Oh great. . .as if the Colorado flood wasn't enough. . .

Harris County Texas Courthouse.  The big legal dome of Houston.

now Texas

Texas law graduates would no longer face the Texas bar exam, and instead take a test with fewer essay questions that could qualify them for a law license in 29 states, if the Texas Supreme Court accepts a recommendation from one of its task forces.

When the UBE became the rule in Wyoming, I predicted, and I wasn't alone, that the net result would be bad for Wyoming's lawyers.

We're five years into the new UBE and it has been pretty much as predicted, although I haven't personally been affected by it and recently even started to do some litigation in the big poaching state to our South.  But I have seen a real decline in the standard of practice.  Indeed, I've been in cases in which the UBE minted lawyers from other states were pretty much wholly ignorant of Wyoming's law and missed filings they could have made to their client's advantage as they were too ignorant of the law to know to make them.  And I've likewise been in a case in which a major mistake was made due to the plaintiff's counsel's ignorance and disbelief that the Wyoming law was what it was.

Now, I don't blame Texas for doing this.  Indeed, it makes sense. There are nearly 100,000 lawyers licensed in Texas of which near 90,000 live in Texas.  So they have plenty of lawyers and in any situation in which you have plenty of lawyers you have plenty of lawyers looking for something to do. Now some of them will look for something to do in Colorado, a UBE state, to the detriment of Colorado's lawyers, who are already practicing in Wyoming do the detriment of Wyoming's standards of practice.  This will make a bad situation worse.

But with big population states like New York and Texas joining this trend, the it's probably unstoppable. The net result will be that things like divorces and the like will be left for local lawyers, but courtroom representation will go.  Indeed, trials are likely to go as the big city trial lawyers in reality hardly ever actually try a civil case.

So this makes the center of mass all the more the big cities, for big matters.  And to the detriment of the local.  Law was once a field that people from rural areas who wanted to remain in their home towns could enter and expect to make a middle class living.  Now its increasingly become one which is a big city occupation characterized by lower standards.  Of course, there's been an overpopulation of lawyers for some time, but this doesn't help states with rural populations.

Some law will remain, of course.  But less of it.  And that's shame . . . most particularly for good representation by those who might want a person attuned to the area they are in.  But we can't be too surprised.  Everything is weighted to the blight of the big cities, which turns everything into a blighted field with it.

The Depressing Issue of the state bar journal and institutional blindness. Patch 'em up and send 'em back into battle.

 

Some time last week the most recent issue of the state bar journal arrived.

I always read it, although it doesn't always take me long to read it.  There's usually some interesting articles in any one issue.

I usually don't read it right away either, for whatever reason.  It's one of those magazines that hang around for a few days before I get to it, usually.  I sort of wish I hadn't read this issue at all.

The magazine is usually centered around a theme, and several articles will be on that month's them.  When this issue came the cover asked if you "Can imagine a world without lawyers?"

Now, first of all I'll note that I don't like articles that take that theme as a rule, and I've seen more than one. Usually articles like that by any one person in a field they're writing about approach some state of hagiography (this one included).  And it's really a straw man argument in the first place in regards to lawyers. There's no earthly way you have a world without lawyers as every society has some sort of role that is equivalent to lawyers even if they're not called lawyers, and in the modern world they're normally called lawyers.  The Soviet Union had lawyers, for instance, and its not exactly a society that we imagine had a lot of really independent court action.  So you really can't imagine a society without lawyers as society by definition has lawyers.

Shoot, even if you've played Monopoly or something like it as a kid, somebody was some kind of lawyer. ..  the one who knew the rules.

Additionally, the article was written by the prior law school dean, whom I'm a little miffed at.  That dean ended up in a spat with the then president of the university as the president of the university took the position that UW should have a special legal focus on law in the energy sector.  In looking at things that way he was not proposing "no more tort law" or something but he was alive to the fact that smaller land grant schools, and we are one, need to be pretty concentrated on what the heck we're doing or we loose out to bigger universities.  What's special about the UW law school, in other words, that will attract people to it?  He had a concept.  There needs to be one for the academic departments of smaller land grant schools in an era when there's not exactly a shortage of universities and colleges.

This is particularly true of law schools, I'd note, as they're in real trouble (and there's a rosy article on that in this issue, more on that later) and need to have a reason to exist. Since the state boarded the barque across the River Styx by adopting the Universal Bar Exam there's nearly no reason to even have a law school in Wyoming anymore, and the president was giving it a survivable focus, maybe. The the then dean opposed it, and the students, naive to what the UBE means for them in the state, backed the Dean.  It was short sighted.

Anyhow, seeing the cover title,I figured that was what the theme of the issue was.  It clearly wasn't, however.  I'm not sure what the them was, but if there was one, it would seem to be that "things are bad for lawyers."

One article in the magazine was by a lawyer I well know, as we share a common set of relatives. We're not directly related ourselves, but we share so many cousins we might as well be.  I have a set of near relatives in town that fit that definition and if we're not quite family we're something other than simple acquaintances or friends in the conventional sense.  That article was disheartening as it dealt with her adopted daughters struggle with addiction and depression, which caught me by surprise.  I should have known that, but I didn't.  In mentioning it to my son, who was only a year or so behind that individual in high school, he was aware of it and was surprised I wasn't, which is good I suppose.  The article closed with advice to young lawyers to "love deeply", to grow from pain, and not to judge.  The advice to all lawyers was to support other lawyers who need help and to cherish our clients. All good advice, in context, I suppose.

As an aside, I'll note that the article reported that her daughters descent into depression was brought about by marijuana.  I'm not surprised by this, but I am tired of the repeated articles I see by weed fans that there's no risk to it at all.  Baloney.  It's dangerous, and can be very dangerous.

Going back towards the front of the magazine there was an article by the State Bar Counsel, who has an article in every issue. This one, however, was deeply personal and detailed that our bar counsel, who had a very long career prior to taking up that role as a practicing trial lawyer, had been back east at a conference on lawyer well being only to find out that a friend of his, a law school colleague who lived in that state and whom he was going to meet with, had killed himself just days prior to the conference.    Pretty shocking and very sad.

The article concluded with an admonition from that conference about how every lawyer needs to take a role in lawyer well being and to overcoming what the conference holder apparently asserted was denial of a problem.  The article closed with the request that we, i.e., the lawyers, get to work on this.

Well, I don't think lawyers deny there is a problem in the profession.  Indeed, I've heard some lawyers speak of it very, very openly.  But I don't think we're going to do a darned thing about it and I don't even think we can.  If reform is coming, we're not the ones who are going to do it, as it would require a massive reform of the very system itself.  We have no interest in that whatsoever and can't imagine any other system anyway.  It's not that individual lawyers don't have an interest in it, but the system that's eating practitioners alive right now developed over a long course of time and it isn't going away soon.

Indeed, it will take the passing of the entire Boomer generation of lawyers and the one or two that came after them to make it pass and even then that's doubtful  The Boomer generation famously rejected materialistic pursuits, or so they claimed, in the 1960s but they took up the banner of materialism ferociously in the 1970s and have never let go.  It's that spirit that dominates the profession and that's not going to change.  The discussion isn't even about attempting to change it.  All of the discussion about the profession is instead about patching up the wounded to send them back in the battle for the bucks.

Wounded in New Guinea, World War Two.  This soldier likely didn't go home, he likely recovered and went into combat.  Whatever psychological wounds he had he likely carried for the rest of his life.

Its not just the conversion of the legal field from a profession into a materialistic pursuit that created this problem and I don't want to suggest it is, solely. That made it worse.  The very nature of American jurisprudence is very high stress and that leads to the problem of stress induced collapse of all type.  That's my point here.  State Bar programs tend to be addressed towards treating the symptoms and, when the suffering individual is sufficiently able, to send the sufferer back out into practice.  I've never seen any suggestion in any of these articles that the root cause of the problem should in any way be amended.  That is, the articles often note that being a lawyer is "high stress" but I've never seen any article, ever, ponder why the profession of law became so high stress.  Never.

Indeed every single program state bars or big bar organizations have to address what they all now acknowledge is a crisis in the field works this way.  On the occasions in which they run stories about program successes that feature testimonials they tend to be from brave lawyers who are willing to admit that they went through such a problem and went back into practice.  The only other articles we tend to see are the ones from lawyers who flamed out and met with a bad end.  We rarely see American articles from lawyers who crashed and recovered by getting their discharge from the field of combat, although I have read just such an article from a Canadian lawyer who ended up disbarred (or maybe suspended), lost his family, etc., etc., but was actually happy that his career had been terminated.

More often than that, we just deny that anything is going on, which is why nothing will change.  We accept the conditions, whether we should or not, and therefore ought to be pondering what we can do to arm people against them, rather than bemoaning the losses and suggesting that patching the victims up is the solution.

 King David of Scotland knighting a squire. This is, in a way, the way most law careers start out, in the minds of the newly minted lawyers, and in the myth of the law.  But in reality a lot of knights ended up dead, and some went rogue.  If we believe that men in the Middle Ages were like men now, no doubt some lived in horror of what they'd seen and probably some were glad when the Welsh archers found their personal mark.

A strong aspect of this is that we have an adversarial system of justice.  Only nations that have justice systems that descend from English Common Law have this system, and most haven't' taken it anywhere near as  far as we have.  The Common Law trial system itself, as I've noted before, was a substitute for trial by combat and lawyers are substitutes, in that system for Champions, who were (let's admit it) mercenaries.  I'm not criticizing lawyers today when I say that our trial system is a species of combat and lawyers are mercenaries in those battles.  That's the truth of it.  Another truth of that is, however, that being a mercenary takes a toll on the mercenary.  People admire mercenaries only if they're Soldier of Fortune fanboys or the viewers of odd movies, like The Wild Geese or The Dogs of War.  In reality, few people are really thrilled if a mercenary sits down to eat lunch with them.  Same thing is true of lawyers. And fighting for money is corrosive on your personality no matter who you are. There are lawyers who are saints, to be sure, but there are a lot more than are pretty dedicated sinners.  No wonder addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography and vice of all types is so strong in the legal field.

 

Mercenaries in the Congo, with rebel troops, 1960s.  Lawyers have more in common with these guys than we'd care to admit and in more ways than one.

And just as patching up a mercenary and sending him back into battle is perfectly possible, just doing that really doesn't address the bigger problem and there's no way within the field to do it.  What are we going to do, as lawyers? Say, geez, this system that we've told the public is the greatest legal system on Earth really isn't?  We're not going to do that.  Most of us don't even know that this isn't the only really functional legal system and would be amazed that most Western nations don't use anything like it and yet have fair legal systems.

There are other advanced legal systems which are fair, just and not adversarial in the same fashion.  We don't know much about them and we aren't going to do anything, myself included, to suggest that adopting them or elements of them would be a good idea.  Nobody is going to stand up, for example, in the next Iowa state legislature and suggest that Iowa model its trial procedure on that of France.  Nope.  Not going to happen.

Not that I won't pitch a few ideas, mind you.

The article by the State Bar President in this issue came about due to an ostensible conversation with his young son, in which that child asked his parent what sort of law he did.  That article starts off with a joke from the President reminding the child that the family needed more doctors, but not lawyers.  I've now heard that joke too many times for me to take it as a joke and I think it reflects conversations that really take place in many households.  Indeed, one lawyer I know with young children keeps a list of other careers taped to his refrigerator for his children to view.  That taps back into another aspect of this, which is the now tired idea that we must make absolutely sure that our children are doctors or lawyers.

Indeed, I know plenty of lawyers who think just this way. "Be a doctor", the advice consistently is. Funny thing is that I hear a lot of doctors complain that their profession ain't what it used to be either, and I believe it.  If there's any profession that has been taken over more by the Siren Call of Money than the law, and I doubt there is, it would probably be the medical field. Be a doctor and make a lot of money is the common theme there.

Of course just saying this makes me sound like some sort of raging radical who would have been in the Petrograd Delusional Club in 1917, which I would not be.   I am in, I suppose the Chestertonian-Beloocian Public House Meeting Society by default.  And in that, I think the evolution of the modern economy as done a huge disservice to mankind.  I'm not in the camp that would urge any child not to attend university as its clear the modern economy has evolved to where that's a practical necessity unless you are the benefactor of a being in a family that's retained some sort of business you can run without doing that, and even then I'd still counsel you to go.  It's unfortunately, to say the least, as we've developed a whole range of jobs, which if statistics are correct, most people actually dislike.  As we've said here before, 70% of Americans dislike their jobs.  Pretty shocking.

In other words, Mike Rowe has a point, but it's a point that most people don't listen to for societal reasons.

Don Quixote, knight errant, which has some analogies to the topic being discussed here today.

Which doesn't equate, I'd note, with what the bar magazine is discussing.  The articles aren't speaking about lawyer satisfaction rates, they're writing about the practice of law eating lawyers alive and urging a Quixotic effort to take that on which we aren't going to do.  Indeed, we frankly aren't even going to look at the things we could do, even those things that wouldn't require a massive overhaul of the justice system itself. Patch 'em up and send them back in. . . everything will be fine.

Indeed, we aren't going to do the one thing that would be really easy to do, which would be to limit entry into the field and attempt to make sure that those entering it know what they are getting into and appear to be psychologically and temperamentally prepared to take what is coming their way.  We don't do anything of that type whatsoever..  We should, but we're not going to. Which takes me to the comments published by the current law school dean in this issue. The dean relates how applications for entry to law schools across the nation have declined over the past few years (which is supposed to be bad) although their up a bit now, but that this is a really good time for people to apply to law school, he says, as it should be easier to get in than ever.

A fine example of how law schools are making the practice of law worse.

This isn't the only way they're doing that, I'll note.  Law school support for the Uniform Bar Exam is widespread and that's massively detrimental to actual practitioners, which most law school graduates ultimately become.  Both stem from the systemic philosophical failure of modern law schools which is the logic that; 1) we need to stay in business no matter what; which means 2) we need to keep churning out graduates at the same rate and; 3) they need to be admitted to some bar no matter how ill prepared, in every since, they are to practice real law.

 Tire production line. . . pretty much the same way law schools view their students.  Not enough demand. . . well somebody needs to buy more cars. . . .

It's a disservice to their students and a disservice to the profession.

And it need not be so.

When I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, Sgt. Ronald E. Adams, one of our drill sergeants, informed us that he intended to break us down, if at all possible, both physically and psychologically.  He intended to do this, he declared, not because we were bad people if we failed, indeed he said quite the opposite, but rather because if we were going to fail, he'd rather it happen at Ft. Sill in basic training than in combat where other people could be killed when we broke down.  That logic should apply to law school.

It did basically apply to my undergraduate field of geology. 

 

Optical mineralogy lab at the University of Wyoming, circa 1986.  This was the last lab in this major a lot of students in the field would ever take, and not for a cheerful reason.

When I was a geology student at the University of Wyoming we were required to take Optical Mineralogy which was, we knew, a "weed out" class.  It was required for the major and you could only take it twice.  If you didn't get by the class with a grade of D, you were out of the program and could never get a degree with a geology major.  On the first day of class, the professor, Dr. Meyers, asked how many students were taking the class for the second time. A smattering of hands went up, including a couple of hands from graduate students that hadn't had to take Optical Mineralogy in their undergraduate programs from elsewhere (almost no graduate student in the geology department was from UW as UW didn't favor admitting its own students into the graduate program).  Dr. Meyers then noted that these were the people we had to watch as "we fail half this class".

That statement wasn't a joke. The grade in the class was curved and 50% of the class was made to fail no matter how good their grades were.  So grades of C and the like on tests were basically failing grades and even grades that were normally in the B range were barely in the D range.  The grade scale was designed to wipe out half of the enrollment in the class, more or less, considering that quite a few of the people who failed would just give up and not attempt a second chance (grad students had little choice but to attempt it).  Yes, I passed the class.

That wasn't the only geology department class that was a "weed out" class, however.  We had electives in the program we could take, but no matter what we took, at least one additional class would be a tough weed out class.  In my case, it was Invertebrate Paleontology, which I liked a great deal but which had a lab that was a nightmare.  Others took similar classes.  The point was that the geology department wanted to make sure that the students who came through the program stood up to academic rigor before they went out in the field or on to graduate school.

Law schools do nothing like that.

Contrary to what people tend to think, the hardest thing about modern law school has just been getting in, and even that isn't that hard.  The hurdle of getting over the baby steps of the LSAT are regarded as horrors by most law students who have never been through a more rigorous program.  Taking the LSAT twice in order to improve a score is very common when it should be the rule that you get one shot and one shot only.  The LSAT only tests logical thought, that's it, and if you have to actually study for that, you have no business in law school.

For that matter, law schools are a shadow of what they once were in terms of academic rigor and that's been followed up on as state after state has reduced the rigor of their bar exam with many now doing what Wyoming has done and having adopted the Uniform Bar Exam with no state test.

The concept that law school is really tough is common, but it's a breeze.  It can be really interesting, as the law can be really interesting, but  it is not hard, and its less tough now than ever.  At one time students had to worry about the long walk in law schools.  Not much anymore.

The long walk is something that also had an analogy to basic training and the geology department.  They had their own long walks.  In basic training, the long walk was an actual long walk.  When I went through basic training we had three long marches.  The first one was about seven miles, not bad. The next one after that was around fifteen, which is quite a hike with full pack and rifle. But the last one was thirty, which is a really grueling long march.  It started off early in the morning, like about 3:00 a.m., and ended up around 17:00 or so.  If you fell out of the march, you were done for good, discharged or recycled to a basic training unit that hadn't gotten to that step yet.  The concept was to see if you were physically able to endure the physical punishment of being a soldier.

In the geology department the same treatment was meeting out during Summer Field Class.  In that class we worked outdoors on various projects every day, making maps at night.  Part of the class involved following around Dr. Boyd, the same professor who taught paleontology, as he walked at high speed.  He was not a young man at the time, in his seventies if I recall correctly, but he could walk people in their twenties into the ground.  You didn't dare not keep up with him, let along because you needed to be wherever he was when he stopped to lecture.  A certain walk up a hill in the class was legendary and had acquired the nickname, in years prior to when I took it, of "the Bataan Death March", recalling that horrible event from World War Two.  While much of that was simply because Dr. Boyd was incredibly spry for a man of his (or younger) age, it was also to make the point that geology was an outdoor profession and you had to be able to endure the outdoors in order to work in it.

Law school, as noted, has nothing like this.  It should. And at one time, as also noted, it sort of did.

Law school is taught by the Socratic method, which basically means that its taught by debate. AT least it was when I was in law school, but I'm told now that this is increasingly rare and often professors just lecture, which would be incredibly dull.  At one time, students who were not prepared to engage in a debate with a professor were made to march out of the classroom, which was universally regarded as embarrassing.  By the time I was in law school, however, this was extremely rare, although I can recall it occurring at least once.

When I was in law school, however, it was still the case that a student had to be prepared to debate a professor and defined his own views of a case.  And there was sort of a weed out class in the form of some required classes that students took their first year in law school.  Only one of those classes, Contracts, was really hard, but that was only partially be design. The other reason was that the professor was awful.  At any rate, I'm told that today, the lecture style is just that, a lecture.

How boring. . .and ineffective in more than one way.

Okay, so what am I getting at?

We're starting to see a lot of articles about how the problems some lawyers develop later in practice can be traced all the way back to law school.  If law schools exist to train lawyers and prepare them to practice law, they ought to also exist to keep those who should note be doing that from doing it.  But instead they pitch to prospective students with absurd "you can do anything with a law degree arguments, allow a testing entry procedure in which applicants can defeat the test which they take to gain entry by taking it multiple times, encourage applications when they know that the number of jobs are down, and encourage the dilution of bar admission standards by arguing for the UBE.  In short, law schools are graduating students who have no business being lawyers, temperamentally, and they really don't care.

Law schools are not going to self reform any more than lawyers are going to demand a reform to the system of law we are trained in and work in.  If anyone could do this, it would have to be state bars, but they are headed in the opposite direction, drinking the Koolaide of  UBE.  If state bar entrance committees got a clue (not likely) and wanted to act on this problem, they could.

They could do that by requiring, first of all, that only graduates of ABA accredited law schools could apply for admission to the bar of their state, something our bar already does. But beyond that they could have real state specific bar exams that were rigorous and on the law of their states. There's no reason whatsoever that the passage of those exams should be much above 50% and there's no reason that an applicant should get to take it more than twice. . . ever.  And there's no reason to have reciprocity with other states.  That would reduce the number of lawyers to be sure, but (and we'll get to that) that would be a good thing.

That would basically reverse things to the way they were as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in most states, but going beyond that an applicant should have an undergraduate degree in some real academic field and something like "general pre law" or some undergraduate degree with "law" in the title doesn't cut it. Those degrees serve only to get a person into law school and are otherwise fairly worthless if the student fails to gain admission or later seeks to get out of law or must get out.

Likewise, the flood of bogus degrees with no application, including anything that has "[fill in blank here] Studies] is not useful.  How to sort these out is would be chore but a group of smart people like lawyers (assuming that's still the case, and given the flood of applicants and ease of application over the past couple of decades that is not necessarily true) ought to be able to figure that out.  Science degrees, engineering degrees, the classic liberal arts (history, English) etc. would count.  Weight out to be given in application to the hardest undergraduate degrees, say a 10% boost by implication in your LSAT scores.

And, and here's a real kicker, at least 10% of the faculty of any law school from which a student seeks admission from should have practiced law within the past five years.  Law schools tend to be a refuge from the practice of law and are packed with people who don't really know what practicing law is like.  Law school professors should be licensed in the state in which they're teaching, under the criteria noted above.

Finally, in my view, a lot of law schools can just go if they are just churning out graduates. For state land grant colleges like our own, if they aren't serving a need for the state, they can go. And I'm saying that about a school I graduated from.  I'm not saying it isn't serving the needs of the state, but right now I have very real doubts about it.

Would that cure the Lawyer Blues problem?  Probably not entirely.  But a much more rigorous academic program, more difficulty in getting in, and more difficulty getting admitted, would serve a lot of the same purpose that basic training does in the military.  It's a lot better to have students weeded out or broken down while they're at Square State College than it is to admit them and have them melt down while representing clients.  And I've seen that.

Will this occur.  No.  I wouldn't be surprised at this point to see a law school dean argue for admission for everyone who graduates from "Ol Big Square", along with a state provided comfort cat and a box of Twinkies to go with it.

And so, while I"m using on the problem, what else could we realistically do, but we're not?  That is, if we, the lawyers, are watching this train wreck, and we're urged by our state bar to do something, what else could we do, assuming that we're not going to argue for a change in the system of law itself, which we are not going to do (indeed, we're going to do nothing at all, but that's somewhat besides the hypothetical point).

One thing we could also do is require a readmission to the bar at some point.

Now, I'm not suggesting that lawyers retake the exam after a period of time, or at least not the full exam. But I am suggesting that perhaps after a decade or so, and then repeating every decade after that, something be done.  Perhaps a lawyer should have to honestly readmit and with certain representations.  Has he suffered a bar discipline and why?  Has he been having medical or psychological, or legal, troubles?  Is he/she actually practicing law?

Truck drivers and pilots have to have medical certificates to do their jobs.  What about lawyers?  That might be a good idea as well.

Policemen do with most agencies anymore, and they have to undergo, quite often a type of psychological examination.  I know, for instance, that applicants to be game wardens in Wyoming must sit through an interview with a psychologist.  If that's the case for game wardens, why isn't it for lawyers on a decadal basis.  Indeed, why isn't it at the point of admission.

Our state bar doesn't even have applicant interviews anymore, which used to be the final stage of admission.  But ti was deemed to serve no purpose and was long ago omitted. Omitted, I'll note, before the state specific test was omitted.  That probably ought to be brought back. And with it, why not require an interview with a psychologist?  If game wardens and policemen have to do it, why not lawyers?

Well, because we're a self policing bar, that's why, just like most others. And so we will not subject ourselves to that.

And indeed, over time, we've gone to a system that's basically designed to get people omitted, no matter what, after they've gone through a school training ground that's designed to churn them out and keep them in.

And then we wonder why things go wrong?

We recruit them to a field that's very high stress and a species of substituted combat based on lies that a person with a law degree is qualified to do something else, fail to test of their suitable, in any fashion, for the combat we're throwing them into, and fail to check up on them after they're engaged in it. When some fail, we patch them up and throw them back in. 

And we wonder why things go wrong?

Maybe, instead of congratulating ourselves on our wonderfulness on imagining how horrible the world would be without lawyers, we ought to wonder why we put so many of those wonderful lawyers into conditions that a lot of them, just as wonderful people, can't endure.

But we're not going to.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Postscript

If all of this seems somewhat strident, and it likely does, let me note that if I had been at the same conference as our bar council and that question had been asked, I would have had to raise my hand.

That gives me a pretty strong set of opinions on this.

A few years ago I was handling the defense of a client in which the plaintiff was represented by a well known and highly respected plaintiff's attorney who was probably in his early 60s at the time.  I'd known of him, but hadn't met him, prior to that case.

I was surprised in the case by how disheveled he seemed to be.  I was also surprised that he wouldn't attend any of the out of state depositions, which isn't the norm for careful practitioners.  But beyond that it didn't seem to me that anything was really alarming about his behavior.  Then, one day, he called me up, after calling a lawyer who was handling the defense of another defendant in the action, and asked for the vacation of a set of dates.

I really debated granting the extension.  It seemed like an odd request and the case was heading relatively soon towards a set of motion hearings.  But usually we cooperate with each other on things like that, so I reluctantly agreed, although I felt really odd about it.

The next morning the other defense counsel texted me early in the morning. The plaintiff's lawyer had gone home that night and killed himself.  I didn't see it coming.

But maybe somebody could have.

And maybe he shouldn't have been in the profession, or have been allowed to stay in it.  Learning a little bit more about him after that, it seemed that it was well known that he was suffering from depression and he'd lived a truly tragic life.

Self policing bar indeed.

So. . . why doesn't the ABA oppose the Uniform Bar Exam?

From the ABA news article email:

The ABA is opposing two federal bills that would require states to allow individuals to carry concealed weapons within their borders if they have permits to carry concealed weapons in another state.

The bills pending in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives mandate national reciprocity for concealed carry permits issued under state law. ABA President Linda A. Klein calls the legislation “a dangerous proposal” that would tie states’ hands in setting concealed-carry standards.

All states allow some form of concealed carry, but standards vary, Klein said. The reciprocity requirement “offends deeply rooted principles of federalism where public safety is traditionally the concern of state and local government,” Klein says in the letters (PDFs) here and here.

If the proposal were to become law, “a state’s ability to consider safety factors—such as age, evidence of dangerousness, live firearm training, or criminal records—would give way to other states’ less stringent requirements,” Klein said. “Unlike some efforts of Congress to create minimum safety standards, this bill could lead to no safety standards as more states enact laws to allow persons to carry concealed firearms without a permit.”
The bills are H.R. 38, “Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017,” and S.446, “Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017.” Klein sent the letters to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Subcommitee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations.

It's hard not read something like this and feel that the American Bar Association is just some sort of liberal organization in which being a lawyer is just a prerequisite.   That the ABA has a position on a firearms related topic at all is hard to fathom.  Predictably, when they have one, its on the left side of the political isle.

Now, I'm not really commenting on this bill at all, and I'll note that there are people on the right side of that isle who are opposed to this bill as they view it as trampling on the rights of state's.  And no matter which way you feel about it, there's something to that view, just  as there's something to the view in favor of the bill. But the ABA?

Come on ABA, if you really cared about "a state’s ability to consider safety factors" you'd come out condemning that farce called the Uniform Bar Exam which Wyoming, and a host of other state, have adopted.

Wyoming has lost 25,000 workers over the past few years and quite frankly some of them are lawyers.  Up here in the state we see out of state lawyers, licensed under the UBE, all the time. The UBE is based on the absurd fiction that the law in one state is just like that of another, and we're seeing that up here, with lawyers from big cities in neighboring states who can't see their way around to Wyoming's law in some instances. That's not good for the state and its not good for the residents of the state either.  The ABA, with its expressed concern for Federalism and the rights of states, ought to now condemn the UBE.

I won't hold my breath.

On the topic of concealment, by the way, I've become increasingly surprised  by how many lawyers carry concealed pistols, and indeed I've become surprised by how many people in general do.  I'd have thought it fairly rare, but it isn't.  It's actually quite common, at least around here.  Firearms in general are so common in Wyoming that a common jesting bumper sticker states "Welcome To Wyoming--Consider Everyone Armed", but it isn't really that much of a joke.  Lots of people carry all the time, including a lot of lawyers, I've learned.  The stereotypes about packing heat are, quite frankly, way off the mark.  Professionals carry pretty commonly, I've come to learn.  And quite a few women do.  Quite a few younger people regard this as highly routine.  Indeed, most of the people I've come to learn carry concealed weapons are such a surprise to me that it actually gives me comfort about the arguments in favor of it, as they're such responsible people.

None of which gets to the actual law proposed above, which again you can argue either way.

Which takes me to another thing that surprised me.  Lawyers are generally more left leaning that other people but reading the reactions to this ABA stand by members of the ABA gives me some hope that lawyers themselves are less lock step than the ABA might suppose.

I've been unhappy with the ABA for some time, which seems to some degree to be attempting to occupy space that would otherwise be taken up by the ACLU, which itself seems to have forgotten its original purpose to me.  And its obsession with "Big Law" is over the top, in my view.  At any rate, ABA members, including ones who don't have any interest in firearms, have been published in reaction to this with some pretty negative comments.  A lot of ABA members feel that the ABA is way out of touch with its purpose.  And I'll note that the UBE connection stated above, while I thought was likely unique to me, isn't.  I saw at least one other comment to the same effect.

A common statement by lawyers, both current and former members of the ABA, is that they've had enough of the ABA and that they have, or are, dropping out. That includes me.  When the ABA goes back to a hard concentration on actual law rather than wasting its time with matters that are social and political policy, I'll reconsider.

LSAT Angst and the Logical Process

Some people study for the LSAT.

Some even take courses to prepare for it.

And many worry about it.

I know this because as a lawyer I accidentally see advertisements and posts etc. along these lines. 

And I occasionally see ones where some poor soul is concerned because he or she is taking it for the third time and is now convinced, not without good reason, that the dream of being a lawyer is about to fade away.

Well. . . dear reader, if you can't get a good score on your LSAT simply by showing up, you probably have less business in law school than a trained bear.

I wasn't aware, when I took the LSAT back in 1986, that people freaked out about it.  I took that and the Graduate Record Exam, the GRE, at the same time and I didn't study for either.  Somebody counseled me to get a book to study for the LSAT, which I did, but it was so boring I didn't put much effort into it and rapidly gave it up.  I really wasn't aware of the freak out nature of the test until I was waiting in line to take it and there were some nervous folks waiting in line who had taken it before and scored low.  I scored high on the LSAT and the GRE without studying for either.  And that is how it should be.

According to the LSAT folks:

The LSAT is designed to measure skills that are considered essential for success in law school: the reading and comprehension of complex texts with accuracy and insight; the organization and management of information and the ability to draw reasonable inferences from it; the ability to think critically; and the analysis and evaluation of the reasoning and arguments of others.

If you can't do that stuff on your own, you may need to study, but not for the test.  In other words, studying for the test may camouflage your inabilities in these regards.

Now, let's be honest.  Law school, any law school, is easy. Everyone thinks its super hard simply because of the myth surrounding it.  But if you have the ability to read and a mind that naturally uses logic, rather than emotion, to analyze, it's a breeze.  It was so much easier than my geology undergrad it isn't even funny.  It's probably a lot harder than majoring in some major designed only to get you into law school, but that's hardly a fair comparison.

But practicing law is hard.  Really hard.  And it never gets easy.  You may get better at it, but as you do the complexity of the problems you face will grow along with it.  

And hence the point.  If you can't do well on the LSAT, maybe you should really consider doing something else.

Advice to the University of Wyoming on elimniating degree fields and programs in this time of budgetary woe. Eliminate the Law School

What?

Are you serious?

Do you seriously propose to eliminate the law school, your alma mater?  Are you insane?

Why yes.  I do, and no I'm not.  

Indeed, shortly after I started thinking this recently, I heard another lawyer, also a UW graduate, with nearly 40 years in suggest the same thing, after the Dean was making his annual tour.  I.e, not only is the question now "why should we give you money", so much as it is "why do you even exist?"

Let's look a the situation objectively.

UW this past week announced that it was considering eliminating sixteen degrees.  According to UW the fields being considered are as follows:

Bachelor’s degrees recommended for elimination are: American studies, Russian, energy systems engineering, art education, modern language education and technical education.

Master’s degrees recommended for elimination are: French, German, neurosciences, philosophy, food science and human nutrition, sociology, environmental engineering, and adult and postsecondary education.

Ph.D. programs that would be eliminated are: adult and post-secondary education, and statistics.

Some additional cost savings measures are as follows:

The proposal calls for the American Studies Program to be consolidated into a Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, along with the Gender and Women’s Studies Program and perhaps others; the Department of Statistics to merge with the Department of Mathematics; and the departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies to consolidate with similar units. The goal is to achieve efficiencies through shared business and administrative services.

The Science and Mathematics Teaching Center, meanwhile, would be shuttered and reconfigured with a broader role in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education -- becoming a P-16 STEM education center dovetailing with UW’s science, engineering and education initiatives.

So, why not eliminate a seventeenth unneeded obsolete post graduate college, the College of Law?  It's time for it to go, really, as its now obsolete for our state's land grant university, which isn't true of at least some of the fields mentioned above, in my view.

Why would this be true?  Well, with the firm entrenchment of the testing debacle of the Uniform Bar Exam the University of Wyoming College of Law no longer necessary and a waste of money.  What's more, with the current state of the law, just having it is pretty pointless.  Axe the sucker.

Okay, I'm not fully serious, but I am serious that it should, at this point, probably be considered. We can replace it with a different system like we do for doctors or dentists, if we find that we're lacking lawyers around here (unlikely) and we could create a really useful school, like a Veterinary college.  Heck, we could convert the law school into a veterinary college.

Okay, why would I propose such a horrendous fate for my dear old alma mater, the University of Wyoming's cherished College of Law, which educated me in a field that I've worked on for lo' near these three decades, from the flower of my youth to my near decreptude.

Well, because we no longer need it and it serves no useful purpose.  Indeed, at this point its served no useful purposes for several years, since the Un-informed Bar Exam came in, and seeing as there's seemingly no going back, and it doesn't educate for a Wyoming application, it may actually be doing harm by its existence.  

Allow me to explain. 

The University obtained a law school back in the day when each state truly had its own set of laws and there weren't uniform laws in anything.  This is important, as we'll expand on in a moment, but the creation of the law school served, I suspect, another purpose as well.  When it was founded in 1920, the state was really still trying to find a pair of big boy pants.  That is, we were still sort of struggling with the concept that we were a frontier state. A law school sort of showed we'd arrived, maybe.

Maybe that wasn't part of it at all, but rather was because we actually had arrived. We could now educate our own lawyers who served in our own courts, for our own state.

And that's exactly what the UW College of Law did for many years.  Most lawyers you ran into in Wyoming, including the truly famous ones like Gerry Spence, or Dave Freudenthal, etc. ,were graduates of UW's program.  And many of those individuals likely never would have become lawyers but for the UW College of Law.  I don't know how common it is, but I myself applied only to the UW College of Law, not to any other.

But even by the time I went to UW this purpose was waning.  By my graduating class a fair number of students came from elsewhere to attend it, and went elsewhere, typically Colorado (but not always) upon graduating.  So by this period in time, a person could begin to wonder if the College of Law was serving some purpose other than the state's. . . maybe its own really.

Then came the UBE. 

Since the UBE the state has been inundated with out of state lawyers.  I have cases, for example, in which I'm the only resident Wyoming lawyer in them.  This supposedly wasn't going to happen, but not only is it happening, I suspect it will become more and more the trend over the years and at some point in the next decade the areas of the law outside of local civil, practice for public entities, and divorce will pretty much be the domain of out of state lawyers.

Which brings up one of the reasons that the UW College of Law existed.  Since our law is unique, it gave you an advantage to go there in terms of taking our state bar exam, and it gave you an advantage in actually practicing law here.

Now, neither of those things is true.

It isn't that our law has become uniform, far from it. And it isn't that the UBE is letting out of state lawyers know what our law is, in my experience they continue to act as if the law from their state applies in ours. Rather, our bar exam no longer features Wyoming law and the law school, from what I hear, isn't focusing on it.

Indeed, at least based upon what I told, after I graduated an era came in which the law school, whose professors are by and large not Wyoming lawyers either, at least in a true sense, told students that they weren't focusing on Wyoming law.  Indeed, that would not have served their self conceived notion of being a competing national school.  Princeton's law school doesn't focus on the law of New Jersey, for example, I'm quite sure.  So that decision made short sighted sense.

And, in fact, when a later UW President attempted to make the College of Law's special focus on energy law, something that made sense during the boom but for which we perhaps might be grateful for its failure post bust, there was a College of Law revolt against it. This seemed to include the students who argued that such a transition would deprive them of the ability to focus on local law, which might be true if the school was focusing on that itself.  I get the point, but perhaps it wasn't evident to the students that a school that eschews a regional law focus, let alone a state focus, becomes just one more national school.

And we don't need it.

There are a lot of law schools around.  So many that many are failing.  And if you get no advantage other than cost savings, what other point is there to having it.

UW doesn't have a medical school, dental school, or veterinary school.  Now, it'd be true that there's a lot more lawyers than dentists, doctors, or veterinarians, but that's part of the point.  Now we not only have the in state practitioners but a lot of out of state ones practicing here as well.  So do we really need a school which will encourage people to enter such a flooded area?

Wouldn't it make more sense, at this point, to approach the field of law like we do the field of medicine and simply make arrangements with out of state law schools, which are hurting for applicants, so that our residents can go to them at an instate tuition rate.  It's worked for other professional fields, it'd work for law, particularly when attending UW's College of Law affords no real advantage anymore.  Indeed, part of the mission of the law school, in its view, is to draw in students from elsewhere most of whom go elsewhere.

Perhaps, therefore, it's time to take a page out of Alaska's book. Alaska's population is about the same as ours and it has no law school.  Rather, it has made arrangements with at least one other school to act as that school for Alaska's students who wish to study law.  Sadly, UW sort of saw itself in that role, I'd note, but didn't become that school, for whatever reason.

Now, are there counter arguments for this?  Of course there are. For one thing, the school's been around for a long time so while its hurting, it is established.  And going there does mean that the students are likely in contact with local practitioneres, which might give them an advantage in getting a job. And it means that those who want to study law here might not have to leave their home states to do that.

Balanced against that, graduates are entering a crowded field in which lawyers from surrounding states are now part of their competition, so they might not end up here anyway, or might not end up in the field they hoped (although that's always been common).  Maybe we're even at the point where it might not really be a good idea to give students false hopes by having an entire college dedicated to a field of study that's rapidly declining in terms of employbility due to market saturation and technological change.

Of course, none of this would be as fully true of Wyoming, which has unique law, had a unique bar exam, which would also serve to protect the interest of the state's citizens.

Seems like we had that at one time. . . . 

Well, it's often said that "you can't go home again". Well, you can.  You just have to want to.

  

Monday at the Bar: Trouble in the legal profession hits the CST.

 Depiction of trial by combat, with combatants properly aligned to give each smiling combatant the advantage of the sun, unbekannter mittelalterlicher Künstler - Dresdener Bilderhandschrift des Sachselspiegels, hrsg. v. Karl v. Amira, Leipzig 1902, Neudruck hrsg. v. Heinrich Lück, Graz 2002.  From Wikipedia Commons.  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.

I've written more than once about the reports of distress amongst legal practitioners here on this site.  Most recently I did that in an item on Alcohol and the Law.  In some of those I've been a little skeptical about what I was reading, but I've reached the point where the evidence seems sufficiently overwhelming (although there are a few doubters) that I'll concede its correct.

Indeed recently I've had a couple of odd instances in which this topic has come up in one fashion or another.  For one, I was sitting waiting for a deposition to commence when an out of state lawyer, a super friendly fellow, started talking about it (the topic came sort of out of the blue and I really don't know how it came up).  He went on a long litany of the statistics, it was like reading a journal article on it, about the topic, going into addictions lawyers have to alcohol, drugs, women, etc. and how destructive it was.  And this from opposing counsel.  I hard knew what to make of it, frankly. 

Anyhow, this past weekend Casper Star Tribune columnist Joan Barron, who is a CST columnist whom I really like, had an article on the Wyoming state program.  I was truly surprised, but I'll give credit to her and to the state bar for trying to publicize what they're doing.  Her article had this interesting set of observations in it:

Some people regards lawyers as rich fat cats in suits who don’t deserve sympathy. Some lawyers are well-off, but the average salary isn’t that stunning.

And they are the professionals people turn to when they are in trouble. They also are the men and women assigned to defend indigents, who have no other options.

Think Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” admittedly a romantic and idealist portrait of a small-town lawyer. Or the more realistic case of the late Gov. Ed Herschler of Kemmerer, who neglected his solo practice to appeal successfully to the U.S Supreme Court the death sentence of a transient he had been assigned to defend, a man he disliked.

She goes on to detail that there were apparently four lawyer suicides in recent years, of which only one was openly that and the others disguised.  I know the guy who had the open one, and indeed, I was in a hearing against him the day prior in which he asked for an extension in his case, which I agreed to.  I've felt horrible about it ever since as it makes me feel like I opened the door up a bit as it gave that case a window for a replacement lawyer it wouldn't have otherwise.

Anyhow,  the article details the new Wyoming State Bar program, which apparently all state bars or at least nearly all of them now have.  It's good that the state bar has one, but I have to wonder how effective these things are.

That's for a variety of reasons, but I'll be frankly that I have come to view a lot of psychological problems as a combination of environmental and organic.  I'll fully conceded that our DNA's in our fallen state set us up for a lot of problems.  But I also think we've created a world which we're not really very well suited to live in, and that includes, I fear, our legal system.  We have an adversarial system, which is not only well known, but celebrated in the law.  The thesis is that the courtroom substitution for trial by combat of old serves to bring out the truth to the jury.  Maybe it does, although I truly have my doubts about that, but what it also does is to put a premium on combat, and all combat takes it toll on the combatants.

 Wounded British soldiers, World War One.  Note the stare of the man on the bottom left of photo.

I suspect that's in part what happens to some of the lawyers who end up in needing the help referenced above.  Years of judicial combat, financial strains, and simply the everyday pleas for help get to them.  I've known a few that seem to have run into such trouble and did indeed take refuge in the wrong places, booze, women, or whatever.  And I've also known a few who seemed to have developed very harsh personalities.

I won't claim to know what the solution to these things is.  Some people end up seeking help in medicine, and they likely should.  But this all takes me back to something I've mused about here before.  I have to wonder about our having built a world that we don't seem fit to live in, and about also creating, as part of that world, a legal system that seems to be going after the well being of some of those employed in it.  Why are we doing that?

 New York lawyers, 1916.

Addressing the legal system alone, what we should note is that technology and advances in communication, while the law believes that it has improved it, hasn't improved the life of lawyers one bit but, if anything, its made it infinitely worse.  If we go back to the year we've been focusing on so much here recently, 1916, most lawyers would have been either solo practitioners or small firm lawyers practicing locally and relying on the mail for communication. Some would have had phones by 1916, but many would not have. Local affairs would principally have been the ones they were involved with, although as we know from very old entries here even in the early 20th Century some Wyoming trial lawyers had state wide practices.  But in those state wide practices they still had to rely on the mail and they traveled principally by train, and occasionally by horse.  

That's quite a bit different from what I see now all the time, which is lawyers flying across country to attend one thing, and checking on others from their Iphone while they are there.  

Technology can't be put back in the box.  But things can be done.  And one of those things is to recognize that law, like politics, is all local. And that would mean discouraging or even preventing the erasure of the the state borders in the practice of law.  But the trend is going the other way.  Our Supreme Court has been complicit in flooding the state courts with out of state lawyers who are sometimes hyper aggressive while also not understanding the local rules and customs.  It's dragging the practice down a level or two and not aiding the practice here a bit.  A partial fix to this problem would be to restore the old rules that you can only practice where you have actually passed a real state bar, not something like the UBE, and that you must actually have some business connection with the state where you are practicing.

Additionally, maybe something should be done to take a page out  of European systems that are more inquiry based than ours.  If litigation is a search for the truth, maybe it ought to actually be a search for the truth.

Finally, maybe something has to be done about he process of legal education.  Indeed, this gets us to the topic of education in general, but again and again I'm struck by how we have a system that's largely designed to recruit the ignorant and burden them with expenses while being educated by individuals who know very little about actual practice. That has to mean that there are people recruited who are not suited for the endeavor.  Once a person is out of law school they're qualified to do exactly one thing, and one thing only, practice law.  Maybe they ought to have a taste of that practice simply as a qualifier to even enter law school, before they do.

Monday at the Bar: The ABA and the UBE

Truly, ABA, do any of you practice law outside of the East Coast big cities?

Two ABA items from awhile ago, that I'm just getting around to posting now:

1.  Could Uniform Bar Exam help law grads' mobility? ABA House asks states to adopt it 'expeditiously'

Who, really, cares. The grads, surely, but the bar exam doesn't exist to aid them, it exists t hinder them and protect the public.

It's funny that a society that worries, in some instances, about firearms "mobility" doesn't worry that much about lawyers moving from state to state with no hindrance, even though they can really do the damage.

2.  The UBE Poll, posted more than a bit late.

A Cornucopia of Unsettling Career Advice and Commentary

 Plan for stained glass window depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by depiction of  modern professionals: architect, dentist, typist, housewife, construction worker, doctor, businessman/husband, and psychiatrist.  To what extent this culture places anything more central than money is questionable.

Some of these posts meander, and this one certainly is going to.  But that's in part because I've been experiencing both some unsettling conversations in this arena and experiencing some synchronicity regarding it as well.  So here goes.

Let's start off with a comment I recently heard.

 Lawyer, sitting, at a desk (probably in a law library). Sitting remains a lawyer constant, but trips to the law library have nearly completely vanished due to on line legal research.*`

Recently I was sitting in a deposition when the very bright young lawyer across the table, who no doubt has a bright career in the law ahead of him, commented on how he just couldn't stand to be sedentary indoors.

Eh?

And you're a lawyer?

Lawyers may try to fool themselves about it, but being a lawyer is, always has been, and always will be, a sedentary career.  Indeed, it may be growing slightly more sedentary due to the computer, although it's always been fairly sedentary.  No two ways about it. It so surprised me that I commented "well you picked a funny career then", to which the another lawyer sitting there laughed and the court reporter loudly exclaimed "yeah".  The young lawyer seemed surprised, like maybe that had never occurred to him, and even looked unsettled.

Maybe he should be unsettled, as it wasn't all that long thereafter that I discovered that the Wyoming State Bar Association has a Facebook page.  I checked that Facebook page out as, of course, I'm a member of that association, all lawyers in the state are.  It was a bit of a shock for a peculiar reason. 

Wyoming lawyers have long used a phrase coined by one of our late bar presidents, Gerald Mason, that we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer".  Mason was seriously distressed by all the animosity directed at lawyers and thought if we had pride in ourselves it would combat and even reverse this, or at least he said that.  He seemed to be a pretty sincere fellow, based upon what very little I knew of him, so I think he genuinely believed it.  If so, he was highly naive on that score.

Indeed, I'm probably a rarity in that I've always been skeptical of the phrase, although I'll concede that there was and is some merit to it.  If we're proud to be a "Wyoming" lawyer, that means that there's something unique about being a Wyoming lawyer, as opposed to merely being a lawyer.  I think sometimes people using this phrase really mean that they're boosting the concept that lawyers should be proud of being lawyers, and indeed a recent article in our bar association magazine struck me that way.  There may be some merit to that as well, and I've listed an impressive list of lawyers on this website with some famous, and let's be frank, some infamous characters listed on it.  Anyhow, people who says we're "proud to be [Wyoming] lawyers" usually point to all the positive things lawyers do in society.  And there are quite a few.  If we say we're "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", that ought to point to the unique things about that status, and there are quite a few, including that our state bar has been small enough that it has encouraged collegial behavior among lawyers.  Of course, that fact that the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam upon the state means that we're now to the lawyer population megalith of Colorado and there's been a flood of Colorado lawyers getting admitted into Wyoming while living in Colorado.  That's changing the practice here, and for those of us who still keep using the "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" tagline I'll suggest it's now obsolete, and probably ought to be "proud to be a UBE lawyer with a connection to Wyoming", something that is becoming increasingly accurate and which is difficult to get enthused about.*

Anyhow, that isn't really my hope, even though I retain some hope that maybe the committee that overseas the bar exam will act on behalf of the state's citizens and go back to an actual state exam, a diminishing hope, and probably a pipe dream, in which case I have no hope that the UBE won't do a vast amount of damage to the state.  My actual point is this. Mason's comments about being "proud to be a Wyoming lawyer" cutting into the negative views about lawyers were naive, and that's something that those proud folks should probably be aware of.  People hate lawyers.

Chances are, however, that Mason knew that, and his comments really meant that we shouldn't add to the perception by being part of the commentary.  Indeed, if I recall correctly, he didn't approve of lawyers circulating lawyer jokes for that reason, although it's been a long time since I've read that article.

Apparently the Wyoming State Bar is actually aware of that.  That is, that people don't like lawyers so much.  The last issue of the Wyoming Lawyer (do Colorado UBE lawyers guffaw when they get that?) has an article about the perception of lawyers from outside the law, and one of those commenting flat out states that, save for when a person needs to hire a lawyer, in which case they generally like that lawyer.  There's been more and more comments in our bar journal noting that, and also more and more noting that a lot of lawyers are apparently slipping into emotional trouble in the practice.

Which brings me back to the comment about the Wyoming Bar Association's Facebook page.  It's full of articles about lawyers in trouble with their lives and beyond that, even ones that  are really  harsh on the practice in general.  It's almost like a Caution sign for those pondering a legal career, although anyone reading it surely (or mostly) must already be a member of the bar, I'd guess.  It wasn't what I was expecting.

One article that I saw listed on that site was actually called "25 Reasons Most Attorneys Hate the Practice of Law and Go Crazy (and What to Do About it)" by one Harrison Barnes (whom one other blawg refers to as a "windbag").** Wow, that's a pretty surprising thing I think for a bar association to list on their Facebook page.  And it's a pretty surprising title in and of itself.  "Most"?  Hmmm. . . .  I know at least a couple who love their jobs and are pretty open about that, and they don't have odd malignant personalities or anything.  Most has to be an extreme overstatement.  Maybe he was trying to shock.

Still the article made me recall the conversation above, as it listed this as one of the twenty five reasons***:

They are miserable being behind a desk all day. Most attorneys spend the majority of their days trapped behind a desk. There is very little one-on-one interaction and socializing when you are under pressure to bill as many hours as possible. While television shows and movies glamorize the practice of law, most attorneys spend their time in an office, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer monitor.

That's a pretty accurate statement.

 Middle aged lawyer at his desk in 1919. . . something that middle aged, old aged and young lawyers in 2015 are doing just as much, if not more, than the subject of this photograph did.

Of course, a lot of modern professions do that, and I've commented on that on this blog before.  People truly not meant to do that, but we're building a world in which that's what everyone is going to have to do, it seems.  That's a very curious fact, as it isn't really good for us.  And I suppose that a person, in pondering careers, should consider, as my young friend mentioned above, their ability o handle that.  If they really "can't stand" to be in a chair all day, the law, and a lot of other professions, probably should be considered in that context.

Another comment that struck me

One that struck me was this comment:

They are exhausted from the constant conflict (conflict with peers, conflict with clients, and conflict with opposing counsel). The constant conflict attorneys face can take a massive toll on them. This conflict is never ending and something that drains attorneys emotionally and physically.

The same author stated, concerning the rising (or perhaps now simply appreciated for the first time a a real problem) of substance abuse:

If I were to pick you up and drop you in the middle of a war zone in the Middle East, give you a machine gun, and tell you that you had to fight there for the next 30 years, that would screw you up pretty badly. You'd want some liquor and antidepressants, and you'd be pretty sweaty and pissed off. Practicing law often feels the same way. At least in the war zone, you would know who your enemy was, and there would not be so many rules!

That's actually not a bad summary of what litigators do, and of course we should keep in mind that not all lawyers are litigators by any means.  I do think that's a factor in lawyer discontent and substance abuse, however.  Indeed, I was pretty surprised a few years ago when I completed defending a pretty hard deposition of a tough deponent, and jokingly asked the opposing lawyer if that lawyer "would like a beer" only to have that lawyer accept. We actually did have some in the office and that lawyer gladly took it, saying to me "I don't think it would be possible to practice law without beer." 

It ought to be possible to practice law without beer, and of course I know a few lawyers who don't drink at all, including a few litigators who don't.****  Frankly, I haven't known all that many lawyers who really had a substance abuse problem either, although it's apparently a rising problem.  I've written on stress and the law before, and I guess this is part of that scene.

Slipping away from the law, however, but noting that I heard the following at a party of all legal professionals, I've been a bit bothered by the western concept of career once again for a peculiar reason.  I've also written on that before.

This one comes up on a personal level, I'll note.

At this party, a friend of mine made an inquiry as to what my son's career plans are.  Oddly enough (synchronicity?) the same topic was simultaneously being explored by somebody else with my wife, which I know as I could hear her discussing it.

We don't really know what his plans are and perhaps he doesn't as well.  I have to say, at age 18 a lack of a plan worries parents but at the same time can a person rationally be expected to have one?  I'm not so sure that everyone should, and a person ought not to rush to one just because everyone thinks you should have one.

And people do think you should have one, and it turns out that they have ones for you, which is quite surprising.

Now, he tested very well on the ACT. Very well. And without bothering to do any studying for it.  So, when his ACT scores were mentioned by my wife (not me) to the above referenced friend, and it was noted that he may start off at the local community college, he was taken aback.  He was frank that a person with such high ACT scores should not do that, very much not do that, and rather should go to a major university from the onset.  Indeed, he thought about it and determined that my son should go to Georgia Tech to major in engineering.

Maybe he should major in engineering, and maybe he should go to Georgia Tech (about which I know nothing at all), but that raises an interesting aspect of Weltanschauung that hard for almost anyone in this society not to have, including myself. That is, in the western world (and my friend here is a European immigrant from one of the highly ordered European societies) there is a very strong concept that a person should exploit academics and then career to the maximum possible extent, even if that means leaving the place of their birth and all they know.

Why is that?

As far as I can tell, the only thing that's based on is a concept of money.  The general idea seems to be that a person should make as much money as they can.  It's a really primitive instinct and it probably derives from the idea that we need to keep the wolf from the door. But it's a particularly pronounced cultural concept, in my view, in Protestant societies.  By that I do not mean that only Protestants have it, that would be completely and utterly false, but it's a cultural aspect of those societies and generally held by nearly everyone in them, without any question of its correctness whatsoever.*^

And it's not as if its devoid of any rationality. There is some.  It's well proven that money won't make a person happy, but poverty sure doesn't help that situation much either. At least a little monetary surplus helps keep some anxiety at bay, unless a person is irresponsible with money.

But the acquisition of it can lead a person into areas that they would otherwise not naturally go.  Its stated by some that a person can't be a monetary success unless he loves what he's doing but the evidence of that is quite poor, and at least by my historical and personal observation the opposite is true in at least some cases.  A lot of people do well, at least for a time (whether they can indefinitely is another matter) doing things that they would rather not.

Indeed, I'd argue that this is responsible for one of the things that is constantly noted in articles like the one linked in above.  People start to compensate for their discontent, with some of that surplus money, with things that lead them into trouble.  According to Mr. Barnes, whose article is cited above:

Here are some incredible statistics:

• The American Bar Association estimates that 15-20 percent of all attorneys are alcoholics or suffer from substance abuse problems. Jones, D. (2001). Career killers. In B.P. Crowley, & M.L. Winick (Eds.). A guide to the basic law practice. Alliance Press, 180-197
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of suicide of any profession. Greiner, M. (Sept, 1996). What about me? Texas Bar Journal.
   
• Lawyers have the highest rate of depression of any profession according to a John Hopkins' study of 100 professions. Occupations and the prevalence of major depressive disorder. Journal of Occupational Medicine, 32 (11), 1079-1087.

Pretty grim.  I think, however, that the last two items are statistically incorrect, and actually dentist have a higher rate of depression and suicide than lawyers do.

All the dentist I've every met, and I've known a lot as my father and one of my uncles were dentists, seemed to be a happy lot but obviously not all are.  Indeed, maybe only the upset in any profession draw attention.  However, I will note that dentist do suffer from some of the same liabilities that lawyers do, namely that people are pretty vocal to express their discontent with the entire group of them and at the same time complaint about their fees, etc.  Like lawyers, they make a lot less money than people believe that they do and they tend to have massive overhead.  Oddly, at the same time, it's a profession that, like the law, people from the lower middle class have pushed their children towards for a long time.  My father got into it in his own, like I did with the law, but college in general was something he was reluctant to do but for a big push from my grandmother.  His father owned a meat packing company and died young.  My uncle's father was, I believe, a construction worker.  One of my father's good physician friends, I'd note, came from a farm in Nebraska and other dentist friends had fathers who were, respectively, a railroad worker and a miner.

Which brings me back to community colleges for a moment.

My father attended the local community college, Casper College.  He did so as his mother wanted him to.  He was employed at the post office at the time, after the death of my grandfather, and his basic plan was to stay there.  My grandmother recognized that he undoubtedly had the intelligence to advance in university and she urged him to do so.  He was the single most intelligent man I've ever met and that was obviously apparent to my grandmother.  He started off in engineering and then went right from Casper College to the University of Nebraska, after a brief stop at Creighton which he didn't care for.  So, he did well, as we've been using the term, by Casper College.  And he's not the only one of his generation around here who did.  And who still does.

Indeed, recently I spoke to a lawyer about a decade younger than me who related to me that he'd started off at Casper College, in education.  He related that it was his opinion that if he hadn't have started there, he ultimately would not have graduated from university, in his opinion.  His father was a mechanic, I'll note.

Likewise, I've often suspected that if I hadn't have started off in Casper College I may have not made it far in post high school education.  Indeed, my earlier college career strongly suggests that to me.

I had no plans at all of going to Casper College at the time that I graduated from high school.  When I was in my senior year of high school, my vague thoughts were that I'd go to the University of Wyoming and major in Wildlife Management.  Like my son, I tested well on the ACT and my mother told me I could go anywhere I wanted, which frankly baffled me as I'd never thought of going outside the state.  Indeed, she darned near scared me by suggesting that I could go anywhere, in part because she cited the example of an older cousin who was going to a very prestigious university and whom I thought of as a really good student.  I didn't think of myself that way and probably regarded myself as an indifferent student.  I don't know that I really was, but I didn't have any developed study habits and therefore must muscled through high school on what I liked or what I needed to learn, when I needed to learn it.  I'd become a student, really, in college and university, a habit that became a personal character trait that's never left.*****  Anyhow, I declared then that UW was where I was going, which seemed to disappoint my mother a bit.

Shortly after that, or perhaps before that, I had my ACT scores as noted and also had to take some sort of personality career test, one of the very few and fairly pathetic things the school district did here at that time to attempt to help students find a career.  Wildlife Management was mentioned and my plan was loosely fixed, sort of. My idea was to go to UW and major in that while enrolling in ROTC, as I also wanted to see if a career in the Army, another outdoor profession (I believed) might be for me.  If it was, I figured I could do that for twenty years and then retire, and enter the Game & Fish here.  If it wasn't, I could do four years and come back and work for the Game & Fish. The concept that I wouldn't get hired by the Game & Fish didn't really occur to me, oddly enough.

I mentioned that to my father, who replied that there were a lot of people around here who had Wildlife Management degrees and no jobs.  That was all the more he said about it, but he so rarely gave advice of that type that any time he did, I listened.  Indeed, I don't ever recall ignoring his advice on such topics, which was always very rare.  That was enough to deter me from majoring in Wildlife Management and I decided instead to major in geology, which was an outdoor science that I was good at in high school.  It might be the case that avoiding  a career with the Game & Fish saved me from disappointment as a game warden later told me that he didn't get out hunting much as he was always working during the season, something that would seem self evident I guess, but which didn't occur to me at the time. That same sentiment is contained in an interview by Brett McKay, of the Art of Manliness, of his father Tom McKay, who was a New Mexico and later Federal game warden.  In that interview he relates:

9. What is the biggest misconception people have about the job?

The biggest misconception is that game wardens spend all their time hunting and fishing. The good wardens and agents have no time for this as they are in the field managing the other nimrods out there during hunting season. I hunted and fished much more before I became a game warden, not at all after I became one.

I would have had a hard time with that.

I did make it down to UW and I did obtain a degree in geology, but I didn't go down right away.  I enrolled in UW and went down to orientation.  Something about it turned me off right away.  It might just have been the hugely unfamiliar environment.  We were supposed to stay in the dorms and the crowd of people there, for an only child and solitary introspective personality was too much, and I backed off that very day.*~ I went home and announced I was going to Casper College.*~~ The very next day I went down and enlisted in the Army National Guard as I felt not starting off in ROTC would be disingenuine.  Joining the National Guard was one of the very best post high school decisions I ever made.

 

Me, as a Sergeant in the Wyoming Army National Guard in South Korea.  My parents weren't happy about me joining the Guard, but it was one of the absolute best post high school decisions I ever made and I have no regrets about doing it at all.

Going to Casper College may have saved my entire academic career.  My mother was very ill at the time and I lived at home.  In the afternoons when I didn't have class I went hunting or fishing.  In retrospect it was the freest I have ever been.  I got into the swing of studying at the post high school level and when I went to UW two years later I was ready for it.  In the meantime I'd learned that I didn't think I wanted a career in the military and my desire to experience that had been satisfied by the National Guard, indeed it'd last beyond that as my enlistment period of six years took me all the way though my undergraduate career. 

Would I have made it through university if I hadn't have gone to Casper College?  I don't know. Maybe I would have, but even during that first two years there were times when I wanted to quit pretty badly and acknowledge my desire to do so, although even now I'm not quite sure why I occasionally harbored those feelings.  On one occasion I recall even asking my father to ask a sheep rancher friend of his if they had any jobs, which would have been a turn in a much different direction, had it lasted, to say the least (that ranch long ago sold).*~~~   By the time I went down to UW however the urge to quit was behind me and it never occurred to me again.

Would my father have gone at all if it hadn't been there?  I don't know that either, maybe he would have.  It's hard to say.  But I can't sneeze at community colleges.  Indeed, as earlier mentioned in a post on this blog, at least actor Tom Hanks feels that he wouldn't have made it through university but for starting at a community college first.

 

Casper College geomorphology class, 1983.  This was the last Casper College class I took in my path towards a Bachelors of Science, and I already had just obtained my Associates when I took it. Technically it was a University of Wyoming class.  Of the individuals depicted, three of us I know went on to UW but only one other went on as a geology major, a good friend of mine who I am still in contact with today.  The professor remains at Casper College to this day.

Circling back around, a crash in the oilfield, much like the one we're experiencing right now, left me unemployable without after I graduated with a geology degree and I ended up in law school a year later.  I'd first contemplated the law, however, as far back as Casper College, when it became evident that I'd probably have to go on to grad school in order to find a career in geology.  I did take the Graduate Records Exam as well as the LSAT, and did well in both, and took the law route.*~~~~

 

Classroom in the S.H. Knight Building, the geology building, at the University of Wyoming, 1986.

Which oddly enough brings me back to this topic.  Recently a dental hygienist, asking my son's career plans, suggested that as his father was a "famous" lawyer, he could go on to law school and then capitalize on the last name.

Well, the thought that I'm famous is flattering, but quite inaccurate.  Indeed, if I'm famous I should be getting on television and capitalizing on my fame by hanging out with the people who are famous for being famous.  But that's not going to happen.  And unless you have a really famous lawyer last name, that's just not going to work.

But the thought that this is good advice is interesting.  Being a lawyer, in reality, is really hard, tough, work and anybody who is familiar with it probably ought to pause before recommending it to anyone.  Some lawyers I know have claimed that they'd not recommend it to their own children, although the very few I know whose have a child who is a lawyer are proud of it.  One person I know fits both of these criteria.  Of course the recommendation is based on a misunderstanding, at least in part, as to what we actually do.

 

All of which brings me back to a few points.

First of all, I think the concept that a person must maximize their economic potential deserves some serious reconsideration as part of the culture.  Not that it hasn't always been somewhat criticized.  But the idea that a person must do something as that will generate the highest income for them assumes that a high income is the highest goal, and it's pretty clear that point of view is destructive in more ways than one.  At the bottom line, just because a person can do it and make a high return doesn't mean that would make them happy.  I'd wager that there are plenty of high income people who would have been much happier doing something else, and I've heard plenty of high income people who look back on some earlier low income position as their happiest one.  Guys at their desks look back on working on family farms, or working in construction, or being a soldier in the Army, as their golden days, and not without reason.  Indeed, to at least some extent, perhaps we ought to reassess our views on this topic on a societal basis.

Which isn't to glamorize low income, as you'll sometimes find people do. Or suggest that a person can suddenly just up and have no income at all.  Not hardly.

Secondly, people should be cautious pushing a person towards a career if they aren't really familiar with it.  I have a better idea than most about a lot of careers, so I could probably do that better than most, but I don't think that's universally the case by any means.  Indeed, one of the really neat things about being a lawyer in litigation is that you get to know quite a bit about what a lot of other people do. Even then you sure don't know everything, however.  I would never have thought, for example, about game wardens not getting to do much hunting and fishing.  Some occupations we know a lot better than others, but usually because we have a close personal association with them in some fashion.

Finally, I think people should be pretty cautious about their concepts of ideal schools or institutions.  We have a very pronounced societal tendency to view certain schools almost as if they're Hogwarts institution of magic.  It's true that there are very good, and very poor, schools, but as higher education has spread in the US post war there are, quite frankly, a lot of really good schools that offer individual students an individual advantage.  A lot of people who go on to other schools start off at a community college level and beyond that quite a few graduate from universities that are very good, if not very big names.  In some occupations, in my view, such as law, some schools have acquired an inordinately revered reputation and society in general would benefit if their stars faded a bit.  It may actually be the case, in spite of all the criticism of higher education, that it's gotten so good that there are not all that many Yugos amongst the Mercedes really, except in terms of reputation, which does admittedly mean a lot in terms of later employment.

__________________________________________________________________________________

*`I'll make it the topic of another entry, more appropriate for the supposed focus of this blog, but a different comment I read elsewhere noted how the big firm expectation of a certain  number of billable hours of young associates is irrelevant in the modern context, as electronic legal research has made the practice of that sort of law so much more efficient. That is, a single lawyer can do the work of an entire team of lawyers.  Not only that, but one lawyer can research a topic in half a day that formerly would have taken days.  That person's comment noted that his superiors, all of whom had started off well before electronic research and never really learned it, didn't grasp that in his big firm, and therefore they didn't understand that what was for him a four hour project wouldn't result in 24 hours of billable time.  A very interesting point.

*Wyoming has seen a jump in applicants to its bar, but due to the UBE.

** Barnes seems to be employed as a lawyer recruiter, and the rest of his articles, to the very limited extent I've bothered to look at them, seem rather rah rah to me about the profession, so I don't know what to make of this one.  He notes that he was a drop out from the profession in this one, so its perhaps unusually candid.  If so, I don't know how to reconcile his rah rah posts and his occupation which would amount to recruiting people into something he claims drives people crazy.  Of course, maybe if I read all of them I'd feel differently, but I doubt that I will.

 ***I was going to list the full 25, and then comment on them, but it was too much of a diversionary project. Suffice it to say, I don't think all of them were all that common.

In fairness, Barnes offers solutions to his perceived problems as well, although there aren't many listed.  One of them is just to quit working and figure it out next, which strikes me as something that wouldn't be realistic for a lot of folks.

****The beloved late Gerald Mason, who coined the phrase "Proud to be a Wyoming lawyer", didn't drink and held what was, as far as I know, the only dry State Bar Association Annual Meeting.  I didn't go, but then I only rarely do.  I recall hearing some complaints about it, however.

Which isn't to say that I've witnessed a lot of lawyer drinking abuse.  I'm sure that lawyers drink more than airline pilots, but I really haven't seen a significant number of lawyers boozing it up.  Maybe I'd have to hang out more where that sort of stuff occurs, but I doubt it.  I suspect that this may be one of those areas where a lot of attention is being paid to a particular problem, but that means that attention is being paid, not that its increasing. 

*^It may mean nothing at all, but amongst European societies, it is noticeable that the ones that have not had a significant Protestant influence tend to be much less economic driven and have cultures much less focused on an individuals relationship to work..  Pretty much all of Europe and south of the Rhine would fit this category, and their work behaviors and life focus does tend to be quite a bit different.  The work ethic of France, Italy and Spain tends to drive Americans crazy to some extent.

Hillaire Belloc, I learned after writing this, was so convinced of something similar that he attributed Capitalism to the Protestant Reformation, with his analysis having some merit to it.  Belloc wasn't stating that in a nice way, as he was a Distributist and lived in the era of fairly unrestrained Capitalism.

*****While I didn't know it at the time, my parents feared in my later undergraduate stage that I'd become one of the classic "career students", a fear that was very parental on their part but actually not very well founded.  On the other hand, by becoming a lawyer, maybe that is what happened.

*~According to the same individual above who first is mentioned in this long winded essay, "introspection is my cure to bear".   Maybe.

*~~These struggles must be more common than I suppose.  I just watched the film American Graffiti for the first time in a long time and found, which I'd forgotten, that much of the film's central plot is based upon the central character struggling with whether to leave the next day for university or to attend the local community college.  He goes, his close friend who is going with him stays.

*~~~Indeed, I was practicing law when it sold and it was one of the first experiences for me on how agriculture was now really beyond the means of the common man, something that shocked me at the time, and which was a sad experience to observe.  Some out of state person bought it, something I can't help relive every time I drive through it, which I very frequently to.

*~~~~ I did well on both tests without studying for either.  Indeed, while I understand why a person would study for the GRE, it still baffles me that people actually study for  the LSAT.  The LSAT is just a logic test.  If a person can't do well on the LSAT without studying for it, they probably shouldn't enter law school.