----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim May" <tcmay@got.net> To: <cypherpunks@lne.com> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 12:08 PM Subject: Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Since none of the former, current, or larval lawyers have weighed in on the issue, I'll give my two bits.
The question is this: is it a good idea for list members to go to law school? Issues of accredited vs. unaccredited, reputable vs. correspondence vs. diploma mills, etc.
Unless you really love the law, really love spending hours and hours in dusty libraries looking at old books and enjoy the smell of moldy paper, don't bother. Law school has its uses but even the top 10 schools are all P/L centers for universities now more than they are about scholarship. Some people get quite a lot out of a legal education. They usually end up being trusts and estates attorneys or something. Just about every lawyer I asked about law school discouraged me from going. I went anyhow. It seems to work that way. The first day of law school I remember they passed out an anonymous questionnaire to everyone in the room asking why you came to law school, some other lefty stuff about your politics and what you intended to do with your degree after graduation. As it turned out 60%+ indicated their intention to go into public interest law of one sort or another. Before the last exam my last year they handed out the same questionnaire they had three years earlier. The results: 90some% of the same class had accepted positions in corporate private practice. Do not go to law school suffering from the delusion that you are going to come out, join a big money firm and change the world by quashing the DMCA. Perhaps you will, but the partners are hiring their little associates for one reason, to pay for those cherry wood offices and the but the odds are awfully slim you will be working on the DMCA. There are so many lawyers out there right now you might find yourself stuck without much in the way of prospects. Professional basketball is a decent alternative. I've never felt more like a prostitute than I did when interviewing for large corporate firms out of law school. They send three or four senior associates to the city they are visiting, rent a hotel room in the Marriott and put a chair outside the door. You show up five minutes early, sit in the chair in the hall, looking at the other candidate interviewing with another firm sitting at the other end of the hall in a chair, and knock when your appointed time has arrived. The last hooker who was in there leaves and you go in, sell yourself in a foursome for 30 minutes then get up when you hear the next knock and prepare to turn your next trick 30 minutes later. Lather, rinse, repeat.
First, there are obviously already a huge number of lawyers in the U.S. I can't speak for Europe, where the "Eurorights" person is presumably from, but it's crystal-clear that there are many, many lawyers in the U.S. And a lot of kids in law school. And yet lawyers are working as low-paid paralegals, doing clerical work processing wills and divorces, and joining "law factories" where they probably make less money than engineers.
Do the math to figure out what it takes to bill 2200-2400 hours a year. That's BILL mind you, not work. That's pretty much what you will be doing for the first 4 years as a corporate attorney.
Second, most of these lawyers won't be doing "interesting" work. See above. Certainly most won't be doing crypto or EFF-type work..unless they go to work for EFF, EPIC, etc. Those with a history of incisive comments on mailing lists and in crypto-related fora may find it possible to get in with these kinds of outfits.
I'm not sure how EFF pays, I suspect not particularly well. The high end corporate firms generally start their first year associates around $110-125k or so for top end of the top school graduates. More in New York maybe. The _median_ salary for a Stanford law grad is $95,000.00 if they go into corporate practice. Just over $40,000.00 for public sector work.
(But why bother? The D.C. groups are mostly lobbying groups...and my strong impression is that they are mainly oriented around their founders and chief mouthpieces. A junior lawyer would mainly be a water carrier for one of the luminaries.)
Bingo. You certainly built a rolodex tho. (Given who's in the white house now I'd try Baker Botts)
Third, "pro bono" Cypherpunks-related work is not very remunerative,
Remove the "very" above and you've got it on the head.
by definition, and also not very common. Even if one thinks of the Parker and Bell cases as "Cypherpunks-related," which I don't, there are not many of these cases. The recent cases of Dmitry/Adobe and West/Oklahoma are more related, but these are likely to be taken over by high-profile experts if they go to trial.
The only real fun in law I ever had was in litigation. Litigation is VERY hard to get into. At the same time of the three major name litigation firms I was more intimately familiar with one held the esteemed reputation for having had _every single_ male partner in the firm suffer a coronary of some type or another, the other had two partners commit suicide in two years. I won't even go into the state of affairs in the third.
What I'm saying is that a few lawyers will end up in interesting areas.
Yep.
The vast majority will be off in Skokie and Boise and L.A., processing immigration requests, meeting with DWI clients, and processing OSHA forms for Fortune 500 companies.
Worse. Writing contracts. Even worse, reviewing already written contracts.
I base this on statistics, on talking to some lawyer friends, and on experiences my brother in L.A. tells me about: he has some lawyer friends who went to UCLA Law School, some even studying under such luminaries in the online world as Eugene Volokh, and it's "slim pickings" these days for many of them. They simply don't have the luxury of picking cases to work on...they're grubbing to make ends meet, to pay off loans, and to maybe, just maybe, get a nominally permanent job at an acceptably prestigious law firm. A friend of mine is now a senior IP lawyer at a leading Silicon Valley law firm, so it _does_ happen. However, he left Intel in the mid-70s and went to Stanford Law School, so he beat the rush and he had the street credentials from his Intel work. Getting into law this late in the game is not for the faint of heart.
It's past the curve. Most decent IP/Patent firms pretty much REQUIRE an advanced engineering degree (Masters/PhD) from MIT/Cal Tech/etc. plus the law degree on the way before they will even allow you to interview with them.
Fourth, much too much is being made of the role of law in pushing or enhancing Cypherpunks-type themes. This goes back to Lessig's custom-law-technology analysis again. Fighting a few cases where some hacker is busted for being stupid is all well and good, but these cases are NOT altering the landscape in ways that certain technologies are.
Agreed. Without getting too deep into a rat hole I still think that law can tell coders and architects quite a lot about the neat places to be looking, and the dangerous places to tread. It's a tool. Same as watching the stock market reports. But we've been over that.
I suspect a lot of people these days (more than the several on the list who have spoken up) are talking about law school is that it's a way to change a career. Seen most cynically, it's a nebulous "in several years I'll be doing something different!" sort of shift. A lot easier to make plans to go to law school than to write a new software application, if one doesn't have the inspiration, that is.
Don't bother with law school as a career change unless you: 1. Can score above the 96% on the LSAT. 2. Can get into a top 20 school. (Better a top 15 or top 10 school). 3. Can finish in the top third of your class (hint: the bottom of the curve doesn't follow you to law school and some of the idiots there have been threatened with being cut out of the will if they don't follow in Dad's shoes). 4. Can tolerate 3-5 years of 14 hour day ass kissing of the highest and most offensive order after graduation.
Fifth, consider that I can think of at least two vocal people on this list who went to law school and got J.D.s One or both may have passed bar exams. Neither are practicing anything related to law at this time. (Though their "legal training" may be slightly useful in their careers...that's not for me to say.) A third lawyer I'm not sure about...he was at a software company, but doing law-related stuff. There's a fourth lawyer, who may be a professor, but he's very quiet these days. Another former list member is definitely a lawyer, and has been active in crypto and ICANN issues.
I find law is extremely useful in my day to day affairs but I'm probably not a good example. I got quite a bit out of being in the legal world in D.C., particularly rolodex wise, at exactly the time crypto and intelligence issues were getting to be a big deal in the public eye (Clipper, export regulation, etc. etc.) but I had a certain level of exposure that was probably atypical of most legal types on the Hill and I never intended to go seriously into private practice as a career. (As an aside I went to a "alternative careers for law graduates" seminar once. There were two attendees including me and the speaker). A J.D. is a professional degree here. A vocational degree in the United States, as it were. (Much different in Europe). Really the J.D. program in the U.S. should be a 5 year PhD type program but that wouldn't make the universities anywhere near as much money because they couldn't command the number of applications they do now. It's all about future value of the degree and that high starting salary. (Contrast this with the fact that Stanford University's Law School, ranked #2 right now, has a 61% national bar passage rate. Nearly 40% of Stanford students fail the bar the first time).
I just don't see spending 3-4 years in law school as being very exciting.
If you can go and not care much about your grades, and have the money, and not intend to practice, it could be amusing. Then again, given these circumstances so could medical school.
And I don't mean my personal opinion of whether I'd go to law school or not: I mean that not much exciting work is being done by lawyers. Most are tucked-away in cubicles, in government offices, in small one-person offices scattered hither and yon. Processing wills. Forwarding escrow documents. Reviewing divorce papers. Ugh.
Yep. The most interesting lawyers I know are either professors, took high level positions in government, or do something OTHER than practice law.
But people should do what really drives them. Anyone going into law this late in the boom just to make money is probably going to be in for a rude awakening. Ditto for anyone going into it in order to do pro bono work on Cypherpunks issues.
Or anyone going into investment banking. See today's wall street journal on the (lack of) prospects for MBAs. (CSFB I think it was, indicated that it doesn't plan to hire ANY until 2003).
For the relatively few people--you know who you are--who have a sharp mind and are laying the groundwork for working in the "cyberlaw" industry, my analysis may not apply.
There will always be exceptions. What drives the hoards of law students we see today is that $125k/year average starting salary figure. The $75 application fee starts to look worth it pretty quickly. They usually don't know what they are getting into and no one in the admissions office is in a rush to tell them either. Some schools are much more cut-throat than others too. It can be a very unpleasant experience. (I might add that you should be prepared to be celibate for 2 years as no law student I knew had much of a sex life until after the second year internship- from which most offers are extended- was secured). Cypherpunk types will do better reading this tidbit from U.S. News: Lehigh ranked high for parties ** University nudges up to No. 15 among "Party Schools. ' It's 3rd best place to find beer, 9th best for pot.
--Tim May