Dear Law School Grads: Here's How To Make The Future Not Bleak

Ignore the depressing headlines; now is a great time to be entering the practice of law.

graduation commencement happy graduateDear Graduating Law Students,

As I’m sure you’re aware, you did not just learn how to be lawyers. You learned how to learn to be lawyers. Soon, you will transition out of your training ground made of hypotheticals and into the real world. You’ll think it’s weird that you spent four weeks learning about intentional torts like battery, but in the real world, there are very few battery cases ever filed because intentional acts are usually excluded under insurance policies and no lawyer wants to chase thirty-three percent of what they can recover from the aggressor in a bar fight. That’s the real world of law. You’ll learn about interacting with needy clients, about interacting with needy partners, and that briefing cases is not billable, but summarizing depositions is (even though it’s a huge waste of time — but nothing is a waste of time if it’s billable). So many lessons to learn.

You’ve probably also heard that a lot of people think that you don’t have a very good chance in the real world. Just look what happens when you Google “Law School Grads”:

bleak

But here’s what I know about you: You’re not dumb – you just completed one of the toughest graduate programs in the United States. You persevere – you knew the profession has changed in the last ten years and become harder for young lawyers, but you chose to pay more for a smaller chance at becoming successful than I did. Most importantly, because of the times you grew up in, you are going to have advantages over some of your peers and colleagues that us Gen X and Gen Y attorneys do not have.

Forget what the headlines say: The Future Is Not Bleak.

You Are Walking Into A Great Time To Practice Law

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When I started working in the legal field, we worried about things like how to email files over 10mb to people. If we had a large file and we needed someone to get it right away, it would take two to five days depending on whether we sent it FedEx or regular mail. We had to print out driving directions on how to get to depositions unless we had a TomTom system in our cars, and then, if we got to the depo early, we had to either just sit there, or actually talk to other people to pass the time because we didn’t have wireless internet touchscreen supercomputers in our pockets. This was just about a decade ago.

You are now going to be representing a different society than most people did when they got out of law school – the information consumption society. The society that gets frustrated when it takes longer than 20 seconds to load a page of the top 50 Thai food places within a quarter mile radius. The society that expects things to be convenient and cheap. The society that needs an app for everything, from getting a ride home to checking stock portfolios.

Clients are expecting the use of technology to solve their problems. Lawyers are expecting the use of technology to solve their problems. That creates a demand for more companies to come in and fill that void, which brings in lots of new ideas and brings in competition and innovation.

Here’s How You Embrace It

This is going to make things different for you. Embrace the positive. So artificial intelligence is going to take over things like fighting traffic tickets or reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents in minutes to find key documents. That is not any more of a setback for the legal profession than sewing machines were a setback for the clothing industry. You are coming into an age of the practice of law where a lot of the legwork is done for you at the click of a button. Just like how people laugh at you for wasting your time learning about the tort of battery, you can laugh at them for wasting their time learning how to use a physical Bates stamp, or 3M redacting tape, or research with books.

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My Advice to You

There are few surer things than the fact that technology will continue to grow and influence the legal profession in the next ten years. Don’t just tread water and go where the current takes you, get out in front of the current. If you honestly think that paper discovery is going to be prevalent in 2022, then by all means, don’t become the office guru in ediscovery. If you think that more courtrooms are pre-wiring all of their departments with A/V hookups at counsel table, but you don’t want to learn about trial presentation software, that’s cool I guess. If you don’t think that mobile apps and cloud technology advancements, coupled with more attorneys working as flextime lawyers, do not create a void for you to learn more about the recent influx in collaboration software tools in Office 365 and the like, then that’s fine too. But I think that there are shortcuts for you to avoid the bleakness, and staying on top of these things is, in my opinion, one of the best ways.


Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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