It really is amazing how fast everything changed. When the classes of 2009 and 2010 entered law school, the economy was booming (or more accurately, bubbling) and some big law firms were seriously contemplating $200,000 annual salaries for first-year associates. Now those same firms are rushing to cut salaries, while the economy, though probably past full-scale crisis, isn’t as strong as the markets would have you believe and likely is set for several years of mediocrity. So you can kind of see where young lawyers’ anxiety is coming from.

Not that everyone is sympathetic to their plight. But if you think they’re overreacting to the recession, try to remember how you saw the world in your twenties, and that no law school generation has ever graduated this deeply in debt. And try to remember, too, that our whole industry, from educators to employers, told these young people that the professional cow was full of cash and would only grow fatter. The growing ranks of unemployed young lawyers and frightened law students out there should remind us how poorly we’ve managed the business of law for years now. We raised their expectations too high and made promises we couldn’t keep, and it seems to me we bear at least some responsibility for helping them get through this.

I first wrote about graduating into a recession last January, and most of what I said then still applies. But in the intervening  months, it’s become clearer that this isn’t just another cyclical downturn. Economically, it’s all bad enough: many banks are still on life-support, people are still paying off or defaulting on various types of debt, and government spending can’t replace consumer spending indefinitely. These problems aren’t going away anytime soon. In the legal industry, the financial crisis has accelerated already-existing trends towards more power in the hands of clients and more downward pressures on lawyers’ fees — major change should now arrive ahead of schedule.

Most of all, though, the crisis has triggered upheaval for large law firms, which for years have been providing the profession with on-the-job training for its new law graduates. The newest trend is toward what NALP’s James Leipold refers to as the “collision of classes” — all those retracted job offers and deferred starting dates for 2009 graduates are leading towards their logical conclusion: no new hires from the class of 2010 (here are recent examples from the US and the UK). Granted, hiring untrained law grads and paying them scads of money to fill out dockets is a recruitment model long overdue for replacement; but for the purposes of new law grads, it means one of the tightest job markets in memory.

So what would I recommend? Well, students currently in law school need to ask themselves a tough question and come up with an honest answer: why am I here? It might well be that you’re a law student because you’re bright, well-meaning and helpful, and the law seemed like an interesting, prestigious and financially reliable career path — that pretty much describes my route. But if that’s all that brought you here, then I think you should give some serious consideration to quitting.

I know how harsh that sounds, especially since a lot of great lawyers went into law school not fully certain if this was their calling. But this is not the same profession that your parents or older siblings entered, where entry barriers were relatively low,  learning curves were pretty gentle, and steady employment was more of a question of “where” than “if.” Law is becoming a tougher profession for new entrants — standards are higher, footholds are fewer, breaks and opportunities are disappearing. It used to be that you could spend the first few years of your career learning the ins and outs of practice from large-firm employers — they’d work you hard and train you poorly, but they’d pay you well because they made money off you no matter how long it took you to get the hang of things.

Those days are ending. The vaunted law firm pyramid is being replaced by the law firm diamond — few partners at the top, few trainees at the bottom, a lot of experienced workers in the middle. Because of the economy, and because technology and outsourcing are taking away new lawyers’ traditional tasks, there just won’t be as many opportunities to get your professional sea legs in a law firm. It’s going to be a lot harder for you to gain work experience — and that’s a real problem, because these same firms, perversely enough, are also narrowing their hiring criteria to lawyers with  experience and skills. I need hardly point out that most law schools provide no training in lawyering skills, client relationships or anything else that firms are suddenly deciding they value.

Many of you, then, will find yourselves standing in front of the profession’s gates with a key issued by your law school, only to find they’ve changed the locks. And since most schools don’t seem ready to issue a new set of keys, you’ll need to find another way inside. You’re going to have to develop the necessary skills and gain the requisite experience on your own. That might take several years, during which you’re not going to earn much or make much of a dent in your student debts, and at the end of the process there’s still no guarantee of a job. So unless you’re driven to be a lawyer, unless this really feels like a calling and you’re prepared for a north-face assault on this mountain, you owe it to yourself to think about suspending or abandoning your law degree. I don’t say this lightly or happily, but I do think it needs to be said.

What if you’re among the committed, or you’ve already graduated, or you’re so close to your degree that, even taking account of the sunk costs fallacy, you might as well finish it off? To start with, you’ll need to reorient your expectations along the lines of what I’ve just mentioned, accepting that the rules changed on you mid-way through the game and that there’s nothing to be done about it. Don’t underestimate the importance of attitude: the faster you can readjust your mindset from disappointment or victimhood to determination and opportunity, the wider a gap you can create between you and your classmates-turned-competitors. Take all the time you need to fully make this transition, but don’t take a minute longer.

The next thing to understand is that it’s time for some career triage.  You might not yet be sure what type of law you really want to do, but you no longer have the option of  browsing through the racks and trying things on. Pick something you think you can do and where you already have some experience or contacts — if you DJ’ed in college, think about entertainment law; if you majored in engineering, think about IP; if you worked at a nursing home, think about elder law. This isn’t about making career choices that will bind you for decades; this is about finding a door to put your foot into, an area where you already come with some valuable attributes. You need a place to start, so choose one in familiar territory.

Next, start building networks and skills. Which networks to construct depends on where and what you want to practise. If you’re settling or setting up shop in a given jurisdiction, join the bar association of that state or province (new lawyer fees are generally low) and go to as many meetings of your local chapter and area-of-practice section as reasonably possible. Meet people, introduce yourself, ask questions, follow up. At the same time, investigate your industry: join trade groups, read industry newsletters and websites, get to know the issues facing your future clients.  And get involved in online networks: join LinkedIn and start making contacts. Join Legal OnRamp and make your mark in the groups, conversations and debates there. If it’s at all feasible, blog.

Skills, of course, are the hardest thing to acquire, part of the “how do I get experience/skills without skills/experience” vicious circle. If you’re lucky, you’re with a law firm that will actually pay you while it trains you in the lawyering skills you need. If you have the luxury of volunteer time, identify an organization (preferably in your chosen area) that needs and accepts unpaid legal help and use that opportunity to acquire skills and make personal connections. If you can afford to pay for an associate position, Dan Hull would be happy to hear from you (it would be a pretty good investment, actually).

But maybe your best immediate investment might be Solo Practice University, an online legal learning and networking institution that fills in the many practical gaps in your law school education. At SPU, lawyer faculty teach real-world skills required in numerous areas of practice as well as marketing, management and technology know-how. I received a guided tour the other day and came away impressed. Even if you don’t intend to go solo, you could learn a tremendous amount (inside and outside class) from some very knowledgeable people at your own pace for about 1/20th the cost of the average American law degree — give it a look.

Really, it might help to think of yourself as a start-up — because in a  lot of ways, you’re a start-up law business. You have a law degree, which is far from worthless; it’s now just a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. You also have talent, drive and dedication, which is pretty much all that most startups ever set out with, along with your own unique life experiences. Now you need to build your personal law business, from the ground up.

Like other start-ups, it might have to be a part-time effort, since you’ll likely need to take a non-lawyer position (or even one outside the profession altogether) to pay the bills. But that full-time  job is just a source of income; your part-time start-up is your calling and your passion, and it will occupy your nights and weekends. If you think that sounds like a lot of work and not much life, you’re absolutely right. Don’t leave your student lifestyle behind yet: the long hours and tight budgets will probably continue for a while, and the discipline they impose, while absolutely a short-term pain, will prove to be a long-term benefit.

A good book to read right now might be Seth Godin’s The Dip: it’s about the importance of quitting the wrong things at the right time, sticking out the right things for as long as it takes, and knowing the difference between them. The most important lesson I took from it was that every worthwhile path has numerous barriers designed to do nothing else except winnow down the number of users. These barriers are what cause the dry spells, frustration, and pain that drive many people to pursue other paths that are easier or better for them — they constitute The Dip, and they separate the curious from the committed.

For a long time, law didn’t have much of a Dip, didn’t have many barriers — most everyone who acquired a law degree ended up with a law job if they wanted it. Now there is one — a law degree has become the start of your legal training, not the end of it. If you’re in law school or just emerging from it, you need to decide whether you can and want to make it through these barriers, the ones that right now are winnowing out thousands of people from this profession. If not, there’s no harm and no foul — life is long, and there’s a new century of opportunities opening up for you.

If you do decide to go for it, get ready for a long and often difficult haul, early-morning work and late-night second-guessing. And you still might not make it. But as that wise man Tom Waits once said: if it’s worth the going, it’s worth the ride. Good luck.

I was wondering if you have any suggestions for me. I graduated with a degree in accounting and had worked in a Big 4 accounting firm for a year before I quit. It’s not that the work was especially terrible, but working 60-90 hours a week, 6-7 days a week, I just didn’t have time for anything else.

While I’m finishing up my accounting licensing requirements, I’m contemplating going to law school, because I have always had quite an interest in legal work. However, I want to enter a career where I am not working over 60 hours and get the majority of weekends off, even if it means less money.

Are there any sectors of law where lawyers have these kinds of hours on a consistent basis (with a comfortable and reasonable salary) or does becoming a lawyer come with the implied recognition that there is no semblance of a “9-5″?

Here’s my response:

I’m probably in the minority of people in the legal world who would still recommend a law career to their children (though I suspect my preschoolers are destined for engineering). I still think the law offers a rare combination of intellectual engagement, collaborative activity and social benefit, especially to those of us who are a little challenged in the math-and-science department. That latter difficulty wouldn’t present itself to you, with your experience in accounting, but I’m nonetheless bullish on law as a career.

That said, I’m bullish only to the extent that someone is choosing a legal career for the right reasons. I’m one of the stereotypical Arts majors who went to law school because (a) it seemed challenging and worthwhile and (b) there’s not much else you can do with an English degree. There are a lot of lawyers out there, like me, who went into law because they didn’t know what else to do and it seemed like something worth trying. That’s an approach you can afford to take if, say, you’re attending a Canadian law school in the early 1990s, where tuition topped out at around C$2,500 a year. That environment, though, is pretty much gone today: tuition at my alma mater has risen about 400% since I graduated, and it’s still reasonably affordable in the overall context.

So to one extent, law is simply too expensive a degree to undertake just to see if you’d like it, both in terms of the tuition costs and in the difficulty of getting a really high-paying job (NALP’s figures on median lawyer incomes for recent graduates are sobering, and should be digested by anyone considering a law school application) to help quickly pay down your debts. That was certainly the case before the recession, and it goes double or triple now: this is going to be a longer and deeper downturn than most people are willing to admit in the run-up to an election. There are no safe careers anymore, and that very much includes the law.

But your question is about hours, and your priority is more safeguarding your personal time than necessarily earning a big salary. It’s good that you recognize the reality of trading off between these two criteria — you might be surprised how many new lawyers don’t yet get that. In this regard, I would say that there are legal jobs and careers — or perhaps more accurately, jobs and careers available to a law graduate — that require more traditional hours and a bare minimum of weekend and evening work. But I don’t think there are very many of them.

I would rule out almost all private-practice jobs these days, and not just with the big firms — ask any sole or small-firm practitioner about the necessity of not just doing the legal work, but collecting outstanding accounts receivable, making equipment lease and premises rental payments, marketing the practice, doing all your own IT troubleshooting, and so forth. I expect there might be some positions with established firms in smaller communities that require predictable and relatively brief hours, but you could not describe them as either remunerative or secure. Legal support jobs — in research, knowledge management or (especially in your case) financial management in bigger firms — would seem to be much more promising. But until clients’ concerns start keeping 9-to-5ish hours, private-practice lawyers can never be entirely the masters of their own time.

In-house work for a long time supposedly offered a respite from the time demands of private practice — steady white-collar work in a predictable corporate environment. If that was ever true, it sure isn’t now: small law departments are overwhelmed with issues that keep their lawyers at the office well past the time other employees have taken the bus home, and larger law departments usually have multinational and multi-time-zone concerns to cope with. The rapid rise of governance as a key corporate worry has also added tremendously to in-house lawyers’ workload, usually without a commensurate increase in staff and resources to handle it. And as tough as law firm partnerships can be about billable hour targets, CFOs facing a long and dark recession make law firm partners look like church mice. In-house lawyers often say they have more predictability in their work flow than law firm lawyers do, but the hours are definitely longer than the corporate average, and the stress is at least equivalent, if not more so.

I’d say your most promising avenue for a legal job or career with more traditional hours might be in the public or non-profit sectors. Many of my law friends work for the federal government, and they enjoy both the challenge of the work and the benefits its provides, in terms of health coverage, work culture and vacation time (both the availability of vacation time and an expectation that it should be taken).

Again, I stress that the work is by no means easy, and if you’re offering legal services, no matter in what environment, urgent matters always emerge that will require you to arrive early and leave late. It’s also not the ticket to a Maserati in the driveway and Ivy League schooling for the kids. But as a general rule, the culture tends more towards the kind of predictable and traditional hours you’re seeking. And if the events of the last several weeks are any indication, the government is going to become a busier and more active employer for quite some time to come — we’re heading into an era when governments are the lenders of first and last resort, so as a legal employer, government is hot for the first time in awhile.

So in general, I’d suggest looking into law firm support work on the financial side, or government legal work. But I don’t want to end this email without a friendly caveat regarding the approach you’re taking.

I understand completely the drive and need to safeguard personal time — I’m not a Millennial, but I’m not a Boomer either, and I tend to be agnostic about this issue. But I would suggest that of all the criteria you might use to decide what sort of career path to pursue, time demands ought to be fairly low on the list. For one thing, hourly demands can change in a hurry — bankruptcy lawyers who were twiddling their thumbs 18 months ago can attest to that. But more importantly, what really sustains you in any kind of job or career — especially during those times, and we all experience them, when the people or the client or the environment gets you deeply down — is whether you have a passion for the work itself.

If you care about the nature of your work — if you look upon it as much as a calling as a job, or if you could honestly say some days that you’d do it for free if you had to — then you can ride out the rough patches. But if you don’t — if the job is just a means to an end, or rewards criteria that are largely unrelated to what’s really important in your life — then even the good days won’t be great days. That’s true in any career, but I feel like it’s especially the case with the law, many of whose practitioners are, frankly, kind of geeky about it.

What’s more, you’ll always be at a competitive disadvantage to those classmates or colleagues who do care about it. These people will work harder and longer on their assignments in law school, maybe even irrationally so, because they get a charge out of it. And they’ll show more enthusiasm and garner more positive attention in the workplace because at some level, their genuine enthusiasm for the subject can get them past dumb bosses and bad policies and silly clients.

So I’d have to advise — strongly — against going to law school in hopes of landing a job with limited hours. Not just because there are fewer and fewer of those jobs all the time, but because unless something about the law really appeals to you, matters to you, and sustains you, it’s very hard to make it through the doldrums, of which there can be more than a few in this profession.

The happiest and most successful lawyers I know love something about the law — from the driest black-letter contract interpretation to the social activism of anti-poverty advocacy, it doesn’t matter what — that makes it all worthwhile. I’d recommend giving some serious thought as to whether you think there’s something in the law that would similarly touch your heart — and if not, law might not be the right path for you right now.

Wise to the cyclical nature of the real estate practice, Greene began to take on other — and, for him, more nontraditional — projects about two years ago. While the bulk of his practice today continues to center around large institutional clients, work for high-net-worth individuals is making the difference between being busy and not busy, making up about a third of his practice now.

A lot of lawyers spend their time looking for the next big thing — the practice area that’s been quietly building up and is poised to become red-hot. But they don’t spend nearly as much time looking for the next small thing — the practice area that’s about to go stone-cold because of changes in economic, technological, cultural or political circumstances. If that next small thing is part of your book of business, you need to know about it. And if it constitutes a major portion of your work, you have a serious, fundamental issue on your hands.

Greene and others like him were smart enough to recognize the bubbly froth developing in the real estate boom and act on it. It’s easy to say, with hindsight, that any lawyer could have forecast the end of feverish times in their practice area, but not many actually do (Cadwalader, for instance). And even if you’re a short-selling economy-watcher with a keen eye for coming disaster, you can’t always tell which way the impact cracks will branch out from a major economic change.

Take high oil prices, which seem to be here for the foreseeable future. Susan Cartier Liebel reports a forecast that in the next four years alone, ten million cars will come off American streets and highways. Sure, if you’re in-house at Chrysler, you can read the writing on the wall. But what if you do corporate work for healthy carmakers whose inventories start backing up because people are holding onto their old vehicles longer? What if you represent suburbs whose tax bases might start shrinking as people can no longer afford to commute that far? What if you specialize in auto accidents and people start driving less?

The challenge for lawyers to spot the next small thing is that they can’t count on their clients in these areas to help them look ahead — as often as not, they don’t see the big change coming either. With Western economies so volatile, in the face of globalization and technology, there aren’t many sure things anymore, and the landscape upon which your practice is built could change awfully quickly.

What can you do? One thing might be to develop an appreciation for the Law of Unintended Consequences, and cultivate a habit of thinking about the indirect results of events in your industry or community. Lawyers are linear thinkers by nature and by calling, but once they start practising non-linear thinking, they’re actually very good at it.

And to the extent you can do so within the bounds of competence, diversify your practice, just as you’d diversify your investment portfolio. Even — especially — when times are good, look for related but separate business lines or client bases into which you can move and eventually come to specialize. As Q said to James Bond in Desmond Llewellyn’s last appearance: “Always leave an escape route.”

The main interim report is 44 pages long, followed by an additional 152 pages spread out over 10 appendices. I doubt there’s ever been a more comprehensive report on the bar admission process (nor will any other province likely try to duplicate the task force’s efforts or findings), and I can only imagine what the final report will look like. For what it’s worth, I think the report’s findings are accurate, timely and sorely needed.

I don’t have time here to break down the report in detail — I’ll be writing a more comprehensive commentary that will appear at SLAW in a few days’ time and will be cross-posted here. But this is what you need to know:

1. The Task Force recommends the abolition of the current Skills and Professional Responsibility Program from the bar admission process in Ontario. Of all the reasons the task force gave for this recommendation, perhaps none is more suprising than its assertion that right now, law schools are doing a better job of teaching students skills and professional responsibility than the law society is.

2. The Task Force offers three alternatives to the current articling process by which lawyers ostensibly receive sufficient practical training to enter the practice of law. These are:

(a) make it extremely clear to all current and prospective law students that the law society does not guarantee articling placements, and accordingly cannot guarantee that a law graduate can become a practising lawyer (laissez-faire).

(b) set up or certify a parallel Practical Legal Training Course that provides law graduates who could not obtain articles the chance to earn an equivalent certification in practical legal skills training (Australian model).

(c) Abolish articling outright (the U.S. model).

The Task Force makes no recommendation concerning these three options — it offers pros and cons of each — but it makes quite clear that the status quo is not sustainable, not least because the Ontario bar admission process is facing a tsunami of rising applications over the next few years, culminating in an expected 2009 application class no less than 38.7% larger than in 2001.

The report is groundbreaking, if for no other reason than that it squarely lays out the numerous shortcomings of Ontario’s present bar admission process and demands that the profession act, now, to change. Go read it.

Things ought not to be as bad in Canada, but it’s still no fun graduating from law school, carrying a huge debt load, to find a mediocre or poor job market waiting for you. If you entered law school within the past five years, you paid boom prices for a law degree and you might end up in a bust marketplace. It’s not fair — but it happens. You won’t be the first new lawyer to experience it, but if you’re a Millennial, you’ve also never seen one of these things before, and they can be more than a little disconcerting.

There are lessons to be drawn, however, from those of us who landed in similarly soft job markets in previous downturns. Here are a few thoughts on what to do if you’re taking a new LL.B. or J.D. into a recession.

1. Don’t panic. Easy to say, not always easy to do, especially if you watch too many all-news channels (a piece of advice: too many = 1). Avoid the temptation to wrap yourself up in worry, self-pity and general gloom — it gets you nowhere and it really annoys your friends and family. Just because you’re not employed does not mean you’re not employable. Moreover, they’ve abolished debtor’s prison, so don’t spend too much time fretting over your student loans. Cycles come and go; we’ve just come through a long period of general economic health, but it was still a cycle, and it was always going to end. Same goes for a recession; this too shall pass.

2. Keep learning. Your career is always on, 24/7/365, regardless of whether you’re employed at the moment. Your law career began on the first day of classes and it will continue until you retire to a life of leisure and complaining about the damn kids today. If you’re not employed, take the opportunity to increase your skill set, broaden your knowledge base, and learn more about the legal industry and the types of law you love most. Read journals and magazines, or if you’re low on cash, blogs and e-newsletters — not only about the areas of law that most interest you, but especially about the fundamentals of running a law business. You didn’t learn them in school and you wouldn’t have the chance to learn them if you were working. Invest today’s downtime in tomorrow’s competitive advantage.

3. Network. Those of us in the law practice advisory business are always telling lawyers to network, make contacts, find opportunities to market their names, expertise and brand. Practising lawyers, in reality, don’t have much time to do this; you do. Find out where lawyers meet, and join them. Attend a CBA or ABA Section meeting (student and new lawyer fees are low) in any area that even vaguely interests you. If you really want to get ahead of the game, go visit a corporate counsel meeting and talk to clients — you’d never get this close to them as an associate. Meet lawyers, introduce yourself, ask questions (about their work, not about whether they’re hiring), listen attentively to the answers, and follow up with the people with whom you best connected — if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a mentor. Make networking your non-paying full-time job.

4. Keep an open mind. You never know which door will open up for you. When the firm where I articled declined to offer me an associate job, I spent the next several months fixated on getting another law firm position, even though I hadn’t especially enjoyed the previous one. I got tunnel vision, thinking that private law practice was my only option — and I can only guess how much worse that must be today, with large firms omnipresent in the student imagination. It wasn’t until I’d exhausted every law firm avenue that I turned, with some desperation, to legal non-profits and the legal publishing industry, and it was only then that things took off for me. Be flexible. Get ready to adjust to new information, new circumstances, and the possibility that something might come along, unforeseen, and be perfect for you.

5. Be positive. This is kind of the flip-side of not panicking, but it deserves a final mention. You didn’t become any stupider or any less attractive to employers because the economy tightened up; this had nothing to do with you. Classmates and friends who managed to land a job aren’t Supreme Court justices in waiting, they just had better luck on the first go-round. Feed your self-esteem with positive reinforcement from those closest to you. Keep a journal and record one smart thing you did every day to prepare for your next job. Learn, network, read and write. Above all, stay in touch with the law and the legal community — because you’re still part of it, whether you’re drawing a paycheque or not.

This is what Ms. Wolf is currently up to:

I’m on a one-woman mission to talk people out of law school. Lots of people go to law school as a default. They don’t know what else to do, like I did. It seems like a good idea. People say a law degree will always be worth something even if you don’t practice. But they don’t consider what that debt is going to look like after law school. It affects my life in every way. And the jobs that you think are going to be there won’t necessarily be there at all. Most people I know that are practicing attorneys don’t make the kind of money they think lawyers make. They’re making $40,000 a year, not $160,000. Plus, you’re going to be struggling to do something you might not even enjoy. A few people have a calling to be a lawyer, but most don’t.

I think she’s exactly right. I’m one of those people who went to law school not really knowing what to expect or what I wanted to get out of it, but needing something to do after completing my undergrad (a five-year honours English degree isn’t exactly ambrosia to most employers). As a follow-up degree, law seemed to offer three attractive features: an intellectual challenge, the promise of steady and even lucrative work opportunities, and (remarkably, this was my leading reason at the time) a chance to help people. The first I found in abundance, the second not particularly, and the third hardly at all.

Looking back, it’s amazing to me how little research I did into the reality and prospects of a legal career. There were no other lawyers in my family or among family friends, and this was in 1989, roughly the Pleistocene Era before the Internet. So I had to settle for a couple of conversations with career planning staff at the university (you can picture how in-depth and helpful that was), a couple of conversations with undergrad professors (one of whom actually did utter the “you can always use a law degree” line), and a browse through about a half-dozen law school application kits. The aura of law as a remunerative and fulfilling career was powerful enough to do the rest.

Law school was great fun, intellectually and socially: a perspective- and life-changing experience. But I made the common mistake of believing that what I loved about law school — problems to be solved, justice to be served, meaning to be found — would be available in equal abundance in the legal workplace. It took most of my articling year to make the adjustment and understand the industry a little better, by which time it was too late to be hired back. And once the admissions process was over and I’d received my license to practise, I had the same bone-chilling feeling Ms. Wolf must have experienced: now what? I have no job, I have no particular passion or aptitude for the practice of law, and I have bills and debts to pay. Getting from there to my current position is a long story beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say I caught a lot of breaks. Most new lawyers in that position aren’t so fortunate.

I can’t conceive of graduating from school $87,000 in debt, even though this is reality for many new US lawyers and a growing number of Canadian ones. From 1990-1993, Queen’s Law School charged an average of $2,000 – $2,300 for tuition. Throw in another few thousand for room, board and books per year, and the whole experience came to maybe $15,000, a quarter of which I financed through summer jobs and the rest through the good people at Scotiabank and the federal government. Because my undergrad degree was also remarkably inexpensive, my eight years of post-secondary education ran me, at most, $20,000. Some students now burn through that in a year.

You know, I understand and empathize with the concerns felt at law schools and law societies about the rapidly growing cost of a law degree. I recognize the potential barriers that these prices erect to would-be lawyers who come from middle-class or less well-off backgrounds (though I note in passing that law schools spend more than ever these days on bursaries for students with financial difficulties). But I can’t help thinking there’s an advantage to the higher cost of a legal education in Canada: it can act as a deterrent to the browsers and test-drivers of legal education, the people who try out law school to see if it’s right for them. If I’d been facing $20,000 a year to go to law school, I’d have had to be extremely sure I knew what I was getting into, or I wouldn’t have been able to justify it. We will lose some good potential lawyers from the profession because of this, no question; but we will also have much fewer stories like Ms. Wolf’s, or mine.

What we really need, of course, is a much better understanding and appreciation among would-be lawyers of exactly what this profession offers and requires: not just its intellectual challenges, but also its ethical peculiarities, its extraordinary personal demands, its diversity of career paths, its captivity to hiring cycles, its average annual salary, and its amazing ability to, every so often, change the world. Thanks to a more sophisticated applicant pool and a wider array of websites devoted to pre-law and law school information (Law is Cool is an excellent Canadian example), we’re getting there. The sooner we can dispel both the good and bad myths of a legal career, the better.

You don’t have to buy your average private-firm lawyer too many drinks before they’ll tell you that in-house lawyers “couldn’t cut it” in the trenches, that law professors are afraid of “the real world,” and that public-sector lawyers are basically civil servants with a law degree. It’s an asinine chauvinism, but one that’s still quietly held by too many private-practice lawyers (and that still resonates too much with some in-house/government/academia/NGO lawyers). That’s changing, but it’ll still be a while before our profession’s system is flushed of it completely.

Considering the broad range of legal careers out there, private firms (especially the large national and most prominent local firms) do have a disproportionately large footprint at law schools. These firms throw a lot of money, time and effort into branding themselves at the schools, resources that smaller firms and non-firm employers simply don’t have. You won’t see the Sierra Legal Defence Fund at too many OCIs. Little wonder that students assume law firms represent the be-all and end-all of legal careers, and focus their efforts accordingly.

But it’s also a fact that large firms are disproportionately represented in the pool of “employers willing to hire new lawyers.” Many large firms will hire two dozen or more articling students a year in one office alone — there are smaller and even midsize firms out there that won’t take on that many articling students in their lifetime. The associate pool at many large firms is larger than the full lawyer complement at most Canadian law firms.

Law firms are, effectively, the engine of post-call new lawyer training in Canada. A lawyer at one large firm in Alberta related that right before the firm announces which articling students will be hired back, she gets calls from other firms and legal employers inquiring about the ones who won’t make the cut. She’ll soon see those lawyers, whom her firm has spent a lot of money feeding, clothing and training, opposing them in court. That happens across the country.

How long firms are willing to subsidize post-call legal training in Canada is an open question – I keep thinking they’ll eventually run the cost/benefit analysis and rethink their policy. But for the time being, the legal profession requires these firms’ annual willingness to hire a lot of graduates who will eventually turn into few senior associates and even fewer partners. And all the students graduating with $50,000 in debt — which they won’t pay off with a job at the Ministry of the Environment — require it too.

All that said, I’m sympathetic to the plight of the excellent legal employers outside the law firm community who have little or no profile among law schools. But their day will come. When third-year students and young associates talk longingly about “alternative careers,” they’re belatedly turning their attention to the other 90% of the legal profession outside of large law firms. I’m a ‘95 call, and I and many of my friends articled and “associated” (is that a verb?) with law firms. Today, the great majority of us work for government, corporate law departments, or NGOs.

Law schools ought to do a better job informing students of the wide world of legal careers. But that’s encompassed by the much larger and more significant question of the relationship between law schools and law firms – a relationship in need of some serious work.

This post originally appeared at Slaw on November 13, 2007.

“I enjoyed the last three months immensely,” I said. “But trust me, ‘time off’ does not in any way describe it.”

If you’ve spent more than a few weeks raising a child hands-on, you’ll probably get that. If you haven’t, you might have a hard time understanding how parenting can be more work than the toughest law job — and can be more rewarding than the greatest law job, too. Similarly, I think most legal employers these days are either clued in to helping their lawyers be parents, or they’re not.

It’s been heartening to hear and read the stories of law firms that do get it: they accommodate within their work structures lawyers’ decisions to have kids. They understand not only the business advantages to that approach — retention, recruitment, and more (set out below) — but also that a law firm community that respects its employees’ personal lives is a triumph of professionalism.

And some firms don’t get it. Their business models can’t maximize production from young parents, and so they accept high turnover rates and the exodus of women lawyers as a tolerable cost of success. What strikes me, even more so than before I spent three months as a full-time dad, is how it’s the firms who are missing out here, not the lawyers. What sensible law firm wouldn’t want to employ a parent?

Parents are the ultimate multi-taskers, simultaneously juggling numerous duties — all urgent priorities and all mandatory — through hard work, organization and efficiency. That’s not valuable to firms trying to leverage the most work out of the fewest professionals?

Parents are tremendous dispute resolvers, balancing both the short-term demands and long-term interests of parties with deeply self-interested viewpoints, usually in high-stress situations. That’s not useful for clients who need conflicts settled quickly and calmly?

Parents are great listeners, reading between the lines of what they’re told and figuring out what someone really needs, earning their trust in the process. That’s not the very heart of effective client relations and marketing?

Parents function on much less sleep than they need. That’s not a survival skill in the modern law firm?

The business case for law firms to recruit and retain lawyers who are parents is clear. The business case for the billable-hour regime and the work-‘em-till-they-drop culture of many firms, which drive away these valuable professionals, remains a mystery to me.

This post first appeared as the editorial in the July/August 2007 issue of National magazine.

The law societies of British Columbia and Ontario have produced reports on this subject, and both identify it as a serious matter for the profession. I’m not entirely sure that it is, for a couple of reasons.

First, that belief presumes that a shortage or absence of lawyers in small centers results in reduced access to justice in those locations. Lawyers have long believed that only they can really provide legal services competently, even as the alternative legal services market (primarily paralegals, but also including title insurers and do-it-yourself will CDs) continues to flourish every year. It would hardly behoove the LSUC, for instance, to maintain that lawyers are a sine qua non for access to justice when the LSUC itself has battled successfully to gain the right to regulate paralegals.

Before we decide that only lawyers’ services pass the threshold of providing access to justice, maybe we ought to let someone else try. If lawyers really want to ensure the best possible world for access to justice, they should help throw open the legal-services marketplace to as many competitors as the market will allow, and let clients sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps needless to say, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Secondly, it’s not clear to me that law societies ought to be responsible for ensuring what amounts to a lawyer in every community, like a chicken in every pot. Law societies are statutorily charged with governing the profession in the public interest – hatching, matching and dispatching lawyers, to paraphrase the TV show.

The law societies are not, I don’t think, mandated to ensure access to justice; certainly, they have neither the funding nor the authority with which to accomplish that. If the marketplace is pulling lawyers away from smaller centers and towards the cities – which is also happening in the general population, as yesterday’s census results confirm – then I don’t see why lawyers’ governing bodies should attempt to maintain what amounts to an artificial geographical distribution of lawyers that belongs to a different demographic generation.

I’m doubtful in any event that the debt-relief option for lawyers relocating to smaller centers is the answer. Skyrocketing tuition fees are a relatively recent phenomenon, but small-center Canada has been failing to recruit new lawyers for much longer, as the average age of its current lawyers (55) attests. Debt relief also assumes that new lawyers will choose Red Deer over Calgary or Smiths Falls over Toronto primarily if their student loans will be paid off more quickly, and I’m not sure there’s evidence to support that. I don’t think these sorts of incentives have worked very well with doctors, for instance.

What this whole thing really presages is a discussion of who is a lawyer, and why. For all the organized bar’s contempt for paralegals, your average solo in Wawa, Glace Bay or Trail has a lot more in common with the local paralegal than he or she does with a pharmaceutical patent lawyer in Ottawa, a tax litigator in Vancouver, or an oil-and-gas dealmaker in Halifax. The general term “lawyer” now encompasses such a wide diversity of professionals that it doesn’t really make sense to categorize them under one term.

In future, I think we’ll see the legal services marketplace continue to break down along price points and risk factors. Already, the type of legal work most commonly found in small towns simply doesn’t pay enough to justify law society fees, professional insurance and practice overhead (or at least, to supply the type of income most lawyers still consider commensurate with their professional standing). Real estate alone is pretty much done as a lawyers’ staple; only title insurers and banks have the volume and risk coverage to properly manage it anymore.

So long as it costs a lot of money to obtain and maintain a lawyers’ licence, the type of legal work that can justify the cost of a lawyer will continue to shrink – in no small part because technological advances will continue to reduce the cost of many services lawyers have traditionally been able to offer exclusively. The urban-rural breakdown of lawyer distribution is as much symptomatic of this change in the legal marketplace as it is of any other associated demographic trend.

This post originally appeared as a comment to a post at Slaw on March 14, 2007.

Today, you’re deluged with news, information and opinions about practice. It’s not only from the law firms, which have had a huge impact on many faculties through sponsorships, donations, lectures and marketing efforts. It’s also through legal magazines and newspapers, which provide pipelines of impressions about life at the bar, and websites like Lawbuzz, which provide pipelines with fewer facts but more interactivity.

The multiplicity of information sources available today could lead you to believe you’re getting a broad cross-section of legal life. But I don’t actually think that’s the case. What you’re really getting is an intense sales pitch from numerous directions. Every element of the legal profession with a law school presence is there for a reason: you’re a valuable demographic, and they’re trying to sell you something.

What you’ll often find offered to you is an image or a model of the profession. You’re already familiar, for example, with magazines that promote a certain type of career and lifestyle as the norm, when in fact the profession is far too fragmented and diverse for any one style to be predominant. Buy into that image if you want, but don’t mistake it for the mainstream of Canadian law practice.

There are other sales pitches going on, too: consider this or that law firm for your summer and articling positions. That’s your call — in fact, it’s all your call, in fact. It’s not always easy, but try to remember that the practising profession is far more diverse, nuanced and complex than the images pitched to you can express. Don’t feel boxed in by an illusion of limited choice.

There are as many different legal lives as there are lawyers, and you can choose any one of them — or reject them all and create your own. It’s your career, not theirs.

This post originally appeared as the editorial in the 2006 law student issue of National magazine.