[Podcast] Why the law sucks (Part 1)

“… be a doctor or a lawyer”

NOT everyone can be a doctor, yet anyone with a pulse can get into law school. There are NO prerequisites an applicant is required to take as an undergraduate, and the acceptance rate for law schools is now something like 80%. THERE ISN’T EVEN AN INTERVIEW !!!!!! As a result of this very low bar for applicants, law schools are infested with ill-prepared students, and dare I say most of them shouldn’t even be there.

Also, consider how law school education relies heavily on large sized classes w/ only ONE stupid exam at the end of the semester (making life easy for LAZY professors). Yes, there is a writing class and a handful of seminars, but these are rare.

In fact, there is very little writing that actually gets done in law school–not many research papers, mock trials, debates, one-on-one mentoring or even clinics. It’s all really just large lecture classes where the professor occasionally calls on you–thus, pretending to teach in the Socratic method.

So, where is the feedback? How can a law student actually improve? Learn? Be mentored?

Answer: they don’t. Law school is NOT about training future lawyers. It’s all about extracting funds from students in the most cost-effective way possible (and making life easy for LAZY professors).

A handful of law school graduates will get into good firms, and hopefully be mentored properly. The majority, however, are shoved-out into the workforce with very few marketable skills and a whole lot of debt.

Thus: “… you start to see a lot of baseless suits coming”

It is important to note that these suits were more often than not a shady attempt to extract funds from insurance companies via settlement agreements (plaintiff’s side) and over-billing (defendant’s side).

Anecdotally, I was once in a settlement conference with a plaintiff’s attorney that was unable to obtain a settlement from a certain defendant’s insurance carrier. Thus, they (the plaintiff’s attorney) threaten us (the defendant’s attorneys) by saying “we will NOT sue your client any longer.”

At that moment I realized what a scam it all is. Plaintiffs’ attorneys and defendants’ attorneys work together to scam insurance carriers. This is the very embodiment of unethical, yet it’s pervasive in the legal sector. Whole specialties of law were made possible by this scam.

You mention Donald Trump. Well, if you had listened closely to him during the Presidential campaign, you may have caught him saying in regards to the Trump University lawsuits that he never settles cases. Trump knew what insurance companies eventually figured out (after 20+ years): if you do NOT settle the lawsuit, plaintiffs won’t sue you in such large numbers.

Therefore, we now have insurance carriers reluctant to sue, as well as the advent of cost-effective ADR. Thus, fewer lawyers are needed in the workforce.

Bottom Line: law sucks not only because it is riddled with scams, but it is a toxic profession that eventually killed itself.