The Transformer sequel sucked so bad, I assume it had to happen.
I just googled an ex co-worker who, last time I knew, worked at Dewey and was kind of an idiot. I was surprisingly irritated to find out that she was a partner at another big reputable firm (given the idiot thing), and then discreditably pleased to find that the bigfirm partner was another lawyer of the same name, and my coworker is an associate at a small firm still. I'm not doing too well on the milk of human kindness this morning.
1: there has to be a third brother, right? Shia, Dewey and little Kong.
(I am completely puzzled by 1 and 3.)
I'd have thought Louie rather than Kong
Kong is just a funny name, okay? It has that hard K sound.
I mean geez don't make a federal case.
Does that article actually explain what happened to this firm? It reads kind of inside-baseball to me.
Inside of a baseball, it's too dark to read.
9: I didn't understand it either, so I conflated LeBoeuf with LaBeouf and went from there.
The conflation was made easier by the fact that I didn't actually know how to spell LaBeouf until I looked it up to write 11.
9
Does that article actually explain what happened to this firm? ...
No. Wikipedia isn't much help either. This article provides some amusing hints.
My take is the merger probably wasn't a great idea. The merged firm tried to smooth over problems with money and got over extended.
I found the article singularly unimformative. What I want to know is how the recent departures figure into the provisions of that firm's line of credit: are they close to a trigger point, or not?
Yeah, I agree with 15. Though, it sure seems like they are going down. Law firms have exactly one asset -- the reputation of their lawyers -- and when the SEC is investigating your chairman, partners are being told to jump ship, etc., it sure looks like they are in freefall.
I don't personally think the biglaw model makes sense aside from a relatively small number of clients and cases, and there are about 50 or so too many biglaw firms. Hard to see why a business in which clients mostly buy individual lawyers is best served by 800 lawyer behemoths, especially given technology and other changes that reduce the need for junior associates and a huge support staff. But then I've never been at Biglaw, conventionally defined.
Maybe a law firm should do what Delta is doing and buy an oil refinery. That way, they'd have two assets.
Two weeks ago, they had lost more than 20% of their partners and the typical lender standard is apparently maintenance of 75-85%. As of this week, they're basically telling the rest of the partners to get out if they can, so there's no way they haven't hit the trigger.
I've been following this story more than I might otherwise because I worked for LeBoeuf Lamb for two years after college while determining that I didn't want to go to law school.
I know this is old hat, but it amazes me what a massive market failure the entire legal profession is.
On the one hand we have hoards of law school graduates who are unable to find work in their chosen field, and on the other hand legal services remain prohibitively expensive.
I consider myself to be doing reasonably well, but as far as I can see I would be bankrupt in short order if I was accused of a crime or got involved in any sort of non-trivial lawsuit and needed to retain legal counsel.
LeBoeuf Lamb
Doesn't this belong over in the cooking thread?
19.1(b) -- Youch!
17.2 -- Clients are frequently irrational. And no one ever got fired for going with IBM (or whatever the current version of that stupid cliche is).
What the fuck is meant by the following:
Altorelli says he was drawn to his new firm by the chance to help change the way he practices law. Altorelli... says the firm is experimenting with ways to "try to get back to more of an intellectual pursuit, rather than just grinding out the paper."
?
21: Along with Fried Frank.
The linked article is sort of worthless -- I've been seeing coverage here and there, but nothing that spells out what's going on well enough to want to link it.
23, 25: And claiming not to churn.
20. Until you look at other places. Bribery, even of judges, is extremely rare. While contingency lawyers may leave a lot to be desired, they're better than having to pay up front for people who have little or nothing.
The legal and financial system here attracts foreign businesses rather than repelling them. Much of this is "institutions" rather than lawyers per se, but they're mostly institutions made of lawyers.
I think this NYT article gives a pretty good overview.
So suppose you needed a lawyer and couldn't afford one the traditional route. You could try hiring a law school grad with no experience at a low rate. Seems like there's a decent chance you'd get some takers. But it's not really clear whether they'd be any good.
20: I don't have any kind of real understanding of the economics; I've always gotten a paycheck rather than being involved in the business model of firms I've worked for. But litigation, at least, is really labor-intensive, and in a way that doesn't scale. At my current job my financially largest case involves literally millions of times the value of my smallest cases, and the difference in workload might be a factor of ten (if that. Some of the tiny cases get laborious.) As a government attorney, there are policy reasons for me to do the tiny cases properly, but I can't see how it could be cost-effective for a private client to hire someone to put in the work on cases up to an amount of money that would be very very significant for me personally.
I have no idea how to solve this.
30: There are companies (e.g. Righthaven) whose entire business model is legal extortion based on the idea that it is, for any single actor, cheaper to buy them off than fight in court. Obviously, in Righthaven's situation, they were finally killed but there are others.
More of 30: On the tiny cases I do, where the other side isn't pro se, they're generally represented by lawyers who I think of as incompetent clowns. And they're probably not really incompetent, there's just no way they can afford to put in the time necessary to do their jobs right at the rates you can charge for a low-value case.
They called the new partnership Dewey & LeBoeuf, honoring a commitment that Dewey Ballantine had made to the estate of Thomas E. Dewey, the former New York governor who once ran the firm. When Mr. Dewey died in 1971, his will said that the firm could no longer use his name. The firm struck a deal with the estate to continue to use "Dewey," so long as it always appeared first.
What a great executor Tom Dewey had.
Interesting. Virtually nobody who isn't a lawyer knows what "Dewey LeBoeuf" is, but it seems like in practical terms this is as epochal an occurrence as, say, Colgate University going under, which would certainly draw more interest from the mainstream media.
29 -- No, it's clear. Everyone's malpractice premiums are going up because, we're told, of the boom in claims against new lawyers.
30.2 We're running an experiment here with limited scope representation. I can ghostwrite a complaint, and have no further involvement. And then ghostwrite the opposition to a motion for summary judgment, without being responsible for the depositions I didn't get hired to take, and documents I didn't get h.ired to read.
That way, I can lose your case much more cheaply than if it's a regular engagement.
37: Yeah, for a lot of cases I'd advise a bright layperson to represent themselves pro se rather than hire a lawyer in their price range. (I'd really advise them not to litigate, but if you have to.) It's not that an inexperienced/cheap lawyer is necessarily an idiot, but there's just no way for you to make it worth their while to handle the case properly; if you do it yourself you'll at least be paying attention, and the judge will probably cut you slack.
38: I just got an employment discrimination case dismissed where the pro se plaintiff had a limited-scope lawyer. I'd say it was worth it to her for drafting the complaint -- a competent professional should be able to hit the elements of your causes of action in a way that's going to be hard for a pro se. Other than that, it's not going to help much.
I believe that ghost writing court documents for pro-se people is unethical in Virginia.
In NY, we just had a rule change recently -- like, recently enough that I found out about it when I got an opposition to my motion to dismiss with "Joe Blow, Esq. assisted with the writing of this motion but is in no other way representing plaintiff" (and then he did her a new complaint when her first was dismissed with leave to replead). I looked at it and thought "You can't do that!" and then checked and found out you can now. You still can't literally ghostwrite -- it has to be disclosed -- but you can do limited work without entering into a full representation.
36: I mean, this Dewy Beef business is front and center-ish on NYT right now; I remember when, uh, Antioch went under; I don't remember it being an enormous story.
How is it that much different from buying a canned lease/will/whatnot at the bookstore?
It's about professional responsibility. I do that "I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice" shtick here when I'm opining offhandedly in a way that I really shouldn't about legal problems, because generally, once you're giving someone legal advice at all, you are 'ethically' (as in the state bar authorities can punish you for not doing this) required to do whatever it takes to do a competent professional job on their entire problem until or unless you withdraw from the representation (which you can't do by just saying "I quit.") Being allowed to enter into a limited-scope representation where you just draft a document lets you get paid for putting in a finite, controllable amount of work. I'm not sure it's good for the client, but I'm not sure it isn't.
43: So would any story about a big ambitious financial corporation going under, which this seems akin to. But I'm getting the impression that it's so rare for a "Biglaw" entity to cease to exist that this is the first such story LB has seen. Maybe I got the wrong impression.
Drawing a hard line between firms big enough and reputable enough that their going under is shocking and smaller firms where it would be no exciting thing is hard, but I can't think of a firm I'd put in Dewey's category going under while I've been a lawyer.
On the tiny cases I do, where the other side isn't pro se, they're generally represented by lawyers who I think of as incompetent clowns. And they're probably not really incompetent, there's just no way they can afford to put in the time necessary to do their jobs right at the rates you can charge for a low-value case.
I don't litigate, but as a lawyer who moved from working on high-value matters to (mostly) low-value matters, and who struggles with feeling at times like his own work has become that of an incompetent clown, but who knows that even though it would unquestionably be incompetent clown work if it came from BigLaw, it's as good as anyone* could do for what the client is willing to pay, and better than most** would do in that price range, and who would (and does) happily do competent non-clown work whenever client budgets permit, I would urge you to bear in mind that your second sentence may really sometimes be correct.***
It's mostly a feeling I have when dealing with biglaw attorneys on the other side of a transaction (which I am fairly often). "Why didn't you do this in [this other, unquestionally better way]?"/"Because that would have taken two more hours, and my client doesn't want to pay for that" isn't a conversation they really seem to understand. So, incompetent clown.
* This isn't strictly true, of course--I'm quite sure there are plenty of much better, much more efficient lawyers than me. But I don't run in to many.
** This is definitely true.
*** (Although, in most instances, probably the odds are that your counterparts really are incompetent clowns.)
48: Thacher Proffitt went down in the wake of the MBS/CMBS meltdown, but they weren't nearly as large.
49: Well, and it's a continuum. Some of the BigLaw perfectionism really is overkill -- there are corners you can cut without significantly hurting your client. I'm not doing BigLaw style litigation myself here. Then there's corners you cut that are real, significant fuckups, but I think you're right that the guys I'm up against aren't mostly doing that kind of thing because they're idiots, but because they're not getting paid enough to work at a minimally competent level.
On the other hand, I hate seeing bigfirm lawyers "slumming" it in divorce case/prenups/etc.
Their briefs are too long and often off point.
They argue at length about issues that have no meaning or relevance.
Litigation is probably different anyway. I mean, my usual response is "Yeah, your way would be better, I just didn't want to take the time. You should fix that on the next draft." And they happily oblige. (And that time's on their client's bill, rather than mine.) With the biggest downside being that they walk away thinking I'm an incompetent clown.
I don't really that things work quite like that in litigation.
Yeah, the BigLaw process doesn't necessarily gear down to a smaller case well; domain-specific expertise and a more streamlined approach can get better results for a third the effort -- that's the level where I think of myself in my current job, and I do love the occasional opportunity to kick some BigLaw ass. But even the competent-but-streamlined approach is still crazy expensive.
Brobeck and, especially, Heller Ehrman going down were very big deals (old line bay area firms that ate it in the dotcom crash) but this is both rare enough to be unusual, and feels like a harbinger of bigger problems with the high end of the biglaw business model.
We had a rule change.
Finley Kumble. Heller Ehrman. That's a couple off the top of my head. It happens, but not that often.
Insurance is another obvious answer: maybe there should be a kind of coverage that pays to bring a case if the other side breaches a contract. (There probably is such a thing, but I don't know about it.) If I had it to do over again, I might learn more about coverage disputes. I watch the new filings in the federal court here, and I've been surprised how dominant insurance cases are. A testament to the costs of other litigation, obviously.
Urple, you should underestimate the number of lawyers way less competent than you.
55: My cousin was a partner at the first of those.
Brobeck was dotcom, but Heller was Crash of 2008.
Depends what you mean by crazy expensive. 100 hours gets you pretty far in a smallish litigation matter; at $200/hr, which is very cheap, that's $20,000. A lot of money to be sure but within the range of a very major purchase for a middle class person or a reasonable expenditure for a small business. The problem is finding a competent $200/hr lawyer, but there are many out there.
I think that much biglaw work is outrageously overbilled but LB is right that its a job that takes a lot of time to do minimally competently.
57 -- god, you're right. I'd mentally conflates the two. Time flies.
$20K sounds crazy expensive to me -- that's in the realm where most people in the country simply couldn't pay it. A middle income person who needs legal help isn't going to get help that's any use at all for much of anything under a couple thousand dollars.
(53 is too sanguine, of course, since on many issues there isn't an alignment of interests. I think of transactional documents as basically coming in three levels of competence: (1) basic accomplishment of the client's goals, assuming everyone on all sides remain friends and no disputes arise, or only the most obvious disputes arise over obvious issues, (2) accomplishment of the client's goals with no winning argument about any unintended unfavorable outcome, were a dispute to arise, and (3) accomplishment of the client's goals without even a colorable argument about any unintended unfavorable outcome, were a dispute to arise. (3) is often unattainable, especially when dealing with novel and complex sitautions, but IME the biglaw model aims to hit as close to as possible to (3) every single time. Whereas, due to cost constraints, I'm happy to be at about a (2.5), with a (2) of most of the document and a (3) on the points that are most important for my client. And I know biglaw counterparts see that and think I'm just "missing" tons of issues, but I've just got to not let myself care too much.) (And there is a hell of a lot of transactional work done in smaller firms that barely rises above a 1.)
Well, right, there would have to be a lot more than $20k at stake. But for major things -- divorce, significant contract case for a small business, avoiding a criminal conviction -- there's a pretty big slice of the population that will pay in that range. Anything under $25k or so basically makes no sense to involve a lawyer.
Let me be the first litigator to express skepticism about biglaw's ability to achieve (3).
Let's take this discussion in another direction. What does "colorable" mean? At what point in law school do you learn the word "colorable"? How come it doesn't sound like a word out of the Chanson de Roland like all other weird legal terms?
An awful lot of people could pay 20K by borrowing against their house. Still it's a lot of money. The scary thing is that there's no guarantee that it won't be 30K or 40K instead of 20K, because you don't know how things will pan out.
It means "I can make the argument without laughing, but I don't necessarily buy it myself". Good enough to argue, but not something you're counting on winning. We talked about it in TFA, and someone came up with an etymology, but I don't recall it.
59 -- 100 hours may well get a matter done. Or it may well not. The problem is that you have no idea at the outset -- unless the thing is a cookie cutter of some kind -- and so a lawyer is going to be looking for security that she'll not be doing 250 hours of work and getting paid for 100.
For you non-litigators, that's 100 hours spread over 18-24 months. So if you're trying to make a living that way, you've got a whole bunch of these at the same time, and the schedule juggling can be pretty intense. (And a large number of that 'whole bunch' are going to go out, one way or the other, after 15-30 hours of work -- so you need all the more.)
66: Lots of people could, but there's very few people for whom it wouldn't be a life-changingly bad idea.
69: Should be "A large percentage of the population could, but there's a very small percentage for whom it wouldn't be a life-changingly bad idea."
$20K is indeed a lot for most people. In 2009, the median net worth was $96,000, with most of that in residential property. 12.5th percentile was $1,700, and 37.5th percentile $61,300. (Federal Reserve)
Are there lawyers who bill at $200 an hour still who have more than 5 years of experience?
Back to the DL thing, it's been a long time since I looked, but it seems to me that debt really ought to factor into the AmLaw ratings (if they don't -- and I bet they don't use it as robustly as they should).
72 -- In Montana, yes.
20k is especially a lot of money if you might lose the case, and then pay the other guy's claim or counterclaim. And you always 'might lose.'
$20K is indeed a lot for most people. In 2009, the median net worth was $96,000, with most of that in residential property. 12.5th percentile was $1,700, and 37.5th percentile $61,300. (Federal Reserve)
Right. I suppose it depends on your definition of "middle class". Even most people who are doing "well" in terms of their total wealth when counting property, 401K & etc. won't necessarily have $20-30 thousand in loose cash just lying around. Especially not if they have kids with all the associated expenses.
I deliberately said 'middle income' rather than 'middle class'. I'd argue that I'm 'middle class', but I'm way over 'middle income', and 20K would hurt very badly.
64: oh, agreed, of course, but IME they are at least giving it their best effort.
en most people who are doing "well" in terms of their total wealth when counting property, 401K & etc. won't necessarily have $20-30 thousand in loose cash just lying around. Especially not if they have kids with all the associated expenses.
Oh, absolutely. It's why most middle income people only use lawyers for absolutely life changing events -- contentious divorces, criminal proceedings, etc. -- and take on huge amounts of debt in order to do so.
65: It means the text is so dense on the page that if you wrote over it with a colored pen, there would be no discernible extra mark.
Sorry, that's the negation of colorable. Colorable means you would notice the mark.
As with the origin of the name of the state, colorable refers to the color red and is from the Spanish. It was derived from the flush of embarrassment if you made such an argument.
(Fn: The three levels of transactional document competence in 62 are basically pure drafting points, and drafting is entirely separate from actual strategic advice to your client about what their business goals are and should be, what their negotiating positions are and should be, etc., all of which is probably generally much more important than the technical drafting anyway, and IME on those points there's less divergence between biglaw vs. smaller firm lawyers, assuming competence on both sides. But, especially for someone who's coming from the background of a biglaw associate, given that biglaw associates deal mostly with the technical drafting (and often have to be a few years in before they're even trusted with that) rather than the strategic advice, it can be shocking to see how poor the drafting of some well-resepcted not-big-firm lawyers can be. And, again, my point was that it's not (necessarily) that they're actually poor drafters, it's that they can't bother to take the time (because their clients won't pay for them to take the time) to really perfect the language.)
I basically have no real idea what transactional lawyers do. I like negotiating the details of settlement agreements and drafting them, though.
What do you mean? We lubricate the wheels of commerce.
The good ones lubricate the wheels of our clients in such a way so as to gum up the wheels of their competitors. But that takes skill.
And obviously also we try to help clients conduct their business in a manner that complies with the law.
Huh... the "lubricate the wheels of commerce" thing was based on the idea that we're "transaction cost engineers", but I guess more recent scholarship says we're not actually transaction cost engineers; instead, we're regulatory cost minimizers.
OK, I was getting into a whole discussion of how hiring an architect is like hiring a lawyer, but it comes down to urple's 3 levels of detail. Level one is going to cover most smaller projects ($500k and under), but occasionally you'll wish you'd paid for Level 2. Level 3 is insane overkill for anything less than a multimillion dollar project, but the big firms are set up to produce Level 3 - drawing sets 1" thick, specification books 3" thick, with every screw type identified.
The difference is that, for the most part, the contractor isn't in a position to exploit the shortfalls in a Level 1 set of docs unless it goes to court, which no one wants. In other words, it's not worth it for H-G's contractor to use undersized nails in his stud walls, even though I didn't specify what nails to use (12d). But in a contract dispute, a good lawyer will seek out and exploit every weakness.
Another thing about Urple's three levels of detail and hiring a cheap lawyer. IME, if you're getting less than level 2 care out of your lawyer, most laypeople would be better off drafting their own documents in English rather than legalese. What you get at the bottom end is a layer of crufty language that obscures whatever it is the parties wanted to agree to, but doesn't actually do much if anything to cover contingencies.
Somebody asked me recently about the likelihood of my returning to the practice of law, if certain gambles don't fall out as one hopes, and I realized that the answer had two parts: (i) I am unwilling to return to that particular slough of despond and (ii) if I were, not only would there be few or no opportunities for a too-senior loose cannon, but -- and several more senior attorneys at or approaching retirement age have agreed with me -- there really isn't much to return to, anyway. The practice is degraded, in status and, in its way, effectiveness, by the reduction of counsel to just another piecemeal vendor, and the waterfall of contempt and disgust makes pretty much every role in the hiring, management and use of counsel a misery.
I disagree with 93 as a general matter, although I'm sure it's true in some instances.
And of course I see the ones that make it to litigation, rather than the ones that help avoid litigation.
with every screw type identified
Except for one type, which is still a mystery.
Or, rather, I guess I'd say that its almost always going to be bad advice. 'You really should get a better lawyer' may be good advice, but 'just drop your lawyer and draft it yourself, you'll do just as good a job' is rarely going to be good advice.
I mean, most people don't hire lawyers for jobs that are too simple to need a lawyer's involvement. I.e., to sell their bike to a neighbor, or whatever.
At this point, I tend to think that the quicker we can bring down the upper middle class professionals the better.
The only issue I've ever hired a lawyer for was a will. I don't think it is always necessary to hire a lawyer for a will, especially when you aren't wealthy, but I was warned that if there was any flaw at all, my family might try to disinherit my cats.
Or maybe it is good advice. Who knows. I'm often amazed by how bad some lawyers are. I think I'm doing a better job than any of my clients would do.
most laypeople would be better off drafting their own documents in English rather than legalese.
Actually, all of my contracts are simple letter contracts, drafted by myself. I'm fairly careful about consistent phrasing, but otherwise, yeah. It's all in plain English, and everyone knows what's been agreed to. The standard AIA contract for client-architect is a dozen pages long, with tiny print; my letters of intent are 1 page, usually with lots of white space.
It's a tough call whether, as a lay person, you're better off drafting your own plain-English contract or hunting around for some "precedent" (most people take things that are free over the internet) only marginally relevant to your situation. Both have risks. OTOH I've seen $100 million deals that basically seem to have been papered by taking more or less irrelevant precedent from some prior deal and badly adjusting them to a new situation.
It's a truly extraordinary lay person who should represent him/herself in even the most basic kind of a lawsuit. Even at the Peoples Court/Judge Judy level, the risk of catastrophic error is just so high. Small claims judges are doing the best they can with what they are presented, but anyone who has watched sc court in action can tell you that they are dealing with an odd collection of stress on irrelevancies, omission of critical details, and ordinarily inadmissible evidence. And folks who think the justice of their position is so self-evident as to be self-describing.
86 -- They traffic in controlled optimism.
I think one of the issues with 93 is that you are presumably not only paying someone to fill out the docs but to decide if it is even the right doc going to the right place, what else you need to do, what to leave out of the docs, tell you if you are being a flat-out idiot, etc.
104: It's not that this is wrong, but that really low-end representation is so bad. I spend a fair amount of my practice litigating against the very bottom end of the profession, and I really think there's a not insubstantial tier who'd do worse than a sensible pro se (partially because the pro se would get forgiven for more errors). Really, the answer if you can't afford (or get through some method involving not having to pay market rates) a pretty good lawyer, the answer is to stay out of court.
Have you seen contracts that non-lawyers draft?!?!? Havent any of you ever litigated such agreements?
They leave out all of the essential parts of a contract. And a well-drafted contract does not have to sound legalese.
And, yes, lawyering often is horrible.
104: I got screwed in small claims court because the person I was going after brought a lawyer and I didn't (I would have been happy if she'd just paid me what the lawyer cost; it never occurred to me that she'd spend the money on that). Actually, wait, the small claims court sent us to arbitration, and it was there that the lawyer showed up. I've told this party of the story before - she was a roughly Ann Coulter-looking blond who A. flirted with the (all-male) arbitrators, B. made a shockingly misogynistic crack about AB, who wasn't present, and C. misconstrued both the plain English meaning of an insurance company document and contradicted what the insurance company had told me the document said. But I hadn't actually brought an employee of Progressive with me, so I was SOL.
It's not actually clear to me that bringing a lawyer would have let me win, though.
The solution is that judges should be empowered and encouraged to disbar attorneys on the spot, if they're clearly incompetent.
All contracts work out great when there are no problems.
It is only when it goes to hell that you need the good contract.
You can make a simple contract. You just have to decide what you dont want protected.
Oh sure, there are terrible lawyers. Outnumbered by terrible lawyer-clients, I'd think.
Arbitration annoys me; obviously you have to do it for transnational stuff, but local disputes?
If everybody is local, you may as well use trial by ordeal.
108: They leave out all of the essential parts of a contract.
Example?
They leave out all of the essential parts of a contract. And a well-drafted contract does not have to sound legalese.
You can't fool me. There ain't no legal Es.
I shouldn't keep reading this thread because it's terrifying me about hiring a lawyer even though I believe it's the right thing to do and arrrrgh. Fuck.
What do you need a lawyer for, Eleanor?
Awesomely fun college employment discrimination stuff. My relative who is high up in the E/E/O/C/ said we've been doing things right but it's probably time to lay the groundwork of talking to a lawyer about options. That way when the internal investigation is done, my partner (who's having the problem) can tell the HR officer that she has to talk to her lawyer about whatever the resolution is or something.
Employment discrimination, you can (at least here) find perfectly reputable lawyers who will work contingency. And when I'm talking about scarily incompetent lawyers who you'd be better off going unrepresented than hiring, I'm not talking about people who are hard to spot; someone who doesn't worry you on an interview may not be the best lawyer in the world, but is better than the ones I'm talking about.
It should be fine. This lawyer has tons of experience and is in good standing with the pertinent national association and whatnot and has had recent major wins against big local companies, which is good because we're looking for intimidation factor rather than a trial. This whole thing just sucks and makes me miserable/weepy/queasy when I think about it too much.
I'm not talking about people who are hard to spot
Lionel Hutz, in other words.
Does anyone know why Hill and Barlow fell apart back in 2002? My understanding was that it was an elite firm with a pro bono culture and that some lawyers got greedy, but wikipedia tells me very little other than that the real estat group left as did the group representing authors and movie producers.
*One track for a law school grad (if you have family money that can float you initially): literary agent.
I've been wondering about whether certain documents really need to be done by a laywer, like a super-simple will for people with no house, a 401k and social security and not much in the way of fancy possessions, living wills, powers of attorney and healthcare proxies. I think that there are online forms that will spit out the stuff that a lot of lawyers pulled out of formbooks anyway.
59: Who charges $200? My uncle and his wife are involved in litigation with her cousins and a friend against the lawyer executor of her cousin's estate who was pulling all kinds of shenanigans like paying some contractor $60K to see if the lot her house was on could be subdivided, when everybody except the sketchy home health aide from New Brunswick who got included in the will at the last minute was on the same page.
That firm usually charges $500/hour, and it's a small trust and estates only firm. They're charging $250, because my cousin who works for the ABA's Human Rights Division is doing a lot of the grunt work for him. Not $200.
certain documents really need to be done by a laywer, like a super-simple will for people with no house, a 401k and social security and not much in the way of fancy possessions, living wills, powers of attorney and healthcare proxies.
I've used LegalZoom.com for some similar things, like a living will, and they seem pretty good. I'd never use them in an area I thought likely to be worth a lot of money or to be substantially contested, however.
Regulatory stuff seems to be a bit cheaper. Immigration (H1-Bs, green cards) is mostly flat fee and generally boutique firms. Long-term care applications for Medicaid cost around $11,000.
68: Charley, do you do alternative fee stuff? I was looking at a BigLaw site where they have different agreements. There are various levels of risk and reward for the firm and the client.
127: Right, but in my example the 401k isn't going to go through your will. You just name the beneficiary.
That could get complicated if you have more than one beneficiary or whatnot.
They have a form for that. Never dispose if your 401k in a will, because then it has to be broken up immediately and you lose the benefit of deferred taxation on the growth.
To be clear, you can't dispose of it in your will. You should never leave it to your estate.
This thread might be dead. But it seems to be the right place.
Today's NY Times editorializes in favor of a new/proposed rule in NY that new lawyers must do 50 hours of pro bono work after admittance to the bar. My 1st reaction was, who was going to supervise all of them? From all I have read, it seems that many new lawyers shouldn't be trusted out there alone. But hey, if it is going to the indigent maybe clown-level representation is OK. Overall it doesn't seem like a great idea.
132: I had a lawyer do it, so I assume he did it right.
My 1st reaction was, who was going to supervise all of them?
A crusty gentleman from the old school who gradually warms to the provocatively-clothed woman with a novel interpretation of the RICO statue. Starring Sam Waterston and Nicki Minaj.
Oh, two NYT links for 134.
The editorial.
An article.
And the pro bono must be done before being licensed to practice. It isn't clear that this has to happen before or after passing the bar exam. If before, yowzers!
137: I dunno, Harvard Law School requires 40 hours of pro bono legal work from its students in order to graduate. (See paragraph H.) It has to be supervised by a licensed attorney. I'm sure other schools do something similar. It doesn't seem like a horrible idea.
20
I know this is old hat, but it amazes me what a massive market failure the entire legal profession is.
On the one hand we have hoards of law school graduates who are unable to find work in their chosen field, and on the other hand legal services remain prohibitively expensive.
I don't think it is that simple. Many of the unemployed law school graduates are clowns who should never have gone to law school in the first place. And it is my understanding that even competent graduates aren't immediately prepared to go into sole practice.
And how expensive are legal services really? I recently bought a townhouse and my lawyer charged me $900. How much lower do you think that could go?
That's a very cheap townhouse for sure. Does your lawyer have any more?
39
Yeah, for a lot of cases I'd advise a bright layperson to represent themselves pro se rather than hire a lawyer in their price range. (I'd really advise them not to litigate, but if you have to.) It's not that an inexperienced/cheap lawyer is necessarily an idiot, but there's just no way for you to make it worth their while to handle the case properly; if you do it yourself you'll at least be paying attention, and the judge will probably cut you slack.
I have heard some judges despise pro se litigants and don't take their arguments seriously. Of course I have heard this from disappointed pro se litigants who may not be totally objective on this subject.
129 -- I've been involved in various matters over the years that have had pretty much all of those alternatives. And I end up discussing alternatives, and have done some different arrangements on my own over the years. Mostly, though, I go hourly, and vary the rate. I can't really go fixed for the kind of stuff I do: (1) there's an opponent who can take control of the meter and (2) in litigation, unlike a regulatory or transactional engagement, I can't walk away if the thing goes seriously under water.
When lawyers say they want alternative billing, they're hoping to make more money than billing hourly. When clients say they want alternative billing, they want to pay less than it would cost hourly. As it turns out, in case after case, hourly ends up the least worst alternative: everyone understands it, and if there is fee shifting, or some other wrinkle, hourly is how courts do it too. (I defended a case some years ago where the client was complaining that the lawyer's contingent fee was unreasonably high [not the rate, but the actual result]. We won, but it took years, and was expensive to do so.)
I have heard some judges despise pro se litigants and don't take their arguments seriously.
My experience on the judicial side is 20 years old, but the contempt was well earned. To be fair, most of the pro se cases we had (D.D.C.) were filed by prisoners, nuts, or both.
Many of the unemployed law school graduates are clowns who should never have gone to law school in the first place.
Not all of them were clowns, of course: many of them were grasping at what they were told, at the time, was the least expensive (in time + money + opportunity costs ("You can do anything with a law degree": no, you can't)) door into the professional class, and didn't realize (or were never informed) that in a down economy a qualification from a top 5-10 school meant something very different from a school ranked below 20 or 30.
prisoners, nuts, or both.
Prisonuts!
I can't read this post title without hearing "Dewey, Cheatam, and Howe".
The biggest law firm I know of that went under was Wolf Block, but that's because it was big news here for about ten minutes. I have no idea if it even made a ripple nationally.
To 134: Paul Campos at LGM has a rant about that proposal. I already commented over there so I won't repeat myself too much, except to say that I think there's a seed of an interesting idea there that is buried in an ocean of reality.
a seed of an interesting idea there that is buried in an ocean of reality.
I like that.
Paul Campos at LGM has a rant about that proposal.
Somebody tell me if Sauron has given his opinion yet.
Re: the pro bono requirement, I think Maryland requires something like that after a lawyer passes the bar. In fact, I'd thought Maryland's requirement was a certain number of hours of pro bono work per year for as long as someone is a member of the bar, but nothing like that is mentioned in the article or editorial, so maybe I'm wrong. Although maybe the distinction between before and after admittance is relevant.
My 1st reaction was, who was going to supervise all of them?
As for ensuring compliance, I assume they'll just have to fill out some form, provide documentation of pro bono work, etc., along with all the other admittance-to-the-bar paperwork. The court is competent to catch egregious offenders, at least, and that would get most people to do it. As for ensuring that the pro bono work is competent, these people are still in school and nonprofits that organize pro bono work exist, so maybe those organizations could supervise at little additional cost to them, but that probably still leaves a lot of gaps.
these people are still in school and nonprofits that organize pro bono work exist, so maybe those organizations could supervise at little additional cost to them,
I don't think they ARE still in school, necessarily. As I understand it, the judge's proposal was just that you have to do the time before you can be admitted to the bar, not that you have to do it while in law school. There are an awful lot of law school grads floating around who are 1, 2 or even more years out and still haven't passed the bar.
Overall, my experience of mandatory community service is that it isn't community service. Because mandatory volunteering isn't voluntary. So it's not at all like "scaling up" an existing volunteer program.
I have worked with dozens if not hundreds, of young and middle-aged people forced to do volunteer work (as a school requirement, as a college requirement, and as a court requirement). There is a fundamental difference between those who have some level of intrinsic motivation and those who are merely fulfilling an external requirement.
Now, of course, being forced to fulfill an external requirement can in some cases "build character" (i.e., help a privileged person to understand the world from a different perspective), but a) that requires that the person be interested in learning, and b) that someone invest a not-insignificant amount of time in facilitating their learning. As the person in (b), I am keenly aware of just how much work it represents, and just how badly people can get injured by well-meaning volunteers.
Basically, the judge's recommendation sounds to me like the people who say that having a baby will force someone to grow up. Maybe, but it's a roll of the dice. And nobody asks the baby how they're going to feel when the dice come up snake eyes.
Because mandatory volunteering isn't voluntary. So it's not at all like "scaling up" an existing volunteer program.
This is so right and should be tattooed on the asses of various officials.
Drat, I dropped a comma. Should be:
dozens, if not hundreds,
152 -- Maryland does not have a mandatory pro bono requirement. I have to file a form every year, that's mandatory. (If there is a substantive requirement, then I make it every year, so I'm not paying very close attention.)
I was admitted on motion in 2008 [2007?] -- there wasn't a mandatory pre-admission pro bono requirement then.
Oh, right. Not on motion. I had to take a bar exam. I should stop digging the hole.
After you pass the exam, you have to go spend a day in Baltimore being harangued on various topics, including pro bono. Then you get admitted.
there has to be a third brother, right? Shia, Dewey and little Kong.
Seems that Shia Lebeouf was named on the model of Sunni Bono. Who was in turn known to family as Sunni "Pro" Bono. True fact.
(Just tying the thread together.)
NY has a goal for admitted lawyers, but there's no enforcement.