Entrepreneurial Lawyering - one way to help make law school worth the money

The blogosphere has been lighting up with reactions over the recent New York Times Op-Ed by Lawrence Mitchell, Dean of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law:  Law School is Worth the Money.  Mitchell writes:

 For at least two years, the popular press, bloggers and a few sensationalist law professors have turned American law schools into the new investment banks. We entice bright young students into our academic clutches. Succubus-like, when we’ve taken what we want from them, we return them to the mean and barren streets to fend for themselves.

The hysteria has masked some important realities and created an environment in which some of the brightest potential lawyers are, largely irrationally, forgoing the possibility of a rich, rewarding and, yes, profitable, career.

Paul Campos immediately countered in Salon with Too Many Lawyers? Says Who?, where he dissects and refutes Mitchell’s op-ed paragraph by paragraph (mostly with data from sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics sprinkled with a bit of Campos-style commentary).  Some highlights:

Translation: Getting people to spend $200,000 for a 50/50 shot at a legal job of any kind is getting harder every day. ...

Fifty-three percent of the 2011 graduates of Mitchell’s law school did not obtain full-time long-term jobs requiring a law degree.  Hesitating to spend three years pursuing a degree which produces worse than coin-flip odds of getting any job for which the degree qualifies those who get it to perform is not irrational. ... 

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Most (all?) of the bloggers weighing in seem to fall into the Campos-camp.  See, for example, Elie Mystal @ Above the Law, Alison Monahan @ A Girl’s Guide to Law School, Abby Rogers @ Business Insider, Matt Leichter @ The Law School Tuition Bubble, and Graham Martin @ The Lawyerist.

But whether you agree with Mitchell or Campos, I believe the lesson for law students (and recent grads or mid-career attorneys) is this:  An essential skill for lawyering success is being entrepreneurial. 

Mitchell observes:

As with any industry in transition, changes in the delivery of legal services create opportunities as well as challenges.  Creative, innovative and entrepreneurial lawyers will find ways to capitalize on this. 

Campos translates this as:

If you fail, it’s your fault.

Neither embraces the implicit conclusion of his position, however, though it is one I have been advocating for a while now.  In Cultivating Learners Who Will Invent the Future of Law Practice: Some Thoughts on Educating Entrepreneurial and Innovative Lawyers, I argue that it is the responsibility of law schools to provide training for our students on how to be entrepreneurial (and I don't mean giving legal advice to entrepreneurs). 

For example, next semester, we'll be offering at Michigan State a new course--Entrepreneurial Lawyering--teaching skills in entrepreneurship to create solutions to the problems that Mitchell, Campos, and others have been talking about for some time, i.e. the enormous untapped market for legal services (everyone who can’t afford a lawyer at three-figures-an-hour but doesn’t qualify for legal aid) and the increasing number of un(der)employed lawyers.  Students will tackle this dilemma in start-up mode.  Among other endeavors, each student must create a business plan and give a presentation pitch for an innovative model to deliver legal services. 

The Entrepreneurial Lawyering course is supported by ReInvent Law, the law lab devoted to technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship in legal services that I co-founded with my colleague Daniel Martin Katz earlier this year.  We started the lab because we were tired of talking (and writing) about the problems faced by legal education and the profession.  We want to actively build solutions. 

So we are very much in start-up mode ourselves, as we apply an entrepreneurial approach to legal ed by launching ReInvent Law.  (Or, as some might say, an 'intra'preneurial approach.) Check out this 5-minute video for more on ReInvent Law's work.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Mitchell is right or Campos is right.  The solution is the same.  Our law students need to be thinking about entrepreneurship and innovation in legal services.  For more of my thoughts in this vein, see this recent Bloomberg Law article.

Comments

[Doug Richmond]

This is interesting. There are at least two graduates for every legal job and that differential will exist for at least the next decade. To the extent entrepreneurial lawyers create LegalZoom or Axiom or other enterprises like them, they either eliminate lawyer jobs, or depress lawyer incomes, or both. And, of course, the overwhelming majority of entrpreneurs--even those with good ideas--fail in their ventures. Don't get me wrong--I am in favor of helping lawyers become more entrepreneurial. But attempting to teach lawyers to be entrpreneurial is not even one molecule of answer to the problems facing law schools, lawyers, and the legal profession today.

[Nicole Hyland]

This proposed solution of greater lawyer entrepreneurialism touches on a deeper issue, in my opinion. It is my totally unscientific observation that law school and the legal profession attracts people who are inherently non-entrepreneurial. Many people who enter law school (and I generalize here) are looking for a "safe" career option. By the same token, practicing lawyers are inherently risk-averse. It is an old joke that the only correct answer to any legal question is "it depends." As lawyers we hate being forced to give definitive answers to questions and no wise lawyer ever tries to predict the outcome of a lawsuit. For those of us who practice in the legal ethics area - well, that tendency is even more apparent. Part of our job is to counsel lawyers on how to comply with their ethical obligations and avoid getting into trouble with disciplinary authorities.

So, while I think that training lawyers who are inherently risk-averse to think and act like entrepreneurs may have only marginal success, one thing it might do is send a message to aspiring lawyers that the profession has changed and is no longer the "safe" option it was once believed to be. In other words, it might disincentivize those non-entrepreneurial types and may even incentivize more entrepreneurial thinkers to join the profession.

[Doug Richmond]

Don't most law students know by now that the legal profession has changed and that it is no longer the safe option it was once believed to be? Can't we say that aspiring law students also know that by virtue of the decline in law school applicants and LSAT-takers? I think the answer to both questions surely is yes. Again, I agree that encouraging entrpreneurial thinking in lawyers is a good thing--I simply don't think it is much of a cure for what ails the profession.

[John David Galt]

A course in how to become a successful entrepreneur would be useful to a large part of the population, not just lawyers. With employment becoming so over-taxed and over-regulated that most people will soon need to become self-employed, every city and state college in the US ought to be offering this course.

[George Conk]

I found myself becoming entrepreneurial when, three years or so post-admission, after winning my first two jury trials I was put at the desk of an eighth year associate and handed his caseload. I decided to leave - and I did within a few weeks. I took a couple of cases with me, tried one, made money and quit my new job.
Spent the next 25 years self-employed. What did I have for capital? Time and advice. What did I have for liabilities? None. I graduated in 1974 from a public law school Rutgers-Newark, which was practically free. So the problem with conveying the entrepreneurial message today is that the last three decades of relentless anti-tax politics has drastically reduced public support for education, virtually privatizing even the public law schools.

[Andrew Perlman]

Doug, I think "entrepreneurship" can have many possible meanings. It could mean creating an entirely new business model for delivering legal services (e.g., Axiom, LegalZoom, etc.), which (as you note) is very hard to do.

But there is plenty of room for entrepreneurship within more traditional models of law practice. For example, virtual law practice, innovative billing arrangements, new marketing methods, the outsourcing of legal services to bring costs down are all modest forms of entrepreneurship. Students today need to understand what it means to innovate, whether in the grand sense (of creating an entirely new way of delivering legal services) or in the smaller sense (of finding new and more efficient ways to market and deliver traditional legal services). If Renee's course can help law students think about these ideas, I think it will be more beneficial than a typical upper level doctrinal course.

[Doug Richmond]

Andy: If all a course is going to do is urge students to work from home (that is virtual law practice in a nutshell), alert them to alternative billing methods, etc., then it is not teaching even "modest forms of entrepreneurship." An essential flaw in the whole idea is that there is an enormous untapped market for legal services that spiffier, niftier, young lawyers can tap into and thus avoid the hardship of unemployment coupled with high student loan debt--there is not such a market. That's not to say that there aren't people who need legal help who can't afford it, but it is to say that lawyers--even innovative ones--cannot charge any sort of rate that this population is willing to pay (or can pay) that will produce a reasonable income for lawyers.

[Andrew Perlman]

Doug, the virtual law office example is a good one. If a lawyer can work from home and use technology to provide routine legal services efficiently (e.g., by automating routine tasks), that lawyer will have a competitive advantage over lawyers who have a bricks and mortar operation, hire expensive staff, and deliver legal services the "old fashioned" way.

LegalZoom is making a mint because they understand the importance of innovation in the delivery of legal services. Lawyers who ignore these trends do so at their peril. At the very least, taking a course that focuses on these developments would be a heck of a lot more practical and valuable to an aspiring lawyer than yet another "Law and..." course in the third year of law school.

[Andrew Perlman]

One more point, Doug. Imagine that you are a partner in a small firm, and you're looking to hire a young lawyer who can help you compete in an increasingly competitive legal marketplace. Would you prefer to hire someone who has just taken a course on how lawyers can use technology to bring down the cost of legal services? Or would you prefer someone who took a 5th "law and..." course instead?

[Doug Richmond]

I would prefer to hire a young lawyer who had taken Insurance Law, or, using my Kansas law school as an example, a very practical course entitled Practice in Kansas, or perhaps other substantive courses that relate to my practice. It is impossible--impossible--for a practicing lawyer to compete with LegalZoom; that's a terrible example. I am simply tired of the oft-repeated, analytically-unsupported claims by law professors and others that there is some magical market of under-served or unserved clients out there that lawyers could tap into if only they were more innovative. There are lawyers with virtual practices now who are starving. There are lawyers trying innovative marketing approaches who are starving. And I am not opposed to this course. My original point, however, was this and it remains unchanged and unchallenged: unless and until we produce fewer lawyers and find ways to substantially lessen graduates' debt burdens, nothing else matters (including courses on entrepreneurship, which are better taught in business schools anyway).