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'Are We There Yet?' Navigating The Legal Profession's 'New Normal'

Ten years have passed since the Great Recession, and our profession is forever changed.

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It was 10 years ago (how time passes or doesn’t) that the financial institution dominos started to fall. JP Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns for a song, or close to that. Then one after another purportedly “too big to fail” institutions did exactly that, or were forced into shotgun marriages, if they could partner with a stronger financial institutions that could take the risk, or at least they thought they could. Remember Wachovia? WaMu?  Lehman Brothers? To name just a couple.

I’m not going to rehash what happened when this country came close to the brink of financial collapse; that’s for others to dissect. On this 10-year anniversary, I am sure there will be a plethora of books/articles/podcasts/interviews/tweets to debate what happened, why, and did we learn anything to try to avoid the next one.

The “Great Recession,” as people call it, affected lives, marriages, careers, savings, homes, and a litany of other significant changes. And it affected the legal profession and still does, in ways great and small, although to anyone who got caught up in its effects on the profession, the effect has hardly been “small.” While the profound effects on our profession may have been “micro” in the overall scheme of the devastation, the effects within our profession have been “macro,” and 10 years later, our profession is forever changed.

Let me provide just a few examples:

1) Job losses, layoffs, reductions in force, whatever you choose to call them, suffered by experienced lawyers later in their careers with no hopes of replacing the jobs, let alone the incomes. Never had age discrimination been so evident, apparent, virulent, and rampant. Couple that with the double whammy to the 401(k)s and other retirement plans.

2) Diminishing or vanishing opportunities for new lawyers who passed the bar and sought their first jobs. Those opportunities evaporated. “Now you see it, now you don’t.” Remember summer associate classes, when law students were wined and dined and offered jobs after graduation? Those days are pretty much a relic of the past. Some Biglaw firms and others cut out summer associate programs entirely in the depths of the financial crisis.  Offers to first-year associates were withdrawn, new lawyers couldn’t find jobs, but law school debt had to be serviced.

3) A sea change in client attitudes about legal spend, doing more with less, becoming more efficient, hiring in-house. The result? The implosion and collapse of some Biglaw firms, firms that lawyers (and others) thought would withstand hard economic times. Do I need to name just a few or can you do that on your own?

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4) A reduction in the number of people applying to law school, whether straight from college or later on. Fewer people applied to law school, so law schools admitted more students than perhaps they should have. Lower admission standards, perhaps, and lower bar passage rates. Who in his or her right mind would go into debt in six figures to graduate, hopefully pass the bar, not always a given, and then not be able to find a lawyer job after going through all that hassle, and looking at repaying debt the size of a mortgage on a first home (given California prices, perhaps a mortgage on a garage)? The Great Recession hangover still exists for some law schools unable to cope.

Debate rages over whether law schools have “dumbed down” by admitting people not really qualified to be lawyers, at least based on test scores and grades, and then not passing the bar in sufficient numbers to satisfy the law schools and to keep up the reputation of the various schools. (Witness the dependence upon rankings such as provided by U.S. News and World Report.) Rank has its privileges, so to speak, and if law schools don’t make sufficient numbers, then they’re forced to become, in a sense, bottom feeders to keep the schools afloat.

5) As far back as 2011, Bill Henderson and others predicted that the impact of the 2008 recession was not just a blip on the legal landscape, but foretold massive structural changes in the legal world. Client expectations were changing, non-legal providers started to populate the legal field, and those lawyers who didn’t understand how the profession was changing were out, or if not out, working at substantially reduced levels and for substantially less money. I don’t think anyone believes that the “good old days” will return, at least not during dinosaur lifetimes, and probably not ever again.

Indeed, one legal recruiter, in its 2018 industry outlook, says that, just like many other industries, the legal profession is in a “new normal,” one that challenges traditional, old line ways of thinking and doing.

We lawyers are supposed to be able to tolerate ambiguity (two of our favorite words are “it depends”), but the continual uncertainty keeps the profession from any kind of a stable footing. The “new normal” is living in earthquake land (I should know); the ground shakes under your feet, you struggle to maintain your balance, and you never know when the next shake is coming.

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So, do you remember when, as kids, we had to sit in the backseat of the family car?  We weren’t allowed to ride shotgun, at least not in my family. (This may well be more of a dinosaur memory than a millennial memory, but whatever.) If the trip took any time longer than what we thought was bearable and before we started beating up on each other, we’d whine and ask, “Are we there yet?”

The same holds true for the profession today. Sorting through the still smoldering wreckage of 2008 and the years that followed, the question remains the same. First, we have to figure out what “there” means, and I’m not sure that anyone knows that. Then we have to figure out how to get there. I don’t think a GPS knows any more than we do.

old lady lawyer elderly woman grandmother grandma laptop computerJill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for 40+ years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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