The upshot of this piece, reading through my $750.00 slightly tinted glasses, is that we need to pump more lawyers into the system in order to make sure there are enough bar exam passers to work at small firms and absolve them of any fretting about their "investments" failing the bar.
Unlike your typical law school brochure I'm only sorta making this up (instead of telling you the straight dope, which the brochures always do):
Because of Big Law’s tendency to hire from elite law schools that have for the most part maintained steady bar-pass rates, those firms have largely escaped the impact of the growing percentage of exam failures over the past five years.To get the gritty, man-on-the-street opinion for what life is like among the lesser-fortunate firms, the piece features voices from 120-lawyer firms and 50-lawyer firms, unquestionably victims of the malicious squeeze upon bar exam rates caused by uber-jealous assholes who simply don't wear the suit as well.
But the reality is different for smaller firms and public sector employers that hire from a wider pool of law schools and can little afford to hold jobs open for graduates who flunk the bar.
...[L]ower pass rates are creating hiring headaches for the smaller employers that can least afford additional recruiting challenges.
Look, Skippy, just because you have a master's degree in statistics and psychometrics doesn't mean you can deny little Riley or Jordan the opportunity to practice law just because [preferred third person subject case pronoun] doesn't know how about affirmative defenses or arcane procedural rules like "jurisdiction."
Apparently, some firms are even scandalously now waiting until lawyers are actually licensed before hiring them. How the hell are young lawyers supposed to organize their financial affairs if they don't have six-figure jobs waiting for them at graduation?
The solution, it seems, is obvious: we need to pump so many lawyers through the system and make the bar exam as easy as possible so people don't have to deal with this whole, messy "is this person actually qualified?" thing. It's just not fair to anyone to expect lawyers to jump over some arbitrarily placed "bar."
Toot! Toot! Make way for the Million Dollar Express(TM)!!!
ReplyDeleteWhy not hire any of the many barred attorneys? Most of them are struggling as solos or on doc review, if they're employed at all. We already have a huge surplus of barred attorneys available to draw from.
ReplyDeleteAlbeit the older someone is, the less they are interested in working for slave wages and being abused. So I suppose small firms may be wary of that.
That would be a third-person, not a first-person, pronoun.
ReplyDeleteAlready there is a huge surplus of people who are called to the bar. Admittedly, not many of them are 25 years old. And that seems to explain the complaint: rather than hiring someone like Old Guy, these "smaller firms and public sector employers" insist on hiring someone straight out of La Toilette—and of course no trifling formality such as the bar exam should stand in the way of their goal.
Grammatical error fixed. Error of writing inebriated, never.
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