What I Didn’t Learn In Law School, Pt 2

How to talk to clients. Well, how to talk to indigent criminal defense clients.

Continuing from my last post, where when my client wanted to talk to his girlfriend before making a decision, he asked me if I would have to check with my wife before I bought new rims for me car.

Most of the people I hung out with in law school with were a lot like me. White with a middle class (or better) suburban upbringing.  Our parents were all educated with white collar job.  I had the ultimate white-bread childhood, straight out of Leave It To Beaver. My family is so suburban, I’m now the strange one for not having a screwed up childhood.  Between school in the suburbs, college, and law school, I never had a chance to learn how to relate with the lower classes.

I’m sure there are criminal lawyers out there who just defend white-collar type criminals; the doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers that make up the defendants on Law & Order.  They sit in their penthouse offices, count their stacks of money and plot how to save Martha Stewart from doing hard time.  I don’t think guys like me who live in the sticks of Texas and are only a few years out of law school don’t get those jobs.

Instead, I’m in the trenches, taking appointed cases to represent the people society doesn’t care about, poor and accused of a crime.  I have no idea how to relate to these people though, not a clue.  I generally stick with the weather, football, or the fact that jail sucks.  That should be safe.

Jump In The Pool, Its Filled With Sharks

I was browsing the ABA website seeing what’s happening in the legal world outside of the Great State of Texas. A press release caught my eye, claiming that there was only a “slight change” in law school enrollment statistics from last year to this. According to the ABA:

• Total enrollment for J.D. degrees increased from 141,031 to 141,433 from the academic year starting fall 2006 to the year starting fall 2007.  The increase in first-year enrollment was smaller, from 48,937 to 48,964 or only .1 percent.
• Looking at gender for all students enrolled for J.D. degrees, there were 74,946 males in the 2006 academic year, but 75,383 in the current year, an increase of .6%.  But the number of women decreased by .1 percent, from 66,085 in 2006 to 66,050 in the current year.  Males represent 53.2 percent of total J.D. enrollment this year.
• Among first-year students, the number of males dropped from 26,322 to 25,799, or 2 percent.  But the number of females increased from 22,615 to 23,165, or 2.4 percent. Males represent 52.7 percent of the first-year class.
• While the number of minorities enrolled for a J.D. degree increased from 30,557 in the 2006 academic year to 30,598 in the current year, they continued to represent 21.6 percent of all J.D. students. 
• While there was a .9 percent increase in the number of minorities enrolled as first-year students, from 10,898 to 10,992, as a proportion of the first-year class they dropped from 22.4 percent to 22.3 percent.

Across this great country, roughly 50,000 people decided to plunk down tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of dollars to go into an overcrowded profession that has one of the highest rates of depression and alcohol abuse, and one of the lowest rates of job satisfaction.

As of 2004, there roughly 950,000 attorneys in the United States, according to the State Department.  According to WikiAnswers (citing the ABA without a link), there are 1,116,967 practicing attorneys.  This article (again, citing the ABA without link) states that in 1995 there were 896,000 attorneys.  So in the course of 13 years, there number of attorneys has risen by roughly 200,000 and some change.  During that same time, the population of the United States has risen by roughly 40 million.  And I’m not smart enough to figure out of lawyers or the US in general is growing at a faster rate.

Looking the numbers, it would seem that every year, roughly 40,000 fresh faces are dumped unprepared by law schools onto the streets to try to earn enough money to raise the law schools average starting salary for graduates.  Does this country really need 40,000 new lawyers every year?  Granted, the 40,000 number is probably high when you factor in those who take non-lawyer jobs and ones who don’t pass the bar.  Still, that’s a lot of people put into a field that’s arguable overpopulated anyway.

Not really sure how to wrap this up, but I have to.  I guess its just an extension of previous posts where my message is don’t go to law school

What I Didn’t Learn In Law School, Pt 1

I’m pre-emptively labeling this as part one, because things I’ve learned on the job, that I never learned in law school will be revisited again.

Over at The Defense Perspective, Stephen Gustitis had a post about using a polygraph as a method of client control. His reasoning goes, criminal clients often refuse to face the facts, even if the prosecution has a mountain of evidence against them. Since they won’t face reality, the client will insist on a course of action where the only outcome is the client spending time in prison, when they could have taken an offer and received less time or probation. If you give the client a polygraph, there’s two potentially positive outcomes for the attorney. The client passes and you can go to the prosecutor with that tidbit of information. Or, the client fails and will (hopefully) decide to face reality.

Where am I going with this? Client control. Extremely important and a subject that was never covered during my law school education. Even in my “practical law” classes when we’d have to roll-play being a client, no one was even the client who wouldn’t take the great deal you worked out for him. Or the client with mental illness. Or the client that just flat out ignores you. Everyone would behave like an attorney talking to another attorney. That’s not the fault of the students, they don’t know how else to behave.

My first experience with an out of control client came at my first trial. Up until then, pretty much all my clients just wanted me to get them a deal. The ones that were trouble, my boss would handle, since he has a lot more experience than I do. But, this one was a misdemeanor, and should have been a pretty easy case for the defense. The first time meeting the defendant was right after I was appointed to him. I asked him how he wanted to handle the case, if he wanted me to work something out with the County Attorney or if we needed to set it for trial. His response was something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hear nothing about a deal, we’re taking this thing to trial.” He probably also used a fair amount of profanity for that one sentence as well.

Whenever I’d meet with or talk to the defendant, we’ll call him Billy, he tended to have a lot of trouble staying on topic. I’d ask him a question and he’d give me a long rambling answer, and I use the word “answer” in the loosest sense of the word.  It was usually a jumble of semi-coherent thoughts about how the county was out to get him, or how the state of Texas was out to get him, or that I wasn’t doing my job, and so on.  He’d always end his diatribe by saying, “We’ve got to get this information out at trial, so the jury knows the truth.”  I’d repeatedly tell him that we had a very simple, and winnable case, and if we started talking about how the state of Texas is screwing him over, the jury would think we’re trying to bullshit them, and wouldn’t appricate that.  He’d agree with me, and then go right back to ignoring whatever I said.

Quite frankly, I had no idea what to do with this guy.  There was nothing in any of my law school classes that even remotely prepared me for dealing with a guy like this.  Stephen’s above suggestion of giving him a polygraph wouldn’t apply since A) Billy had no means to afford a polygraph; and B) our defense was that he had legal authority to commit the acts, not that he didn’t do it.  I couldn’t remind him that going to trial costs extra, since he was a court appointee.  In short, I was stuck.  All I could do was keep telling him that its very easy to talk your way into jail.

The trial was an unmitigated disaster.  Even though the prosecutor, the judge, and my fiancee said I did a good job, I felt like I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Billy took the stand, with my blessing.  I told him to testify for two reasons.  First off, he had been waiting five months to tell his side of the story.  There was no way in hell he wasn’t going to get up there and testify about how the county, the judge, the prosecutor, and the great state of Texas were out to get him.  This was going to be his moment in the sun.  It was like Festivus came early for him, he got to air all his grievances.  After the prosecutor got done with Billy, I just wanted to lay my head on the table and wave the white flag.  The second reason I told him to testify was that we’d get two extra defenses if he took the stand.  If I had to do it again, I’d probably tell him not to take the stand, but I know he wouldn’t listen to me.

Was there anything I could have done to keep Billy under control?   I’m not entirely sure.  But I do know that law school does a poor job of preparing people for difficult clients.  I know the rebuttal.  You’re a criminal defense attorney in a rural county.  You’re not exactly dealing with the best and the brightest who are going to listen.  And that’s true, but a class on client management would be very beneficial to new attorneys.

Crusade

The courts are closed today with the observance of Dr. King’s birthday, and since I don’t have any timebombs going off this week, I decided to take the day off. And so the day wouldn’t be completely unproductive, I figured I’d clean out my email, namely sort through all the emails that the ABA and the Texas Bar send me. I figure I’m safe ignoring those, I’m sure if I was in trouble with the Texas Bar, they’d send me a letter, or a subpoena.

In one of the emails, there’s a link to a story about Kristen Wolf, a Boston University law graduate who is on a one-woman crusade to discourage people from going to law school. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, Ms. Wolf said:

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.

To Ms. Wolf, I say, preach on!

While none of the criminal defense blawgs I read mentioned this story, Susan Cartier Liebel talks about it in her incredibly informative Build A Solo Practice blog. Ms. Liebel notes that Ms. Wolf didn’t go to law school because she felt a real calling to be a lawyer. Instead she went because she had a liberal arts degree, no apparent job prospects where she could put that degree to use, and had figured that she would make a decent living being a lawyer. Turns out, those starting six-figure salaries are reserved for a precious few, and Ms. Wolf wasn’t one of them and is currently not working in the legal field.

Ms. Wolf’s story sound all too familiar. Law school is filled with people who probably shouldn’t be there. Not because they’re not smart enough, or talented enough, but because they really have no desire to be there or be lawyers. Heck, I probably fall into that category. I went to law school for the same reasons Ms. Wolf talks about in her interview. I had a graduated from college and had a liberal arts degree, the economy was in the tank, the job I had unloading trucks was a dead end. Why not go to law school?

Let’s face it, law school isn’t fun. A relative once asked me what law school was like, and I told him to picture the worst people he knew arguing over the most pointless topics he could think of. My school hasn’t invited me back as a guest speaker for some strange reason. You’re spending a lot of money to get that degree, plus three years of your life. And what happens at the end? Chances are you don’t have that job making six figures lined up for you. Then you realize that those 10 people from your class that are going to make 100K or so have skewed the average starting salary high, and there’s no way you’re even going to earn 60K (or whatever your law school claims for a average starting salary).

Wrapping this up, I really only agree to a certain extent with Ms. Wolf’s cause. Talking people out of going to law school isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than to give me less competition. But not everyone who wants to go should be dissuaded. Only those who plan on using law school as a way to escape the real world for three more years. There will always be room for another good, passionate, and committed lawyer.