> An attorney is called upon at the birth of an organization and then, later, when it is sick or dying. Two or three times a month like clockwork I would sign up a new client in the throes of a software warranty dispute; I would usually find out that the deliverables had been ill-defined, that there was a mismatch of expectations between the parties, and that the warranties and the conditions of acceptance had not been specified.
This is an apropos description of what a litigator does. They're there when the optimism and hype if a project "to be" gives way to the cold hard reality if a project as it "turned out." I imagine many people find this depressing.
That said, its really fun in its own way. My wife is a bankruptcy attorney, and loves this aspect of her practice. Bankruptcy practice is all about expectations meeting reality. The $40 billion EFH bankruptcy winding its way through the courts was a bet on gas prices going up that hit the reality of fracking driving up supply. Its fun, in its own way, to try and clean up the resulting mess. If I had my way, I'd only ever take cases where things had gone really sideways.
> If I had my way, I'd only ever take cases where things had gone really sideways.
I like taking on projects like this. The client won't fight with you about your bill-rate because they've seen what the result of being cheap is. The bar is set pretty low, it's already screwed up, you can only make it better.
my experience is very different: often problem projects are in that situation because of problem clients. How do you work out the difference before committing?
edit: though I bet not dealing with clients that quibble about billing rates excludes lots who didn't learn their lesson the last time
I like to only commit to a short elaboration, several weeks of documenting the state of the current project and coming up with a plan to get it on track. I then offer the client the option of continuing, almost always at T&M at this point, or they can take my write up and shop it around.
The plan generally starts with a "stop all new work and stabilize" phase; getting code metrics and an idea of technical debt; fixing processes, builds, making sure testing and QA is in place; and so on before any new work is done. Any client that isn't willing to pay for these things is just replacing one bad implementer with another.
Former lawyer here. I left the law for similar reasons. I used to be a software patent attorney. I got fed up with the kinds of things people were filing patents on. I felt it was all a complicated extortion scheme.
I left the profession and took a 70% pay cut my first year out. I'm still happy I did it.
>I was enticed by the idea of running a software business myself, and making organic, creative decisions.
This quote resonates with me because it describes my own flight from the law. On a day-to-day basis, the practice of law is relatively non-creative, rote and ultimately dull, at least when compared to technology and programming. The law just moves so slowly. When programming, thinking about the development of a product, or even running a company, I can explore a dozen or more creative and complex ideas in a day. I also experience feelings of success (and failure) every single day. Litigation doesn’t permit that. The anticipation and excitement of successes and failures are fewer and further in between — even that they can be very big and rewarding when they occur.
The author’s description of dealing with judges and attorneys in New York state court are disappointing. The law has structure and my vision is to map it out with sufficient detail and accuracy that we can put it on “rails,” the way most people assume it works when discussing “the rule of law.” Robolawyer will never be in the cards but it should usually be clear what laws are at issue, what arguments are relevant, and how the balance of past cases have applied those laws to particular sets of facts. Mapping out the law means we can guide reasoning along well worn paths, make it easier to express the logic of the law, and thereby shame “terse, incoherent one paragraph opinion[s]” out of existence.
> The author’s description of dealing with judges and attorneys in New York state court are disappointing.
What makes you think that any other city or state is any different? I've heard a few stories about Oregon that make me think it's pretty much the same here.
I think people would be very wise to avoid lawsuits unless they have a very very strong case. And even then be prepared to lose or to litigate for years.
In most common law countries judges are not elected and don't get away with the kind of thing discussed in the article (like informal ex parte conferences).
The table doesn't look that bad - for the first page, if sorted by "requiring law degree" column, for all schools at least 70% work either at job that requires or prefers law degree. Of course, if you look at the worst ones, the figures are abysmal, but isn't that somewhat expected?
I'd like to see another table however - which correlates the law-related employment chance with the cost of the law degree. E.g., how much chance of being a lawyer you can buy for $10k?
Yet more ammunition to prefer non-incumbent candidates over incumbents, and to prefer non-majority party candidates over majority party candidates in local elections.
Too often, local politics gets owned by a single party, and that is rarely a good thing.
Too many people are too consistently party line when they vote in elections. If you live in a R area, vote D locally. If you live in a D area, vote R locally. Just hold your nose and do it.
Yet another former lawyer here, current engineer/PM. I agree with many of the already stated reasons why a career in tech beats lawyering, but what really did it for me was wanting to do something for myself instead of always just being somebody's lawyer.
Once I made the switch I realized the joys of building a tangible product that users get to know and love.
I wonder what the judicial system would look like if people were completely truthful and forthcoming. It seems like 90% of a lawyer's job revolves around dishonesty. That's got to be a frustrating career.
What I think these anecdotes raise, and where it differs from my own experiences with the law, is the "Big Show" of litigation. Especially where jurors, witnesses, or court observers are involved - it's some fractional part of the equation to be 100% correct. It might even be completely irrelevant. Compare the best "I won this litigation" story with the best "I got this case settled" story and I think the odds are clearly in settlement's favor that everyone ended up better off - because you succeeded without turning it into some carnival show of justice.
I practice a type of law where I hope I never have a hearing or go before a judge. No one ever told me in law school this was the type of practice I could be one day doing (although if I had taken the right class - Admin Law, it might have seemed a possibility). My practice is almost entirely by fax (and hopefully one day soon some technology from this century). I advocate best by putting pen to paper, well fingers to keyboard, and connecting the dots in a way that someone can read it and say "that makes all the sense in the world, looks like your client should win." Of course, I'm not so naive to be it operates 100% like that but it's how I get to operate my practice and it means I get to really enjoy my work and feel fulfilled.
Here's the shocker - I'm writing to the VA (Veteran's Administration).
EDIT - Caveat - I would still totally leave to start a software company to improve the legal profession. Been teaching myself code for the last couple years and love to just mess around in my spare time. I just wouldn't be leaving because I was disgruntled but because it's a better opportunity.
What I find about lawyers is that they often seem to create conflict where there is none or inflame conflict where it already exists, to set themselves up as the savior. A very simple example of this was the first time I bought a house, everything was very cordial up until the moment lawyers got involved to review the closing documents. Suddenly everything was an argument, with no ground given until the other party gave up something. In retrospect it was really just seemed to be the lawyers justifying their presence.
This is actually a serious problem. There are plenty of things you can put into a major contract that will have the effect of transferring e.g. $10,000 in value from one party to the other. Or you could just flat out argue over the price. And both parties might still agree to the contract either way.
The issue is that it's economically advantageous to pay a lawyer anything up to $5000 in fees if the result will be a 50% chance that you can net $10,000. So the parties could collectively pay the lawyers $10,000 to argue over who should get $10,000, even assuming everyone is acting rationally and has substantially accurate information.
The waste of resources is inherent to the adversarial process. It's in the same nature as a war but fought with money and time rather than blood. It's the same calculus: The fight is very rarely worth the cost but if you have no soldiers you're a victim to someone who does.
My guess is that it's less dishonesty -- though no doubt that occurs -- but far more often there never was an agreement. The two parties thought they had one but it wasn't fully specified, and now they have discovered that the two sets of unspecified assumptions in their heads don't match.
we need both. we need lawyers to become familiar with the system and develop new technology. we need software engineers to get inside the system and implement their own/others' improvements to the profession.
This is an apropos description of what a litigator does. They're there when the optimism and hype if a project "to be" gives way to the cold hard reality if a project as it "turned out." I imagine many people find this depressing.
That said, its really fun in its own way. My wife is a bankruptcy attorney, and loves this aspect of her practice. Bankruptcy practice is all about expectations meeting reality. The $40 billion EFH bankruptcy winding its way through the courts was a bet on gas prices going up that hit the reality of fracking driving up supply. Its fun, in its own way, to try and clean up the resulting mess. If I had my way, I'd only ever take cases where things had gone really sideways.