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Honestly given the legions of unemployed TT and TTT grads aren't we due to see some sort of crazy white collar doomsday cult or armed militia consisting of the dregs of humanity (unemployed lawyers) formed any day now. Or at least some dude finally snapping and robbing a bank or something.
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Jun 20, 2010 14:55
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ManiacClown posted:lipstick thespian, would it be theoretically possible for someone with an American JD to come to Sweden and practice there? If so, how would that work? I'm not sure. Getting a work permit in Sweden is far easier than getting one in the US (far, far easier, no lotteries involved, all you need is an employer). After that, getting a residence permit is a matter of staying for a sufficiently long time and learning the language (though you will definitely be able to survive just fine in Sweden on only english skills seeing as swedes are generally very good at english). With that said I have no idea wheter there'd be any demand in the legal job market for someone with a JD from the US. It would obviously depend on the firm and its clients, I suppose, but the ones handling international contracts and so on probably wouldn't give you the time of the day if you weren't from a T14. If you can make it, however, prepare to get babied by the socialist nanny state until the day you die. I hope you like the idea of giving up all your  freedoms (including the freedom to go bankrupt due to medical bills or the freedom to pay huge amounts of tuition to go to college).
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Jun 20, 2010 15:02
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I became pretty disappointed when I learned that you need to learn Swedish to work for Google Sweden because I am an entitled American who had hoped you could get by on English alone. #fwp
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Jun 20, 2010 16:36
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FREE RINGTONEZ posted:I'm almost done with my first year as a lit associate at a big NY firm. I'm happy to take questions. Have you realized yet that you suck really hard? First year associates are the worst because they still think they know what they're doing. Somewhere around the end of first year and the middle of second year, they realize that they don't, ask us for help/directions/examples, and start getting better.
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Jun 20, 2010 17:21
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JudicialRestraints posted:You have to recognize my divinity and that the federal government is controlled by the antichrist through the federal reserve. Can I be Sheriff? I'm really really good at oppressing dissenters, I mean heretics.
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Jun 20, 2010 18:24
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Mookie posted:Have you realized yet that you suck really hard? I came in knowing I suck. But I know what you mean: we have a large group of contract attorneys doing a big review right now. Many of them make executive decisions about responsiveness that end up costing us lots of time and money.
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Jun 20, 2010 18:28
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I just want to ask some questions as I might possibly be interested in law school except the whole "law school is expensive as gently caress and there are no jobs" aspect makes me kind of on the fence on that(more like on the other side of it.) I've put the conditional that if I can't get into a T14, I just wasn't meant to be a lawyer. But if even that doesn't guarantee a career, I figure I would be better off not trying. One thing I want to know is what do you forsee in the future for the law job market or how long the current lack of jobs will last? If I would go to law school, it would be at LEAST three years away. Do you think there will possibly be at least somewhat better job prospects in six years time? And another thing I want to ask about is about international legal jobs. Do they have as much of the same job outlook as the rest of law industry in America? (Of course, I guess it would depend on what region or country) What qualifications do you need for these jobs in the first place? I imagine language skills, of course, but do they also look for experience practicing law in America already? Also, are these mainly just considered as a temporary part of a lawyer's career? If you end up deciding that you like living in the country you're practicing law in, would it be feasible to permanently live there and build a career out of that practice, or are you usually expected to eventually come back to the States to practice law? Please feel free to tell me that there's no hope, only despair, so I can go ahead give a pass on preparing for it. Will2Powa fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 19:07
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Mookie posted:Have you realized yet that you suck really hard? I've fully come to realize that A) I suck rear end; B) Law school didn't teach me gently caress all about how the law actually works; and C) A whole lot of attorneys not at big firms produce poo poo work but it's not that hard to produce the caliber of work big firms do. Then again I've only butted heads with Bracewell and Locke Lord. G-Mawwwwwww fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 19:22
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Will2Powa posted:I just want to ask some questions as I might possibly be interested in law school except the whole "law school is expensive as gently caress and there are no jobs" aspect makes me kind of on the fence on that(more like on the other side of it.) I've put the conditional that if I can't get into a T14, I just wasn't meant to be a lawyer. But if even that doesn't guarantee a career, I figure I would be better off not trying. I honestly believe that the US legal market coming back in a big way would be predicated on a reversal of the trends to 1) outsource work, 2) employ temps in larger and larger capacities. Given that both (and, in a more domestic context, especially the latter) are hugely profitable, I have a hard time imagining it happening. The fact that people are being enticed to go to law school in much larger numbers than there are positions right now means that any sort of upwards pressure on wages and benefits is very unlikely. There'll be a ton of starving TT and TTT grads (possibly even T14 grads) in the near future if this keeps up, and with a ton of people eager to fill the same positions you're not looking at a very cheery picture for trying to recoup your student loans. As far as international jobs go (in the sense of international biglaw), I wouldn't imagine there's a very bright job market there either unless you are at the absolute top of your class from a top of the line school. Not something to bank your hopes on (but I could be wrong). If your prime interest lies in making money and minimizing the chance of you ending up a bitter hobo with a worthless skillset, become a welder or something. You statistically stand a MUCH better chance of making very decent money doing that, and in case you're shooting for your own McMansion, I honestly wouldn't be suprised if becoming a welder and opening your own company didn't give you somewhat comparable chances of living the american dream as going to law school would. I think the choice is clear unless you really want to practice law out of the sheer enjoyment or the social status that goes with being a lawyer in america is something that has an incalculably large importance to you.
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Jun 20, 2010 19:27
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Will2Powa posted:One thing I want to know is what do you forsee in the future for the law job market or how long the current lack of jobs will last? If I would go to law school, it would be at LEAST three years away. Do you think there will possibly be at least somewhat better job prospects in six years time? Problem with projecting that far out is that nobody really knows what's going to happen to the industry - the economic slowdown hit around the same time as a serious sea change for the legal industry in the States (as one of the articles in the OP describes, and lipstick thespian above does a lot better at than me). There's no guarantee and no way of guaranteeing that any of these lost jobs are coming back. Still, if you have three years between now and a potential law school, and you make it into a good enough school, and you actually want to be a lawyer (which is the ONLY reason to go to law school even in the best of times), then sure, job prospects will probably be better in six years time after all of us unemployed grads have starved to death. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 19:29
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Dallan Invictus posted:Still, if you have three years between now and a potential law school, and you make it into a good enough school, and you actually want to be a lawyer (which is the ONLY reason to go to law school even in the best of times), then sure, job prospects will probably be better in six years time after all of us unemployed grads have starved to death. I'd say this is predicated on everyone from the current crop of TT/TTT's starving to death and people suddenly stopping going to law school. Given that the serious sea change in the legal industry coincides with a serious sea change for the american middle class in general, it's hard to tell wheter this will happen. Given that median wages for the most of the population remains stagnant while fixed costs have been steadily rising, pressures to "make it big" (so as to insulate onseself from accidents, sickness or job loss resulting in serious personal economic disasters) rise. Law school has traditionally been seen as a way to become filthy rich off of Biglaw's teat, and it's unsure wheter that will actually change to the point where schools like Cardozo and Seton Hall can no longer entice gullible people to sink six figures into a worthless education. Unless that changes, or unless the feds deal out a ringing blow against law school accreditation for the TTT's, you might very well end up with more hungry law school grads in the future, not less. Right now, law schools (and for-profit education in general) is a hugely profitable business. Obviously legal services can't all be exported the way manufacturing can be (and has been). Some have been, and that outsourcing may grow in the future with negative effects on the job market. The jobs that remain are of course victims to the ravages of supply and demand. If there's a high supply of bodies looking to fill the positions, downward pressures on wages and benefits become a lot more likely (as well as simply transforming previously normal positions to "permatemp" ones). This is obviously further compounded by the lack of unionization in the field as far as the US is concerned. I honestly don't think the job market will be better in the near future. That's not the same thing as saying that the economy itself and revenues for law firms won't pick up (they might very well do so), but these revenue increases do not a priori have to go to the associates and temps- not unless there's some sort of pressure to do so. I remember seeing a chart that displayed that the median american's productivity (I don't know how this was measured, however) had steadily risen since the seventies while median wages had completely stagnated. If true it's obviously something that shows that banking your future as a law grad simply on the economy picking up is probably not a good idea. Keep in mind that if you have significant student loan debt and the only work you can find is doc review or something that pays about 40K a year without benefits, you WILL go into personal bankruptcy if you get sick for an extended period of time. This got really long and gay so here's a tl;dr: don't go to law school. You will die bitter and alone from your heart shrivelling up into a black ball of hate and misery as you're restocking the appliances section of walmart. lipstick thespian fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 19:56
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Why do you know so much about the US
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Jun 20, 2010 20:33
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Will2Powa posted:And another thing I want to ask about is about international legal jobs. Do they have as much of the same job outlook as the rest of law industry in America? (Of course, I guess it would depend on what region or country) What qualifications do you need for these jobs in the first place? I imagine language skills, of course, but do they also look for experience practicing law in America already? Also, are these mainly just considered as a temporary part of a lawyer's career? If you end up deciding that you like living in the country you're practicing law in, would it be feasible to permanently live there and build a career out of that practice, or are you usually expected to eventually come back to the States to practice law? As far as I know, there is no "international legal" job market for American lawyers as such. There are plenty of corporations in other countries that do business with America and need lawyers that are versed in American law, but when that comes up in a multinational, they either retain a US law firm or their in house local lawyers call up their US office. That's as a general rule. There are plenty of exceptions to that rule; for example, there are a lot of US lawyers in Russia for one reason or another - some got sent there by BIGLAW and never left, some Russians who went overseas for a degree and came back, and so on. However, all of those people either had a US job that sent them overseas, or had existing Russian connections that got them a Russian job. Even a Harvard diploma is not going to help you get a want-adsed overseas job out of law school with nothing else going on. In theory, were you to have a rich foreign uncle that wanted you to take a job midway up his corporate hierarchy, you'd need an LLM (note: this is one of the very few reasons why a US-born lawyer would ever want an LLM), along with fluency in the required foreign language. In most cases, you would eventually also want to be admitted to the overseas bar, which poses its own problems if you've ever been convicted of a crime (things that the US bar looks on lightly are not necessarily things that a foreign bar likes, and vice versa.)
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Jun 20, 2010 20:34
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Ganon posted:Why do you know so much about the US I have aspergers (self-diagnosed of course  ).
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Jun 20, 2010 20:47
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Adar posted:Your first question has already been answered so I'll take a crack at the second. This is generally true for lawyers transferring skills between jurisdictions period - your best bet if you want to practice overseas is to go to law school overseas, and even then it's a longshot. The closest thing to an exception to this would be an American lawyer transferring to another common-law country like Canada/UK/the Commonwealth, where there's enough overlap at the foundations of the system that the transitional work you'd have to do to qualify for the overseas bar might not be too onerous, but even here I wouldn't count on it at all.
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Jun 20, 2010 20:56
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There's no question that the flood of law school grads is putting a massive downward pressure on wages for new attorneys. However, I'm wondering what the flood of law grads will do to the market for those of us who have actually been practicing for a few years. Since law grads have no practical skills and therefore worthless for anything beyond entry level positions, do they really have an effect on wages for 3+ year attorneys? Also, I plan to go out on my own (hopefully) within 5 years and have been honing my skillsets and networking to achieve this goal. As a future employer, wouldn't the apocalypse currently underway in the legal market be a huge benefit to me? I'm thinking by 2015 I should be able to hire a small army of unemployed law grads for minimum wage. They'll be like paralegals who can also do court appearances!* *Not a troll, I'm actually serious about this.
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Jun 20, 2010 21:16
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GamingHyena posted:There's no question that the flood of law school grads is putting a massive downward pressure on wages for new attorneys. However, I'm wondering what the flood of law grads will do to the market for those of us who have actually been practicing for a few years. Since law grads have no practical skills and therefore worthless for anything beyond entry level positions, do they really have an effect on wages for 3+ year attorneys? There is always someone younger and hungrier, or just hungrier and smarter, particularly in this day and age. It is not just new attorneys - realize that this economy has turned loose a poo poo ton of fired associates with 3-10 years of experience at BigLaw firms as well as dequitized partners with more experience than that. My firm has been receiving lateral applications from individuals who, on paper, are honestly better than 80% of the existing attorneys at my firm. Of course that's pretty much going to be the case for any firm, given that the applications I'm talking about are top quartile at HYS types with legitimate experience with large banking and corporate clients. It's not going to take too long before someone figures out, "Hey, why don't we drop the existing guy's pay by a few hundred grand a year and hire this new guy as a flyer." Practicing for a few years is not insulation. Insulation is having five-to-ten years left to retire and hoping to ride out this long-term poo poo storm because you already have almost enough cash saved up to make it out alive.
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Jun 20, 2010 21:29
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GamingHyena posted:There's no question that the flood of law school grads is putting a massive downward pressure on wages for new attorneys. However, I'm wondering what the flood of law grads will do to the market for those of us who have actually been practicing for a few years. Since law grads have no practical skills and therefore worthless for anything beyond entry level positions, do they really have an effect on wages for 3+ year attorneys? This would likely depend on the # of them that gain marketable skills to compete with you. If people remain unemployed and can't find legal jobs that train them correctly, I wager that it will have litter downward effect. If, on the other hand, many of them get trained well while volunteering or slaving away at low wages, then it would likely put downward pressure on mid-level salaries. quote:
I hope you get good malpractice insurance.
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Jun 20, 2010 21:35
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SlyFrog posted:There is always someone younger and hungrier, or just hungrier and smarter, particularly in this day and age. It is not just new attorneys - realize that this economy has turned loose a poo poo ton of fired associates with 3-10 years of experience at BigLaw firms as well as dequitized partners with more experience than that. While I agree with pretty much everything in this post, I think the oversupply of experienced attorneys is more a symptom of a terrible economy than it is for law grads. Are the structural problems on the entry level end of today's legal market (over saturation of law grads increasing supply and outsourcing/legalzoom decreasing demand) really as prevalent as you gain experience? 7StoryFall posted:I hope you get good malpractice insurance. I doubt hiring a licensed attorney to do paralegal stuff and the occasional easy court appearance (uncontested prove ups, default judgments, etc.) is any more of a malpractice risk than taking on a new associate just out of law school. Obviously I wouldn't be passing off jury trials to brand new attorneys while I sip margaritas at the beach.
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Jun 20, 2010 22:11
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GamingHyena posted:There's no question that the flood of law school grads is putting a massive downward pressure on wages for new attorneys. In medicine, fee for service pay systems have lead to an increase in the number of services preformed. I'm not sure why a massive increase in lawyers doesn't = a massive increase in lawsuits. Economically it should be so cheap to bring a suit that many more suits will be brought. I don't know why this doesn't occur but it doesn't appear to be.
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Jun 20, 2010 22:23
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Roger_Mudd posted:I'm not sure why a massive increase in lawyers doesn't = a massive increase in lawsuits. Economically it should be so cheap to bring a suit that many more suits will be brought. Because lawyers need lawsuits. This requires a client, and it also (if the lawyer wants to eat) requires a client with money and a will to spend that money on attorney fees for lawsuits, frivolous or not. Why would it be cheap to bring suits, exactly? Even if you go pro se, getting smacked with paying for the opposite side's attorney fees can completely ruin your economy and possibly even force you into bankruptcy. I'm not sure you've thought this through. 
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Jun 20, 2010 22:28
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Not to mention that filing suits involves a good deal of court fees that aren't subject to the supply-and-demand pressures of the legal industry, so there's a limit to how cheap any of this gets.
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Jun 20, 2010 22:41
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GamingHyena posted:While I agree with pretty much everything in this post, I think the oversupply of experienced attorneys is more a symptom of a terrible economy than it is for law grads. Are the structural problems on the entry level end of today's legal market (over saturation of law grads increasing supply and outsourcing/legalzoom decreasing demand) really as prevalent as you gain experience? I think that oversupply is noticeable in the event you ever lose your existing job and need to go find another. I have a few peers in other firms who have needed to look for something new, and it is absolutely brutal out there from what I can tell. So if you have something good that you can keep, you're probably okay (at least for now). But heaven help you if you are out there looking. Of course, even if you have something good right now, I think you always need to be aware that you could be the guy in Office Space who ran reports from the fax machine to the engineers, and was a "people person." Basically, confusing tenure with the ability to actually hold your own technically and effort-wise when the wolves are at the door. I still think it is possible that a lot of 10-20 year practitioners who have just kind of kept pace in sleepy little mid-sized cities are going to start feeling pain. Not just because of the economy or oversupply, but because of things like increasing globalization, technology, and the greater sophistication of practice that requires. In part, that is because (in my belief) that the oversupply did not just start happening in the last 1-2 years. The economy tanking has, in effect, put a highlight on the oversupply that has been there for awhile. They have been synergistic. And of course, oversupply almost by definition goes hand-in-hand with the economy. I mean, by definition, if the economy is doing well enough to absorb, there is no oversupply. I think what has actually happened here is that we have been oversupplied for a number of years for anything but a cheap cash driven boom economy. Now that the wheels have fallen off, the system has been exposed. Of course, people were saying similar things at the end of the dot-com era, and just a few years later everything was milk and honey again (at least for five years or so). SlyFrog fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jun 21, 2010 |
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Jun 21, 2010 00:36
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Thanks for the feedback, guys. Barring a miraculous recovery in the job market, it seems that lawyering is a dead dream. It sucks because I kind of wanted to do law and prestige definitely wins out over wealth for me, but I don't want to do it enough to hit my dick with a hammer for it. I'll probably still take the LSAT or at least study for it, since critical thinking skills never hurt. @Adar: Yeah, I strongly suspected this would be true. I was guessing that positions like this would be like the Expat positions in other jobs. And from what I understand, even those Expat positions are on the decline because companies can just outsource to in-country labor, though Law might be a bit different in that regard.
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Jun 21, 2010 01:11
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Will2Powa posted:[...] prestige definitely wins out over wealth for me [...] This is a luxury you most likely can't afford. Do you want to have a home? Do you want to eat? Do you want to keep those two things if something unexpected happens? The whole "become a plumber" advice is hardly new, and I doubt anyone has ever listened to it. It's understandable, because if you're considering going to law school you are almost guaranteed to be the sort of person who'd never even entertain the idea of doing anything that wasn't the purview of the commissar class. I think the sooner you square with the fact that you will likely never be an unique butterfly, the sooner you can get out of academia (or at least, the sort that doesn't pretty much GUARANTEE you a decent paycheck that offsets your student loans). Right now, the opportunities for decent, secure employment in the US are getting scarcer, given the wage stagnation and rapid growth of nonflexible (healthcare/insurance/rent) costs of living. Suck it up, realize the odds are stacked against you as far as joining the HENRY club is concerned, and make the best of the situation. At this point, that probably doesn't involve going to college, and certainly not something that's not in incredibly high demand while mysteriously being completely unattractive to the student body at large. Like, uh, nursing? Of course, hearing it from people who already go to law school might not sound convincing. That said, most of the people who do go and post in this thread are either retarded and completely aware of this fact (im looking at you JudicialRestraints), too far down the rabbit hole to make anything decent with their lives, or stuck in socialist hellholes straight outta Orwell where tax and spend eurocrats force people to go to college for free and then rob them of the joy of paying their own medical bills. lipstick thespian fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jun 21, 2010 |
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Jun 21, 2010 02:04
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On a somewhat similar note, this is seriously going to be the life of a couple of people in this thread a few years from now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeyN8HnHWs
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Jun 21, 2010 02:06
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lipstick thespian posted:This is a luxury you most likely can't afford. Do you want to have a home? Do you want to eat? Do you want to keep those two things if something unexpected happens? The whole "become a plumber" advice is hardly new, and I doubt anyone has ever listened to it. It's understandable, because if you're considering going to law school you are almost guaranteed to be the sort of person who'd never even entertain the idea of doing anything that wasn't the purview of the commissar class. My goal is government work where my loans will be repaid and I will get a middle class income and good benefits for rewarding work. I will literally kill to achieve this. That said, I kinda really like law work (because I'm broken) and I'm doing pretty well at a pretty decent school for pretty cheap. I'm not looking to get rich, just to do all right for myself while practicing the law. Eventually I want to go into politics where the higher prestige of law helps. I am a special flower, but only insomuch as I like working fairly long hours, like legal work and consider 40-50k pretty good starting money.
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Jun 21, 2010 03:00
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So, what benefits come with a lateral move? Is it just hoping your next batch of peers aren't as big of assholes as your current group, or is just a location thing, or what?
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Jun 21, 2010 03:20
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I was reading through the last law school thread and saw remedial got brought up. If you were one of the people who got their money stolen you can sit back and lol now(without faxing photos of his dick to his law office). [quote="NHBA "] And the issue is very real to Concord attorney Daniel Dargon, whose law firm is fighting an enforcement action – and a threatened $60 million in fines – for allegedly acting as "loan originators" without obtaining necessary licenses. The law firm also faces contempt charges for refusing to allow the Banking Department to examine its client files to determine whether it was complying with the limitations of an injunction which halted the original enforcement action. [/quote] http://www.nhbar.org/publications/display-news-issue.asp?id=5597 Looks like his other partners have done some interesting stuff to! [quote="NHBA "] * Mr. Kasmar made a misrepresentation to the court and opposing counsel. * Mr. Kasmar failed to correct the misrepresentation. * Mr. Kasmar acted intentionally and knowingly in making this statement to the court and opposing counsel. Mr. Kasmar was issued a Six Month Suspension, retroactive to March 1, 2009, and ordered to pay all costs associated with the investigation and prosecution of this matter. [/quote] http://www.nhbar.org/publications/display-news-issue.asp?id=5137 Lesson is, don't go to a T3-T4!
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Jun 21, 2010 05:36
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Xane posted:I was reading through the last law school thread and saw remedial got brought up. If you were one of the people who got their money stolen you can sit back and lol now(without faxing photos of his dick to his law office). Part of me finds this hilarious that fat gently caress may have to pay $60 million in fines, yet part of me thinks he probably shouldn't be forced to turn over ALL of his client files so that banking regulators can go on a fishing expedition. So conflicted  In conclusion: 
GamingHyena fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jun 21, 2010 |
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Jun 21, 2010 06:05
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I'm afraid I missed this. Can someone please fill me in?
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Jun 21, 2010 14:07
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ManiacClown posted:I'm afraid I missed this. Can someone please fill me in? Dan Dargon is famed shitposter Remedial, who used to fill D&D with terrible libertarian posting, and led the eve-online goon guild goonfleet for awhile. He stole all sorts of money from goons, and even begged for rent money, which the idiots in the guild donated to him. Now he seems to have moved on to scamming people in real life
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Jun 21, 2010 15:26
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lipstick thespian posted:Because lawyers need lawsuits. This requires a client, and it also (if the lawyer wants to eat) requires a client with money and a will to spend that money on attorney fees for lawsuits, frivolous or not. Your assumption is that all clients with valid suits are currently being represented and thus a lower price wouldn't increase the "suit pool". I think there are plenty of suits (meritorious or not) left on the table because of price. The majority of the cost of a law suit is not in court fees or opposing attorney's fees but in the client paying their own attorney + witnesses. One would assume that a large pool of attorneys would drive down the cost for clients as attorneys compete on price. My argument isn't that this is happening, but I'm wondering why it's not.
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Jun 21, 2010 16:07
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Roger_Mudd posted:Your assumption is that all clients with valid suits are currently being represented and thus a lower price wouldn't increase the "suit pool". I think there are plenty of suits (meritorious or not) left on the table because of price. No. I'm sure a lot of people have valid suits and then don't find it in them to bring it to court. And that is exactly the problem. Lower prices might very well increase the amount of suits brought to bear, but given that we do not like in a market with perfect information, a lot of people don't know or care about their possibilities of winning regardless of the merit of their potential case (or the cost of their potential attorney). As such, they don't sue. Information inadequacies in markets is some serious 101 stuff. If you want to keep your analysis of what's happening on the most basic level possible, you should probably incorporate it into your model.
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Jun 21, 2010 16:14
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lipstick thespian posted:No. I'm sure a lot of people have valid suits and then don't find it in them to bring it to court. And that is exactly the problem. Lower prices might very well increase the amount of suits brought to bear, but given that we do not like in a market with perfect information, a lot of people don't know or care about their possibilities of winning regardless of the merit of their potential case (or the cost of their potential attorney). As such, they don't sue. Sure there isn't perfect market information. One would assume an army of hungry lawyers would advertise their low low costs and help correct the inadequacies. I'd like to see a study of the # of traffic tickets contested as the market price has gone from ~$100 to ~$50 here locally. Is your argument that there are structural problems in the legal market or the market is working fine? "serious 101 stuff"
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Jun 21, 2010 16:32
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lipstick thespian posted:This is a luxury you most likely can't afford. Do you want to have a home? Do you want to eat? Do you want to keep those two things if something unexpected happens? The whole "become a plumber" advice is hardly new, and I doubt anyone has ever listened to it. It's understandable, because if you're considering going to law school you are almost guaranteed to be the sort of person who'd never even entertain the idea of doing anything that wasn't the purview of the commissar class. Helpful tip: a fellow lawyer at my firm is dating a plumber (or an electrician, I forget... either way a skilled trade). He owns a house, a nice car in addition to his work van, and takes her on multi-week vacations to awesome foreign locales. She owned a condo that was over $100k under water, still has an equal amount in student loan debt that you can't get rid of in bankruptcy, and is generally hosed for life despite working hard at a top-paying biglaw firm. In short: seriously, be a plumber. If I ever quit, I'm going to totally ask him to hook me up with his local and see about apprentice programs. EDIT: Green Crayons posted:So, what benefits come with a lateral move? Is it just hoping your next batch of peers aren't as big of assholes as your current group, or is just a location thing, or what? That's the hope, but unless you work at a particularly hosed up place it is as realistic as going to a bottom-tier law school and planning to transfer and then get a biglaw job. The real reasons include, but are not limited to: (1) More partnership opportunity. Making a lateral hire is ridiculously expensive for a law firm, and so you tend to be at least pre-vetted for the next step up down the road. Which leads me to (2) New bridges to burn. Remember that rear end in a top hat senior associate you told to gently caress off a couple of years ago? Well, guess what, he's a partner now, and is out for revenge in your reviews/assignments/jerk-off schedule etc. The lawyers at the new firm might be assholes, but they're different assholes; (3) Different practice focus. Say you're doing tons of reinsurance work, but you really want to do mass tort defense. A lateral move to a firm that does all that may be helpful; (4) Relocation; (5) The desperate belief that the grass is greener; (6) Going from an established office to a startup office because you'd rather have one tyrannical, mercurial boss rather than twenty. Mookie fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Jun 21, 2010 |
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Jun 21, 2010 16:42
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I'm looking to retire from the law business in the next couple years. How possible is it to sell my practice that would consist of client files, contacts, web site, work product and some lovely used furniture? I can thrown in a secretary and law clerk but can't guarantee they'll stay. Is there a revenue or profit multiple I can apply or is this a pipe dream?
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Jun 21, 2010 17:34
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poofactory posted:I'm looking to retire from the law business in the next couple years. How possible is it to sell my practice that would consist of client files, contacts, web site, work product and some lovely used furniture? I can thrown in a secretary and law clerk but can't guarantee they'll stay. Is there a revenue or profit multiple I can apply or is this a pipe dream? The rule of thumb I heard many years ago was 7X yearly profit. In years past, the occasional PI case would buoy a lot of shaky solo office, and that PI revenue has almost completely dried up. So I suspect that the multiplier has nosedived in recent years. I am aware of an older attorney who sold his practice to a younger attorney for $5,000 about a year ago. It was a shitlaw practice, but it was a longstanding, relatively stable practice.
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Jun 21, 2010 17:39
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poofactory posted:I'm looking to retire from the law business in the next couple years. How possible is it to sell my practice that would consist of client files, contacts, web site, work product and some lovely used furniture? I can thrown in a secretary and law clerk but can't guarantee they'll stay. Is there a revenue or profit multiple I can apply or is this a pipe dream? What state? If Texas then PM me.
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Jun 21, 2010 17:40
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Solomon Grundy posted:The rule of thumb I heard many years ago was 7X yearly profit. In years past, the occasional PI case would buoy a lot of shaky solo office, and that PI revenue has almost completely dried up. So I suspect that the multiplier has nosedived in recent years. I am aware of an older attorney who sold his practice to a younger attorney for $5,000 about a year ago. It was a shitlaw practice, but it was a longstanding, relatively stable practice. 7x profit sounds really high. Is that before or after I take my salary and other benefits? I would sell right now either way. Business is stable and has steadily increased over the years. I'd say 15% average growth. No PI stuff to skew the numbers. Roger - Sorry I'm in Chicago. However, it is 90% immigration and only a 1/3 of that is local.
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Jun 21, 2010 18:32
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