A few days ago, a reader sent me a link to a JD Underground thread and suggested that it would enlighten me as to how young lawyers were thinking. The thread began with a question,  Might start non-profit–what services to provide?

I’m thinking about opening a non profit and providing free/hugely discounted legal services so I can get the PSLF* and also gain some experience…What are some basic, easy to learn services that I can readily offer clients to build up volume? I’m thinking form-filing stuff at this point, but any advice would be appreciated.

There is certain virtue in this question, though it may not be obvious at first.  The person asking the question is thinking about alternatives to address his circumstances, most notably the crushing debt load. He (I assume it’s a “he”) is trying to do something rather than sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and pondering the misery of his choice to go to law school.  He’s trying.  He gets points for that.

The problem arises from that part of the question which seeks “some basic, easy to learn services.” Or to put it differently, what practice area of law requires no knowledge or skills?  Some of the responses include:

Bankruptcy seems like a good fit. Chapter 7 and 11. I don’t know tons about it but I think consumer 7s and 11s are fairly easy to learn.

…you’d be better off getting a job at legal aid.

tenants rights cases, restraining orders, small claims advice, non-complicated wills are a few things that spring to mind.

Help parents of special ed kids who have no choice but to put their kids into public schools. Special ed advocate, attend IEP meetings so the parents can’t get ambushed, etc.

To the credit of the forum, there are others who challenge the ease with which someone who “the only thing is I don’t really have any real skills” could perform these functions.  The problem is that the OP’s question has but one mission, to address the repayment of student loans.  Nowhere is there a suggestion of any desire to be a lawyer, to practice law, to practice any particular area of law. The only criteria is what is so easy that someone with no skills can do it.

There was recently a very troubling post at  the Puddle where Chris Bradley, an occasional lawyer when he isn’t writing marketing copy, instructs the groundlings that the only thing needed to successfully handle a deposition is to “show up.”  Jordan Rushie at  Philly Law Blog wrote about the need to actually have a clue when doing depositions.  Alex Craigie, At Counsel Table, ripped a broader swathe by noting that lawyers are not potted plants.  As for “just showing up,”

It’s not enough. Or nearly enough.

And in a footnote:

I mean no disrespect to monkeys, trained or otherwise.

If all lawyers need to do is just show up, then we may well have no raison d’être. And indeed, it may well be that in certain traditional lawyer roles, the “expertise” that might have been required 100 years ago has since been commoditized and minimized.  It may well be that some of our functions no longer require a lawyer and can be adequately handled by a non-lawyer, a paraprofessional, the hard-working but nice man who puts your trash in the back of his oddly-shaped truck. 

To the extent this is true, then it’s time we parse our functions and open the door to non-lawyers, or people with less expensive qualifications who are more than competent to satisfactorily handle the matter.  I’ve made  my suggestion as to what should be done, not that anybody cares.

But if the question asked at JD Underground is what practices areas of the law are best suited for a person who is without skills or a clue, the answer is clear: None.

Sure, there are time when a particular service ends up going smooth and easy, requiring little if any thought and filling in the blanks ends up being more than sufficient. But then there are also times when a well-placed bit of insight can turn sufficiency to excellence. More importantly, there are times when that insight can prevent what appears to be sufficient at superficial blush from turning into disaster.  That’s what distinguished a lawyer’s services from a form-filler.

The other question is whether there is any area of law, any niche at all, that this person gives a damn about.  Does it interest him? Does he feel he might make a difference and help people? Is there any tug, even the slightest, that draws him toward an area of law?

It’s understandable that a law student facing crushing debt must deal with the harsh reality of his poor choice, but that choice is made all the worse by what appears to a lack of purpose in entering the law in the first place.  If the only issue is what he can do that requires no skills, then why go to law school at all?  Because mommy assured you it was the a guaranteed path to middle class stability?  Because dad wanted you to be a “professional?” 

If there is no area of law that interests you, then get the hell out. You won’t be a good lawyer. You won’t be a happy person, spending your days doing something that holds no interest for you solely to put to use your expensive and poorly chosen education. Deny you ever went to law school so you can find a real job, and use the income to pay for your wayward youth.

But trying to find a niche in the law where no skills are needed only compounds disaster.  I agree with Craigie, that this reflect no “disrespect to monkeys, trained or otherwise.”  If you can’t be a real lawyer, don’t be a lawyer at all.

* PSLF stands for public service loan forgiveness.

Lawprof Bill Henderson was part of the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, charged with coming up with tough measures to deal with what anyone more thoughtful than a dirt pile now concedes is a royal disaster.  He writes about it at The Legal Whiteboard.

The issues are well known, too many warm bodies, too expensive, too impractical an education to allow students to put it to use without a second education in how to actually practice law.  Yet, putting anybody in a room with the ABA seal of approval is almost the kiss of death of solutions, no less tough measures.

Contrary to what outsiders may believe, the ABA types don’t reflect boots-on-the-ground lawyering, where trench lawyer-types make hard choices every day, and put solving problems ahead of the niceties of cooperation, consensus and civility.  It’s not that we’re not civil or try to be cooperative, but that the primary goal is fixing a mess, and we never forget it.

Bill was, how shall we say, unconvinced that “deliberative bodies” such as the Task Force had the wherewithal to deal with problems of the ABA’s own making, such as its accreditation requirements, but offers a twist.

These programs are laudable and, from an institutional perspective, necessary.  But will an ABA taskforce, or AALS, LSAC, or some other industry group taskforce produce substantial change?  History suggests that the answer is no and that, instead, meaningful change will come from the bottom up rather than the top down.  Change will occur at the bottom from either the desire to survive or the opportunity to do something great.  Other similarly situated institutions that feel less urgency or inspiration will eventually perish.  It is just that simple

The accreditation system we have created is an anachronism.  But if we think the ABA Standards are holding back the forces of innovation in legal education, we are kidding ourselves. Any law school or law professor who wants a better way can have one — we are all like Dorothy and her red slippers in the Wizard of Oz: we have had the power all along.

It’s certainly true that no one really needs the ABA’s permission. Indeed, being somewhat Malthusian, I suspect nature will provide a harsh but effective solution to thin the herd regardless, though I doubt it will suit any of the stakeholders. But if the stodgy ABA types can’t manage to get off the dime, Bill suggests that Dorothy can do it without them.

From an analogy of his own experience, pre lawprof, as president of his firefighter local union, Bill explains how they joined together in their mutual self-interest to push through a highly beneficial law which allowed his union members to submit the inevitable impasse to binding arbitration. Naturally, it meant that they got a raise no matter what, as public sector arbitrators are invariably inclined to do.  Bill had told me of his sordid past, so this came as no surprise to me.

His suggestion is that Dorothy is a lawprof, and if the prawfs could organize themselves and click their heels, they could force the change that the ABA can’t or won’t.  They can rip the accreditation process from this dinosaur’s claws.  This leaves the future of law school to the sensibilities of lawprofs. The problem is that the present state is a product of the best ideas of lawprofs, who held that wing of the ABA captive at the time and created rules that favored them at the time.

One alternative is that the law students and young lawyers, for whom the disaster has had the greatest impact and who, like the lawprofs, are sufficiently interested that they can, and have, organized into “unions” to force change.  But having had the misfortune of spending a bit of time the other day watching a particularly vocal segment of them interact, this holds little promise. 

A blog called Outside the Law School Scam, purportedly to start from the point where Paul Campos’  Inside the Law School Scam left off, offered a  vapid critique of a post by  Keith Lee urging young lawyers to get off their butts, stop whining, and make their life happen.  Brian Tannebaum jumped in to back up Lee’s view, which generated one of the most  absurd attacks ever launched from behind the jungle gym.

That it was snarky, vicious, infantile, even anti-semitic, didn’t bother me greatly. Even children can be amusing, and tone should never get in the way of substance. Though I might have preferred they spend their time worry about whether to  pay down their debt or save for their future, they instead found it more important to “burn” Tannebaum.  “Burn,” apparently, is a term of art among digital natives, meaning that they “won” the battle for playground hegemony, even if only in their own unformed minds.

But it was a modern day example of what in my youth would amount to screaming “your mother wears army boots.” Painful as that may be to a third grader, adults aren’t particularly persuaded by such cries. We live in reality, not juvenile fantasy, and we know our mother doesn’t wear army boots. What saddened me deeply with the monumentally poor grasp these young lawyers had on what constituted valid reasoning and their tenuous grasp of reality. As amusing as their snark may have been, their critical thinking skills were largely nonexistent.  Without them, they cannot be Dorothy.

So if Dorothy shouldn’t be lawprofs, and can’t be law students or young lawyers, the only stakeholders left are more mature and experienced lawyers.  And from what I’ve seen, we aren’t sufficiently interested in the fiasco happening in law school to take time away from trying to serve our clients or make a living. 

Malthus for the legal profession is beginning to seem the most likely default, and it is highly unlikely that it will please any of us or make our profession any better. But unless something gives, it will happen whether we want it to or not.  We can wait for Swift to make a modest proposal to shake us out of our lethargy and self-absorption, or we can spare a few moments that we might otherwise spend learning how to  use twitter to build a successful law practice and serve as the counterpoint to the lawprofs’ self-interest and the law students’ terminal immaturity.

It’s 9:08 a.m. on a Saturday, and I should be in the midst of a meeting with a fellow with whom I made an appointment to do some work on my home. A neighbor used him, and told me he did a decent job. She also told me that he talked too much.

Me: Does he take a hint to stop?

Her: No, not at all.

Me: So what should I do?

Her: The only way to get him to stop is to tell him to stop talking. Anything less direct and he doesn’t get it.

Me: So just tell him to shut up?

Her: Pretty much. Or stand there for an hour and listen to him talk about nonsense that means nothing to you.

Me: Got it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care that he was a talker, but that my options were limited.  Following Hurricane Sandy, there were things to be fixed.  I called about, but couldn’t get anyone on the line. No one even called back. For the moment, the people who fixed things were in great demand, and didn’t need the work. They would, of course, need the work later, after they milked the storm for all it was worth, and then they would come begging, hat in hand, for any work they could find.  But for the moment, they were in demand.

Being a principled person, I had a problem with calling people in the spring who were too important to return my call in the fall, which is why I sought my neighbor’s advice. She had someone I didn’t call, and therefore it wouldn’t violate my sense of propriety to contact him now.

Dr. SJ had seen the work done at the neighbors, and thought it looked fine.  Speak with her, Dr. SJ commanded me. Find out her person and call him, she implored. So I did.

He returned my call a day after I left him a message, and we spoke briefly, with him asking me to email him my address and contact information, and then launching into a description of the wonders of his services. I cut him short by telling him I had to go, and sent off the email.

I heard nothing back for a week. I sent him another email, asking if he received the first.  He responded by suggesting that we meet today, and asked if that was good with me and for a time. I replied that it was good and gave him a time of 9 a.m.  He sur-replied “perfect, see you then.”

And here I am, typing on a computer instead of meeting with him because he called me at 8:55 a.m. to tell me he was running late for our first meeting.  He launched into an explanation of the many very important things he had to do this morning that caused him to run late to our appointed meeting, but I told him to stop talking.  He sounded hurt.

At least he called.

Heads were exploding. It’s always fun to watch heads explode. Carefully crafted business plans were dropping like flies, as desperate twits trying to spin the words were typed furiously.  Avvo’s Lawyernomics conference was in full force, and somebody let Sam Glover onto the stage.  There will be hell to pay.

Before you rip me a new one, yes, that’s the same Sam Glover who owns the Puddle. Yes, the same Puddle that offers insipid, superficial advice from lawyers who have yet to need a shave about how to be a fabulous lawyer, not necessarily wrong but invariably inadequate. But then, remember that Puddle readers tend to prefer small words, ideas that require no chewing and numbered lists so they can check them off.  It’s not the same crowd as here, so don’t judge them harshly.  That’s my job, anyway.

Even though my  Lawyernomics closing keynote address is fully written, somebody at Avvo forgot to send me a first class ticket to Vegas, so I have to count on others at the conference to provide a counterpoint to the facile nonsense they’re giving the sad mopes who paid to attend.  Like this:



Then Sam gave his presentation, gracefully entitled “Why your blog sucks (and what to do about it).”  He begins with an apology for his role in making our world a little worse.

A lot of lawyers have blogs. A lot of those blogs suck.

I suppose I am partly to blame for this. For years, I told every lawyer who would listen that he or she ought to start a blog. I explained that a blog was a great way to get clients in the door, as if that would magically happen if you started posting something on your blog every few days. I neglected to explain how to write a blog that doesn’t suck.

Write good stuff because you want to that other people will want to read.

That’s when the heads began to explode. Sam Glover, friend and confidant of the Slackoisie and marketers everywhere, speaking truth to his tribe?

This comes as no surprise to me. I’ve watched Sam develop for a while now, having been occasionally critical of his ugly baby, even if in a way that made him feel somewhat less than fully appreciated.  They don’t like tough love at the Puddle, but its merit becomes undeniable over time.  And I attribute time and natural maturation to Sam’s epiphany.  Reading what Sam writes, I have seen him recognize how the notions he promoted a few years ago were, how can I say this nicely, bone-headedly wrong.

The point is that the baby lawyers who thought they knew it all grow up.  They gain experience, suffer the indignities of reality over time, and come to realize that neither life nor the practice of law is nearly as easy and simple as they once believed with all their heart and soul.  If they have half a brain, and by no means is Sam not a bright fellow, their eyes eventually open and they see that the stuff the mean curmudgeons talk about has been happening all around them the whole time, and they were just too busy believing their own nonsense and validating their own choices to see it.

Sam Glover is coming into his own.  And I, for one, am proud of him.

He’s got a ways to go still, as is apparent from his Lawyernomics talk. The business he got from the name recognition he developed as a baby blogger might have been pretty good for a n00b, but will be the stuff he doesn’t want as his practice matures.  He will come to realize that things that work in local niche practices don’t scale or work for lawyers in other practice areas.  His tolerance for the hundreds of phone calls for free answers will wane.  But all this takes time.

A glaring omission is that not everyone can have a viable blawg. For some, the love of writing isn’t enough to make their output sufficiently interesting to anyone else.  For some, there will be the painful lesson that their best ideas are deemed by others to be, well, dumber than dirt. Not every lawyer’s thoughts are brilliant. But the overarching reason is that even if they’re good, there isn’t enough room for ten thousand blawgs. Nobody has that much time to read. 

Still, watching this change happen to Sam has been enormously gratifying to me. Contrary to those who think curmudgeons hate the babies, we are very much interested in helping them to move beyond their infancy and become productive members of the profession. We are here to help, and willing to give of our time and energy to aid in their success. We want nothing from them, no business, no money, no adoration, and see our role as an obligation of one generation of lawyers to those that follow to move them from crawling to walking to running.

But it is fun to watch Sam make other people’s heads explode. Mea culpa. And it’s good to know that there will be lawyers in the generations that follow the grey-beards who aren’t satisfied with wallowing in the gutter.

Special Added Attraction: And if you think I’m dead wrong here and just a complete and total douche,  Bruce Godfrey offers you a blogging form to facilitate your path to awesome wealth and prestige.

Update:  Colin O’Keefe, Kevin’s kid, interviews Sam Glover for LXBN :

When a multinational corporation finds out that some of its tens of thousands of employees, agents and their nasty friends are up to no good under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, they open the big money pit in the back of headquarters and throw in tons of cash.  Well, actually they hire lawyers to conduct investigations to prove them guilty as sin and, for good measure, alert the government to prove what good corporate citizens they are.  But it’s the same thing.

Ralph Lauren, the fellow who sells more shirts with a polo pony on them than with the name Lipschitz emblazoned on the breast, found out the hard way that the playbook is a harsh and expensive solution. Via Lawrence Cunningham at Concurring Opinions :

Ralph Lauren Corp.’s mid-level executives discovered that a few line employees in Argentina had bribed local officials. That enabled importing of the company’s clothing products without the necessary paperwork or inspection.  The bribes, paid from 2005 to 2009, ran to $593,000.

A routine internal corporate review of controls and compliance programs by Lauren managers uncovered the employee actions.  The corporate response was swift, a textbook exercise in corporate crisis management.

Crisis management may not be the best way to describe it.  Yes, it’s the “common wisdom,” but that comes from former government prosecutors who have shifted to Biglaw “defense,” which means they hold corporate hands while walking them to the United States Attorneys office to confess, write checks larger than the economies of several small nations and offer their first born.  For substantially larger sums, these specialists tell their charges there is nothing to be done other than kill off employees, concede malfeasance and throw money away, a not-insignificant chunk of it ending up in their hands.

A prompt investigation was conducted, involving translation and examination of documents and interviews of witnesses.  It resulted in dismissal of several employees and recommendations for internal governance reforms that included new reporting protocols and training programs.

Within two weeks of the discovery, Lauren provided the resulting full report  to US federal authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice, accompanied by the documentary record.  (The company then went further: terminating operations in Argentina and conducting a worldwide review of compliance and training programs.)

For such efforts, the SEC’s enforcement authorities decided to give the company enormous credit and a mere slap on the wrist.  In a non-prosecution agreement, the SEC required Lauren to disgorge the $593,000 plus interest of $142,000. It did not require the company to make any additional changes in controls or governance machinery.

The DOJ was not content with such a modest federal response. Although it also refrained from imposing governance changes, the DOJ imposed a penalty of $882,000 and required the company to admit to specific allegations (detailed in 16-paragraphs of text).

No sizable corporation can assure that no crimes will be committed by its employees or agents. The best we can do is design governance, control systems and training programs to deter and detect. When a system shows leaks, corrective steps are warranted. Ideal steps are best determined by the corporation’s own management, as done here.

Government officials rarely know enough about corporate governance or culture to direct corrective steps.  Yet the proliferation of deferred prosecution agreements in the past few years has led them to do so expansively.

When the DOJ (and now the SEC) use resolution vehicles [non-prosecution agreements] that are not subject to one ounce of judicial scrutiny, this is not something to praise, it is something to lament.

When the DOJ and SEC take action against an entity (one of the world’s most admired companies according to this recent Fortune list) that had an isolated instance of conduct that likely did not even violate the FCPA as Congress intended, this is not something to praise, it is something to lament.

When the DOJ and SEC extract approximately $1.6 million from an entity that acted like a responsible corporate citizen upon learning of an issue, and then imposes annual government reporting obligations on that company, and otherwise “muzzles” the company, this is not something to praise, it is something to lament.

And of course, despite all this fabulous cooperation, it could just as easily have gone a very different way, as it has for so many others.  It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who questions the very expensive common wisdom of capitulation.

Not too many care about the fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a kid. Not too many will feel troubled that he was shot.  In fact, there are a great many of us who think that rubbing salt in his wound would have been an excellent way to both make him talk and pay him back, just a little for now, for the horrible crime he’s accused of.  After all, America is furious, and that changes everything.

The battle between a principled criminal justice system and whoever we hate the most at the moment rages every time a tragedy strikes.  But that’s the point.  The legal system doesn’t have much reason to seize the people we admire and respect, the ones we want to be treated well and whose rights we pray will be honored. Not that it doesn’t happen, but not often.

It’s by the treatment of Tsarnaev that the bar is set.  And it has just be set at 16 hours, but only by the fortuitous interference of a United States Magistrate Judge.  How many more hours is left to our imagination, but for that mettlesome judge.  Via Emily Bazelon at Slate :

According to the AP, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev answered questions for 16 hours before he was read the Miranda warning that he could remain silent and could ask for a lawyer. Once Tsarnaev was told that, he stopped talking. (So much for the idea that everyone has heard Miranda warnings so many times on TV that they have become an empty ritual.) The AP also reports that the investigators questioning him were “surprised when a magistrate judge and a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office entered the hospital room.” The investigators “had planned to keep questioning him.”

Wow. That’s bad no matter your point of view.

But to show the distance we’ve traveled: No one delayed the Miranda warnings—or talked about enemy combatant status—for Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, or Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber. OK, that was before 9/11. But even in 2009 after the arrest of the attempted Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the FBI questioned Abdulmutallab for only 50 minutes before Mirandizing him.

The details are pretty sketchy, and the source pretty partisan, so let’s assume the worst for the sake of argument.  Via Toke Signals, which should give you a clue about the sources perspective:

The home of Idaho marijuana activists Lindsey and Josh Rinehart was raided on Tuesday by Boise Police and Child Protective Services while Lindsey, Josh and their friend Sarah Caldwell, a fellow marijuana activist, were on a small trip to the mountains.

Lindsey and Josh’s two children were taken into “protective custody,” and because Sarah’s two children were also at the residence with the babysitter, they were taken as well.

It’s left unsaid what exactly the arrests might be for, but I would take a wild guess and say it probably has something to do with this:

“This happened yesterday, so now it’s a waiting game for hearings and to see if the state is pressing charges,” Frank said. “When the police raided the house they took several garbage bags full of evidence (Lindsey has MS) so charges are probably being filed as we speak.

Several garbage bags full of evidence can mean a lot of things. Let us assume that the evidence is marijuana, and the “several garbage bags full” means, say, a lot of it. Enough of it to make it a felony punishable by a term of years in prison.

The parents of the children taken are open supporters of marijuana legalization, leaders of the movement to make medical marijuana available in Idaho. 

Lindsey Rinehart is the director, chief petitioner and volunteer coordinator for Compassionate Idaho’s medical marijuana petition. She is also a core member of the Idaho HOPEFest Committee and of Idaho Moms for Marijuana. Josh Rinehart is Lindsey’s husband, director of Idaho NORML, and core member of Idaho HOPEFest and Compassionate Idaho.

Sarah Caldwell is executive director of finance in Moms For Marijuana International. She is also a founding member of Idaho Moms for Marijuana, founding director of Compassionate Idaho, Idaho NORML, and the Idaho HOPEFest.

They shouldn’t have been terribly hard for the police to find if they were inclined to hunt them down as heinous criminals. They’re names and addresses were likely all over the place. It’s one of the risks one takes when deciding to take a stand on an issue like the legalization of marijuana, where enlightenment comes one state at a time, one police department at a time. 

Why the Boise police chose that day to raid the Rhinehart’s home isn’t said, but the fact that they were away makes the timing curious. The fact that the only adult there was a baby sitter with the children too. And the fact that it wasn’t only the Rhinehart’s children, but the children of a fellow activist as well, seems especially interesting. 

In the scheme of grave injustices, one can argue which is worse. Is it the beatings or maimings?  Is it a killing or the humiliation of having an officer insert a hand into a woman’s vagina on the public roadside.  There are no shortage of grave injustices, and while most people believe the one they endured to be the most horrible, there is no real need to argue the hierarchy of which is worse. They are all wrong, and there is no reason to compete.

But this raid stinks of the deliberate intent to seize the Rhinehart’s and Caldwell’s children.  The cops came with Child Protective Services in tow. These activists didn’t hide in the shadows like the anonymous tough guys of the internet, but put their names to their beliefs and made themselves open targets in the War on Drugs.

It’s no stretch to suppose that the police knew the parents were off while the children remained behind.  Not alone. Not without care. But without a parent present to call a neighbor, a relative, someone to take custody of their children if the parents were arrested. 

That the police believe in their holy war against these heinous marijuana activists presents one issue, an issue with which a great many people disagree. But that they seized their children and hold them hostage as part of their battle plan is an outrage.  Forget the benign rhetoric used by the government when it comes to children, like the dubiously named Child Protective Services.  Forget the way politicians appeal to our emotion by tossing about the “do it for the children” argument whenever they want to crush another right or criminalize half the population.

The children of the Rhineharts and Sarah Caldwell were kidnapped by the police as a weapon in the war.  They are a bargaining chip to shut the activists down and put them away.  Had these children been taken by anyone else, there would be a thousand person hunt for their whereabouts. Instead, they will face a grueling battle with a system designed to impose a Puritan’s vision of proper child-rearing.

“They are heartbroken and just want their babies back,” Frank said. “Unfortunately, it’s a long, drawn-out process once CPS has them in custody.

“All three of these dedicated cannabis warriors are physically disabled, and receive very little to no income, and absolutely zero income from any of their volunteer efforts in cannabis reform,” Frank said. “They are all in need of help to retain both family law and criminal law attorneys.

They can fight the battle for marijuana reform. They should have realized that they risked arrest at any moment. This is the price of taking a stand.  But having the state kidnap their children and hold them for ransom wasn’t part of the deal.  Fight with the parents all you want, but leave the children out of it. Do it for the children.

H/T Radley Balko

In perhaps the most ridiculously insipid story to ever grace the pages of the ABA Journal, Debra Cassens Weiss writes about a law firm whose grasp of social media is so fundamentally poor that they are offering prizes for Facebook “likes.” 

The firm’s founders are trying to raise its visibility with a social media campaign that includes “thank you Thursdays” offering prizes for “likes,” the Daily Herald reports. One recent prize was a three-month membership at a local gym.

Some marketing guy from Avvo called me the other day, and I shut him down the same way I shut down most marketers: I told him I am so swamped with business that I couldn’t possibly take on one more case.

For example:  Avvo claims that my profile was “seen” by 1,566 “potential clients over the past 30 days.  I have no idea what it means to be “seen”:  Does this mean that my profile came up on 1,566 searches for a criminal defense lawyer in D.C. or Virginia?  Or that someone actually clicked through to my profile?

If I averaged 1,500 views a month over that time period, which is just under the number they say I had for the last 30 days, that would come to 63,000 “potential clients” who had seen my profile. And yet, as far as I know, I have not had a single person even contact me through my Avvo profile, much less decide to hire me.  “I found you through Avvo” is something I have never once heard.

At PrawfsBlawg, John Pfaff posts a graph that sucks the air out of the room.


We tend to address the explosion in prison population as a direct result of the War on Drugs, and it’s a foundational argument to end the war.  Pfaff raises some issues:

Today, the US is home to about 5% of the world’s prisoners population, but nearly 25% of its prisoners. Our prison-and-jail incarceration rate* of 756 (in 2011) is the highest in the world . The countries filling out the top ten (in descending order) are Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Belize, Georgia (the country—the state has a higher rate), Kazakhstan, Suriname, South Africa, Botswana, Israel, Ukraine, and Chile; Russia’s rate of 629** putting it in the number 2 slot.

Like all zombie ideas, the claim linking the War on Drugs to this explosion has some facial plausibility. The surge in incarceration and the War on Drugs started around the same time (if you use the Reagan Administration, not the Nixon one, as the starting point for the War on Drugs). And between 1980 and 2009, the number of prisoners incarcerated on drug offenses rose by approximately 1,175%! 

But like with all zombies, cracks in the argument become quickly apparent. Take the 1,175% number. In 1980, there were 19,000 drug inmates in state prison, a number which soared to 242,200 in 2009. And yes, that means there are more people in prison today for drug crimes than were in prison in 1972 for all crimes (around 200,000).

But in 2009, there were over 1.36 million people in state prison. And 242,200 is only 17.7% of 1.36M. So a lot of non-drug offenders were added to prison during those years, too—a lot more, in fact, than drug offenders.

Consider the following thought experiment. What would US prison populations in 2009 look like if in 1980 we released all 23,900 prisoners serving time for drug offenses (the 19,000 state prisoners plus 4,900 federal drug inmates) and proceeded to admit no prisoners for drug crimes in the subsequent years? Instead of rising 3.8-fold, it would have risen 3-fold. A difference, but not an enormous one.

In the Empire State, we refer to lawyers who are authorized to practice law as “admitted.”  Whenever someone used the word “barred,” my mind immediately envisions an iron gate making it impossible to get through.  As in, the lawyer was barred from any public place where pleasant people congregate.

In other locales, the word “barred” means that a person is admitted to the bar. Weird locales to a New York lawyer’s ear.

But what makes it even weirder is when the lawyer refers to those locales as the places where they find and represent clients, even though they are neither admitted nor barred.  That’s because lawyers, whether you like it or not, are only authorized to be lawyers in places where they have been barred. Or admitted, if you come from a place where people don’t talk funny.

This is a fairly fundamental aspect to being a lawyer.  Just as a cop is only a cop in the geographical area of his employment, authorized by law to make split-second decisions that elsewhere would assure him a murder charge, a lawyer can only practice law where the sanctioning authority says he can. Practicing law in places where a lawyer is unauthorized is a pretty clear wrong, much like raiding an escrow account because that new car is calling your name.  Even the ABA, in rule 5.5, admits as much, and they are certainly the last carry the torch of arcane ethical rules.

One would think that the disciplinary authority of jurisdictions where a person engaged in the unauthorized practice of law would take something so obvious pretty seriously.  After all, if they don’t keep a lid on who gets to hang around their jurisdiction claiming to be a lawyer, then what’s to stop anybody from doing so?  And if anybody can do so, then the public would be deceived and led to seek legal advice from people of dubious competence and devoid of ethics, and the bar associations wouldn’t get their dues paid. It would be a disaster all around.

Which led me to ponder the significance of this  description of a law practice.

She is barred to practice law in New York and New Jersey–but she lives in South Dakota with her husband and one year-old daughter. She services clients living everywhere from Bangladesh and Costa Rica to California and Florida.