Comments on: The Contract Lawyer Conundrum

By: Marshall R. Isaacs

Marshall R. Isaacs — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:44:55 +0000

Excuse me for being a sycophant, Carolyn, but I love this post. Many of my colleagues have gone the contract lawyering route. It is especially popular here in New York City with the abundance of mega-firms.
My suggestion to new lawyers: DON’T DO IT. Contract work is crack cocaine for attorneys.
Picture if you will: Barely admitted, the budding lawyer suddenly finds herself making $50 per hour (maybe it’s more these days?). Plus free lunch and dinner and a limo ride home!
Young lawyer sours on poring over boxes of meaningless documents and takes a job at a two-attorney personal injury firm. Now lawyer gets yelled at daily for unwittingly botching real cases and can no longer afford her chic Manhattan one-bedroom or any apartment in the outer boroughs, for that matter. Lawyer returns to contracting. Lawyer sighs in relief: Life is back to normal and she never has to worry about getting yelled at, so long as she keeps going through those boxes.
No less than 20 of my colleagues have repeated this experience. Only one managed to finagle a full-time position. The cold-turkey effect was so powerful, many of these quit law altogether.
Law practice is wonderfully rich, rewarding, challenging and enlightening. Unfortunately, those rewards do not come overnight.
If offered a position, pretend someone was handing you a pipe full of white powder. Just say no.

By: Melody Kramer

Melody Kramer — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:39:26 +0000

“Contract lawyering” and “freelance lawyering” are not the same thing. The fundamental difference is the identity of your employer. Working for yourself is far superior in the long run than working for someone else because you are the only one that will keep your best interests at heart.
Law firms and staffing agencies keep young lawyers so overworked and overtired that the lawyer never gets the time to sit up and take notice of the fact that nobody is looking out for their longterm best interest. They just want to wring as many billable hours out of them as possible, and then discard them by the wayside.
By freelancing, however, you become your own boss and determine your own working conditions. I have done this for years and would never turn back. I currently have a hybrid practice of solo practice (collaborating with other solos so we can work on more complex litigation) and periodically doing freelance work for other attorneys.

By: Contract Attorney Kimberly Alderman

Contract Attorney Kimberly Alderman — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:23:13 +0000

I just don't get it. I don't get this mentality that "they" are deciding what a contract lawyer is or what the working conditions are. The only "grim realities" in life are the ones that people allow themselves to become subject to. To the extent that people feel oppressed by their debt, that debt is the known consequences of their choices (in the case of student loans, the choice to go to a better school than one that would have been more affordable.) I get emails all the time from attorneys who are interested in entering into contract work, but once I start to tell them *how* to do it (marketing, paying for Lexis or Westlaw, setting up an actual firm), many quickly fall off, dissuaded that the amount of effort it takes to run a contract lawyering firm is comparable to that required to run *any* solo firm. For those that want contract lawyering to be something "easier", requiring less investment than setting up a solo firm, then staffing work and doc review really is the only option. There is only one way to be richly rewarded in this life, and that is to take charge of it, find ways to overcome obstacles, and seize your empire. But this applies to lawyers, bakers, and jugglers alike, and for those that choose to focus on the negative, that's exactly what life will give you right back. My own comments on the same article that Lisa comments on are can be found at http://contractattorneys.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/back-in-action-and-sorting-through-the-rubble/

By: Cliff Tuttle

Cliff Tuttle — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:17:44 +0000

Contract lawyering was a great idea that was turned into a grim reality. Today there are a cadre of professional contract lawyers who are not given the time flexibility necessary to keep even a modest practice going. Strangely, legal knowledge and experience are considered a negative in this world, except experience using document review software packages, the gist of which can be learned in about 15 minutes. This experience can be a wrong turn for a new lawyer who hasn’t had an opportunity to learn basic lawyering skills. But for a mid-career lawyer who doesn’t stay too long, it can be a useful introduction to the brave new world of electronic discovery.
CLT