God damn I love this industry. Give me a fellowship and let me shoot this shit in my veins, drooling passed out in the stacks of the local law library.
Here's the article with the golly-shucks lawyer picture (winning sartorial formula: bow-tie, bold belt, no suit; needs suspenders or jeans ideally, B+) and the one-two punch of anecdotal whimsy ("kids 'r' movin' away!") and context-free data (only 1 lawyer for every 1310 residents, Orleans County, how dare you!).
"Rural justice is a quickly disappearing commodity," the article bellows, tickling my fervid loins like an electric feather and calling upon anyone who can pass the first year at St. Johns and once upon a time read a Richard Russo novel...
These articles all sound the same after a while, but we're used to seeing them pop up about states no one ever wants to visit like Nebraska or Montana, woebegone artless shitholes that have to pay for tourism campaigns with subtitles like "it won't be THAT embarrassing to tell your parents you came here!" New York has hick places, but you're never that far from a liberal arts campus, a tourist hot-spot, or a big city - the town featured in the article is within an hour of Binghamton and a bit over an hour from Syracuse, after all. But I guess those expert practitioners cannot drive...
If that place can have a lawyer shortage, the only answer is to start a task force, ask how you can get young people to move to rural communities against their economic and cultural interests to, uh, serve the undefined and debatable greater good, and, hell, just pump more people through law schools, will ya?
Not convinced? Want to claim that young people are rational economic actors (ha!). Well, don't worry, the neutral Albany Law School brought science to this church potluck:
A survey by Albany Law School published in April shows the strain facing those left behind. Among its conclusions: Rural attorneys are overwhelmed by their caseloads, suffering financial stress and struggling with limited resources.Overwhelming work with financial stress? What could possibly go wrong on the five-lane way to making money hand-over-fist?! Well.... for one thing, Boomer lawyers and their egos could not retire:
Responses like this were typical: “I am the only lawyer handling complex business transactions. I am 69 years old and cannot retire because too many people rely on me.”If only the State of New York would put the resources in to train lawyers who could handle the complex business transactions of postcard New York.
I guess, again, we'll just have to put out more lawyers until we get one to apprentice for this gentleman and then pay him a generous buy-out in lieu of a retirement account.
Ditto for Georgia and Maine, which the article also states face calamitous lawyer shortages. The ABA must act now to correct these things, or else in ten years life will continue unabated and the law school profit-self-righteousness matrix will remain sadly underwhelming. Scam on.
I honestly think most people would be happy that there's no lawyer in their town.
ReplyDeleteOnce I moved to a town with no McDonald's outlet. I considered that a decided advantage. A month after I moved in, however, it was announced that a fucking McDonald's was coming…
DeleteEasy solution = open more law schools.
ReplyDeleteThere's a shortage of established, experienced, financially stable attorneys that will work for 1970s fees.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out that if you indebt generations of the young and refuse to train them or provide them resources, they don't accomplish things, they give up, and your economy eventually sputters. Just throwing out insults at them won't change any of that.
Fortunately, this is somewhat easily remedied---as population nosedives and the older generations die out, a society can just actually invest in a lesser number of younger people. In fact this is exactly how it worked with Boomers, the preceding generation got killed off in WWII and so with less people around, wealth was spread around, and the Boomers especially benefited. But then there were too many Boomers, they sucked everything up, and there was nothing left for Gen X and Millennials. And now Millennials birthrates are dropping, so likely by the time whatever is after Gen Z will benefit. Of course that's going to be in a good 30-50 years from now.
The Boomers can fairly be described as a plague of locusts.
DeleteOld Guy can be fairly described as a parasite. He just can't seem to find a job as a Wall Street lawyer, so he refuses to look for anything at all. If nothing else, he could quit vomiting ignorance and hatred all over the Internet and just learn how to code.
DeleteLearning something productive, without any malicious motives, would be good for his shriveled soul. I'm almost certain he still has one.
Here's the ugly reality of all these articles: sure, everybody would like to pick up the phone and have immediate access to their "personal" lawyer.
ReplyDeleteBut one thing is an absolute, whether its rural or urban: nobody wants to pay a lawyer, ever. And none of the authors of these articles cares if lawyers ever get paid.
It's pretty simple: if new or even older lawyers could make a living, they'd be moving to these alleged legal deserts.
Reminds me of an old song:
ReplyDelete"Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'. Gotta have somethin', if you wanna hire me!"
Linked article is behind a paywall. I did glean enough to look up its subject's environs.
ReplyDeleteChenango County is a county located in the south-central section U.S. state of New York. As of the 2010 census, the population was 50,477. Its county seat is Norwich. The county's name originates from an Oneida word meaning "large bull-thistle."