After arriving, I was supposed to meet some people at a mysterious location. They refused to give me any details in advance. I knew the purpose of the meeting and who set it up, and I didn’t want to end up on the other side of town scrambling to reach some secret location in time for my appointment. I consulted Google, entering the name of the government agency involved. I went to the location I found, the first hit nonetheless, and I sat there drinking a cup of terrible coffee.

Shortly before my scheduled meeting, I got a call from the organizer. He told me to meet everybody else at a certain location. It probably had way better coffee than the place I chose. It was a few blocks away, so I walked over and made small talk. Some impressive law-enforcement types pulled up a few minutes later, and we got into a little convoy. I felt like the president. For about sixty seconds.

Where’d we go? A few blocks away, to the exact place where I was happily drinking that awful cup of coffee ten minutes earlier. I wish they’d at least given me some kind of warning about the coffee. The kicker is that they wouldn’t confirm where we were going the next day. Hint: it was the same place.

Thinking about that makes me think about another situation.

I recently went to visit my parents in rural Western Kentucky. I met an old friend at a bar one night, and I saw they had Sam Adams Octoberfest on tap. In my opinion, it’s the best beer that company brews, so I ordered a pitcher. As I carefully poured two pints, I noticed it was cloudy and the carbonation was off. The smell wasn’t right either. My friend and I knew there was something wrong with the keg before the end of the first sip.

I started to write this paragraph beginning with the words “I don’t want to brag,” but that seemed ridiculous. I probably should brag; I have a great palate when it comes to beer. I can taste any beer and consistently identify the style, the varieties of malts and hops used, the IBUs, the yeast strain, and much more. I’ve spent years testing myself too. I can make a homebrew clone of pretty much anything I can taste. I drank a Sam Adams Octoberfest from a good keg less than a week prior, and Oktoberfest styles are among my favorites. Unless the Boston Beer Company has started making a special edition Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus Festbier, there was something wrong.

Confident there was a problem, I brought my glass to the bartender and told him there was something wrong with the beer. His comment? “That shit is fucking delicious. It’s a fresh keg.” There was a blond girl with curly pigtails sitting next to him. She looked exactly like Daisy Duke’s beat-up evil twin, with super-short cutoff jeans and a red and white plaid shirt that exposed her stomach. Apparently she was a beer connossieur, so she chimed in. “Yeah, that’s good shit. Totally fucking delicious.”

I asked the bartender to try some, a request that didn’t require much convincing. He poured a quick shot from the tap and without looking or smelling tipped the glass back and drank it in one gulp. He should have looked at it, as certain beers are supposed to have a certain appearance, and he should have smelled it, as you can get at least as much sensory input from smelling a beer as you can from tasting it. It took him a second, but after an awkward pause in which he seemed to have forgotten why he just took a shot of beer, he confirmed his initial reaction. “Fucking delicious.”

In situations like those two, I often think about a comment my mom made made a year or two ago. She was talking about retirement and mentioned how it would be interesting to see how it feels, as the men and women of her generation identify themselves by their work. The job defines them, apparently. I’ve thought about that statement often. I can’t say if she’s right, but I can say that a negative implication of her statement is definitely true. The men and women of my generation generally do not identify themselves by what they do for a living.

I frequently see blog posts about job-hunting for law students and new lawyers. Getting a job is obviously a big concern for a lot of people, and there are plenty of others willing to provide advice. Advisors suggest things like hanging around with practicing lawyers and broadening the search to include non-lawyer jobs. They say to embrace social media and to think outside the box. Those are the tools to get a job, the explicit goal of people in my generation. Rarely do people mention being qualified for the desired job as an important part of the equation. The advice all seems geared toward staying just as you are while altering superficial things that make you more appealing to employers.

My generation wants work, but they don’t want to define themselves by their work. A job is a way to live in a nice house, drive a late model car, and have enough stability to relax on evenings and weekends and during several weeks of vacation each year. A job will provide an office with a window and a big desk under which they can grab a quick nap after taking a long lunch break at a trendy restaurant with their work friends. Jobs are means to an end. They want a job not because it’s the job they want to do or even that they can do exceptionally well, but because it will help them do the non-job-related things that make them happy. They don’t care if their work time is well spent as long as it pays the bills.

Every time someone who’s done nothing to build a foundation of knowledge and skill in a given area of law complains about how employers in that area want someone with three to five years of experience, I worry about the future. Just like when I’m confronted with government agents needlessly shuffling me around to make work and bartenders with no knowledge of the beer they’re serving, it confirms that far too many people my age believe a job is just a way to stay busy and get paid. It isn’t the kind of thing that you strive to do well or efficiently to make the world a safer or more enjoyable place, but rather a set of motions you go through to draw a paycheck.

My experiences have left me hoping that my generation isn’t actually different. I hope that previous generations were just like us but that they changed. I hope that they’ve just forgotten, and that they now they criticize us because their memories are bad. I suspect the only way the world is going to function in the future is if we change, and knowing it’s happened before will make me far more optimistic. If my hopes are misplaced, though, I suppose I’m going to have to get used to wasting time over bad coffee and paying for unintentionally sour beer.

[I]t is surpassingly strange that there is no connection between [school] programs, the trainers, and the [businesses] that will employ [graduates]. There is no dialogue about what type of [graduates] schools are preparing, how the paradigm needs to shift, and what new skills [employers] should be considering for the future. I cannot think of another industry where there is no relationship between the employers and the trainers. For the future, this really needs to change and I believe the key words are “partnerships” and “collaborations.”

Sounds like a great idea, right? It sure does to me. In fact, it’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying here for a while. Every hiring lawyer I know has been saying it. Smarter law students often tell me how they lament the lack of practical knowledge they have upon graduation.

I changed the words in brackets to make its source less obvious because it wasn’t written by someone involved in law at all. Who said it this time? It actually came from the president of my alma mater, but not my law school alma mater. It’s a quote from Tony Woodcock, president of the New England Conservatory of Music. Here is what he actually wrote:

[I]t is surpassingly strange that there is no connection between the conservatory programs, the trainers, and the orchestras that will employ conservatory-trained musicians. There is no dialogue about what type of musicians music schools are preparing, how the paradigm needs to shift, and what new skills orchestras should be considering for the future. I cannot think of another industry where there is no relationship between the employers and the trainers. For the future, this really needs to change and I believe the key words are “partnerships” and “collaborations.”

I guess law isn’t the only profession where there’s that kind of disconnect between the education and the job. I wish ASU would take a page out of NEC’s book. As much as the school seems to have improved in many ways in the years since I graduated, my recent experiences with ASU tell me I shouldn’t hold my breath for a paradigm shift creating new partnerships and collaborations with practicing lawyers to prepare students for the practice of law.

I judged law school moot court oral arguments last week at ASU. The judges’ orientation included a discussion of recent changes to the scoring system. The changes? Law students, presumably people with bachelor’s degrees and enough intelligence to have achieved a modicum of success in at least one area of their lives, were getting their feelings hurt by low scores.

The people in charge said that a 7 out of 10 should be where we start. I think 8 was supposed to be good, 9 great, and 10 exceptional. Scores of 6 and lower, it seems, were only for people who used obscenity in their oral arguments or ran out of the room crying. The new rules, which were already tough enough for some of the mathematically-challenged lawyers judging, were only made tougher by the fact most categories involved a score out of 22. No one thought it was funny when I asked if the participants would be hurt if I rounded down the mandatory 15.4 in those categories. I imagine that giving someone a zero in any category would have been viewed as highly insensitive and unforgivable.

The category for rebuttal involved only 4 points, so the default score should have been 3. My problem, however, was that some students forgot to reserve time for it and therefore didn’t do it at all. The grading criteria listed relevant considerations like “Did he/she ask the court to reserve time?” and “Did he/she limit his/her rebuttal to a few, brief points?” Am I really supposed to give someone a 3 in a category where they did absolutely nothing? I think that’s the intent. Maybe 2′s and 1′s are only for students who say “okay judges, I know I need to reserve time for rebuttal but I’m not, so go screw yourselves.”

While law students at a decent law school complain until they begin getting credit for doing nothing and further insulate themselves from the fact the world they’ll soon be entering is not always a happy, feel-good place, it seems that music students elsewhere are begging through their president for greater collaboration and more partnerships between those who do and those who will soon do. It seems very bizarre to me that conservatory musicians, not usually the most sensible lot (trust me, I know), are trying to acclimate themselves to the way things really are as law students fight tooth and nail to keep their heads in the sand.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that there’s a least one other industry other than music where there is no relationship between the employers and the trainers. It certainly can’t be a good thing for any profession. All I really know is that I’d love to see law schools reaching out and trying to develop a relationship between the employers and the trainers and the students. No one benefits from disconnecting future lawyers, or really future anythings, from reality.

H/T Bruce Hembd

It sure warms my heart when my alma mater (for law school, at least) gets mentioned on national TV.

Maybe that works if you want to write wills or review contracts, but in criminal defense, that won’t cut it. It’s a calling. It’s stressful, time-consuming, frustrating, depressing, and generally thankless. A lot of the time, it just flat-out sucks. However, the people who do it for the right reasons wouldn’t think of doing anything else. We eat, sleep, and breathe criminal defense. If you end up a criminal defense lawyer because it’s the job you happened to get, you are probably in it for the wrong reasons. It’s that simple. You should quit before you do a disservice to any more clients.

When people ask me if they should go to law school, my response is always “no.” They’re asking the wrong question. The people who should be lawyers, criminal defense lawyers at least, are the ones who want to know how they can do it, not if they should do it.

If it’s your calling, this very moment is the very best time imaginable for you to become a criminal defense lawyer. If it isn’t your calling, forget about it.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if I should be proud of my alma mater or start telling people I went to U of A.

Adrian and I went into solo (or is it duet?) practice straight out of law school. Throughout law school, I intended to do criminal defense and nothing else. I wanted to fight the big, bad government. My goal, which I made clear to everyone around me, was to immediately hang out a shingle upon receipt of my bar number. I set aside time to watch court. I did a public defender clinic, attended public defender new hire training, spoke with a number of judges, and met as many good criminal lawyers as I could. I bombarded every criminal lawyer and paralegal I encountered with questions and did about two years of work as a clerk and research assistant for a prominent criminal defense attorney who had his own solo practice. He led me through a number of his cases from start to finish, showing me exactly what he did and why he did it. Adrian took a fairly similar path. All but a handful of people at ASU discouraged us, but we were undeterred.

When we first started the firm, we did very little advertising (we still don’t do very much, but that’s beside the point). The attorneys we knew referred to us those clients who couldn’t afford their fees. Judges and lawyers helped us get indigent defense contracts. I never felt like I was doing anything completely on my own because there were so many highly qualified people willing to help us when we needed it. After about a month of being out on my own, one of the state’s best criminal lawyers was generous enough to sit down with me and spend over an hour discussing everything he would do if he was handling each of my cases. Experience like that was invaluable.

In the beginning, we charged next to nothing, and almost every case was a flat fee. If a client insisted on being billed hourly, we did it at a ridiculously low rate and cut out the time we spent learning things more experienced lawyers would have known already. We devoted an incredible amount of time to each of our cases. When I added up my time on some of my first misdemeanor flat fee cases, each was over a hundred hours. I was terribly inefficient, but I made sure clients never had to subsidize my learning curve. Neither of us had to lie to clients. We were completely honest about our experience, and although some clients probably didn’t hire us because of that, I doubt we would’ve been a good fit anyway.

One of the reasons we went out on our own was because we thought it would actually give us better training than any other route. I think it did. If we had worked as a prosecutor or public defender, we wouldn’t have had as much choice (if any at all) over who taught us. Instead, we went to the best lawyers we could find, the ones judges and other criminal defense lawyers recommended. They were almost always happy to help. We also wanted to control our caseload. That worked too, as we’ve never had to take more cases than we felt comfortable handling.

Most importantly, aside from occasionally covering for other defense attorneys, we only appear in court on behalf of our clients. To me, that’s a big deal. We know everything possible about them and their cases, as we represent them from beginning to end. I have the utmost respect for public defenders, but if I had gone that route, I would have likely spent a lot of time sitting in court doing coverage. I wanted clients. I wanted cases. I wanted to avoid appearing in court on behalf of people who weren’t my responsibility.

If we’d gone to work for the public defender’s office, we still would’ve represented clients more or less immediately. To some extent, we would have still had people’s lives in our hands, and they would’ve received representation from inexperienced lawyers. They aren’t any less entitled to competent representation than someone who pays. I wouldn’t have viewed theirs as training cases any more than I viewed my private clients’ cases as training cases. Every lawyer has first clients. Ours just happened to pay us.

In his post, Scott Greenfield says he expects new criminal defense lawyers to inform him that he’s wrong by insisting that they’re great. I might be a new lawyer by his standards, but I’m not going to claim I’m great or make any other self-aggrandizing, unverifiable claims. That would be meaningless, as anyone on the internet can make themselves look like Gerry Spence. I hope this post doesn’t come across as bragging or self-promoting. What I want to get across is that going straight into solo practice can provide as much training and supervision as a more traditional career path. The drawbacks Adrian and I encountered, like more liability, more expenses, more risk, longer hours, and less-than-steady pay at the outset, were things that affected us personally. They weren’t to the detriment of our clients.

Grudging soon-to-be solos who do it straight out of school because they have no other options may indeed need advice to minimize the harm when they’re unleashed on the public. However, the people who are prepared and choose to do it for good reasons are just as deserving of sage advice and support. If you make competence top priority and lay the proper groundwork, there’s no reason not to go right into solo practice criminal defense.

I’m pleased to hear Andrew Golden has observed only minimal alienation in the PD’s Office. It’s nice to know there are islands of integrity and commitment in the profession.
However, I strongly agree with Chris King’s sense of the proper relationship between legal education and the practice of law. We don’t want law school to be lawyer-training school. When we cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions, we actually invite alienation among law students and lawyers. Legal education should appreciate the depth of the legal discourse and explore its rich complexities. It should operate on a graduate-school level and graduate people truly learned in the law.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe it’s not the stupidest thing I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely stupid. You can read excellent commentary here and here and here.

What confuses me most is this sentence: “When we cave in to demands of that sort from the ABA and assorted study commissions, we actually invite alienation among law students and lawyers.” Huh? Really? How? Admittedly, I haven’t researched the alienation caused by law students being properly trained to be lawyers, but I just don’t see how that can be true.

As a lawyer, what at times alienates me from law students is hiring them to do a research project and realizing they know next to nothing about criminal law or criminal procedure despite having gotten excellent grades in law school criminal law and criminal procedure classes. They can, however, tell me about the professor-made-up “toothbrush rule” for Fourth Amendment standing or Justice Black’s arguments in favor of total incorporation. As a former law student, I still remember being alienated from lawyers because my knowledge was so impractical that I had to do a lot of extra-curriculur research just to ask them intelligent questions about their practice and understand their answers.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved law school (most of the time). I love being a lawyer (most of the time). Sure, maybe all any school can do is give you the tools to go out and learn your chosen profession, but do the people teaching you have to avoid giving you practical knowledge about that profession? Do they have to exhibit disdain for practicing lawyers? Can someone please enlighten me?