Waking the neighbours

Ten years ago, it was rare to see more than a passing mention of law practice management or legal business issues even in the legal press. Today, the legal press has finally caught up, but the mainstream media also seems to be warming to this topic. In recent weeks, we’ve seen prominent articles on lawyer job-hunting struggles in the Wall Street Journal, on the continuing bondage of the billable hour in Slate, and now on the decreasing appeal of legal careers in The New York Times (love that hip, timely photo of the cast of L.A. Law in the NYT story).

I’ll leave the articles for your perusal — they don’t say much that critics within the legal industry haven’t been saying for awhile –but it is interesting to see the MSM take an interest in the effects of the profession’s broken business model. One explanation could be the old anti-lawyer standby, that the media has always liked kicking lawyers around at any opportunity. But I don’t buy it in this case: the tone and approach of these articles is fair and at times downright sympathetic. The writers and editors behind these stories, I’m guessing, have friends and colleagues in the law and have been struck by their misery.

I suspect what we’re seeing here is the sharpening of the crisis within the profession — the tension rising to a pitch high enough to be heard outside our cloistered walls. This is, in the long run, a good thing — it’s like when an addict’s friends arrange an intervention; it lets the addict know that there really is something seriously wrong. I look forward to seeing a segment on the billable hour on a future 60 Minutes — and that’s not as outlandish as it would have sounded even a couple of years ago.



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