Touro Trying to Reduce Class Size

Remember how Albany has decided to reduce its enrollment? It looks like Touro has joined in (maybe I just missed the news on it). From the Wall Street Journal:

[Albany and Touro] plan to admit 10 fewer students.

Still, the cuts represent an unprecedented acknowledgment among law deans that the product they’re churning out isn’t as highly valued now as it was, say, 5 years ago.

“It is the ethical and moral thing to do,” Touro Dean Lawrence Raful told the NLJ. “I don’t think the [job] placement situation is going to turn around for a number of years and I think we are concerned about the ethics of turning out quite so many students in debt when we know that not everyone can get a job to pay off that debt.”

According to the NLJ, if the Touro board agrees to Raful’s proposal, enrollment in this fall’s first-year class will dip to 270 from the 280 in 2010. Raful is proposing further 10-student reductions in the falls of 2012 and 2013.

Are they a few years late? Absolutely. But good for them for taking this stance rather that certain other states' deans*. It's not like anyone could reasonably expect the schools to just cut off 50% of their graduates at once.

They aren't completely waving the flag of justice and "the ethical and moral thing to do," but you have to applaud steps in the right direction. Good for Dean Raful for scaling Touro's wreckage back despite his self-interest. I wonder if we can expect the other New York lower-ranked schools (Hofstra, New York Law School, Syracuse, St. Johns, Pace, Brooklyn, Buffalo) to do likewise and help ease the saturation in the Empire State.

*My prime example here is Minnesota's four law deans, notably Thomas Mengler. Their sharp wit and brilliant approach to oversupplying the market can be seen here. Among the highlights are Mengler's assertions that lawyers are no different than coffee shops and that the market should be able to handle all St. Thomas grads because St. Thomas is a unique educational experience unrivaled by any other.

Iowa Law Symposium In Review: No Motel 6's For These Deans

Matt at LSTB has run a review of the recent Iowa Law Review Symposium/masturbation for academic eunuchs concerning the future of legal education, which I had mentioned earlier. He reviews the Chronicle of Higher Education's commentary and the fallacies and the moral dubiousness certain administrators keep spouting amidst some sensible concessions and realizations. He also asked my opinion, which is a mistake almost no one makes, but here goes.

I don't want to rehash the same ground, because LSTB's run-down is fairly brief and gets the point across well, but - setting aside the moral issues - I wanted to focus on the theme of law school efficiency, tradition, and readiness for legal practice. Here are some relevant excerpts from the Chronicle's review:

One reason schools are sticking with a familiar playbook: "It's a cost-effective method of education," Mr. Chemerinsky said.
...
Richard A. Matasar, dean of New York Law School, summed up the attitude he sees at many campuses: "We're all old dogs trying to learn some new tricks, and all of us old dogs have got tenure and we're not going any place."
...
Legal education does cost too much, Mr. Matasar said, mainly because it is "grossly inefficient." Schools could cut costs by stratifying—offering, as a friend characterized it to him, a "Motel 6" education with few bells and whistles, in which practicing lawyers teach many of the courses, as well as a "Ritz-Carlton" version taught by full-time, tenure-track professors. Neighboring schools could share library, faculty, and other resources, he said, adding, "Does every law school need an expert in the law of Timbuktu?"
...
Gail B. Agrawal, dean of law at the University of Iowa, cautioned that law schools should be careful, as they shift their emphasis toward practical skills like drafting motions and interviewing clients, that they don't shortchange broader goals, such as cultivating a commitment to social justice.

Reading through these responses conjured up two main streams of thought: (1) this is exactly the type of predictable "the sky's the limit"/"but we have so much to do" worthless-at-the-end-of-the-day dialogue I expected; (2) this is exhibit A as to why self-regulation is a bad idea for legal education.

From a student view, who in the hell would choose a non-elite "Ritz-Carlton" (a.k.a. "Undergrad II") law school model? I would think that student demand would be to actually learn how to draft legal documents, file motions, argue at hearings, and - you know - make money as a practicing attorney. Frankly, it's derisive, ego-centric, and presumptuous to call the tenured professor model the "Ritz-Carlton" and the efficient, functional model the "Motel 6." Is it really a "luxury" to learn the Rule in Shelley's Case?

In other words, given a choice at equal cost between a Ritz-Carlton and Motel 6, everyone would take the Ritz. Given a choice at equal cost between a functional, trade-type law school and an Undergrad II model, I would think 2/3+ would prefer the former, since I'm 95% certain that that school's graduates would succeed and be more employable than those who got a less-hands-on education.

But the casebook-Socratic method thrives. For one, it is, as Dean Chemerinsky asserts, cost-effective from the schools' point of view. From the students' point of view, it isn't effective at all (i.e., they're not even getting the product they paid for). And I take issue with the idea that teaching practical skills is inherently more expensive. Setting up a formal law clinic or an advocacy course, yes, that's expensive. But so is having an Israeli Law and Policy seminar with 5 students in it, and so is paying Professor Bookworm 250k to be an expert on arcane applications of federal procedure.

But if you're going to have a class called, say, Constitutional Law, why not look at actual Con Law cases and arguments made in the past 5 years? Why do they do an anguishing review of commerce clause cases from the 1930s? Do a brief intro and go straight to Lopez, Morrison, and Raich. Are the Lottery Case and the Shreveport Rate Case interesting? I suppose. Would anything of real value to practicing lawyers be lost? Nope. After all, when given a new topic to do legal research on, no one would ever start at square one. Why would you? We tell students in their first-year legal skills classes to go straight to Am. Jur. to figure out what's going on and yet, in the doctrinal classes, they start at time immemorial. Why, God, why?

But it's more than just professors being "old dogs." It's also that the ABA has built in a number of safeguards to ensure that this system will remain in place for a long time. They allude to this in the article, quoting Jay Connison, Valparaiso Dean and ABA Accreditation chairman, in saying that the ABA is looking into changing their standards. Of course that should have been done 20 years ago and probably won't be done now, but the deans are right when they say the ABA's standards limit their creativity. For example, read Standards section 4 and tell me how in the "Motel 6" model of law school is even possible. And how is a school supposed to share a library with section 6 in the way?

What I suspect Matasar knows full well is that such a vision is impossible under the ABA guidelines. And while deans may complain about the ABA guidelines publicly, they are the ones who run the show. You can't blame "the man" when you are "the man!" And despite Connison's words, nothing is going to change. Why would it? Deans are self-interested capitalists who love the Ritz-Carlton model. Do you think anyone makes six figures under a Motel 6 model? No, and no one gets to fly to Iowa to pontificate, either.

Thus, all of this mess comes back to the ABA's monopoly over national accreditation, which the deans - especially the vocal ones who seem to wind up at all these symposia - have power to change. So, they've essentially bound their own hands so they can cry about having their hands tied.

But because their restrictions require so much in the line of library resources, tenured faculty, scholarship, and all sorts of things that seem, to me, ancillary to legal education that they've effectively shut off price competition. It's a complex oligopoly. Instead of having price (tuition) stability, they let anyone compete against them, provided that they have the virtually the exact same expenditures (guaranteed by ABA regulations). This isn't how real business works, of course. In the "real world," there'd be "Motel 6" law schools everywhere by now. And as much as we joke about it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

Business has a natural tendency towards efficiency. We're seeing that in law firms, as they integrate LPO and cost-cutting. If "Motel 6" law schools could generate 90% bar passage rates at do teaching students part-time at $15k total cost, who in the hell would care? As long as there are still ethical and admission standards that the ABA holds the schools to, the American justice system wouldn't suffer at all. If anything, the range of options available may cause consumers (prospective students) to actually research the places more and figure out which schools are good, which are bad, which produce results, etc.

If you cut the resource requirements to what is actually reasonable, the "Motel 6" schools would have an incentive to keep costs low in a way that current TTT/TTTT schools simply can't. People bemoan the third-tier private schools that cost 30k+ a year, but the fact that every private law school has raised tuition in lock-step seems indicative that something else is driving their upward price movements. I don't think they're dumb enough to collude on prices, but nonetheless you wouldn't expect that in a world where the lower-tiered schools have at least some incentive to provide quality at a lower price. I think a lot of that comes back to the resource requirements (or perceived requirements), having a full-time tenured faculty, having a library, having state-of-the-art technology, having a scholarly output, etc.

Don't get me wrong, tuition has also gone up because of unnaturally-high demand for the product, but you can't tell me that it really costs 30k+ to teach someone enough law to pass the bar and be a practicing lawyer, and you can't tell me that all third- and fourth-tier private schools independently decided to set their tuition higher and higher every year because not onl are they trying to meet USNWR's (unreachable, for most) 2nd-tier status, they're also trying to outpace ambiguous ABA requirements.

And those regulations won't change. The deans have no intention of ever seeing a "Motel 6" law school genuinely compete for national students. No businessman - and that's what these guys are at heart - gives up a monopoly.

It's a remarkably simple problem with a remarkably simple solution, but it's one you'll never see at a symposium like this, where they'd rather show concern for "social justice" while implicitly supporting a system that is blatantly socially unjust. Where is the justice in stifling honest competition and innovation? Where is the justice in having an exclusive system that saddles students with $150k+ in non-dischargable debt? Where is the justice in forcing people to sit through instruction that has absolutely no relevance to their professional career, merely because some professor is interested in English common law conversion actions?

Fair criticisms aside, capitalism is excellent at rewarding efficiency. If you admit your system is inefficient, as Dean Matasar did, the answer is to remove any artificial constraints. Don't misread me: I don't think there should be law schools on every corner. I can't imagine the U.S. needing more than 100-150 law schools for its present population.

But I'm not about to grandfather in a bunch of inefficient dinosaurs merely because they have a second-tier name. If someone can make a law school that teaches ethics, gives hands-on experience, teaches practical skills, and gets a 90% bar passage rate for Costco-level pricing , I'm all for it. Anyone who is seriously concerned about tuition costs should be as well.

That, I think, is ultimately what the future of legal education hinges on: whether the ABA changes its ways or someone makes the ABA change its ways. Beyond that, I doubt it will be much more than morally duplicitous talk by men in nice suits who acknowledge the problems but want to find a solution that's more amenable to their interests.

Very long and winding and barely-coherent, I'm sure, but that's my basic take.

Replacing Some Advice From the Washington Post

A little bit off the beaten path today, but here is part of a letter that was written in to the Washington Post's advice column:

My girlfriend has recently started back to law school as a full-time student. She says she does not have time to see me AT ALL for the next three months. She said she will be able to communicate by e-mail or text.

I understand she is very busy with law school and her part-time job. She lives only five miles from me. I asked her if she would not mind seeing me weekly for a half-hour walk in her neighborhood, just to keep in touch. She said no.

I want to know if her behavior is reasonable, or am I being selfish in thinking that she should make some small amount of time for me?

The advice given by the Post's writer is basically that the schmuck doesn't possibly know her true intentions, so he either needs to decide for himself whether she is worth waiting for or not and either wait or move on.

While normally I don't interject myself in these things, I think this is incredibly poor advice. It said in the introduction paragraph that the guy is in his 30s, and if he's writing in to a newspaper for advice, he's likely not the type to take ambiguous advice well (i.e., he's going to wait like a schmuck and wind up miserable one way or another).

So here's my advice: you need to compose her an e-mail (her preferred method, apparently) that states, very clearly, that you are strongly interested in her, and you will gladly continue talking to her, but that you will be actively dating other people for the next three months and that, although you respect her, you do not agree with her course of behavior. Because here's the thing: she's being incredibly dumb and, if this course of behavior continues, you want absolutely nothing to do with this woman.

Let me explain. First, they tell you when you enter law school not to have a part-time job your first year and to be careful with work after that (generally a 15- or 20-hour limitation). I don't know what "recently" means, but if she's trying to work a part-time job while taking her 1L 2nd semester finals, she's an idiot.

Second, law school does not black out every fragment of time in a three-month period. Can it be busy, yes. Are there are multi-day blocks where seeing people really isn't an option? Of course. But under no circumstances is every weekend just wall-to-wall reading and writing and class-ing. Anyone who has to take every ounce of time to do well in law school should not be in law school.

Even if law school was a major time-hog for her, it's really unhealthy to sacrifice social interactions, including romantic ones. Given a choice between working 65 hours a week on law and making time for coffee or a walk around the neighborhood and working 75-80 hours a week, the 65-hour a week person will be healthy, happier, and probably a bigger success. It's a margin cost evaluation where the benefit of spending the extra 10 hours almost never justifies the high cost. And when you're talking about sacrificing parts of your life, it's a very high cost.

Most of the mental health issues lawyers have stem from law school behaviors. These include this perverse idea that you have to study obsessively and that if you haven't drowned out other pressures, you're not a hard-working student or aren't taking it seriously. This is bullshit. Being a lawyer is not worth being a shellshocked, socially-isolated zombie, but it's obviously a belief that many young legal students and professionals have and one this young woman seems to have adopted.

So let's go back to the facts. The Post writer said we can't know this woman's true intentions. That's fine; we don't have to. One of two basic things seems to be true: (1) she's really not interested in our letter-writer and is using law school as a passive excuse to phase him out so she doesn't have to break up with him; (2) she's interested in him, but views school as a priority that takes absolute precedence over him.

If it's (1) - and because he wrote the letter you know that's what he strongly suspects (and rightly so; what woman has time to email but not grab coffee somewhere?) - waiting around for three months is the worst thing you can possibly do. In this scenario, you want to force her to be honest with you and tell you she's not interested in seeing you anymore.

If it's (2), she's got a sickness that isn't going to be cured by waiting three months. If she has this belief now, what will stop her from having this belief if and when she's a young attorney? If you let yourself be marginalized now, you set a precedent (lawyers are big on this) where her school/work comes before your emotional needs, which are obvious from the letter.

If there's no time for you now, there won't be time for you next year or the year after, so even if she is Abigail to your John Adams, Simon to your Garfunkel, yin to your yang, your heart and your penis will grow moldy and stale on the shelf while she's scrutinizing RFA 13 in the Hawkins interrogatories at the kitchen table at 3 am because this is "a really important case."

And that's if she's lucky enough to be in the part that gains legal employment. For 1/3 (maybe more) of law school graduates, law school turns out to be no more important or door-opening than a hobby or a musical history class. This even happens to Georgetown grads. What if, 5 years from now, it turns out that you put your life on hold so she could get the part-time same job she has now? Won't you be bitter towards her? If I had to wait a few months for a woman who I knew was going to be making a good living (a doctor, for example), that's one thing. If I had to wait for a woman so she could pursue a degree that may only make her 40k, that's another ball of wax entirely.

So, letter-writer, I would advise you to give her a quasi-ultimatum and say that you accept the way things are, you don't agree with them, but you're opening the door for other people. Then gauge her response. It will be easy to tell whether she's really interested or not.

Above all else, do not wait three months for her. You'll drive yourself crazy obsessing, for one. And if she does actually like you, you should not let her have her cake and eat it, too. Letting type A personalities have things exactly as they want them is a bad idea. Grow some balls. You're a man, not a pony to be stabled until she wants to take you out in three months. If she insists on marginalizing you in such a way, all for a career that may not be that lucrative, you want no part of her slow-burning suicide, anyway.

You owe it to yourself, letter-writer, not to be placed in that mental prison. Go out and meet some other women if she doesn't want to spend time with you. Maybe you'll find one who isn't crazy enough to try this crap.

UMass Law School "Proving Critics Wrong"

UMass Law School, not to be confused with the Massachusetts School of Law (or any of the other directional Massachusetts schools) is apparently turning into a cash cow for the good ol' Commonwealth:

With higher than expected enrollment, UMass School of Law, which operates as part of UMass Dartmouth, will turn over a lot more money this year to the state than the original projection of $674,000 in tuition revenue, officials said.

"It's subsidizing the taxpayer," UMD Chancellor Jean F. MacCormack said. "It's sending $918,000 to the commonwealth, and the commonwealth is not sending any money to it."
...
Officials had projected $5.9 million in total revenue for fiscal year 2011, but they have revised that number up to $6.9 million. Tuition is turned over to the state, while fees and private donations are used to operate the school.

Tuition at this thing is 23k for in-state students and 31k for out-of-state students.

Basically, the school accepted 36% more students than it anticipated and is apparently doing things on the cheap, which isn't entirely good, because, as one critic points out, they don't have the resources the ABA requires for accreditation, which they hope to achieve by 2017.

But my favorite line in the whole story is that last bit: tuition goes to the state, but fees and donations run the place. Isn't that screwy? Why are students expected to fund the state of Massachusetts while they're law school is floundering? And while I'm at it, wouldn't a real public university lower the costs and fees to the break even point in order to serve the public?

The real sad thing is that this place is pinning its hopes, more or less, on getting accredited six years from now. But that hasn't stopped it from selling the optimism:

Sandra Saenz, a second-year student who started when the school was still a private institution, said students are pleased with the transition so far.

"I really think everyone is very excited about this, especially the new students coming in," said Saenz, 36, who is from Seattle.

...

"I think there are many people familiar with the UMass name," she said. "It's going to be really nice to have that on my diploma."

Okay, so you're going to be 38, from Washington, and looking for an attorney job with a law school no one's heard of and you think it's going to be "really nice?" UMass is, what, the 5th or 6th nicest school in Massachusetts, and there's already an over-saturated legal market with at least three schools UMass Law doesn't have a prayer in outshining anytime soon. The only people impressed by UMass Law School are non-lawyers.

But hey, when you're desperate for good news, one year suffices to "prove critics wrong," I guess.

Another New Law School Being Explored

From the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

FORT WAYNE – The Indiana Tech Board of Trustees announced Friday the creation of a committee to look at the feasibility of opening a law school in Fort Wayne.

The committee will submit a preliminary report and recommendation to the board May 13, according to a written statement from the university.

Let me give you my recommendation: no.

Often, you'll see people list reasons not to go to law school, and I feel like someone should start making a list of reasons not to start a law school.

Here's one:

The American Bar Association has a rigorous accreditation process, [Allen County Bar Association President] McNamara said, and if a law school can successfully attain that, it would be worthwhile to the community.

"It might get accredited" is not a good reason to start a law school, not that the ABA actually has "rigorous" standards, anyway.

Here's another silly justification for law schools:

The state has four law schools now...

That, McNamara said, is about average for a state this size.

The creation of a law school, though, would fit nearly perfectly with the mission statement of the local bar association, he said.

Is your bar association's mission to have a second unemployment office just to cater to indebted and unemployed lawyers?

I'm personally surprised existing schools aren't looking at opening satellite campuses a la Cooley. But at this point, I'm not even sure I can take these articles seriously, because wanting to open a new law school is worse than buying suburban real estate in 2006.

NLJ Report Shows Contracting Proportion of Graduates Going to Top 250 Firms

The National Law Journal has conducted a survey of hiring at its top 250 law firms.

I'm not going to copy the list, suffice to say that many of their results match up with the similar small-scale study I did awhile back on this exact same subject. Stanford did more poorly than you'd expect; Howard, BYU, and Rutgers-Newark did better than expected. But there are also some surprises. Yale finishing only 15th is a surprise. Same with Wake Forest, Seton Hall, and Maryland being more highly rated that I'd expect.

But what's really noteworthy is not the order of the schools, but the percentages. Texas is 20th on the list and only a quarter of its grads land jobs at these firms. By the 50th school, the number drops to 10%. It's not just conjecture: you really do have to be in the top 10% for the jobs most of these schools portray as what the median graduate does.

The most noteworthy result is the comparison to 2009, most notably how more exclusive legal hiring has become:

[T]he top two schools on the list supplied nearly 3% more of their graduates to the nation's 250 largest law firms, compared with 2009. But overall, this year's Go-To Law Schools sent fewer graduates into the big-firm market. The percentage of 2010 graduates taking jobs at NLJ 250 law firms was 27.3%, compared with 30.3% of 2009 graduates.

With 45,000 graduates, a 3% drop translates into 1,350 people who are looking for jobs elsewhere. But if the top schools' numbers are increasing, that means that 1,350 deficit is coming disproportionately from lower-tiered schools. In other words, it seems big law firms are being more exclusive in their hiring practices and taking fewer chances on kids from second- and third-tier schools.

Thus, when the job market fully turns around, it looks like there may be a trend towards elitism instead of away from it. With fewer big law jobs to go around, big firms may be more reluctant to "take a chance" on no-name school graduates, instead making certain that they fulfill their "prestige" quotient. So when you third-tier career services' offices claim the job market is turning around, even if it's true for Cornell graduates, it's not necessarily true for everyone else.

A General Rant About Attorney Oversupply

One of the constant themes that comes out in this blog and some others is the universality of the problems facing the legal industry. The educational/training system in the United States is by no means unique - even if the effects may be different - especially in a world where the profession as a whole is threatened not only by outsourcing and paralegals, but also by computerized efficiency systems that make previously-lucrative positions expendable. And of course the training sector is the last to get the memo, even though it's written in all-caps on the wall.

But I digress. I couldn't help but think of universality when I read this article from the U.K. about growing concerns amidst the legal sector.

Here is a highlight reel of the concerns featured in the article:

• Rising tuition leaves trainees with "up to 70,000 [pounds]" in debt (about $112,000 in yankee dollars).
• For recent graduates, there are 11,500 people chasing 6000 jobs.
• The legal profession is concerned that high tuition will price out minorities and reduce diversity.
• Reduced standards to increase enrollment leading to incompetent lawyers who have gone through the training programs.

Completely foreign, right?

But what struck me are two quotes in the article that refer to disgruntled graduates becoming an "army of enemies" to the legal profession, or being a detriment to the profession itself.

What struck me is how little this argument is invoked in the States, or how those who most strongly defend the status quo ignore it. A common response to people who complain about the law school system sort-of mixes together caveat emptor (you should have KNOWN that going to Roger Williams wouldn't have got you anywhere) and individualized criticism (oh, you weren't law review/magna cum laude/drowning in internships? That's just YOUR problem; the system's fine).

Maybe that's the dark side of American "I'm exceptional" individualism rearing its head (I'll spare you the banal comparisons to Europeans), but to me, it misses the big picture and shows a startling lack of awareness, of an ability to see the entire forest, that - and maybe it's just me - I would certainly want in my attorney for any kind of long-term engagement.

A rash of articles have been published in the last 2-3 years noting that clients at BigLaw have been demanding cost-effectiveness, i.e., cost-cutting. The writers generally think this is a new development, but I think that misses what's really happened over the last few decades.

Imagine you're a businessman with a given product. Year after year, your clients keep buying your product. You keep raising prices and giving massive bonuses at the end of the year, and the clients keep buying. And then one year they balk and tell you to start lowering the price.

Why would that happen? From the clients' perspective, as the price was escalating every year, they continued to believe that the product was in-demand and in short supply, justifying the price increase. When they don't fall for the game anymore, they've either realized that their demand for that specific product is not what they thought it was or that the supply is much greater than they thought.

Can you connect the dots yet, elitists? You see, when someone goes to a plastic surgeon, the plastic surgeon can charge a ridiculous amount of money because there are few of them (or, more appropriately, there is a perception that there are few of them) and there is high-demand, both in fact (lots of people want plastic surgery compared to what's available) and in appearance (many plastic surgeons present themselves as having elite clientele).

What do you think happens when the average member of the public sees attorneys flooding the yellow pages, desperate for personal injury clients? What happens when it sees cheap asbestos/mesothelioma/drug class action advertisements? Or if it meets an attorney driving a cheap used car and wearing a lousy-fitting suit?

And what happens when the public sees bar members working part-time at Barnes and Noble or Starbucks?

Here's what happens: the myth of short supply - that this particular field is anything "special" - disappears completely. Additionally, the illusion of popular demand vanishes. The only thing that's left is actual demand, and that's more or less a constant in the legal field.

And big businessmen are not only members of the public who laugh at lawyers' expense, they're also some of the global leaders at cost-cutting in order to boost a company's balance sheet without actually improving its product or its sales revenues. If you want to see an example, look at positive earnings reports over the last two years and note how many mention cost cutting, shedding employees, etc. (look at samples here: HP, General Mills, Alcoa, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, McClatchy).

See, you only get to charge high- and escalating prices - and they'll only put you off-limits on the cost-cutting - if you're worth it, if you're really unique. While many of these companies pay more for the prestige of having the "best and the brightest" attorneys, it's hard to justify the cost differential after a while. After all, if a Hofstra J.D. is selling you clothes at Bloomingdales, why would you pay $300 an hour for some NYU schmuck the same age to do glorified paralegal work?

Does the NYU grad bring more prestige? Of course, just like driving a Honda Civic has more prestige than a used Chevy Cavalier. But if the Chevy Cavalier works well and is priced at $5,000, the Honda Civic can't go for as high of a price. If the Honda seller tries to charge $70,000, the buyer will ask him to come back to Earth or start buying Cavaliers.

Big businessmen did not get where they are at by making dumb financial decisions. Prestige has a value, for sure, but it's not infinite. Some brands produce an extremely high prestige value (what a person is willing to pay just to have brand x), even if sometimes irrational, like Yale, Cravath, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Tiffany, or BMW. But at some point, the prudent always cash out if the price gets too high. And unlike Rolex or Louis Vuitton, where trained eyes can tell a difference in quality between their products and knock-offs, the difference in legal work is extremely hard to gauge, even if one could honestly tell the difference between a Yale grad's brief and one filed by a competent middle-tier graduate of St. Johns.

Now, if that middle-tier St. John's graduate has a full slate and makes a very good living, it's one thing. But if competent lawyers are floating around desperate for work, or working for 25k a year, it actually can cut down what most people (and most companies) are willing to spend on legal representation, even high-end. If all lawyers could bill $150/hr and have full work weeks, then the corporate bigwigs would probably think paying $500/hr for the top dogs would be a downright bargain. But if the floor fell out of the legal market, and alternatives were plentiful at significantly lower prices, the odds of that sucker paying you $500/hr drop.

Because so much of sales is based on illusions, BigLaw's "ceiling" is largely based on how high or low the floor for the entire legal sector is. Any profession's is. If plastic surgeons were on every street corner for $50 a nose job, the guys who went to Johns Hopkins in the rich suburban wonderlands are going to take a hit. Why would law be any different?

So, when you hear of an unemployed graduate from Touro or Temple or Suffolk, Mr. Columbia 3rd-in-his-class, Sullivan and Cromwell highly-paid associate lackey with a gorgeous invisible wife, an Audi he never drives and an irresistible urge to hit the scotch, your response should NOT be these:

What was his GPA?
Did he network?
Did he gain experience?
Why did he go to Touro/Temple/Suffolk/3rd-tier/4th-tier?

Your response should be:

God damn it, this guy's existence is costing me money.

Because this is not a situation caused by an individual lawyer's personal failures that is divorced from the high-achieving lucky ones who snag a spot on the podium. The massive oversupply of attorney labor is a collective problem that affects every single lawyer on an individual level. Because of the massive oversupply, the 3rd-tier grads cannot all find jobs and your own wages are suppressed.

Young big law associates should be as enraged at the system as the third-tier graduates. Why do you think the odds of any new lawyer making partner have fallen dramatically in the last 20 years? Why do you think many of you work the equivalent of two full-time jobs to keep up the illusion that you're worth the high salary the firm is paying you? Why do you think cost pressures on your firms have increased enough to make your bosses think like cost-cutting, slave-driving industrialists?

The old system, the one that made BigLaw a great gig, was premised on the notion that quality attorney work was expensive and prestigious. Because the ABA sat by and let law schools assault that image by overproducing the product to where Georgetown and Duke now have to pull out the magic trick book to get all their graduates paid work, that system will not truly come back.

And yet when people complain about the system, some of you inescapably go to the individual level, looking for personal faults like low GPA, to defend the system that supposedly rewarded you.

My grand point here amidst all this late-night rambling is that lawyer oversupply is a collective problem that affects everyone, not just the proverbial bottom-of-the-barrel, non-t14 folks. Discrediting people based on their personal characteristics is a classic tactic of elites to hide systemic injustices. Who you are or what you've done doesn't matter when you're being disadvantaged for being a member of a class. And that's clearly what's happened to almost all young lawyers, as far as I can tell.

The original article I pointed to spoke of unemployed attorneys in Britain becoming an "army of enemies" against the legal profession. It may happen here, too, and perhaps the "scamblogs" are indicative of that.

But it shouldn't be just the unemployed who despise the system. It should be everyone who got thrown in the meat grinder, even if they came out relatively unscathed. Many of the law professors and lawyers who write in to here and to other legal blogs have realized that these problems - especially oversupply - are collective, system-wide problems that affect everyone regardless of status. Curiously enough, those with some of the most prestigious educations are the most stalwart in insisting the system works well, which, if anything, should make one question the value of such degrees.

Because it's screwing them, too, just like it's screwing the British, the Canadians, the French, the Germans, the Algerians, the Ugandans, the Filipinos, the Rhodesians, the Hobbits of the Shire, wherever this type of system is put into place, an entire class gets screwed, not as individuals, but collectively. It doesn't matter whether you make $150,000 or are an unemployed beggar, you're getting screwed one way or the other, and a screwing is a screwing.

That, to me, is ultimately how lawyer oversupply truly could turn people into bitter anti-legal system advocates. The oversupply of attorneys really does harm everyone, especially others in the profession. The only thing stopping certain young American attorneys from realizing this seems to be their myopic egocentrism. Otherwise, there'd be a lot more pissed off people running around the states, like the British article suggested.