Send Law Students, Idealists and Grant Proposals. Was: Re: Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[Black Unicorn]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim May" <tcmay at got.net>
To: <cypherpunks at 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