How does one write a brief?
Do you try to invoke a summer's day? Smelling of earth and all-too-fleeting.
Perhaps the winter's cold? It ravages the lips and nose. Fingertips have no feeling.
Maybe a genius high? A paean to the better forces of our nature.
Or do you just try to get it done? And hope your partner does it better.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Dearest A,
Kudos on a fabulous post. And your excellent use of non-words as words (i.e. "prestigey successoryness"). Will you have coined the next "truthiness"? Only time will tell.
Despite all this talk of the downfall of the gilded professions, my faith in the law as an important, noble career was restored today. After swearing in newly-admitted attorneys, a judge told them to always remember that the law, at its heart, is important work. Courts decide questions that affect people's property, liberty, and, in the most extreme cases, their very existence. This judge, sitting way up on the bench, knew exactly why the law is so attractive to so many people. And he elucidated it perfectly.
It's easy for a young associate to forget why she became a lawyer as she's mired in stacks of insurance documents. But today, at least for a little while, I remembered. And it made me proud.
Love,
Sammy
Kudos on a fabulous post. And your excellent use of non-words as words (i.e. "prestigey successoryness"). Will you have coined the next "truthiness"? Only time will tell.
Despite all this talk of the downfall of the gilded professions, my faith in the law as an important, noble career was restored today. After swearing in newly-admitted attorneys, a judge told them to always remember that the law, at its heart, is important work. Courts decide questions that affect people's property, liberty, and, in the most extreme cases, their very existence. This judge, sitting way up on the bench, knew exactly why the law is so attractive to so many people. And he elucidated it perfectly.
It's easy for a young associate to forget why she became a lawyer as she's mired in stacks of insurance documents. But today, at least for a little while, I remembered. And it made me proud.
Love,
Sammy
Monday, January 7, 2008
Wow, Sometimes Posts Just Write Themselves
When I'm looking for hard truths backed up by clear evidence, you know the first place I go? The New York Times Fashion section.
I mean, some might look at this article, prominently posted on the front of the NYT website early on a Monday morning, and conclude that it is a fact-free trend piece specifically designed to bait New York lawyers and get to the top of the most emailed list. True, there are weasel words ("say many ... lawyers", "Many young associates ..."), evidence-free assertions ("Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations" ... uh, really?), and hilariously broad assumptions about youth culture ("Their attention span, everything, is instant feedback: quick, quick, quick"). But, really, check out this hard-hitting data:
The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”
Well, the Sense of Pride Index is down 42 points over the last six months and the Inflation-Adjusted Success Definition Embodiment Scale is the lowest it's been in decades. And don't even get me started on the Mueller-Greggs Erosion of Cachet numbers. Other evidence:
Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council.
In the year I applied (2002), law schools recorded their highest number of applications ever. So in 2002, by the article's logic, the law was at the height of its prestigey successoryness. Five years later and everything's gone to shit?
The rest of the article is gossipy tidbits (including an honest-to-god "somebody came up to me at a cocktail party" story!), a couple of timeless grievances, and the now-mandatory-in-every-Times-article "god, wouldn't it be great to be at a hedge fund?" boilerplate.
Okay, here' s my crack at this article: The 2001 recession made jobs straight out of college scarce. This led to a glut of law school applications, which have since abated as the white-collar economy has become stronger. Some of the applications were likely from people who would ordinarily have gone into other professions out of college, and were unfamiliar with the legal world. Meanwhile, Wall Street law firms, which have extraordinarily high levels of turnover to begin with, have recently seen a slight uptick in the number of young associates leaving. It is possible that some of this uptick is due to the people from the 2001-2002 law school glut entering the legal profession and becoming dissatisfied, although this is impossible to quantify. A reporter wishing to prey on the insecurities of young lawyers could theoretically use these tiny bits of data to spin a tale of an industry-wide decline. THE END.
(Alternate title for this blog: "The New York Times Legal Articles Blog")
I mean, some might look at this article, prominently posted on the front of the NYT website early on a Monday morning, and conclude that it is a fact-free trend piece specifically designed to bait New York lawyers and get to the top of the most emailed list. True, there are weasel words ("say many ... lawyers", "Many young associates ..."), evidence-free assertions ("Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations" ... uh, really?), and hilariously broad assumptions about youth culture ("Their attention span, everything, is instant feedback: quick, quick, quick"). But, really, check out this hard-hitting data:
The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”
Well, the Sense of Pride Index is down 42 points over the last six months and the Inflation-Adjusted Success Definition Embodiment Scale is the lowest it's been in decades. And don't even get me started on the Mueller-Greggs Erosion of Cachet numbers. Other evidence:
Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council.
In the year I applied (2002), law schools recorded their highest number of applications ever. So in 2002, by the article's logic, the law was at the height of its prestigey successoryness. Five years later and everything's gone to shit?
The rest of the article is gossipy tidbits (including an honest-to-god "somebody came up to me at a cocktail party" story!), a couple of timeless grievances, and the now-mandatory-in-every-Times-article "god, wouldn't it be great to be at a hedge fund?" boilerplate.
Okay, here' s my crack at this article: The 2001 recession made jobs straight out of college scarce. This led to a glut of law school applications, which have since abated as the white-collar economy has become stronger. Some of the applications were likely from people who would ordinarily have gone into other professions out of college, and were unfamiliar with the legal world. Meanwhile, Wall Street law firms, which have extraordinarily high levels of turnover to begin with, have recently seen a slight uptick in the number of young associates leaving. It is possible that some of this uptick is due to the people from the 2001-2002 law school glut entering the legal profession and becoming dissatisfied, although this is impossible to quantify. A reporter wishing to prey on the insecurities of young lawyers could theoretically use these tiny bits of data to spin a tale of an industry-wide decline. THE END.
(Alternate title for this blog: "The New York Times Legal Articles Blog")
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Billable Burden
Dearest A,
The Times has been dishing up some good tidbits for our blog the last couple of days -- the CIA tape-destruction investigation, the Supreme Court's thoughts on cruel and unusual punishment, a college's protests against the RIAA's draconian litigation policy. We'll get to those.
First, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: Billable hours.
The way firm lawyers bill their time is in six-minute increments. The expectation is that between billable and pro bono hours, associates will rack up at least 2,000 hours over the course of the year. That comes out to about 38.5 hours per week.
"Hold on!," you non-lawyers say. "I work more than that!"
Well, let me finish. If you take two weeks of vacation per year, that brings the number up to 40 hours. If you don't count the ten holidays you get a year, we're up to 41.7 hours per week.
And now this is where it all gets very tricky. Forty-two billable hours a week may not sound like much. But remember two things: 1) That's the MINIMUM. 2) That's the amount of time ACTUALLY SPENT WORKING. It does not count lunches, or bathroom breaks, or time spent blogging about your billable hours. It doesn't even count work-like things you do -- cleaning off your desk, preparing bills for clients, or doing the research a partner asked you to do for the article he's writing. It only counts actual legal work you perform for an actual client. To get those specific hours up to forty-two per week, associates are at their desks every day from 9:30 a.m. until 8 p.m. at an absolute minimum.
Is the incentive there to cheat? Absolutely. Anybody who says they haven't been tempted to leave their timer running is a big fat liar.
But I see an even bigger problem -- this system is a barrier to creativity. Your success is measured by how much time you bill compared with everyone else. But you also don't want to bill too much time, since a client will notice a large bill just as much as a partner will notice a small one.
This limits your options. You can write a motion in the same way, in the same amount of time, as everyone who has come before. Or you can think about it a little more, delve into it a little more, and suffer the consequences when you charge six hours for a task that takes everyone else three.
Measuring time is a wrong-headed way to measure success. Law firms will cling to it like a baby to a bottle because it makes them goggling amounts of money. But it will continue to make young associates miserable. It will continue to stifle innovation. And it will certainly drive lawyers out of law firms.
Love,
Sammy
The Times has been dishing up some good tidbits for our blog the last couple of days -- the CIA tape-destruction investigation, the Supreme Court's thoughts on cruel and unusual punishment, a college's protests against the RIAA's draconian litigation policy. We'll get to those.
First, I want to talk about something near and dear to my heart: Billable hours.
The way firm lawyers bill their time is in six-minute increments. The expectation is that between billable and pro bono hours, associates will rack up at least 2,000 hours over the course of the year. That comes out to about 38.5 hours per week.
"Hold on!," you non-lawyers say. "I work more than that!"
Well, let me finish. If you take two weeks of vacation per year, that brings the number up to 40 hours. If you don't count the ten holidays you get a year, we're up to 41.7 hours per week.
And now this is where it all gets very tricky. Forty-two billable hours a week may not sound like much. But remember two things: 1) That's the MINIMUM. 2) That's the amount of time ACTUALLY SPENT WORKING. It does not count lunches, or bathroom breaks, or time spent blogging about your billable hours. It doesn't even count work-like things you do -- cleaning off your desk, preparing bills for clients, or doing the research a partner asked you to do for the article he's writing. It only counts actual legal work you perform for an actual client. To get those specific hours up to forty-two per week, associates are at their desks every day from 9:30 a.m. until 8 p.m. at an absolute minimum.
Is the incentive there to cheat? Absolutely. Anybody who says they haven't been tempted to leave their timer running is a big fat liar.
But I see an even bigger problem -- this system is a barrier to creativity. Your success is measured by how much time you bill compared with everyone else. But you also don't want to bill too much time, since a client will notice a large bill just as much as a partner will notice a small one.
This limits your options. You can write a motion in the same way, in the same amount of time, as everyone who has come before. Or you can think about it a little more, delve into it a little more, and suffer the consequences when you charge six hours for a task that takes everyone else three.
Measuring time is a wrong-headed way to measure success. Law firms will cling to it like a baby to a bottle because it makes them goggling amounts of money. But it will continue to make young associates miserable. It will continue to stifle innovation. And it will certainly drive lawyers out of law firms.
Love,
Sammy
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