Category Archives: Law: Practice

New Lawyer Salary Distribution Has a New Shape

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Bill Henderson, Empirical Legal Studies: The End of an Era: the Bi-Modal Distribution for the Class of 2008:

Of the 22,305 law school graduates in NALP's sample (over half of all 2008 graduates), a remarkable 23% (5,130 '08 grads) reported an entry-level salary of $160,000. In contrast, 42% of entry level lawyers reported salaries in the $40,000 to $65,000 range. Once again, the central tendencies are a poor guide to the distribution as a whole: whereas the mean salary is a $92,000, the median salary was $72,000. Further, the two modes ($50,000 and $160,000) are separated by $110,000.

Amidst all the layoffs, deferrals, salary cuts, and apprenticeship programs announced in 2009, it is safe to venture that the bi-modal era has peaked. Every law school class for the foreseeable future will graduate to a much different economic landscape. Although many students will regret the opportunity to earn such a big payday upon graduation, it brought with it intense billing pressure, client resentment, heavy leverage, and very little substantive training for new hires. I would argue that profession as a whole (including current and future graduating classes) is better off with a lower entry level salary.

Admittedly that is a long-term view for the profession as a whole. In the short term, current students and recent graduates are in a world of hurt.

And that hurt is spelled D-E-B-T. This has to have implications for law schools.

Posted in Law: Practice | Comments Off on New Lawyer Salary Distribution Has a New Shape

Someone Could Make Money on This

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

There's clearly a business model here for a multi-national legal partnership willing to provide this service at commodity prices.

Tales from the encrypt: the secrets of data protection | Technology | guardian.co.uk

But what if I were killed or incapacitated before I managed to hand the passphrase over to an executor or solicitor who could use them to unlock all this stuff that will be critical to winding down my affairs – or keeping them going, in the event that I'm incapacitated? I don't want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that's because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries's laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else's keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own.

…

Finally, I hit on a simple solution: I'd split the passphrase in two, and give half of it to my wife, and the other half to my parents' lawyer in Toronto. The lawyer is out of reach of a British court order, and my wife's half of the passphrase is useless without the lawyer's half (and she's out of reach of a Canadian court order). If a situation arises that demands that my lawyer get his half to my wife, he can dictate it over the phone, or encrypt it with her public key and email it to her, or just fly to London and give it to her.

As simple as this solution is, it leaves a few loose ends: first, what does my wife do to safeguard her half of the key should she perish with me? The answer is to entrust it to a second attorney in the UK (I can return the favour by sending her key to my lawyer in Toronto). Next, how do I transmit the key to the lawyer? I've opted for a written sheet of instructions, including the key, that I will print on my next visit to Canada and physically deliver to the lawyer.

Someone could package this. There would be some details to work out, especially how best to transport the data (internet? post? special encrypted usb sticks?), but it could be done.

Posted in Cryptography, Law: Practice | 1 Comment

Justice Should Smell Good

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Gurrbonzo says the Miami courts stink.

Literally.

I wonder what Rumpole would have to say about this?

Posted in Law: Practice | Comments Off on Justice Should Smell Good

It’s the Known Unknowns That Worry Me

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Lawrence Cunningham has a soothing historical perspective on the mass of law firm layoffs at Steel, Patience amid Adversity:

In September 2001, after terrorists attacked lower Manhattan, the stock market closed for several days. Corporate finance and deal activity contracted. Law firms lost work. Associates were let go and firms cut back hiring. Eventually, work resumed, with deal flow flourishing.

Then a professor, I went to the library to leaf through the law reviews published in the period just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. I also read books about law firms during that period.

Amid World War II, people were terrified, deal flow contracted, associates at large firms were let go and hiring contracted. Scholarship appeared to have been cut back, but in corporate and securities law, did not seem to abate or shift course due to the attacks or resulting war. Eventually, the war ended, markets resumed, expanded, deals flowed, associates were hired, paid, made partner, and prosperity resumed.

Ditto with the episodic booms, busts, scandals and havoc that have ensued—the 1960s electronics boom and bust; the 1970s foreign bribery scandals; the Vietnam conflict and related upheaval; the 1980s savings & laon crisis; the 1980s/90s junk bond boom and bust; the late 1990s / early 2000s telecom boom and bust; and the current crisis, and its coming resolution.

Patience is a virtue for all those affected by adversity, whether economic, military or otherwise.

There's more, but I want to focus the part I quoted. Yes, it's good to learn from history. And indeed, the business cycle tends to repeat. But there are two reasons why I can't quite feel soothed. First, there's the question of which is the right parallel. We're not in 1929 yet, and I still think the smart bet is that we won't get there, but until we see a floor, we can't be sure about that. Especially since just about the entire minority party in Congress, which includes a blocking minority in the Senate, has wedded itself to idiocies such as being for economic stimulus but against spending. Yes, I actually heard a senator say that on the radio last week. And there's lots of it around.

Second, as regards the legal profession we face structural changes not encountered in a while. And I don't mean the likely collapse of the inflated salary structure (and unhealthy billables/month) for the best-compensated associates (and, I'd argue, partners). That's minor compared to the competition from off-shoring legal suppliers in India and elsewhere, not to mention the looming, inevitable, introduction of computer-assisted legal drafting.

Is it time to start writing the contract-generating AI of the future?

Posted in Econ & Money: Mortgage Mess, Law School, Law: Practice | 15 Comments

What Good Lawyers Do

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

Although it came highly recommended there were a number of things that I found didn't resonate for me in Deconstructing the First Year: How Law School Experiences Lead to Misunderstandings of What Lawyers Do at the blog called “clinicians with not enough to do.” I do think almost all of this part is pithy and descriptively accurate:

Really good law students succeed in part by figuring out how law school works and organizing around long-standing structures. Really good lawyers succeed in part by pointing out (diplomatically) what facts the judge does not understand accurately, or by making an argument never tried before in a particular jurisdiction. Really good lawyers know their cases and their files better than anyone else, inside and out. Really good lawyers understand the policy behind the law and why the laws are written a particular way. Really good law students learn to accommodate authority. Really good lawyers confront authority (again, in a diplomatic way).

My only caveat with the quoted passage that I'd say really great law students learn to maneuver around authority structures. But that's hard.

One could of course have a long discussion as to whether this is a good way for a law school to be. But I hope we'd agree that a good part of what a really good law school does is offer the initial training people need to be really good lawyers.

Posted in Law School, Law: Practice | 2 Comments

Secret Taping in Florida 10th Judicial Circuit Courts

Posted on February 17, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

This very confusing article entitled More questions about court recordings indeed raises more questions than it answers. Piecing together the story between the official obfuscation and the uneven writing, what seems to have been going on is…

  • Someone — we don't know who — in the state court system in the 10th Judicial Circuit installed an official backup taping system in the Florida state courts. At present no one is willing to take the credit for this innovation.
  • Signs were posted warning the public that taping was going on, but it is unclear if the signs referred to the primary system — which has “a blue indicator light [that] is apparent at the front of each courtroom” when it is on. More to the point, that appears to be what the public thought it meant.
  • The court staff indicates judges were aware of the system and could ask for it to be turned off; they also are now suggesting that it was used more in criminal than civil cases. But if there were court orders regarding when taping should be on or off, they have yet to be produced; it's likely that litigants were not informed one way or the other.
  • The tapes are public records covered by Florida's aggressive Sunshine Law — but the court staff are not responding very enthusiastically to record requests. They say they have to redact them first (I'm unclear as to how much redaction they are entitled to do).
  • Although this is particularly unclear from the article , there is some implication that the tapes might have able to capture sounds over the whole courtroom, not just the front.
  • Parties are concerned that private conversations with their lawyers may have been recorded.

Lots here that remains very murky. Florida is a two-party consent state for sound recording. Does putting up a sign in a court room suffice to get consent?

Posted in Florida, Law: Criminal Law, Law: Practice | 1 Comment