I come from a family with several California lawyers (I am a lawyer as well) and see this transition from apprenticeship to law school in my family. My great, great uncle was a lawyer and a judge in a small town in the Bay Area. He never went to law school. His nephew, my grandfather, went to law school, but only needed a 2 year college degree to attend law school. He became the judge in the town after his uncle retired. Both were successful and well regarded professionally.
Reading this article, it’s easy to conflate bar passage success with being an effective lawyer. Law school is probably better training for passing the bar than it is for practicing law. Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me that apprentices have lower passage rates than law school grads. Apprentices are training to practice – not to take tests. It is well understood among lawyers that law school may give you some discipline, some research skills, and some understanding about how to think about fundamental aspects of “the Law”, but that it doesn’t by itself result in being able to practice law. That happens over the course of about the first 5 years of practicing law. Becoming a lawyer or a doctor both take about 8-9 years, but with law, you do most of it out in practice. So in this sense, all lawyers are apprentices. Another thing that illustrates this point is the fact that a lawyer’s effectiveness has much less to do with the quality of their law school than is generally thought. I know many excellent attorneys who attended local law schools here in San Diego that do not rank well. What they did in their first 5 years (and other factors) mattered more than law school.
I see the arc of the profession as one that used to be more tuned toward apprenticeship in the context of a much slower overall pace of business and life toward one where it is increasingly hard to access that critical one-the-job training. Historically, clients would essentially subsidize the training of new associate attorneys, but, particularly since the belt tightening post-2008, clients increasingly refuse to do so and many law grads are left to figure it out themselves. Some have rules that no attorneys with e.g. less than 3 years’ experience are allowed to work on their matters. Another challenge are the strict laws in California on unpaid internships. I would be happy to provide training to a new lawyer in exchange for some unpaid help and know many new attorneys who would jump at the chance, but that is not allowed in California.
This is a very insightful comment. In my opinion one of the largest shortcomings of our system of minting new lawyers is a lack of practical training. While doctors generally must both go to medical school and complete an internship and/or residency in order to treat patients, a freshly licensed lawyer can represent someone without previously having ever entered a courthouse, drafted a will, or taken a deposition. I think most recognize this is a problem and there are some law schools that are doing an excellent job of addressing the issue by requiring 3rd year practice court, externships, or clinics that actually give lawyers some experience in the things they will be doing after law school. Bar associations are trying to address the issue through mentor programs and CLEs aimed at new lawyers. No longer can the profession depend on mid to large law firms to bring lawyers up through the ranks, both because their clients aren't really interested in subsidizing it and the firms cannot or will not put in the resources to train all those entering the profession.
Thanks. Agreed that it's a problem. I was active in leadership in the local bar association and often ran into attorneys straight out of the local law schools (e.g. <6 mos.) who had opened their own practice due to a lack of other options and need to repay their student loans. The old system of training is broken.
I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has strict rules about that stuff because they have been, and still are, abused (see the entertainment industry).
Overall though, whether lawyers or other professions, our move away from apprenticeships and other sorts of on the job training or investment in employees has most likely been detrimental. When you read complaints about us Millenials job hopping and 'having no loyalty' a quick peek behind the curtain should reveal that it's not only economic (esp. given student debts) but you learn rapidly how merciless companies can be.
On internships, there are different contexts. One can clerk at a law firm during law school and be paid for it and a starting attorney at a firm is often arguably paid more than they are worth making them akin to an intern (the firm is investing in cultivating future attorneys for their firm). These are the opportunities I am suggesting are shrinking dramatically, but still exist. The intern context I’m speaking about is in the context of small firms such as my 6 partner transactional firm. California sets out a set of requirements for a unpaid internships to be legal. Essentially, it must be an educational experience where the intern is not really engaged in productive work for the benefit of the business. Our firm is not in the position to create an educational experience for an intern without tangible benefit to the firm. At the same time, the services they might provide to our firm are not important enough to us to merit paying them even the minimum wage (plus deal with other employer hassles and risk). Transactional work (e.g. negotiating a SaaS agreement) is particularly challenging in this regard because it doesn’t require much low-level work as compared to litigation or M&A work. All of that said, I’d be happy to mentor a new attorney in negotiating and drafting commercial agreements in exchange for them say, organizing my forms library. I believe that this would be a mutually beneficial arrangement and I don’t think there is much likelihood of abuse. New attorneys are capable of evaluating the benefits of this arrangement and leaving if it doesn’t work out. Entertainment is a peculiar example where there is unusual desperation to get into the industry and unusual concentration of power in individuals in the industry (and many egos and *holes). I’ve heard of production companies where the interns not only didn’t get paid, but had to pay the company e.g. $30k. I’m sure there are industries where these unpaid internship restrictions provide some important protections and I’ve no illusions about businesses’ capacity to take advantage of people, but in my context, I think it’s preventing what would be a useful arrangement to help address a critical need.
That makes more sense now given the specific context of law. I guess it's a field most that us non-lawyers are unaware of in terms of how it operates internally. Thank you for clearing it up!
Lawyers currently have one of the most bi-modal salary distributions of any profession. It seems to me that for folks who want to enter the profession doing low pay work that this should be a more supported and common path as law school is a ridiculous choice for someone who is going to make less than a teacher for the rest of their life. I’ve known a handful of public defenders in my time and almost all of them had some form of alternative support (usually rich spouse or parents).
Additionally, the UK has a hybrid system that seems to work well, and they also have two types of lawyers: barristers and solicitors. From what I understand it’s easier to become a solicitor, but your mostly doing small cases and family law and can only argue before certain courts. Barristers have a more arduous path, take more serious cases, and can argue cases in the higher courts. Seems like we could adopt a similar system (though it’s probably too late at this point).
The barrister/solicitor split is theoretically that between litigation (solicitor) and advocacy (barrister). If you're a commercial solicitor working in the city it's very much not a second-best option and is very lucrative. Solicitors do advocacy in the lower courts, but it's theoretically not the main focus of their job.
You're right that it's generally harder to fully qualify as a barrister, though [edit: in England and Wales]: there's a compulsory year-long practical training in a law firm element, which is murderous to try to get a spot in.
The distinction's actually eroding in the UK. Solicitors can train in advocacy and get rights of audience in the higher courts, and barristers can now be instructed directly by the public (which used to be illegal: their client was always a solicitor).
Litigation is not the right word for solicitors' work in general – they do a lot of non-contentious business, especially in the City (eg. corporate finance and M&A). Although many solicitors do litigation (which includes advocacy in the courts), most barristers do it exclusively. Also, it is solicitors who are required to undertake a year of practical training in a law firm [1]. Barristers do a pupillage [2] under the supervision of a mentor.
"Solicitors can train in advocacy and get rights of audience in the higher courts"
Solicitors who do get the right of audience apparently don't appear as much as you'd expect - solicitors still use barristers/advocates to offload risk on high value cases.
That's not true in Scotland - solicitors have two years of on the job training after a law degree and a postgraduate qualification. Training to become an advocate (Scottish equivalent of a barrister) takes a year as a "devil" which means passing some extra exams and basically following a senior junior (or two) about for most of a year and you can do that after a single year of training as a solicitor.
During this phase you are an "advocate's devil".
Source - my wife was called to the Scottish bar - which is an amusing ceremony in itself (no clapping, only stamping of feet).
Agreed, as a Scots qualified lawyer and now an engineer I don't feel that choosing the solicitor route was somehow the 'lesser option'.
Additionally most advocates/barristers will work as a solicitor for several years before making the leap to the bar. It's useful to have contacts and to be somewhat known before you do your devilling/pupillage as the minority of the advocates/barristers will pull in the majority of the work and it can be slim pickings for someone who is new.
I wonder why that's not more commonly known - I imagine many think of a solicitor as simply the "S" in ESPC or ASPC, i.e. that they relate mostly to property stuff.
Ironically, the chances of actually having domestic conveyancing done by an actual solicitor is pretty small - it's mostly done by paralegals (domestic conveyancing is very much at the low end of the legal market - with corporate at the high end).
Edit: Not to say that domestic conveyancing can't be complex but the fees are so low for the actual conveyancing part (rather than the sales part) that you are unlikely to get a very comprehensive job done. I've heard utter horror stories of what can happen with conveyancing when it goes wrong....
> Lawyers currently have one of the most bi-modal salary distributions of any profession.
I understand what you're saying but I feel like the top 50 would be occupied by people in various types of art, food preparation/serving, personal care/service, and writing. It would probably be top 3 easily for the amount of debt most of the lawyers go into for their degree(which seems to be the issue you are getting at anyways).
Income in those professions is not bimodal; it follows a power law. The frequency distribution of income for US lawyers has two clear modes (local maxima) at around $50,000 and $160,000 [1], meaning that roughly the same number of lawyers earn each of those salaries. Put another way, a randomly-selected US lawyer is more likely to earn $160,000 than the much lower mean US lawyer salary.
I literally posted a bls link where they discussed how bimodal at least a couple of those types jobs are. Did you bother to ctrl+F "bimodal" in that link? Furthermore upon a quick glance at your source, nothing in your source seems to discuss any of the jobs I had mentioned. Were you hoping your gut feeling was evidence enough?
You’re probably not wrong to which you could add sports, entertainment etc. but there’s a distinction between professions that have a fairly large number, if overall minority, of well paid to very well paid members and those that almost have a lottery winner sort of effect.
My cousin, who is a former K St lawyer, told me about how in the 80s(?), Texas passed a law that allowed people who fit very narrow requirements to take the bar exam without attending law school. One high profile businessman passed the bar exam this way.
So.. If you want to skip law school, have one of your legislator cronies slip in a law school loophole in a bill.
Non-lawyers are allowed to take the patent bar exam. It's the same exam IP attorneys take, except if you pass you cannot call yourself a patent attorney without a law degree. You get the designation of patent agent. That's what I plan to do- become one of the few licensed engineers that has also passed the patent bar.
You still have to have an accredited BS in engineering or science to take it. I assumed a degree from an accredited school would fit the bill but found out that was not the case when I wanted to take the patent bar years ago. You have to check the website to see if your degree qualifies.
I have a BS in Computer Information Systems which is almost identical to the CS degree that I could have gotten. The difference was that it switched out some general classes and the foreign language requirement for business classes...which seemed like a good idea to me.
Only the BS in CS was accredited. I also have an MS but the patent bar strictly cares about your BS.
You can also choose to pass the FE exam to qualify for the patent bar; most states require a BS in engineering to take the FE exam, but not all, and an FE pass in a state that doesn't still qualifies.
There are also various combinations of coursework that qualify (x semester hours of physics, y semester hours of engineering or chemistry, etc...). It's in the patent exam application docs.
One interesting and controversial one is that mathematics courses are excluded from patent prep (i.e., mathematics is specifically excluded from the list of courses that qualify you for the patent bar[1]).
[1] perhaps this is why mathematics dressed up as something else often gets patented, because the patent bar specifically and deliberately excludes people with strong math backgrounds from the profession.
Yeah, some of the requirements do not seem well thought out. I've passed the EIT and PE exams but not the FE exam. I have two engineering degrees, but let's say I had a math degree.(If I recall correctly you can take the EIT/FE/PE with hard science or math degrees.) I wouldn't qualify for the patent exam. That said, all these licensing exams are about jumping through hoops- find out the requirements, and finish them.
This is because professional licensing occurs at the state level in the US. While there are legal credentials at the Federal level, there are not Law Licenses. The same is true of CPA's and the IRS has a test/certification for Enrolled Agents that have the equivalent status of CPA's in terms of representing clients in tax matters.
I thought Vermont permitted this, and according to the article, it is (or was) four states:
"Today, only four states — California, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington — allow aspiring lawyers to take the bar exam without going to law school. Instead, they are given the option to apprentice with a practicing attorney or judge."
>> You get the designation of patent agent. That's what I plan to do- become one of the few licensed engineers that has also passed the patent bar.
These people often get called as expert witnesses in IP-related cases and get paid a huge amount of money. I am sure you know this, but it's definitely something to investigate.
While the American Bar Association certainly dose not use violence the whole system stinks like a protection racket. The fact they pushed states to enact a form regulatory capture is pretty messed up.
Then add the fact apprenticeships are not the norm so these lawyers are not making as much. Overall, it's quite silly and sad.
It’s not really much of a protection racket since the DOJ intervened on antitrust grounds. The ABA isn't allowed to use law school accreditation to limit supply of JDs—hence there is a huge oversupply of graduates compared to available jobs. (What keeps prices for business lawyers high is the same thing that keeps prices for MBA consultants high. There is no legal barrier to entry in that field, but Big Corp. doesn’t want a self-trained consultant, it wants a Harvard MBA who has worked in big projects before. There is a limited supply of those folks.)
Who the ABA hurts is lawyers. Requiring a JD, as opposed to just an undergraduate degree as is common in Europe, allows law schools to capture a lot of the lifetime income of lawyers.
Yes it's terrible the ABA has created a system that rigorously weeds out unqualified individuals, polices it's professional members ethics and uses education and testing to ensure all lawyers have a solid baseline education. Terrible!
I wish software engineerers had an actual equivalent to the ABA, and no the ACM doesn't count.
I was not implying letting unqualified individuals practice law. They still have to pass the bar apprentice. Are we seriously going to claim school is the only way people can learn?
I would also like to see some certification for actual software engineers. Also wish that businesses would not be allowed cheap out and rush software development. Partly, why I prefer hardware. The timelines why still may be fast are more reasonable.
There is a fair bit more nuance to the law than just memorizing some stuff and passing a test. I have a couple close family members that are lawyers and their general thought is law school is:
1.) shaping a person's mind to be critical of presented facts and evidence.
2.) develop good skills in the art of arguing.
3.) develop good skills for legal research and dealing with changing laws.
Personally, I am skeptical someone who has not gone to law school is going to be good at those things and that's why I think law school sets a high baseline and is a good thing even if it is expensive.
There's a software engineering PE exam now, fwiw. I don't know anyone who's taken it though. I took the computer engineering exam the year before the SE exam was offered; I would imagine the two have a lot of overlap.
An exam is useless if nobody hiring uses it. Good luck getting a job as an lawyer if you have not passed the bar exam because the bar exam and the ability to practice as a lawyer are linked by law.
depending on the circumstances, I do think a prosecutor can play a pivotal role. There are examples of misconduct where a prosecutor fails to turn over exculpatory evidence that is so convincing as to make prosecution essentially impossible. It's true that the jury and judge make the decision, but there are cases where they would almost certainly have reached a different decision had the prosecution behaved ethically.
"It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one."
Assuming the prosecutor believed the man to be guilty, and that the prosecutor didn't use improper methods to secure a conviction, I'd say they were competent.
Now, if they used _improper methods _to secure the conviction of an innocent man, or if they knew the man to be innocent, that's another matter. I'd agree that the prosecutor is in incompetent (in the sense of "not fit to be a officer of the court", and not in the sense of "not having the skills required to do the job").
But the post to which I replied made no mention of this evil intent, so I gave the prosecutor the benefit of the doubt.
First, this article only addresses the USA. If you don't want to practice in the US, there are lots of options. See Korshak, Landing a Legal Job Overseas. Law school is an American anomaly. In Canada/UK/Ireland, you can major in law as an undergraduate. You can't do so in the US. With a LLB degree, you can do legal work in lots of countries--and even qualify to take the bar in the U.S. The author leaves out little details like the "diploma privilege" in Mississippi and other Southern states--but never Florida--if you graduated from a state law school there was no need to take the bar exam. And during WWII time in law school was reduced or relaxed.
That's not entirely correct. In Quebec, medicine and law are first degrees. The bulk of law and medicine graduates from French language universities do not have an undergraduate degree but rather enter with what is roughly equivalent to the first year of an undergraduate degree. Also, many English language universities accept applications from students who have completed the second or third year of their undergraduate degree.
It's always interesting to hear discussions of the apprenticeship system in this day and age. Law school is an extremely valuable experience, but the problem is not all law degrees are created equal. A T14 (the top tier of schools) can employ the majority of their students into legal jobs, while a equally pricey, but less well known school could fail to employ even a small subset of their student population to JD-advantaged jobs (a job that makes use of one's law degree).
Prospective law students today should aim to maximize their application strength, and take advantage of the plethora of scholarships given out at just about every reputable law school (excluding HYS). Furthermore, attending a reputable school gives students access to public interest programs within the schools that support their high debt-relatively low -income students.
This is fascinating to me because of the parallels to my own experience. Getting a high paying career in IT without even a college diploma.
I've always felt IT was one of the only industries where this can fly (merit based rewards vs paper based reward system). Almost every job I've got in this industry (support, cloud, TAM, solutions architect) had steep requirements on paper that I did not meet, yet I got the job.
It's not just merit-based rewards; it's the lack of a professional standards body. Anyone can call themselves an IT professional, but not everyone call themselves, e.g., a doctor or a civil engineer.
Apprenticeships seem to have been very common up until very recently. They offered an alternative path to college, which for many leads to insurmountable debt and poor job prospects. Who is the largest holder of student debt in the United States? The answer to that question explains why apprenticeships and trade schools are not promoted.
> Who is the largest holder of student debt in the United States? The answer to that question explains why apprenticeships and trade schools are not promoted.
Could you spell this out for us? Who hold the largest debt? And promoted by whom?
Most student debt is owned by the US Federal Government.
"In 2010, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated 55% of loans fell into this category. Between 2011 and 2016, the share of privately originated student loans fell by nearly 90%."
"In February 2016, the U.S. Treasury Department revealed in its annual report that student loans account for 31% of all U.S. government assets."
Who is Mike Ross? When searching such a common name (at least it sounds common to me, a non-native speaker), I see a politician, someone who got capital punishment, and a bunch of other people. Adding lawyer to the query doesn't seem to help.
I've just started reading Robert Caro's "Path to Power", and LBJ's father took exactly this route to become a teacher:
"He had to quit going to high school because of health problems, and his parents sent him to live on his uncle Lucius Bunton's ranch in Presidio County, Texas for several months.[3] When he returned home, Johnson had ambitions to become a teacher; however, the Texas hill country at that time had no state-accredited high schools and no colleges. He learned that he could get a state-issued teaching certificate without finishing high school by passing a state examination.[3] In 1896, with the thirteen textbooks he needed to study for the exam, he moved to his retired grandfather's nearby home to study in quiet.[4]"
Same as in land surveying or any other discipline that requires state licensure. Some surveyors do have civil engineering or geomatics/geodesy degrees, but you certainly don't have to obtain one to practice surveying (state law varies). What's important is that you have field experience under the direct supervision of a PLS and can pass a very rigorous licensure exam that includes demonstrating a deep knowledge of property/boundary law, trigonometry, and calculus. There's no question about your competence if you can pass a PLS exam.
Not saying I disagree, because I think the bar association is a cartel and everyone should be "allowed" to practice law. However, the reason the CA bar is "notoriously hard" is precisely because they allow anyone to sit for it. If lots of unqualified people take an exam and fail, it causes the passage rate to drop and makes the exam appear "harder."
Not totally true, it's legitimately harder. First time taker pass rate for even people going to tier 1 law schools is significantly lower than many other jurisdictions. The addition of allowing an expanded group to sit for it does bring down the overall passage rate though. Schools like Stanford aside, overall pass rate by school is in the mid-high 80s for any Tier 1 school for CA bar exam, whereas for a jurisdiction like NY, those same schools will pass 95%+.
It's well-known to be a harder bar exam (I have taken both it and NY, for an anecdotal data point).
Another reason the CA pass rate is lower than other states’ is that in CA you can take the bar exam as many times as you want. NY cuts you off st 3, as a comparison.
That is something I've dream of but in California that is not possible from the research I've done. I live in Los Angeles county. If someone knows something otherwise please let me know. Thanks Rich
What? It literally says that it's possible in California in the article.
"In California, this option is called the “Law Office Study Program” (rule 4.29 under the state bar’s legal code). All lawyers seeking to forego law school must meet the following stipulations..."
I thought you could do this in California by apprenticing with a lawyer. No idea if this is still the case, but I vaguely remember reading about this a while back.
Unmentioned in the linked article is the fact that sitting for the Patent Bar exam with the USPTO does not require a law degree but instead it requires an engineering or hard science degree.
If you like the idea of working with patents, trademarks and copyrights, you may wish to take that route. A lot of Computer Science programs at universities don't meet the requirements and you'd need to supplement your existing degree with laboratory chemistry, physics or biology classes at your local decently accredited college.
Patent agents - the term for a non-lawyer who passes the patent bar exam and gets a USPTO registration - are qualified to directly file for patents, and tend to be used by law firms for other analytical tasks requiring technical expertise. However, they tend not to be involved in trademark work, nor copyright work, for a variety of reasons.
I've done both.
But really, i'd love to understand what the outcome you seek is.
These are very different roles, and i'd love to understand what you are hoping to get out of law.
Otherwise, feel free to ping me, happy to chat about it.
I'm neither a lawyer nor female, I am married to someone who is both and considered law initially (family of them). Are you missing working companionship or feel pushed out as a female in SW? Is there a specific type of law you'd like to go into, similar to medicine or even software, there's many many different paths.
Best of luck, curious why you're looking at switching, I still flirt with it sometimes. Personally, I think the unreasonableness of some of the dealings/proceedings would irk me too much. It is very interesting though and the lawyers I know genuinely help better other people's lives, directly, while making a decent living.
I did lightweight eng to law to heavyweight eng. It's really set me up (or at least changed peoples' perception of my skills) to do big picture stuff and make technical recommendations, like a CTO style role.
Sorry I was trying to convey that I was more freelancing and working on personal projects/contributing to open source before law school, then I did purely law, then moved to SWE at a large SV company.
I went the other direction. My advice would be to make pretty certain you know you'll like whichever area of law you want to go into.
I thought I would like corporate law especially working with startups. I got a job doing pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, but I didn't actually like it and only practiced for a year.
In my limited, purely anecdotal experience, comparing my developer friends and my lawyer friends, a much larger percentage of my lawyer friends hate their jobs.
Reading this article, it’s easy to conflate bar passage success with being an effective lawyer. Law school is probably better training for passing the bar than it is for practicing law. Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me that apprentices have lower passage rates than law school grads. Apprentices are training to practice – not to take tests. It is well understood among lawyers that law school may give you some discipline, some research skills, and some understanding about how to think about fundamental aspects of “the Law”, but that it doesn’t by itself result in being able to practice law. That happens over the course of about the first 5 years of practicing law. Becoming a lawyer or a doctor both take about 8-9 years, but with law, you do most of it out in practice. So in this sense, all lawyers are apprentices. Another thing that illustrates this point is the fact that a lawyer’s effectiveness has much less to do with the quality of their law school than is generally thought. I know many excellent attorneys who attended local law schools here in San Diego that do not rank well. What they did in their first 5 years (and other factors) mattered more than law school.
I see the arc of the profession as one that used to be more tuned toward apprenticeship in the context of a much slower overall pace of business and life toward one where it is increasingly hard to access that critical one-the-job training. Historically, clients would essentially subsidize the training of new associate attorneys, but, particularly since the belt tightening post-2008, clients increasingly refuse to do so and many law grads are left to figure it out themselves. Some have rules that no attorneys with e.g. less than 3 years’ experience are allowed to work on their matters. Another challenge are the strict laws in California on unpaid internships. I would be happy to provide training to a new lawyer in exchange for some unpaid help and know many new attorneys who would jump at the chance, but that is not allowed in California.