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Unemployed Lawyers Go Zombie, And Why
by Charles Carreon
July 24, 2013
Nastier than a bag o’ baby rattlesnakes, that’s what I’d
call ‘em, the latest generation of legal vipers turned out
upon the world. Young lawyers are a lot like baby rattlers,
well-known to be much more likely to bite than an older
snake, that realizes that even though every other living
creature may well be an enemy, it doesn’t always pay to
attack them.
These little asps came slithering out of the laws schools
under a trifecta of bad omens: a spike in law school
tuition, a dive in the lawyer job market, and the explosion
of “blawgs” where unemployed lawyers can “blaw, blaw, blaw”
about stuff they’ve never done, in hopes that someday,
someone will give them a shot at a job.
Law school was no picnic in my day, and when we got out we
were in debt up to our necks, but we got jobs. Being a
family man, I felt considerable pressure when I walked out
of school $70,000 in debt – and into a salary of
$47,000/year. My wife and I both worked full time, she as a
legal secretary, me as an associate lawyer, and it was
always a challenge to raise a family of five in LA on our
income, and pay down the debt. I cannot imagine what it
would be like to have twice that much debt, no job, and an
economy with few prospects of producing a job for me. Which
is the position of many, many young lawyers.
Statistics? Almost 13% of new lawyers have no work. Barely
half of new lawyers have gotten a full-time job that lasts
at least a year and puts their bar license to use.
Meanwhile, the median salary for new lawyers is $61,245,
while average education debt for private law graduates
(including those who will never pass the bar) has soared
into the range of $125,000. If you ask yourself how those
numbers are going to even out, the answer is, they never
will. We have minted a generation of lawyers who are under
water, personal-capital-wise. And as we know, that debt is
non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Nasty.
Nasty enough to drive some people right into zombiehood.
Take Adam Steinbaugh, for example. He can’t find work, so
he blogs about things he doesn’t understand. How could he
understand them? A lawyer with no experience in the
courthouse or the conference room is simply a helpless
creature, often veering from one near-disaster to another,
frightened of judges, frightened of other lawyers, unable to
communicate with clients effectively, spreading an aura of
discombobulation throughout the vicinity.
Of course, Adam doesn’t feel like a zombie, yet. He knows
that some sense of decorum is required, that he needs to
show restraint, but he doesn’t know where the boundaries
are. Meanwhile, he makes heroes of people whose own careers
are not exactly the envy of the profession, like Marc
Randazza. Adam worked for a little while at a firm that
represents truly bad lawyers, like the Prenda Law Group
fellas, whose conduct seemed so clearly criminal to Judge
Otis D. Wright III that he referred these bad lawyers to the
U.S. Attorney for investigation in a sanctions
order. Adam scrounges around for praise from Ken
Popehat White, and what good does it do him?
Tell you what – the more closely he associates himself with
the Rapeutation business, the longer it’s going to be before
he is able to cleanse himself of the association and begin a
life of normal, meaningful lawyering.
Because, you see, lawyering is not about blabbing about
“legal issues” on the Internet. It’s about having clients,
whose interests you serve using a wide array of skills that
you develop a little at a time, thanks to the patience of
the more experienced members of the profession. You learn
virtues like loyalty, and how to subordinate your concerns
to those of the client by working diligently and never
selling out, even when it means you have to work long hours
for no money. You learn how to control your temper, stay
cool under pressure, planning your adversary’s defeat, and
putting that plan into action, putting in months and years
of detail work. You learn how to lose pretrial or at trial,
and appeal. You learn how to win at trial, and then lose on
appeal. You learn to respect your adversaries, almost all
of them, even if only because they beat you. Before you’ve
learned these things, anything you write is like a child
writing about sex. Utterly ignorant.
But if you have nothing else to do as an unemployed lawyer,
you might fall into it. You might think you’re keeping your
skills sharp, reading recent legal developments, picking up
on the scuttlebutt, but likely you’re not benefiting
yourself or anyone else, because you don’t have a client to
work for, and you just don’t really learn that much,
theorizing in the void. It’s like target shooting without a
target.
So then, since you’re a lawyer, you’re likely to pick a
target. Someone who’s been identified as a vulnerable
target by someone like Ken Popehat White, who spends a lot
of time identifying targets for rapeutational attacks. He
has some little mental quirk that spurs him to do that.
Then he gets guys like Adam Steinbaugh to form a cheering
section of useful foolish “lawyers” who can agree with him,
zombie-style, thus emboldening lower-grade zombies, the
console-humpers who will truly ignite the fires of a full
scale DIRA. At that point, Adam may even think “Wow, this
is getting out of hand!” But he won’t be able to do
anything about it. Having participated in getting the DIRA
going, he’s pretty much bound to stay true to its
principles.
But all this blawging ain’t gonna pay the bills. And baggin’
on other lawyers isn’t going to attract a client or a future
boss. So here’s a word of advice for unemployed young
lawyers. Work for free, if you have to, but don’t just
fiddle around and write about stuff you don’t understand.
It’s low-grade zombie activity, and nobody is going to be
impressed by your drivel. Give it up now, before someone
screencaps it and publishes it where you can’t get rid of
it, or it could become a real enduring problem for you.
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