So you want to be a lawyer? Are you sure about that?

Looks like you don't have to worry
about that $275K, friend

"The grunt work in corporate litigation is being farmed out to contract attorneys. More and more law school graduates, steeped in student-loan debt, are settling for this unsteady, monotonous work for surprisingly low pay. WSJ's Vanessa O'Connell and Jason Bellini report."

-- blurb for the WSJ article
"Lawyers Settle . . . for Temp Jobs"

by Ken

A colleague smuggled this out from behind the WSJ paywall, and I'm still shaking my head over it.

I know, I know, we all have automatic responses to bad news for lawyers. (All of us who aren't lawyers, I mean.) "Serves 'em right!" "Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to become lawyers!" Still, I can't help thinking there's something wrong here, maybe something deeply wrong.

Lawyers Settle... for Temp Jobs
As clients seek to cut costs, the field of 'contract' attorneys expands

By VANESSA O'CONNELL

When he decided to become a lawyer, Jose Aponte followed a familiar path: He took the LSAT, spent more than $100,000 on law school, took a grueling bar exam and paid for continuing education.

But the work the 37-year-old New York lawyer, a graduate of American University's Washington College of Law, is getting is a far cry from the stable, lucrative type he originally envisioned.

Mr. Aponte is part of a growing field of itinerant "contract" attorneys who move from job to job, getting paid by the hour, largely to review documents for law firms and corporate clients. These short-term jobs, which can pay as little as $15 an hour, have increasingly become a fixture in the $100 billion global corporate legal industry as law firms and clients seek to lower their costs.

This new "third tier" of the legal world illustrates the commoditization of the legal profession, which once offered most new entrants access to prestige and power, as well as a professional lifestyle. It also shows how post-recession belt-tightening is permanently altering some professions.

For 10 to 12 hours a day—and sometimes during graveyard shifts—contract attorneys such as Mr. Aponte sit silently in a big room, at rows of computer monitors. Each lawyer reads thousands of documents online and must quickly "code" every one according to its relevance in litigation or an investigation.

Supervisors discourage talking and breaks are limited. The computer systems count each lawyer's speed. Some law firms use their own contract attorneys, while others hire them through third-party agencies.

The increasing reliance on temporary workers comes as the industry continues to struggle from a downturn that has produced a glut of unemployed U.S. lawyers, including crops of indebted recent law school graduates. About 10% of all private practice jobs accepted by last year's law school graduates were reported as temporary, a steady increase from 5.4% in 2007, according to the National Association for Law Placement.

Responses to a June survey of top legal officers, conducted for The Wall Street Journal by the Association of Corporate Counsel, a bar association for in-house counsel:

Approximately 34% of 876 respondents said their companies had used non-staff "contract" attorneys in the previous fiscal year.

The most common reason for their use was given as "project cost management," by 29% of those respondents using contract attorneys. About 26% said they were looking "to satisfy the need for a specific skillset." Another 20% said their use was the result of "cost management" by a law firm.

About 35% of 319 respondents said their companies typically paid more than $80 an hour for document review work by contract attorneys; 18% said they paid less than $40 an hour.

Source: Association of Corporate Counsel/WSJ Contract Attorney Use Survey

To make a living, Mr. Aponte, who works for a variety of agencies, must scramble for the next gig. He has worked for as little as $33 an hour and has endured up to seven months' unemployment. The duration of a job is unpredictable. "A case can settle at any time. One night they'll call you, and the next day the project ends," he says.

A typical contract lawyer with an average flow of work can make $40,000 to $50,000 annually, according to Veronica Maldonado, a contract attorney in Chicago who recently started a website for contract lawyers. That compares with an average starting salary of $160,000 for associates—who may also get bonuses of $10,000 or more annually— at some of the big corporate law firms in New York.

Temporary legal staffing in the U.S. is projected to increase by 25% cumulatively over the next two years, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, a temp-industry tracking group. The hourly rates that temp agencies charge for contract attorneys are just a fraction of what a first-year associate at a big law firm typically bills per hour.

Large firms are billing $325 to $550 for an hour's work this year by freshman associates, while smaller firms bill them as low as $100, according to research firm Valeo Partners. Temp staffing agencies, in contrast, might bill around $50 an hour or less for document review work by contract attorneys. . . .

Sure, every profession is subject to redefinition, even extinction, as the world changes. But I don't think that's really what's happening here, or at least not entirely. It seems more a part of a process of social stratification which is spreading into more and more areas of our lives. I suppose it counts for something that it's not based on accident of birth, like the old forms of aristocracy, but it's sure as heck not based on merit either. I'm sorry, you can't tell me that these lawyers reduced to sweatshop-style piecework are less skilled than the people exploiting them. No, the new class stratification is based, as far as I can tell, on: money, connections, and chutzpah.

So, we now have a permanent underclass of lawyers, a piecework commodity, an unexpected (to me, anyway) expansion of the working model of a transformed workforce envisioned by the economic elites who have been so busy remaking the world economy into their private stomping ground, where they get to do the stomping and the rest of us are the ground.

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