Greg,

Hey, I just call it as I see it.

I’ll be the first to admit that for me, going to law school was a mistake; but when I graduated with my BA in Jouralism in 1983, about the only jobs around in the state where I live (Oregon) were unpaid and low-paid stringer assignments at places like the Oak Ridge “Dead Mountain Echo”.

So, what do you do with a degree in Journalism? Go to grad school! Law school became the choice mainly because other people said I’d be good at it, not because it was my passion.

Now, it’s true that there are some types of lawyering that are comparatively satisfying and collegial: corporate lawyering, which I did for five years in Japan and New Jersey, was OK because at least both sides have something in common (i.e., “Let’s make money”). But when the Japanese economy went into a nearly decade-long recession starting in the mid 90s, the demand for Japanese-speaking lawyers dried up. That’s how I found myself in a civil law firm.

And that’s when I began to see the underbelly of the adversarial system, and the pernicious role that so many lawyers play in it.

Note, Greg, I wrote “so many” and not “all” lawyers. You can find some good ones out there. But you’ll have an easier time finding the ones that make you stop wondering where all the lawyer jokes come from.

Sad fact is, there are too many civil lawyers out there whose primary concern is “winning” and not “helping.” And too many of them have the will to win by any means necessary. The result of that kind of mindset is that too often, the “winner” (other than the lawyers, who always somehow got paid) was the last one standing after the clients’ financial bloodletting was over.

That’s also, incidentally, why 90+ percent of civil cases never go to trial. Civil litigation, not horse racing, is the true “Sport of Kings” – because royalty are about the only ones who can afford to indulge in it.

Oh, and as to the value of a law degree in finding other work … I have to disagree. It took me about three years to make the conversion from lawyering to technical writing. The biggest hurdle I encountered was potential employers’ attitudes about my legal background:

- “Oh, he’s just marking time until he finds another lawyer job, then he’ll quit.”

- “Oh, he’ll never be satisfied with less money and less prestige than he had as a lawyer, so he’ll get frustrated or bored, and quit.”

- “What’s wrong with this guy? Why would he want to give up lawyering for technical writing?”

That law degree and lawyering experience wasn’t an advantage in changing careers: it was the single greatest albatross I’d ever hung around my own neck.

So, my advice to aspiring law students remains: Not “Don’t do it,” as Greg seems to have taken it, but “Think again.” There are a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be a lawyer, and as a result there’s a good reason why, at any given time, 70 percent of lawyers wish they were doing something else.

Spurius Ligustinus on June 23, 2006 at 5:33 PM