JDs Rising

Methinks there are too many lawyers!

By Daniel Koewler

I think that every new lawyer and budding law student can agree that our law professors were all well-read, well-rounded individuals. I can all but guarantee that all of my law professors had at least a pop-trivia knowledge of Shakespeare, and undoubtedly had read the oft cited “kill all the lawyers” line uttered in the Bard’s famous play “King Henry VI.” I just wish they all hadn’t taken it so seriously.

In my experience, the community of law schools here in Minneapolis are doing one thing very well – killing all the lawyers. There’s nothing like an supersaturated market full of under prepared attorneys to ensure that any legal community will wither and die, and probably sooner rather than later.

Over saturation of the market aside, every new attorney will quickly find out that law school had little (or nothing) to do with the actual practice of law. Law school taught me nothing about marketing, which is almost every attorney’s bread-and-butter. Worse yet, marketing wasn’t even touched upon as a subject for discussion. I was Socratically led through the evolution of public nuisance law, and learned a great deal about the legal landscape in America in the decades after the Civil War, but I don’t remember ever being taught how to attract a client to my doorstep. The assumption seems to be that once you get your J.D., clients will naturally find you (and not your classmates?) or that a large firm will simply deposit various files on your desk. Put more bluntly:

Step One: Obtain a J.D.

Step Two: ????

Step Three: PROFIT!

I work in a small firm, and this is decidedly not the case. I spend as much time marketing as I do appearing in court, or preparing legal briefs, which makes me wonder why I received no education on something that occupies half of my time as a lawyer. Maybe I went into law school a lot more naive than I should have been (exhibit A, my B.A. in Political Science) but all the same, I think all our law schools are shirking their responsibility when they lead their students to believe that graduating from law school sets you up to be a successful attorney.

The easy answer is that the law schools don’t care. I know a lot of professors have hefty academic credentials and little courtroom experience, and will naturally focus on the nuance of legal theory over the practicalities of running a business. Law school administration has little incentive to scare the pocketbooks out of law students, and every financial reason in the world to boost enrollment. Sadly, however, I think the real answer is that law schools are secretly supportive of Dick the butcher’s sentiment “let’s kill all the lawyers.” In a legal community where top-performing law students cannot find any type of legal employment, where many new members of the bar have no choice but to start their own solo practices without even knowing where to begin, and where too many lawyers are fighting for too few clients, it appears that our legal education system has struck upon a great way to strangle the legal community.