first.

fIRST ELIIES BLAAH

"Too close for missiles. I'm switchin' to guns."

2 -

FAIL!

-- 1

first

I will nominate John McCain.

congratulations 1. i lost focus and actually read the article before posting. you certainly bested me this time, but you're too dangerous. i won't give up.

2.

Here's a "rebellious" idea for the ABA:

Don't greenlight outsourcing of legal jobs to people who are not licensed in any U.S. jurisdiction (ABA ethics opinion 08-451) when American law students are compelled to committ massive investments of time, money and effort to become qualified in the US.

I wonder how long Lisa Solomon chips in with here comments about how outsourcing to unlicensed attorneys in India is no different from allowing alaw student to perform legal work?

Elie, did you take that picture from Lat's softcore porn stash?

This post is faggotry; unless these attorneys are bombing ABA headquarters or otherwise attempting a coup, they are not rebels

please moderate

Fuck the ABA. They stood by and did nothing while the legal industry collapsed. Points to 9.

9, hmm, what is the difference between work done by an Indian lawyer licensed only in India and a summer associate not licensed anywhere?

better manifesto

We are coordinated.
We are dominant.
We are innumerable.
For every one of us that falls, another ten joins.
We are omnipresent.
We are omnipotent.
We are unstoppable.
We have no weaknesses.
We utilize every weakness.
We are the humanity under every mask.
We are the mirrors of conscience.
We are created equal.
We are born free.
We are an army.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.

9 is more articulate, but I have to give it to 11 for brevity

The ABA is at best a cowardly organization and at worst, bba corrupt one. As others have mentioned, the ABA folded to biglaw, big money partners by allowing them to outsource legal jobs despite the overwhelming burdens facing young american lawyers today.

Fuck the ABA.

The ABA is at best a cowardly organization and at worst, a corrupt one. As others have mentioned, the ABA folded to biglaw, big money partners by allowing them to outsource legal jobs despite the overwhelming burdens facing young american lawyers today.

Fuck the ABA.

13 - the unlicensed law student will eventually be licensed in the US and will conceivably make a decent income, pay taxes, and spend money in the US.

With all due respect to the ABA, "the world's most respected legal education system" was not a radical innovation. I suppose that I should know the answer to this, but ABA accreditation has been stifling, not innovating. Prior to the ABA accreditation regime, there were many paths to the practice of law. Early last century, the ABA decided that it needed to erect barriers to the practice to limit the number of lawyers. To achieve this end, the ABA lobbied legislatures in all jurisdictions to set up licensing commissions to be administered by lawyers, to require that all lawyers take and pass a bar examination, and that only graduates of ABA approved law schools should be allowed to take the bar exam. The ABA then set up its accreditation apparatus, which over time has led to the crushing uniformity of legal education. If a school dares to depart from the ABA orthodoxy, it is denied accreditation, and truly progessive and innovating ideas about legal education wither on the vine.

ABA: "We're so rebellious, we're going to let a thousand TTT law schools bloom!"

18, that sounds nice but isn't really a legal argument now, is it?

And some law students don't take or pass the bar. Plus Indian lawyers can conceivably eventually get licensed in the US and do all that you said. Distinction fail.

#13.

A summer associate's work is actually supervised, and mostly involves writing memos and research.

The idea that a firm can properly supervise Indian employees in Mumbai is absurd.

It's funny how the ABA and State Bars give us all this bs about ehtics, but as the ethics rules get in the way of their buddies making a buck they suddenly the ethics rules go out the window.

The same thing was seen recently when the Mass Superior Court could not hire any law clerks to the Justices of the Superior Court. Big firms offered deferred asociates as law clerks for free and they would pay their salaries......A clear conflcit of interest would be harder to imagine. Suddenly, the BBO comes out with an ethics opinion saying it's fine!!!

Funny how ethics is so important .....then they move the goalposts.

Outsourcing is different than using U.S. paralegals/law students/contract attorneys.

People who do legal work shape American law. Outsourcing the shaping of American law to non-resident foriegners is a problem in a democracy because, in a democracy, the people who are governed get to make the rules.

This reasoning is accepted in the Equal Protection context. States can descriminate on the basis of alienage when in comes to eligibility for certain public offices, for example.

That's the difference.

That manifesto is really cliche-tastic. When did copy writers for Nike and Monster energy drink start working for the ABA?

23 -

I assume that English your second language.

25,

Please point out my grammatical mistakes with greater particularity.

--23

I suggest each of you contact your state bar and ask it to develop its own criteria for accrediting in-state law schools whose students are permitted to take the bar. The ABA has blown its job of smartly accrediting schools. If each state removed the requirement that test takers have to have a degree from an ABA-accredited school, then the ABA loses its power to further ruin this profession.

Lisa Solomon supprtys (ABA ethics opinion 08-451) because it helps make her money. It says its ok to pay for a contract attorney and add a markup...so you pay the Indian doc review guy $20 and charge the US corporation $300!

Most states allow a contract attorney licensed in a US jurisdiction to perform work for an attorney in another state in which they are not licensed, and allow the attorney who buys the contract work (from people like Lisa) to then add a markup to their client.

So she charges $x dollars an hour and the attorney adds $150 or whatever. She see the opinion as helping her biz, so it's justified and to hell with everyone else.

I got your BigLaw manifesto for ya..........right here!

I'm all for codes, but who would ever want to be a rebel?

If anyone reading this is an actual signatory to that manifesto, you are either one of two things:

1. You are a true believer and really are a cowboy, in which case, you're everyone's problem. That's because every time you go up in the air, you're unsafe. I don't like you because you're dangerous; or

2. You are in desperate need of some serious deep-dicking

My money's on 2.

14-

We are Legion.

21 - it's an economic argument, not a legal one. And yes, I suppose an Indian lawyer could, one day, come to the US and get licensed. But, as an American lawyer (as I presume you are), wouldn't you rather have legal jobs stay in the country?

21 - also - why would the indian lawyer come to the US if the job has been outsourced to him in India? That would make no sense.

Here's the score:

In favor of outsourcing: Biglaw income partners and a handfull of shills with a financial interest

Against: Everybody else (99.9% of the legal profession)

Also,

Would someone please start a meme to mock Lisa Soloman?

Thanks.

Please do not talk about Lisa Soloman. I don't want her to appear here, and I don't want to have to look at her pig face avatar.

Please do not talk about Lisa Soloman. I don't want her to appear here, and I don't want to have to look at her pig face avatar.

Big Law Manifesto:

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

I let my ABA membership lapse, while staying a member of my local bar associations. Any young lawyer with any sense should do the same. The dollar speaks louder than any angry letter ever could.

I feel the need... the need FOR SPEED!

Elie,

Please cover this:

Microsoft... no Polish people are bigots. Microsoft is just catering to the market.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/08/26/2009-08-26_microsoft_apologizes_for_altering_photo_to_edit_black_man_out_of_picture.html

Hilarious. Gosh, ABA - I might join up if you included a decoder ring . . . and it was free

You know, I'm sick of this whole BS narrative about the law being a "risk averse" profession. I get that we're not taking as much risk, on average, as your typical Vegas gambler or venture capitalist, but the law is actually a lot less safe than most professions. Anyone ever here of a teacher getting sued for malpractice? How about an advertising executive losing their license to be an advertising executive? Especially for litigators, we live in a world of risk where if we so much as miss a deadline or fail to cite an important case we and our clients are in a world of hurt.

Maybe you mean financially risk averse? Because the law is a guaranteed path to riches? Are you kidding me? At most law schools you have to graduate in the top 10% of your class to even have a shot at a high-paying job. A risk averse person wouldn't take those odds.

Sorry to be the devil's advocate here, but the work they are outsourcing is not the kind of work for which you actually NEED to be licensed.

Research, doc review, drafting and revising motions, etc...they don't require admission to the bar. If that were the case, the paralegals, law clerks and summer associates wouldn't be able to do it.

And supervision by a licensed attorney in India is not nonsense at all. All you have to do is relocate attorneys who were educated here in the US who would then be responsible for the work product, just like licensed attorneys here are responsible for the work product of paralegals, law clerks and summer associate.

If anything, as other posters have pointed out already, the practice of outsourcing should call into question the barriers to legal practice. Very few junior associates at Big Law firms do anything that would actually constitute giving "legal advice." That being said, why the hell do they need to spend $100K to $200K on a legal education? They learn more on the job than they ever actually do in a law school.

+1 to the ABA sucking. I suppose the ABA is putting that stuff out to indoc today's "edgy" youth so they come to law school, a path reasonable people know to avoid by now. The flood of accredited schools have to fill those seats or the ABA doesn't stay rich.

The saddest part is people are actually signing the manifesto. I'm going to PDF it to retain a list of names and ensure I never work with anyone susceptible to such tripe.

44 - The problem isn't really India, or outsourcing, it's the legal education model as you hinted at in your last paragraph. Law students gambling on biglaw and losing out to LPO's are like the engineers in the 80's who gambled on GM and lost out to a Japanese robot. The industry's changing. But whereas engineering schools retooled and now focus on more and more sophisticated hi-tech stuff, especially the harder to outsource R&D stuff, law schools and legal education remain static. Yeah there's talk about what to do with the 3L year, apprenticeships, yada yada yada, but I don't see any of the prestige whores at HYS leading the way on innovation.

Or, for that matter, the ABA doing anything on innovation either.

-46

The simple fact is that there are too many lawyers in this country for the U.S. economy to support. This problem was created by the ABA. The ABA pushed every jurisdiction to require a 3-year law degree for the practice of law. One might think this would keep the number of lawyers down by increasing transaction costs to get into the legal profession. However, it actually had the opposite effect. Students were lured into the profession with the explicit or implicit promise that if they put in their time they would be guaranteed a good living at the end of the rainbow. Then they graduated, passed the bar, and found that they'd invested too much in their education to do anything else. So they remain as lawyers even though they aren't making as much as expected, they don't enjoy their jobs, and they'd prefer to do something else.

Now a lot of people seem to think the solution to this problem is more ABA meddling. The ABA should strictly limit the number of law school graduates, so the narrative goes, and then we really will have an elite profession. This might work, but I propose the exact opposite. Break the law school monopoly on entry into the legal profession. Allow anyone who can pass a Bar give it a whirl. You might say, that's crazy! Then everyone and there brother will be a lawyer, right? Wrong. Then everyone who has an inkling can give it a shot, but they've invested relatively little time or money into it. When they discover they don't actually like the practice that much they can move on to something else without debt and without flushing years of their life down the drain. The people who stay in the profession will be people who actually like the practice of law. At the top end you'll still have great lawyers, at the bottom end you'll have a constant stream of people that try it out and quit.

But what about protecting clients? Don't we need the paternalistic state to ensure people don't get bad lawyers. No. We'd still have malpractice laws and disbarment rules that would kick out the incompetents in short order. Mostly it wouldn't even come to that since the incompetents wouldn't be hired in the first place. Most clients aren't actually the mentally defective children we seem to think they are.

I know this will never happen. There are too many wealthy law school deans, professors, and their fellow travelers. They are too savvy and plugged in politically to ever release their their stranglehold on the law school gravy train. But just pause for a second to imagine it. Imagine all the people, living life without having to go through a cabal of coddled psuedo-intellectual jackasses. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

the above comment 43 is completely right about the legal profession now being a real gamble.

Unless you get into a top school (top 20 or so), law is definitely a risky gamble. The odds are that you will be poverty stricken for years after graduation because of the huge oversupply of new lawyers in the last couple of years. The law school cartel lured these new victims in by using false salary and job stats for their grads.

Going to vegas and betting your life savings at the gaming tables is actually far more prudent than going to a tier 2-4 law school. At least for vegas the odds are somewhere around 30 percent or thereabouts that you will win.

With the huge oversupply of new lawyers in the last few years, the odds for a non-elite law school grads are worse, and also, with law school you actually go into $100K of debt, besides losing your life savings.

Plus, at least when you lose in vegas, you do not waste years of your life.

What happens in vegas stays in vegas, but when you go to a non-elite law school, unless you finish top ten percent, you lose 3 years of your life in school, and your entire life is affected in a very negative way for many years to come.

31-

None of us are as cruel as all of us.

43, most law students are too dumb to know the odds are stacked against them. They think graduating from any school, no matter how pitiful, earns them their golden ticket to fame and fortune. How else do you explain the existence of the third-tier schools?

i let my worthless ABA membership expire. that said, i am an ACC member, which most attorneys do not qualify for. At least ACC represents my interests though.

I worked as a public defender instead of going Big Law because I thought Big Law would be waiting. Retarded. Big Law wasn't waiting and my previous offer was no longer on the table. Im stupid...but I just had to try cases. I did try cases but now all I have is memories of when I used to be a lawyer. At least I have some skills to help someone else. Even if I am a loser I can help someone else not completely f^% up their lives. Peace out.

I worked as a public defender instead of going Big Law because I thought Big Law would be waiting. Retarded. Big Law wasn't waiting and my previous offer was no longer on the table. Im stupid...but I just had to try cases. I did try cases but now all I have is memories of when I used to be a lawyer. At least I have some skills to help someone else. Even if I am a loser I can help someone else not completely f^% up their lives. Peace out.