Copyright 2016 William P. Meyerhofer, JD MSW
Book design by Newhard Design.
Author photo by Len Irish.
ISBN: 978-1-4835711-9-5
DEDICATION
For all those lawyers out there
Sometimes paranoias
just having all the facts.
William S. Burroughs
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Request for Injunctive Relief
Lets face it, things arent much better. Hence the title of this book.
Speaking of which, I cant say there was a lengthy debate surrounding that choice. I ran Still Way Worse past a client. His reaction was immediate:
Oh, yeah, thats perfect, because, you knownothings really changed.
After a few more responses like that, I figured I was on safe ground.
Naturally, its not one hundred percent correct to say nothing has changed. Some things have changed. Its the gestalt that hasnt changed, what might be referred to as the legal-industrial complex, that endlessly revolving, self-perpetuating, interconnected dynamo of law schools, law firms and lawyers which continues to churn merrily away, like a vast sausage grinder. The input is young lives and billions of dollars in tuition - the output vast mountains of documents, uncountable billable hours, staggering (and seemingly perpetual) loans, equally staggering partner profits, and a bottomless lake of human misery. I dont want to seem like Im laying it on too thick (I get accused of that from time to time.) So lets enumerate the facts:
The good news, such as it is, all comes at the input end of the sausage grinder, and its marginally good, at best, but hey, were clutching at straws here. Depending on your choice of metaphor, either slightly fewer lemmings are lining up to jump off the cliff or slightly fewer cattle are mindlessly lining up for the bolt gun to the forehead. The numbers arent huge, but obviously any life spared a career in law represents (well all agree) a step towards a healthier world and brighter future for humankind. It might not seem critically important that a low double-digit percentage fewer kids are heading to a testing center to take the LSAT this year, but to paraphrase the Buddhist tale (or New Age koan or whatever) it makes a difference to that one starfish! (You know, the story about the guy who tosses a starfish back into the water despite there being zillions of starfish on the beach because it made a difference to that one starfish? Oh, whatevers.)
I dont want to wander too far off on a tangent (but what the heck, why not?) I only wish to point out that, in the on-going struggle between the-lemmings-marching-off-the-cliff metaphor and the cattle-tramping-up-the-ramp-to-receive-the-bolt-gun-in-the-forehead metaphor, the latter is clearly winning out. And some interesting variations have cropped up along the way. One client (who reappears in anonymized form as a character in a piece within these pages) refers to her biglaw firm on principle simply as the veal pen. Another explained her decision to quit biglaw with a rhetorical flourish: Sorry, Temple Grandin, your magic dont work on me. (You sort of have to know who Temple Grandin is to get that joke, but trust me, its worth looking up if you dont.)
Sowe have a slight decline in cattle lining up for the bolt gun in the forehead, in the sense that LSAT test-taking numbers are down. (Yay!) Enrollment at the very lamest and most obscure fourth-tier law schools is down, too, at least a smidgeon. (Whoopie!) But Im afraid youll have to season your admiration for awhile as, per the norm in law, there is some fine print: First of all, many of these schools started life as auto body shops and still offer alternative academic tracks in cosmetology; and second, when I say enrollment is down, that means down from the absurd heights of a few years back, when the numbers of students enrolled in these Ponzi-schemes-disguised-as-academic-institutions doubled and tripled with an alacrity nearly matching the soaring tuition costs, which rose in near-miraculous parallel with the governments willingness to loan immense quantities of money to broke, clueless twenty-three year olds. So things are better, but still pretty damned bad.
The good news is that the law schools, at least some of them, are ever-so-slightly hurting. The truly larcenous bottom-rung outfits are hurting the most, to the point where theyve had to (oh, the horror!) trim the jobs of minimum wage adjuncts in order to maintain the million dollar salaries of administrators and presidents whose lavish lifestyles are the true raison detre of these esteemed institutions. Sacrifices must be made to keep legal education alive.
That pretty much sums up the good news in a nutshell: Hooray! There are slightly fewer kids becoming lawyers.
Now for the bad news (you can always count on me to be there with the bad news.) Man oh man oh man are there still too many lawyers. America remains up to its browline in lawyers. Lawyers lawyers lawyers everywhere you look, as far as the eye can see.
What is the fallout of a nation swollen like an over-stuffed haggis with lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers? A variety of mass extinction. To put it mildly, several features of the legal landscape whose abundance we once took for granted have proven evanescent, only to deliquesce, thaw and resolve into a dew, peace-ing out, quoth the raven, nevermore. After many a summerThis is the end, beautiful friend.
Something along those lines.
What am I blathering about? The discontinuation of a lot of stuff we used to take for granted.
For starters, there is no longer such a thing as becoming a law professor. In the misty recesses of memory there existed a time when, if you got good grades at one of the better law schools, but didnt really like law, you could take it up as a purely theoretical enterprise, pen long, puzzling academic monographs concerning pseudo-philosophical vagaries like international human rights law or queer theory and actually obtain a tidily remunerated gig teaching torts at a third-tier backwater.
No ms.
At this point, you could pull straight-As at Yale and clerk for (and personally physically pleasure) each and every Justice on the Supreme Court hell, you could be on the Supreme Court but you aint gettin no job teachin at no law school. There are law school presidents who earn $1 million or more per year for their fund-raising skills. There are tenured old fuddy-duddies who have been teaching since the dawn of time and will expire at their lecterns (then remain on an additional semester for the money.) And there are adjuncts, who are paid minimum wage, do all the actual teaching, and are currently being laid off in droves. But thats it, the sum of legal education for the foreseeable future. There are no jobs no decent jobs available teaching law.
a nexiste plus.
Ill point out that lawyers earning minimum wage will be developing into an additional trope or leitmotiv here, one thats linked via phenomenology (i.e., concerning shit thats actually happened to people) to my other, mass extinction theme. Thats because most of whats going extinct in a massive way are jobs for lawyersat least, jobs that support a middle class lifestyle. I recently heard from an unemployed lawyer client that hed been offered an internship (I kid you not, an internship) at a law firm. It was basically doing doc review, he told me, except you didnt get paid. Much to his credit, he declined said offer, and it is my fond hope that for at least a short while longer, unpaid internships spent doing doc review for nothing will continue to be staved off by starving out-of-work lawyers (not that I would be shocked if things trended in the other direction.) At this point in time, simply to announce, with a straight face, that you possess employment, any employment, constitutes a status symbol for a lawyer. If your particular job happens not to be at Walmart, restocking shelves or working the checkout line, thats a big plusas it should be.
