Most often, we use words to describe the brilliant grace of the law. This preference arises from the fact that we, generally, are wordsmithy lawyers, trained in legalese and office persiflage but utterly lost when numbers show up, save, of course, when the checks come (and they do!). But loving the law can be expressed quantitatively as well, and buddy, it's rainin' good stuff:
- 60+% of young lawyers are satisfied with their professional lives and over 50% would run to sign up for law school again
- 41% have found so much success in the law that they have dreamed of transitioning to other fields, presumably like teaching, writing, or being CEOs of multinational corporations
- 79% are working less than 60 hours a week, providing an excellent work-life balance
- 43% report feeling no anxiety or depression at all in the practice of law
- in an especially highlighted positive finding, "66% said they enjoy performing the day-to-day work of the job."
The biggest victory is in the student loan debt department. Behold the glory: "The median outstanding student loan amount was $150,000."
How many times have you heard that common student debts from "unnecessary and predatory" fourth-tier "shit-holes" like Barry, Coastal, or Ave Maria run 200k, 300k, etc.? Well, if we accept that libel as true for the sake of argument, these lean, mean, lawyering machines are rapidly paying down their debts, no? Is that not basic math?
$150k for an early career practitioner is nothing. Just 15 years of $10k in payments (plus a teaspoon of interest and a fee here or there). These badasses can live large in Destin or Naples and should have no issue paying down their debts. I don't even know why we have IBR much less Liz Warren.
It's obvious that sunshine is the best disinfectant when the Sunshine State has, apparently, been scrubbed clean of the "it's a scam!" virus.
I mean, it is, but shit...
Scam on.
I wouldn't trust the Florida bar to design a proper survey. As you said, few lawyers understand arithmetic—and fewer still understand statistics.
ReplyDeleteApparently only lawyers were surveyed, probably for the obvious reason that only lawyers belong to the Florida bar. Still, the alleged satisfaction of lawyers with their profession says nothing about the many graduates of law school who were not able to become lawyers or who left the profession.
When you say "Florida Bar" do you mean the regulators of attorneys, a voluntary bar association or a mandatory bar association? I ask because if it is a voluntary association this might well be a redux of the famed Literary Digest poll of 1936.
ReplyDeleteFor those unfamiliar with it, that poll predicted that Alf Landon would handily defeat FDR in the latter's first bid for re-election. Landon, however, carried only Vermont and Maine. The problem was that the Digest took the poll by telephone using lists taken mostly from its own subscriber lists and lists of automobile registrations. And of course, the people suffering the most in the Depression were the ones who could no longer afford cars, magazines or (most critically) telephone service.
The Literary Digest was a weekly general interest magazine the circulation of which peaked at over a million. The debacle of its 1936 poll threw it into a tailspin. In '38 it merged with another magazine and folded soon after, with Time buying the subscriber list.
I ask because I would imagine that the least prosperous of Florida's young lawyers are buying groceries in preference to paying dues to a voluntary bar association. Most such associations tend to serve the interests of mid-law and big-law.
That Literary Digest calamity is still cited as an example of incompetent polling. The magazine ran an extremely expensive poll of some 10 million people, of whom 2½ million responded, yet still obtained results that could hardly have been worse (the predicted landslide actually went the other way). With a well-designed survey, about 2000 people would have sufficed. No statistician worthy of the name would have recommended polling millions of people.
ReplyDeleteDesigning a proper survey is much more difficult than most people think, and I suspect that the Florida Bar (the regulatory authority) had no idea of how to do it.