A fellow blogger on the End of Esq. site (Chronicling the Collapse of the Legal Profession in America) has just made a committed resolution.
"I resolve to expose the American Bar Association as a fraud on the profession and to work vigorously throughout the year to strip it of its law school accreditation function. The ABA has betrayed the Main Street practitioner and is on a campaign to globalize the practice of law, which, if successful, will mean hundreds of thousands of legal jobs lost here in the United States and the consolidation of the legal profession into a series of gega multinational firms where human capital is purchased wherever it is cheapest.
**** ***** *****
Everywhere I go I hear complaints from lawyers about the supply/demand imbalance, the threats of outsourcing and the utter siege the practice of law has become. Lawyers are fed up with scraping by or working around the clock for slave wages and see the profession collapsing before their eyes. They have no faith in the elders of the profession and why should they? The big firm lawyers and pampered princes have made the profession a miserable way to make a living and allowed the industry to be flooded by more and more lawyers. No law school student contemplates that a municipal worker like a fireman or garbage collector will have a more enjoyable and more profitable life than he, but that is the sad reality. In a span of 25 years, the legal profession has become poop.
2009 is the year we push back. Join us."
http://endofesq.com/?p=784
How to push back? By keeping the story alive. Here's an email I received yesterday from a woman at the Washington Post.
"Hi. I'm working on a story about projections that unemployment among those with a BA or higher degree is about to hit record highs.
I was wondering if you are hearing from out of work folks with JDs and what you're hearing, whether they are finding it hard to find work. How hard is it to get temp lawyer work? Is it getting more competitive?
Are there folks at some of the legal temp agencies you recommend I talk to?
Any help is appreciated. Thanks."
Share your thoughts in the comments section, or email me and I will provide you with her contact information.
Also, if you haven't done so already, send a message to the ABA by voting for this blog in the ABA's annual blog contest. Voting ends on the 2nd.
http://www.abajournal.com/blawgs/blawg100_2008/careers
228 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 228 of 22810:36 - could you, like, possibly be more of a pedantic prescriptivist? "Stupidest" is a perfectly acceptable word in English, at least in American English.
Your arrogant posting makes you look like a much bigger, and stupider, asshole than the person you attack.
Many people on this site seem unaware of, or give short shrift to, the complex issues of jurisdiction and conflict of laws involved with practicing in jurisdiction X on a case that pertains to jurisdiction Y. It is by no means obvious that an attorney in India, no matter what he does, is liable for unauthorized practice under an American statute, unless you can subject him to the jurisdiction of the relevant state. If he never sets foot in that state, and his only contact is through the internet, this may be exceedingly difficult to do, and at the very least raises numerous unresolved issues pertaining to jurisdiction in the cyber age.
11:28, "stupidest" is not a word. "Stupid" should be modified, according to degree, with "more" or "most."
So you shut up, you big, ignorant, STUPID, asshole.
11:53 - First, you are not the arbiter of what is and is not a "word." Second, you are clearly no lexicographer. Webster's Third New International Dictionary states that the superlative form of "stupid" is, in fact, "stupidest."
Stupid is as stupid does, and you do it in spades. Your prescriptivist views on language are stupid, and they are also incorrect.
I just checked Webster's. You're incorrect. "Stupidest" is not a word. The superlative of "stupid" is "most stupid," Stupid.
2:19 - what edition of Webster's are you looking at? The 3rd New International edition gives "stupidest" as the superlative. That aside, no dictionary, or any other source, has any authority to issue edicts on "correct" usage. If you knew anything about linguistics, you would know that.
I would say that "stupidest" and "most stupid" are both acceptable versions of the superlative. There are many examples of acceptable grammatical variants in English, e.g. "I dived" versus "I dove").
1133, We couldn't care less about punishing the Indian lawyer; it's punishing the agencies, firms and companies that are authorizing the Indian lawyers to work on the case that I am interested in stopping.
3:17: the American steel workers and electronics industry fought this battle and lost. You will too. Deal with it.
You all act as if the police arrest people for the unlicensed practice of law. The people who do the policing are the same ones who are stamping the outsourcing with their seals of approval.
"It is by no means obvious that an attorney in India, no matter what he does, is liable for unauthorized practice under an American statute, unless you can subject him to the jurisdiction of the relevant state"
Well, you are providing further reasoning for not doing one bit of work in India. If one cannot prosecute or hold them liable for the inevitable malpractive, what on earth would possess a company to hire such unaccountable workers to save a few dollars? How incredibly short short sighted and stupid.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this economic mess - short term, quarterly thinking, a race to the gutter.
917
The apologists keep making arguments intending to prove that the India outsourcing is acceptable, but what they do is to prove why they are wrong.
Until your post, I had not thought of the additional risks you decribed. Given what you wrote, what's to prevent some tech savvy Indian lawyer from taking sensitive documents from the site? Theorectically in the US there are more avenues to control the contract attorney given the threat of disbarment.
Now I'm really getting scared. In late 2008 the agencies said "its slow but it will pick up when the President was elected." No new projects in NYC, NJ or Boston. Then it was, "well it should pick up at the beginning of 2009." Well still no projects in NYC, NJ or Boston and we're almost halfway through January.
I'm starting to believe that the first level English work is really being done in India. I mean where the hell is all the sub-prime discovery work and the throng of corporate bankruptcies?
9:17 - Your argument wrongly assumes that firms and clients are only saving "a few dollars." But they are, in fact, saving major amounts of money. There are numerous risks associated with work in India, as have been pointed out, but clients have the right to do a risk-benefit analysis and conclude that the cost savings outweigh the risks.
1207
So did the investment banks and individual borrowers for mortgages, and now where is the economy? What happened to our entire finance system as a result of that thought process? What these things should have taught you, but obviously didn't is that there is a balancing of interests.
There has to be a balance against their short term interest and the integrity of the legal system. If the system as a whole decides that it no longer cares about privilege and other issues, fine, but that's not what's happened yet.
People taking on wild risks is not justified just because individual actors believe they can profit from it when it hurts the broader system by which everyone is to be governed. That's a lesson that you have l earned, but again did not. Sadly, it seems the hard wayis the only way most of you get things.
by the way- we will not know what clients think until the first wave of large scale screw ups happen, what they do with the cases and what the courts do with them should the clients decide to sue their attorneys for advising them to go with indian doc reviewers. Saying this is the client decision will not answr that question, and nor will risk benefit analysis about cost versus risk. The risk will determine itself through the courts once the screw ups happen.
I think this activity will result in major e-discovery rule and law violations. The risk to save a few dollars is foolhardy. For many, it will result in more expense and legal defenses.
Guess who will be laughing all the way to the bank? American lawyers!
1:27 - You said "there has to be a balance against their short term interest and the integrity of the legal system." But why? A client in calculating his risk-benefit trade-offs is not required to consider "the integrity of the legal system," whatever that might mean. Or the client may consider it and assign whatever weight to it he chooses. The point is that the elements of the cost-benefit analysis are for the client to choose, and you have no right to require that he consider issues such as "the integrity of the legal system," anymore than American consumers who purchase Hondas are required to consider the integrity of the American automobile industry.
1:30 - it is true that the full nature of the risk may not be currently known, but that is in fact part of the risk analysis - making gambles as to what the risk will turn out to be. It is the client's right to make this wager if he so chooses.
I realize people here want jobs and want other people's money, but you should understand, once you put emotion aside, that you have no right to force someone to give you a job if he can have the job done cheaper, to his satisfaction, elsewhere. Perhaps the Indian worker is not as good, perhaps he is. That is irrelevant. The client can choose a trade-off of quality and price if he so desires. Consumers of all sorts do this all the time.
427,
It's a little hard to argue for the free market with the government bailing out big business types with hundreds of billions (and soon to be trillions) of our taxpayer dollars!
523
Individual actors are not always the best way to determine how a system should work.
Free market fundamentalists or people who still don't get what happened recently believe that risk so long as its freely determined is okay.
The problem , again, is about more than free market players or even contract attorneys, but what happens with the market as a system.
look, either you get that the legal system is more than about benefit risk analysis (I know Posner is on your minds with that one) or ou don't. It realy does not matter. The fact is ultimately your theories do not amount to much against what will come next. That the risk will eventually create systemic problems that the invidual will ignore, but the system can not. For Wall Street that meant a near world wide collapse. There were a lot of individual who made bank and stilla re off of it. It does not mean the system was a good one.
For the outsourcing companies they will make bank in the short term, but for the legal system it means a more risky legal process. There is a reason why the legal system is a closed system that requires things like licensing, rules of ethics ,etc. Those reasons are being messed with to save short term money.
It will come back to bite us the system in the ass like letting other individuals act on their interest but not the system. That's my only point. Factually, after Wall Street you are arguing against reality based on your beliefs, and not what's actually known to be the case.
No 4:27 PM, you are completely wrong. You don't have a choice to use unlicensed foreigners to do an American's work. Have you seen the unemployment rate? It's 7.2%!
It's unconscionable to take jobs from Americans who followed the law and planned their future as lawyers. To then take these jobs and give them to foreigners, is the unlicensed practice of law and moreoever bad business.
American corporations have allowed greed to overtake them, to allow CEOs outrageous salaries and to cut corners on the little guy.
No way, no how should and unqualified Indian "attorney" should be taking our jobs and our work. You have no argument for taking our jobs, except that it's "cheaper". How utterly base and unprincipled. You not schooled in our law, not licensed to practice here.
You have no right to take our work, our jobs and our futures. You need to get a life and your own work. There is no "choice" it's our work.
No it is a choice and the companies are choosing to go with people who do not complain and demand things that they think are owed to them.
908
Either you have a reading comprehension problem, have some version of Stockholm Syndrome or are engaged misdirection.
The outsourcing company's interests (and even the individual law firms) are irrelevant to a) the risk involved for the legal system and b) our interests. We are discussing the later to things.
Despite being contract attorneys, we realize that you are changing the subject from these two topics. You are not fooling anyone by doing so.
Taunts about wanting more also are irrelevant because as stated before we are discusing numbers that are below the American poverty line. No American in the American economy could survive on $7000/year. This is simple economics 101.
The problem for the companies is that this is not simply up to them. This is why we are discussing the other factors in the market in which they operate.
Here's my advice: provide a linkage between your argument and ours or stop wasting our time.
It is so cute you think your interests matter to anyone.
1124
They matter to you since you responded.
The interests discussed are for American workers and the legal system. You personalized it to me, but I am getting out of the legal industry.
Just one more bit of misdirection by you. Old debate trick: When you can't respond to the argument, personalize it to the person making the argument.
So your interests matter, yet you are leaving the legal industry?
It is sort of ironic that you are such the expert in debating, yet were doing document review where your oral skills did not matter. But hey, congrats on defeating an imaginary person in an imaginary argument, who was most likely posting just to get a rise out of you. Maybe you can print this out and frame it on the wall of your new office as evidence of the great debater ou truly are.
330
I saw your post, and I am contacting another friend to see if he can help me with my transition. I was on the bubble because he's not a close friend. For motivation to take a chnce, I got to thank you.
I come here because folks like you and the discussions here are just a good reminder of why I need to move beyond this.
7:37 wrote "You have no right to take our work, our jobs and our futures. You need to get a life and your own work. There is no "choice" it's our work."
----
I'm not sure who the "you" is you're referring to, but what I am sure of is that the "work" you say is yours is in fact not yours; it is the client's, and the client may give the work to whomever he sees fit. Them's the facts, kid.
Post a Comment