Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of . . . pseudonyms and a small blog.
Greetings. I am The Monk, founder and primary author of The Key Monk a small politics-and-sports blog I started in April and which my old high school buddy and I now work on in our spare time.
I am a lawyer in Texas who has run the law firm private practice gamut: large general practice firm to medium-size insurance defense firm (where I was on the frontlines in the asbestos wars) to a small commercial litigation boutique. No, I haven’t seen it all, but I’ve seen a lot. I now practice primarily appellate litigation, which I prefer because it is analytical and there’s no discovery in appellate litigation. I have also worked as a prosecutor in North Carolina, a pro bono lawyer in Boston and was a journalist of sorts as the sports editor and advertising manager of my college newspaper.
The best work I’ve done as a lawyer is easy to select: my pro bono work for the Shelter Legal Services Foundation (formerly the Veterans Legal Services Project) — a foundation dedicated to providing legal help to homeless and indigent veterans, battered women and other people in the Boston area who cannot afford most legal services.
Hopefully I can bring some perspective as a practicing attorney who has worked in a variety of legal settings. I look forward to contributing to Overlawyered.com — long one of my bookmarks (sycophancy alert!) — for the next week.
For a first entry: how about one of the reasons lawyers are often disdained — their big salaries. In addition to big salaries, they get big bonuses — $30-75,000 at some of the large New York firms. To make that worse, put those numbers in context.
The $30,000 bonus paid to some first-year associates in New York who are just receiving notice that they (or about 70-75% of them) passed the bar exam. And unless things have changed since I passed the NY bar, these “baby lawyers” do not get admitted to the bar until February or March because NY does background checks after it scores the exam because it has so many applicants that pre-bar background checks would be prohibitively expensive (when I took the test in July ’95, more than 7,000 sat for the bar and about 5,000 passed). Thus, these baby lawyers may not even be admitted bar members yet.
First-year associates are ignorant, as I know from personal experience. They have often barely started (often beginning their work in September or October) and many receive stipends while studying for the bar exam in July. And now in NY they’re getting more than the per capita GDP of Western Europe as a Christmas bonus. Who pays for those super bonuses? Clients. Whose money pays the clients’ bills? End users of the clients’ business — such as consumers. Happy Holidays!
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