity partner -- with no share in the profits -- to equity partner. She was not promoted, and after she took a few months off to have twins, her pay was "decreased almost by half" in 2009, according to the lawsuit. Then in January her pay was "reduced by another $100,000," it said, and her appeal of that decision was denied.

And then there's my favorite line in the story, which, typical for new-world journalism, comes at the very end as an afterthought:

Mr. Cordes said he would produce examples of sexual quid pro quos as the case continues.

Now, this isn't come crackpot pro se plaintiff doing this. This is a presently-working partner at BigLaw, who is both experienced and attractive enough to make the complaint pass any threshold skepticism.

Just a few blocks away, the Duquesne School of Law recently settled a discrimination, retaliation, and defamation claim with a former clinical administrator:

[She] claimed in her July lawsuit that Law School Dean Ken Gormley demoted her and cut her pay, among other things, in retaliation for her filing a sexual harassment complaint against him with the University's Affirmative Action Officer in 2006.

Now, I realize that settling a lawsuit is not an admission of liability and all that, but given that law school ethics should at least promote the appearance of propriety, I would have a hard time believing they settled a merit-less claim since, at least to me, it makes the dean look like a scum bucket, which I'm sure helps Duquesne's institutional integrity, especially with female students. And, as the article notes, there are two more claims for gender/racial discrimination still pending against the law school.

I find both of these interesting in light of the Allegheny Bar Associations explicit initiative - going back to 2008 - to specifically work against findings of massive gender inequality in Pittsburgh with their Institute of Gender Equality. Guess who was outgoing President of the Allegheny Bar in 2008, when this place was founded? Yep, Ken Gormley, who was also Vice-Chair of the Gender-Equality Task Force. This raises an eyebrow, doesn't it?

And curiously, even though Reed Smith is the second-largest place in town, they have no representation on the current Board of Governors (the 3rd-largest firm, Buchanan, Ingersoll, & Rooney, has at least two people on it).

I find these all interesting developments. Was Reed Smith key in the Allegheny Bar's findings that there were severe problems with gender inequality? Was the Institute of Gender Equality a mere meaningless action to look like it was solving the problem? Isn't Ken Gormley something of a gargantuan hypocrite for being on a Gender-Equality Task Force while his own female employee filed a seemingly-meritorious claim against him?

I don't know how to bridge this all together, but I find the seemingly-independent developments quite interesting and revealing of the tangled mess between firms, law schools, and bar associations that sometimes can prevent systemic change. Let's wait and see what happens with Ms. Dillon's lawsuit, especially if she has ammo and she starts using it over offers to settle.