Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[Greg Broiles]

>I just don't see spending 3-4 years in law school as being very exciting. 
>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.
>
>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.

Yeah. People thinking about law school should spend some time talking with 
currently practicing (or non-practicing) attorneys and validate their 
assumptions and expectations before investing years of their lives and tens 
of thousands of dollars. The practice of law isn't what it looks like from 
the movies and TV - mostly what people don't understand is that the 
practice of law is a business, and it's a service business, where revenue 
is directly linked to hours of human effort applied to market demand. If 
the demand's not there, or the human effort's not there, there's no revenue 
- nor if the clients can't pay. Attorneys who make a lot of money do so 
only by leveraging the efforts of junior attorneys and support staff, just 
like any other service business, and consequently spend a significant 
amount of time managaing and marketing instead of lawyering.

None of the prominent Cypherpunk trials have featured defendants with the 
budget to hire defense counsel, nor the inclination to turn over strategic 
or tactical decisions to their attorneys. Those trials weren't 
opportunities to make lots of money, or show off one's learned skills - 
they were tar pits of malpractice and resentment.

(That doesn't mean the prosecutions or convictions were necessarily 
reasonable, nor that the defendants deserved what happened to them, but 
they weren't situations where some Legal Lone Ranger was needed to ride 
onto the scene and save the day.)

Even the current prosecution of Dmitri Sklyarov is being handled in a 
non-cypherpunk way (and that's good for him) - e.g., no full-court-press on 
Constitutional grounds, his attorney is talking quietly with his colleagues 
in the US Attorney's office, likely to positive results for Sklyarov. 
Firebreathing, Stallman-quoting Disney-DMCA-Adobe-hating activist-lawyers 
wouldn't make things better here.

People who want to make money or privacy should look to technology long 
before they look to law - law is slow, conservative, and full of fussy 
rules. Just write code.

I find that Oliver Wendell Holmes' commentary "The Path of the Law", 
written in 1897, is still incredibly insightful and on-topic regarding the 
relationship between law, morality, and the utility of a legal education, 
especially as discussed on the list. It's available (following a ridiculous 
amount of Project Gutenberg legal and marketing horseshit) at 
<ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/gutenberg/etext00/pthlw10.txt>.


--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids