
Why I Turned Down $160,000 - aaronbrethorst
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/28516050984/why-i-turned-down-160-000
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endtime
Wow, this is the wordiest I've ever seen someone be about their STAT-101
material.

Also, "Second, while most startups do not succeed, I have reason to believe
that this one—Amicus Labs—will succeed." totally fails to account for the fact
that this is true of everyone with a failed startup. No one starts a company
thinking it's going to fail.

~~~
yitchelle
Totally agree - I don't know why this was explicitly stated. I mean, how many
founders would do a startup in a serious manner with a vision for failure?
Every founder _will_ believe that they startup will succeed.

~~~
davidw
It would make for good parody material:

"You've heard of 'fail fast', right? We're taking it to the next level: failed
out of the starting gate!". Something like that.

~~~
mgkimsal
A whole ecosystem of startup-support companies built around helping you fail
even faster would be good to have in the parody. "site sinker", "business
buster", etc (but of course with more clever web 2.0 names).

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henrybaxter
It's not clear to me whether the author has much experience actually working
with lawyers, in law firms or otherwise. It would seem that experience, even a
few years, would vastly improve the odds of building successful products and
services.

~~~
rdl
He probably realizes that a few years of making 160-200k/yr will make dropping
down to a startup salary afterward a lot harder, particularly with parents,
girlfriend, etc.

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xiaoma
According to what I've read, the current employment prospects for law school
grads in the US are the worst they've _ever_ been. Considering that law
students as a whole were far stronger undergrads than their peers, a nearly
15% unemployment rate is pretty brutal.

[http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-
Law/1...](http://chronicle.com/article/Unemployment-Among-Recent-Law/132189/)

~~~
repsilat
And at the same time legal services are still horrifyingly expensive. This is
partly because law students have unreasonable amounts of debt. Somehow there's
too much supply keeping jobs scarce and too much demand keeping prices high.

There are a couple of factors behind this. One is the accreditation process
law schools need to go through. It's backed by all of the major schools
(because it protects their interests), but it's pretty expensive to get
accredited.

Another point is the cultural position the legal profession has. The old
cliche of money-grubbing soulless lawyers has died down somewhat - if you have
a bad experience with a lawyer it will resurface, but most of the time when
someone says they're a lawyer (at least for me) the immediate associations are
professionalism and prestige. Add to that the fact that it's about the only
"safe bet" career for graduates in the humanities and there's an obvious glut
of labour.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but think I part of it has to be making
starting up a new legal practice a more attractive and more approachable
option.

~~~
rayiner
> And at the same time legal services are still horrifyingly expensive. This
> is partly because law students have unreasonable amounts of debt. Somehow
> there's too much supply keeping jobs scarce and too much demand keeping
> prices high.

Price is the equilibrium of supply and demand. Cost (the expense of educating
each student at an accredited school) doesn't influence the price.

The problem is that people are defining "supply" incorrectly. Firms don't want
to hire just any of the 45,000 law students. They want to hire one of the
1,000 Harvard, Yale, or Stanford students, and then depending on the market
one of the 4,000 students at the top regional schools like Duke or U Chicago.
The enrollment at these top schools has grown only very slowly over the last
century.

The price of an associate at a big NYC firm is determined b how much it costs
a top Columbia graduate to go to that firm as opposed to a competing firm.
Associate salaries thus exploded in the 2000's as the demand for legal
services far outstripped the enrollment at schools like Columbia, while they
have effectively been cut substantially (due to reduced bonuses) in the last 5
years as the demand has dropped while enrollments have stayed constant.

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inthewoods
Given that most law grads I know are buried in debt and thus really can't
think about joining a start-up, I find myself wondering whether the author is
unique in that he has no debt and therefore has this choice in the first
place. For most people in this position, I would argue, there isn't much of a
choice.

He does raise good points about raising a family - start-ups can definitely
give you more flexibility. But, on the other hand, going home and telling your
wife that the start-up you joined has failed and you're out of a job isn't
easy. Granted, that can happen at any job.

This post will likely come off as way too negative, but I certainly do wish
him well in his path - the legal profession could certainly use the overall.

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kamakazizuru
"In economic terms, the worst outcome (forever making $40,000 while trying to
“fight the good fight” while trying to stay on top any of various loan
forgiveness programs) can be pretty brutal."

Interesting - when did making 40k a year become "brutal" ? There's people
doing fine on much less. Sounds more like a case of "hey I made a big scary
decision - so now I'm going to blog about it so that people can validate my
decision for me. In the process I'm also going to point out how even in the
worst case I'd be better off than 75% of the worlds population is. ".. come
on...

~~~
milesskorpen
I think 40K could be pretty brutal when you've given up years of potential
wages for law school to take on 150-200k of debt. And then most of your
classmates are making at least 4-5x your income.

A lot of studies have found people's perception of wealth is relative, right?
Making 25% what your pee/friends make would really suck.

~~~
greedo
It also depends on location. $40K in the midwest is livable, while on either
coast, not so much.

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jacabado
Not apropos your post, but slightly relevant.

After having some involuntary contact with law, I found that I love to read
laws and jurisdiction. I'm finishing my MsC in computer engineering and would
love to try to pursue a career that would intersect technology and law. I've
just found a LLM, a masters in Law, that doesn't requires a Law degree in the
University of Edinburgh, they even have the possibility for distance learning.
([http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/teaching/llm/llminnovationtechn...](http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/teaching/llm/llminnovationtechnology/))

Can you tell me what should I expect to do with such degree? I was thinking
something like paralegal work on technology related cases.

Besides that, what could I do to prepare myself before entering the LLM? I'm
almost completely ignorant on most Law concepts/theory.

Thanks, and good luck for your startup. I had thought of something like that
but for the government decrees, to increase state transparency.

~~~
grabeh
I'm sure plenty of firms would be interested in a candidate who has a good
grasp of technical concepts so why not look to convert to become a lawyer by
applying for training contracts with law firms? Many firms like candidates who
have done a first degree and will fund you to do the conversion course. It's
obviously a very competitive space but then due to the excess of law grads, so
is the paralegal space.

Your course provider is best placed to advise on some good introductory texts
to the subject you are studying. Some general introductory books along the
lines of 'How to study law' may be of interest however.

Speaking as a lawyer, many of the legal concepts you will come across are
relatively straightforward, it is the subsequent process of applying them to
the facts where problems arise, but if you have a logical mind (which is
likely to be the case coming from a computer engineering background) then you
should be ok.

------
hanskuder
"Generally speaking, legal practice is fairly inefficient and anti-
technological. My cofounders and I are not the first to notice; there is a
veritable graveyard of failed legal technology companies."

The issue, in my opinion, is that law firms have a direct incentive to be
inefficient and bill more hours. Why would a firm invest in time-saving
technology when it will literally mean sending smaller bills to clients? The
firm would have to raise their rates or work even harder to drum up business
in order to maintain revenue.

This is a really unfortunate situation, but it's reality. I hope Amicus Labs
has a strategy to address this.

~~~
rayiner
To be fair, the author is a fresh law school graduate. What does he know about
whether legal practice is inefficient or not?

I was a summer associate at a large New York law firm, and the level of
technology was fairly typical for corporate America. We had a centralized
document management system that integrated version control and generation of
deltas. We had a centralized, searchable repository of every document
generated for every client, which we could use to avoid duplicating effort
when doing new work. We did everything via Blackberry e-mail and Outlook
calendaring.

Beyond the generic "you can always have better document management" I'm not
sure what else there was to do. The major legal research databases (Westlaw
and Nexis) have god-awful interfaces, but there isn't much law firms can do
about that, since there is a huge barrier to entry in that market (the
proprietary databases).

The fundamental problem is that nearly everything you do for a client is a
one-off. It's 90% similar to what you've done for a previous client, but that
remaining 10% is not very amenable to technological automation. Can you write
some software that will cross-reference an SEC disclosure against the client's
big pile of haphazardly-assembled internal documentation, which are handed
over in God-knows how many formats? If so, then you're going to make some
serious money. If not, then well that's how that graveyard of failed legal
technology companies builds up.

The big recent advance in legal technology has been software to speed up
document review, which leverages document search technology that has really
improved (and obsoleted a large number of discovery attorneys in the process).
Law firms have been quick to embrace such software, as well as services such
as "in-sourced" discovery centers in places like West Virginia. To date, legal
technology hasn't advanced much beyond that, largely because computer
technology for working with documents hasn't evolved much beyond search.

------
grabeh
"Mapping the legal genome" brings to mind visualisation of case law in diagram
form so dependent on search terms you could see a visualisation of relevant
cases incorporating the precedent cases and then below them cases which have
relied on them.

As a lawyer, this would be interesting for me to see and would definitely be
more interesting and helpful than current search methods from which it isn't
immediately clear the hierarchy of case law is.

Whether this is an idea which would be attractive enough to monetise
successfully is another question entirely...

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ank286
This person hasn't experienced the hopelessness and defeat that comes with a
failed idea. Getting a summer associate position that brings about a 160k job
is "winning" the protocol for law school success. There is no such protocol
path for startups. Also, Amicus Labs, which maps Legal Genome, better have a
good plan for attacking the high barrier of entry into these BigLaw firms.

------
veyron
To be honest, 160K isn't that much.

Many of my friends, some just graduated in Law and others starting in other
fields, are making more than that. Especially in NYC. Many hedge funds, for
example, are still shelling out 300K+ salary for people 2-3 years out
(considering you had to go through law school its apples to apples)

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antidaily
_But my team and I expect our venture to prove even more lucrative._

Best of luck.

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zobzu
"practicing law is all about making money" Okay

~~~
its_so_on
Where did you find that quote? (Or are you ironically summarizing / was the
article changed?)

The article says "Practicing law is safe and probably fairly lucrative" and
"Practicing law is an honorable profession. Indeed, I think it’s probably one
of the more interesting professions there is."

~~~
zobzu
its what i got from reading the article, ie my own summary i probably wouldn't
call it honorable. law is based on honorable concepts. but.. past that, stuff
has been corrupted beyond recognition

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rorrr
Contrary to the impression media and movies have created, lawyers get paid
VERY LOW salaries now, at least in NY. We have overproduced so many lawyer
graduates who thought they would be making 100K+ at their first job, it's just
insane.

Just start browsing craigslist or monster listings, it's very revealing.

~~~
MayanAstronaut
How did this guy get a 160k base then?

~~~
rayiner
Legal salaries are bi-modal. You either work at a big firm paying the market
big-firm rate ($160k+ bonus in NYC, Chicago, etc) or you work at a small firm
making $45-70k.

There are some weird market dynamics in the legal field. Law firms create an
artificial shortage of lawyers, and thus a corresponding explosion in
associate salaries, because they refuse to hire substantial amounts outside
the top 15 schools or so. They'll hire anyone at Stanford and most people at
Duke, but only the very top of the class at say U Washington.

~~~
GFKjunior
Exactly, I know a Columbia law grad who works in NYC. His firm hires nothing
but Harvard, Columbia, and Yale grads.

He said that it's not because a Berkeley or Texas grad isn't just as good it's
because they have a certain culture and in case one of the new hires messes up
a case no one wants to be the partner who gave that "public school kid" a
chance and lost the firm a lot of money and prestige.

~~~
rayiner
Law is also a pretty insular and regionalistic field. E.g. at one of the most
selective firms in the country (Susman Godfrey in Texas), a UT Austin grad has
a much better chance than a Columbia grad. They think UT = Harvard down there.

It's all very strange. In most fields such blatant regionalistic favoritism
isn't so encouraged.

~~~
btilly
In most fields the rules do not vary so much by state and to a lesser extent a
small collection of states. But in law your state law matters, and even on
federal law the precedents can vary according to which circuit you are in.

