Thursday, March 10, 2011

Law is a terrible career... at least the guys competing for your clients say so

I have done quite a bit of reading by people who are saying that going to law school is a horrible mistake.  Fair enough.  They'll point out that lawyers are unhappy.  They'll say the pay isn't so great.  They'll say the jobs just aren't there.

There's a grain of truth to all those things.  Frankly, I think folks considering going to law school should understand both sides of the argument.  It would be naive to go into this thinking that the day you pass the bar, somebody rolls up with your signing bonus and $160,000 a year job, and viola, that's the way it goes when you go to law school.

However, a lot of the griping about law school reminds me of the way a lot of other professions gripe.  This seems to happen whenever you have a bunch of people who work primarily with other people in the same profession.  They lose perspective.  They think about their dissatisfaction, which matches the dissatisfaction of the majority of people they bump into on any given day, and they forget that other people have their troubles, too.

Perfect example:  doctors.  A huge percentage of them believe that the world is really unfair to them.  That they get paid too little relative to their worth.  That if they had gone into business, they'd be much wealthier.

All I can figure is that doctors are smart.  They look at businesspeople and think, "They don't look so bright to me.  If I worked in their job, I'd be CEO." 

What they forget is that the CEO isn't the smartest guy in the place.  That's probably some database administrator, or financial analyst or actuary.  Maybe it's some guy working in HR who could win on Jeopardy, but he just hasn't had a lot of breaks in his career. 

The smartest guy isn't the highest paid.  In fact, most successful business people are successful because of interpersonal skills, not quantitative and scientific skills. 

If you've ever seen the way a typical doctor's office is run, you have an idea of their true business skills.  They don't have any.  They're completely delusional.

The idea that they could make a lot more money doing pretty much anything else is laughable.  According to the BLS, the mean wage for a GP or family practice doctor is almost $170,000 a year.  Yes, they have monster student loan debt to pay off.  So, if they got $200,000 in student loans and paid it off over 10 years, yeah, they'd have to make do on the equivalent of only $140,000 a year or so.

So, when they whine that they shouldn't have gone into medicine, the reality is that they're just whining.  They don't know what they're talking about.

Same for teachers.  They whine that they're overworked and underpaid.  Now, I won't say they're overpaid, but they're certainly not underpaid.  They love to tell folks how low the pay is for brand-new teachers.  Okay, fair enough, but teachers are paid based on seniority.  You'll notice they almost never talk about what mid-career and late-career teachers make.  According to the BLS, they make about $47,000 a year, on average.

Do they earn their pay?  Sure they do.  I think they earn every penny.  They also work about 190 days a year, compared to about 240 days a year for your typical person working for a company.  They get a LOT of time off.  Their work-day isn't that long.  Yes, they have to bring home work now and then. 

However, because they only work around other teachers, they lose sight of the fact that, gee, most baccalaureate holders who have jobs with real companies put in long hours and work hard, too.  But they don't get a good retirement plan.  They don't get to avoid paying social security, they don't get nearly as many holidays, they don't get 2 weeks off at christmas or a week in the Spring, and they sure don't get their Summers off.

This is not to say that either doctors or teachers are bad people or that they are overpaid or whatever.  All I'm saying is that they are insular groups in society that band together and feed each other's petty gripes to the point that they believe that they have a crappy deal out of life and that the grass would be so much greener if they had chosen to do X instead of Y.

Same for attorneys.  According to BLS, the median wage of salaried attorneys is $110,000 a year.  That, I presume, does not include partners.  So the idea that the law pays poorly is pretty misguided.  That's still more than twice the median wage in the US.  It's not what doctors make, but it isn't what teachers make, either.

So, are attorneys underpaid?  Unlike most professions, it's very, very easy for an attorney to get paid exactly what they're worth by going into private practice.  Sure, some attorneys aren't paid much, but frankly, not everybody is cut out to be an attorney.

Other complaints about the legal profession circle around the idea that attorneys are (take your pick):  depressed, substance abusers, pessimistic, high strung, hyper competitive, no personality, workaholic, etc.

To this, I sort of wonder if people realize that the legal profession probably didn't make people this way.  It's highly likely that those traits are ones they brought into the law, and to one degree or another, it helps them become good lawyers.

Example:  pessimists do well in law school.  However, it sort of makes sense that a person who is always thinking about what could go wrong might do well in this profession. 

To me, the charges that "attorneys are (fill in the negative character trait here)" is about like saying that NBA players are, disproportionately, black and very tall.  So, what conclusion would you draw?  That basketball makes people grow and darkens their skin?

Or would you presume that maybe inner city kids who play basketball all the time tend to be black, and that being tall helps you get further in your career.

If the law wasn't there for all these socially challenged, hyper-competitive depressing people, what else would they do?  Go into sales?  Yeah, everybody wants to buy a car from the nerd who prattles on and on about seemingly insignificant details of stuff and is always sorta mopey.

I'm gonna say that the law doesn't make people that way.  It gives people who are that way a place to feel at home and earn a living.

There are some other legitimate gripes such as the number of legal jobs seems to be smaller than the number of graduates every year.  To that, I can only say that six-figure salaries don't grow on trees.  Want one?  You better be a big enough boy to go out and take one.  If you finish last in your class from anything but the very best law schools around, you're going to be treated like somebody who was the absolute worst person in their peer group.

Again, if you finish last in your law school class and can pass the bar, there's still hope for you.  You can go out and hang out a shingle and through nothing more than sheer force of will and hard work, you can make a good living.  That's just not an option for most folks.

Contrast to another degree that I categorize as being roughly in the same ballpark:  the MBA.  Most of the time, you can't get one from a good school without demonstrating some level of professional achievement, first.  And the bad schools?  That will take you with essentially no work experience?  Just try graduating last in your class from some liberal arts college with a non-AACSB-accredited MBA program and no work experience. 

You will not likely find a good job.  At least not one that pays what most people associate with MBA salaries.  Your life will be no better, whatsoever, for having gone to get your graduate degree. 

So, the takeaway from all this?  If you're going to graduate last in your class, you'd better make sure it's from medical school.  Otherwise, you aren't getting a job. 

Is that law school's fault?  Maybe.  Nobody forces anybody to go to law school.  A lot of the 3rd and 4th tier schools are there to present an opportunity to people (like me) who could not attend law school if only the first and second tier were around.  It's a possibility of attaining something better, but without any guarantees.

Perhaps more realistically, a person should take an honest inventory of themselves before going to law school.  Are you going to kick butt?  Did you get accepted to a first tier school?  If not, are you ready to get in there and do what it takes to graduate #1 in your class?  If all you want to do is slack off and graduate in the fat part of the bell curve, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the prize waiting for you at the end is the same one everybody else on the fat part of the bell curve is likely to get.

You buy your ticket.  You take your chances.  Go big or stay home.  Either one are perfectly valid options.  If you're entrepreneurial and smart, you can make a lot of money.  If you're just smart, you can make a lot of money working for somebody else  If you just want a credential that gives you an easy access to a cushy life, you're probably going to end up with what most people who look for the easy path to a cushy life end up with.

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