
Are Lawyers Getting Dumber? - skunkwerks
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-08-20/are-lawyers-getting-dumber-
======
graeme
Here are the stats for Brooklyn, the school cited in the article:
[http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/](http://www.lstscorereports.com/schools/brooklyn/)

The school has a total unemployment rate of 12.3%, and an underemployment

Yes, that unemployment rate is worse than the national average for all
workers. This is typical of law school grads.

Brooklyn's Median LSAT score has dropped 7 points in four years. It's 25th
percentile LSAT score has dropped 9 points in four years, from 162 to 153.

Those are massive drops. I work in the LSAT field. At 162, students will avoid
making mistakes in formal logic. E.g. "All cats have tails" can be drawn as C
--> T. You can also say "not T" \--> "not C".

At 162, students will almost always get this right, even with harder
sentences. At 153, students will repeatedly make logical mistakes and come up
with things like Tail --> Cat.

(They wouldn't make that error on a simple sentence, but they would with
different subject matter)

\------------

Post-2008, legal employment went south, and law school tuition costs soared.
To study law now you're looking at $200,000 in debt.

So most smart students avoid law school unless they get a full ride
scholarship to a T14 school.

Meaning that a larger and larger portion of remaining students are....less
analytically capable, to put it gently.

\----------

People ask: if there's a glut of lawyers, why are legal services not getting
cheaper. But there's a certain minimum standard you need in a lawyer.

A bad lawyer can do a LOT of damage, and the damage won't show up for years
down the road.

~~~
supercanuck
What does the tilde mean in your Cat/Tail example?

~~~
graeme
Oops, that was a convention from LSAT forums. It means "not". I changed the
comment to just use "not" instead because it's clearer here, thanks.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Interestingly, ~ for logical negation is also a convention in C, which I think
is more widely known among HN users. I would have predicted (wrongly,
obviously) that the LSAT might use the symbol from logic, ¬. Any idea how they
chose the tilde?

~~~
deanmen
~ on the US keyboard is in the same location as ¬ on the UK keyboard, and ~ is
in ASCII. I have seen both in math books, but ~ is even used in some books
which were printed before computers.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Hmm, according to the wikipedia article on ~, it's the original negation
symbol in logic, and "Modern use has been replacing the tilde with the
negation symbol (¬) for this purpose, to avoid confusion with equivalence
relations."

I wonder when that started.

------
ergothus
My (now) ex-wife was a law student graduating in 2002. IIRC, that year had far
more students than jobs, and the rumors from 2003 (from other friends in the
school) were even worse, so I think the job situation predates the 2008 wall
street issues.

I've often wondered about the disconnect: How do we have too many lawyers, and
yet legal services are still too expensive? To a degree, there IS a correction
underway - prepaid legal services are far more common than they were. In
another way, the burden new grads face (massive debt, limited job market,
basically no employment during law school) means that many people choose NOT
to pursue employment as actual lawyers, so the supply of law school students
!== supply of lawyers.

~~~
jsprogrammer
A lawyer can only represent a single entity during any given billable unit.
This means the independent lawyer is completely dependent on other individuals
for their entire income which must support all of their outlays.

If a lawyer is entitled to the same work schedule (40 hours/week) as everyone
else, then those 40 billable hours must be paid enough to support those
outlays. That is why legal services are expensive. You are not just paying for
a unit of work, but rather, subsidizing a lawyer's entire lifestyle.

~~~
thfuran
And do lawyers typically incur considerable expenses during the course of
their business? I guess I'm not really sure what outlays you are talking
about.

~~~
ergothus
Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw access are essentially required to look up relevant
cases. (to rile your fairness sensibilities, look into how much of a near-
monopoly is enjoyed over public info there). That can be, IIRC,
thousands/month.

Then, depending on your area of work, you've got issues like software to
record and cite websites, continuing legal education requirements, etc.

Not the most expensive profession in terms of base costs, but not cheap
either.

~~~
cplease
Lawyers who bill their time by the hour also bill their Lexis/Nexis or Westlaw
fees back to their client.

------
will_brown
An actual drop in average scores is probably attributable to a different
phenomenon in law schools. Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to
prepare students for taking the bar exams (which ironically has very little to
do with the actual practice of law) and there has been a major push back to
curb bar based teaching for a more practical approach so instead of teaching
how to pass the bar they teach how to practice law.

Additionally, the actual score to pass both the State Bars and Multi-State Bar
has generally increased state by state in order to keep the number of licensed
lawyers artificially low. Example, in Florida the passing score is 136 but 10
years ago would have been 131. Those 5 points are not arbitrary they keep a
lot of people out and/or force them to retake the bar at a substantial cost.
Some failure can be attributable to the historical increases in the passing
score, but not in significant drops in average score.

~~~
lbaskin
> "Traditionally, law schools would teach classes to prepare students for
> taking the bar exams"

Really? When and where? In fact, the opposite is true. Traditionally, law
school classes have little to no relation to the actual bar exam (or to the
actual practice of law, for that matter - unless you do constitutional
appellate litigation).

In recent years, some (many?) school have begun teaching to the bar, so to
speak - so as to raise their bar passage rate. This has happened primarily
post-crash (and the resultant contraction in the market of high-paying legal
jobs), to (1) help their students look somewhat more marketable and (2) just
as important to them, make the schools look better (both to prospective
students and prospective employers).

Subsequently, "here has been a major push back to curb bar based teaching."
But I don't think the same people who disapprove of teaching to the bar are
those behind the movement to teach more real lawyering (workshops, etc.) - I
think those who dislike the trend are professors and other legal academics who
refuse to admit that they are teachers in (what should be) a vocational school
- not philosophers.

All too many law professors are wannabe PhD's of economics, policy and/or
philosophy who believe they missed their true calling.

------
mindslight
(spoiler/answer warning for those who haven't yet taken the test at the end)

HN-pertintent question on #8 -

The test question describes a scenario in which a businessman's location is
broadcast on TV against his wishes. The possible answers for why he doesn't
have a claim are "because he did not suffer harm" and "because it was
newsworthy".

Meanwhile, given the current trends of (face recognition, phone cameras, wifi
tracking, license plate readers, and even credit bureaus themselves) I would
have expected the actual answer to be closer to "because the TV station can
record and broadcast whatever the fuck they want" (phrased more appropriately
for a bar exam, of course). At least this seems to be the general principle
referenced whenever private sector mass surveillance is discussed.

Each of these activities does have its own confounding factors
(commercial/non, business relationships, governmental support, public/private
broadcast), but essentially creates a similar situation where an individual is
broadcast against their wishes, and whether their activities are _newsworthy_
is questionable. And the only goal of much private surveillance is to cause
financial harm to the surveilled.

What exactly gives? The only plausible resolution I've thought of is that
since the case law is not settled, these two opposing concepts are actually
fighting and it's not as cut and dry as we think (which would imply that
stating it as settled is supporting anti-privacy). But I'm interested in any
other explanation.

~~~
cbr
Not a lawyer: in this case it was newsworthy, and out of the applicable
defences that's the strongest.

~~~
mindslight
It's a stronger (sounds better) defense if it holds up, but it's also
rebuttable.

My question is not about whether this answer is the right choice, but about
the creation of the answers. Bar exams focus on abstract concepts, so if the
general lack of privacy in public spaces is such a thing, I would have
expected it there.

------
eggoa
Average LSAT scores took a dive for class of '14 too. The schools lowered
standards circa 2011 as fewer students applied. Three years later they
graduate and, yeah, their scores are lower on average.

------
Cacti
There are plenty of dumb lawyers out there that passed the Bar just fine. What
it sound like is that the law schools have lowered their standards to keep
admissions high to compensate for the lower applicant numbers, with pretty
much the results you'd expect. And that we could see this coming by examining
admission rates and last scores three years previous.

------
LoSboccacc
Statistically speaking the ones who didn't pass the exam disn't pass so you'd
need to rerun the whole article and compare the average scoring of those who
pass with the average score of those who are in the profession now.

If you average the score with those that don't pass, you get incomparable
results because you are counting both lawyers and dropouts.

~~~
BlackFly
Yeah, I had a passing comment in that grain as well. At one point the head of
the NCBE (Moeser) is pointing out that the average of the 25th percentile of
LSAT scores was decreasing at the school of her biggest critic.

To me, that screams data mining. The average score of the 25th percentile is a
very strange statistic. Why not use something more conventional like the
median of the entire population? Then you could honestly say: the majority of
people at this school are getting worse. The use of an obscure statistic makes
it seem they went hunting for a statistic to spin a story upon.

~~~
rhino369
One reason might be that according to statisticians the LSAT is only very
correlated to bar passage rate until you get LSAT score of 150+, which is
about the 50%th. Essentially, getting smarter stops helping you pass the bar
after you get to about average. This makes sense because the bar is a minimum
competency test.

So a school having the class drop from 170 to 160 shouldn't have much of an
effect on the passage rate. But if they start letting in a large number low
LSAT scores (below the 150 threshold) you'll really decrease the passage rate.
Even if the median is still the same.

~~~
graeme
Interesting. Do you have data on 150+ being a significant threshold for bar
passage?

I work in the field, it would be good to have a hard number to present to
students.

Anecdotally, I notice a big difference in those who can't break 150 vs. other
students.

------
bayesianhorse
Law school tuition fees rise constantly, without any respect to the market.
Sounds like a recipe for failure. Of course less students enroll, when the
proposition of the 120K loan looks worse and worse.

~~~
graeme
Not just less students. The best students will avoid law school if it costs
200K and has poor prospects.

So the people left will be....the sort of people less likely to pass a bar
exam.

------
xacaxulu
They are getting less in-demand due to the post crisis glut. I know grads from
top schools who still can't find anything other than contract work from time
to time.

------
puppetmaster3
Re: Cost of lawyers, I'd love to try to get H1s. Smart, hardworking.

Why only software engineers?

------
nolepointer
These are probably the same students who asked to be excused from exams
because they were too shaken by the verdicts of certain cases vigorously
reported by the media.

------
rdtsc
On a tangent but, we have self-driving cars, perhaps we should have lawyer
robots as well soon ;-)

Maybe point Watson to all the case history and see what he can do.

It is funny how we read the article yesterday about the "New Aristocrat"
class. Maybe automation will replace the Aristocrat class at some point for a
change...

~~~
monochromatic
Professions that require human judgments will be the last to fall to the
machines. We won't have automated lawyers until we have strong AI.

~~~
TheCapn
Yep. The law isn't necessarily "logical" as one judge can interpret situations
or deem "justice" differently from the next.

~~~
ghaff
Furthermore, as someone I know is fond of saying, the law doesn't compile
cleanly. If you think you've uncovered a loophole that lets you murder someone
in a tiny slice in Idaho ([http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole-
landwhere-cr...](http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole-landwhere-
crimes-cant-be.html)) and no one can do a darned thing about it... well, no,
you almost certainly won't just waltz away untouched while the legal system
shrugs.

------
nikhizzle
This reminds me of the movie "idiocracy", where the protagonist got his law
degree at Costco.

------
wfo
The article paints Moeser as a villian -- she refuses to accept the fact that
their system broke and compromised the integrity of the results on an exam,
and instead insists that the students are just getting dumber, the eternal
complaint of the aging generation, and are getting worse at taking an exam she
declined to ever take herself. It's mind-blowing she is allowed so much power
to shape what American lawyers look like, but this is coming from a profession
that works very hard for 3 years to completely remove moral reasoning from
their repertoire and replace it with bureaucratic rule-following.

~~~
monochromatic
> completely remove moral reasoning from their repertoire and replace it with
> bureaucratic rule-following

Spoken like someone who truly has no idea what lawyering is about.

~~~
wfo
I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law
schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience,
discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them is
like talking to a wall. Something happens to them in law school: they concern
themselves with only what can be argued in court and precedent, probably
because they must in order to do their jobs. I have heard so many different
paraphrases of the quote "right and wrong don't have anything to do with the
law or a courtroom" from so many different lawyers. I can only imagine the
moral hardening that must take place to work in a the kafkaesque legal system
that generates so much horrible injustice every day almost by design and sleep
well at night; the claim of a lack of ability to moral reason is not really an
attack on the character of lawyers, but rather a cry of sympathy for people
doing adapting as they must to survive and still work in the field.

People who inflict enormous amounts of suffering upon others as part of their
jobs (prosecutors, cops, prison guards, criminals, judges) develop these
attitudes as a defense mechanism.

~~~
pdabbadabba
> I have plenty of experience with lawyers who graduated from high-ranked law
> schools. I won't claim to speak for everyone, but at least in my experience,
> discussing moral considerations or moral consequences of the law with them
> is like talking to a wall.

You should find some different people to talk to. This attitude is not only
not the norm among my friends, colleagues, and classmates (virtually all of
whom went to good law schools), this attitude is almost totally unknown to me.

It's true, of course, that lawyers have to understand and accept that legal
outcomes are not always moral outcomes. So it's true that "right and wrong
don't have anything to do with the law or a courtroom" in the narrow sense
that when law and morality conflict, law typically carries the day in court.
But don't mistake this practical understanding for a lack of moral awareness
more broadly.

Believe me, nobody knows better the injustices perpetrated by our legal system
than lawyers. This, after all, is why many people _become_ lawyers.

But also consider that some of the injustices widely believed to be generated
by our legal system (though certainly not all, such as racially-biased mass
incarceration) are, in fact, not injustices but are simply widely
misunderstood. I would say that legal reporting is about on par with science
reporting in terms of the misinformation and half truths that get spread
around.

Also remember that a lot of the injustices widely attributed to the U.S.
judicial system (and here I _am_ talking about mass incarceration) are not
primarily products of the judicial system. They are products of the
legislative system (i.e., Congress), which the judiciary is constitutionally
bound to obey. Lawyers and judges have very few tools to minimize this damage
while also performing the job that our system of government assigns them.

~~~
wfo
To your last point, I would argue the injustices are not misunderstood they
are in fact injustices, and I'm talking about details far beyond racial
discrimination, though I don't mean to minimize the consequences of that.

The vast majority of our cases are settled through plea bargains; this is in
essence a coerced (we must assume false -- if we are to accept innocent until
proven guilty, none of these cases are proved) confession, little different
from in banana republics where your signed confession is required for the
authorities to recall their torture or confinement. Once a prosecutor has you
in his sights your choices are to fight back, demand a trial, and have the
prosecutor throw the book at you and ask for the maximum most extreme
sentence, try to lock you in a cage for years to be repeatedly beaten and
raped and destroy your ability to succeed in society for having the audacity
to demand your rights, or accept the punishment the justice system has decided
to dole out to you with a plea. So we trust prosecutors to only push cases
they truly believe are just. But the promotion scheme for prosecutors is such
that those prosecutors who believe any winnable case is a just one get the
most convictions, and therefore the most power.

And consider juries; as a juror you are instructed (falsely) that you are
required to judge a case simply on the facts and that you must leave your
ability to be a human being and do moral reasoning at the door (hence,
morality has no place in a courtroom -- the jurors, who decide the case, are
explicitly told they may not use it), and lawyers are even legally prevented
from informing the jurors of their rights.

I think you're very right about the source of these problems -- they come from
lawyers in so much as almost all of our legislators are lawyers, trained into
this profession and having gone through all of this before they create laws.
But it's not the trial lawyers or judges who created these issues, and many of
them get into the game in order to make things better. But I think to succeed
in a system requires acceptance of the system; it changes you. I'll concede
that it's likely there are many, many people in the legal profession for whom
my analysis isn't particularly accurate and I'm encouraged by your vigorous
repudiation of my pessimism (I don't want to be right), but I think there's
some truth there to what I'm saying. And I'm not suggesting that there is an
easy solution; the problems are emergent, systemic, and very deep.

