So far, 2015 has been the year of law firm mergers. According to Altman Weil MergerLine, the first six months of 2015 saw the most half-year mergers ever, with 48. One of these mergers was the biggest ever, as global law firm Dentons merged with China’s largest law firm Dacheng to form the largest law firm in the world by attorney head count, with more than 6,500 lawyers in 50 countries.

Even so, law is one of the few industries in which the market is not monopolized by a few top firms. Last year, the 200 highest-grossing law firms in the world earned $115.2 billion, according to data collected by ALM Legal Intelligence, but the global law market is roughly a $600 billion industry. By comparison, the Big Four audit firms Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG audit 99 percent of the companies in the FTSE 100, and 96 percent of the companies in the FTSE 250 Index. As of December 2014, the top four wireless telecommunications carriers in the U.S. controlled approximately 70 percent of the market based on service revenues. The top 25 health insurance companies account for nearly two-thirds of market share.

Restrictive conflict of interest laws, coupled with the notion that law is a national, not international practice, have prevented the legal market from consolidating to the extreme degree of other industries. Furthermore, law firms do not benefit from economies of scale the way firms in other industries do. In fact, bigger firms spend more, not less, on overhead on a per lawyer basis, according to Altman Weil. Law firm strategist Alan Hodgart said that consolidation is happening around types of legal work, rather than across the industry as a whole. For example, only a select few firms can handle the largest M&A deals, but that group cannot get much smaller because eight firms are needed for every major transaction, he said.

When it comes to law firm mergers, bigger is not always better. Altman Weil outlines two questions every law firm should ask itself before considering a merger: first, will the economics of the combined firm be substantially better than the economics of each firm currently? Second, will the firm’s financial indicators improve?

Of the 200 top law firms Altman Weil surveyed in 2005, almost two thirds had merged within the previous two years, and 90 percent of firms indicated that their experience with the merger was “very successful,” or “successful.” So then, law firm mergers are a proven business technique to improve revenues. The challenge is in finding the right fit.

Dentons and Dacheng are still working out the kinks of their merger. Six months after the announcement, Dentons and Dacheng have yet to roll out a joint-name or a combined website. Some of the problems are straightforward: things like translating and standardizing over 4,000 Chinese lawyers’ biographies. Other problems are deeper, stemming from the incorporation of two vastly different legal cultures, which could prove harder than combining teams of engineers, scientists, or doctors. Then there are the radically different rules governing protection of client information and regulations in various industries. It will be interesting to see how the merger turns out, and whether it will positively or negatively affect the recent trend of law firm mergers.

Hyunjae Ham

Hyunjae Ham is a member of the University of Maryland Class of 2015 and a Law Street Media Fellow for the Summer of 2015. Contact Hyunjae at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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I would like to go to law school sometime in the relatively near future. Whenever I tell current lawyers or law school students about my career plans, they tell me one of two things. They either tell me to make sure I take a few years off between undergrad and law school, or they tell me to absolutely not go to law school.

It’s true that having a law degree doesn’t really have the prestige that it used to. As the economy continues to slowly rebuild after the recession, young lawyers are having a difficult time finding employment in their field. Above the Law looked at one of the most recent crops of young lawyers—the class of 2012—only 56% are in full-time, long-term legal employment nine months after their graduation. They are doing slightly better than their predecessors: at the same point last year only 55% of the class of 2011 could report such success. Only about 10-12% of these students are in classic “Big Law” jobs. Furthermore, legal educations are expensive. The cost averages at about $50,000 a year. As a result, it is not unusual for students to graduate with exorbitant debt.

Google “is it worth it to go to law school?”,  you’ll get thousands of results. Every news outlet, blogger, and Internet commentator wants the last word on the law school debate. Now a Chicago attorney is putting his money where his mouth is, literally.

Matt Willens, who heads up the Willens Law Offices in downtown Chicago, is offering a $1000 scholarship to students who chose to pursue a graduate degree in anything that is not law. It seems like he plans to make this a repeat offer for at least the next few years. The firm’s website actually has a page for the scholarship where they outline their motivation behind the incentive program:

“Some of you may be wondering, why would a law firm create a scholarship to dissuade students from practicing law? The answer is simple; we currently do not have enough jobs to be able to effectively train the current number of freshly minted lawyers in our profession. To protect the reputation of our profession, Willens Law Offices has created this scholarship to persuade undergraduates to pursue another graduate degree for a limited time.”

Willens himself commented to the Sacramento Bee:  “the situation has become untenable. Too many of our best and brightest are pursuing a career where there just aren’t any more seats at the table.” The offer is nice, but $1000 is obviously much more of a statement than a generous scholarship. That being said, it could be nice help for a student who is pursuing a non-law degree.

While I understand the logic, I take issue with part of Willens’s idea. While law school is very expensive, so are most other types of graduate programs. While this scholarship is open to any student who chooses a different field over law school, it clearly aims for students who were considering law school and then instead chose another subject. For example, I doubt the Willens Law Office will receive any applications from people who are attending medical school. Students who are passing up law school tend to stick to the humanities, and pursue a graduate degree in something like Political Science, Public Policy, or English. None of these fields necessarily have better career prospects than law. For example, according to the National Science Foundation, among Humanities Ph.D recipients, 43% reported “no definite commitment for employment or postdoctoral study.” People with a Ph.D in a humanities field are doing better than new lawyers, but not by much.

I don’t think the question of “whether or not a legal education is worth it in our current economy?” will be answered anytime soon. Legal education and the legal field as a whole are clearly going through changes, but we don’t know what will happen in the long term. As for me, I still pretty much plan on going to law school—but if anyone wants to offer me a bit more than $1000 to do something else? Well, I’d consider it.

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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Adam Tinworth via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Would You Rather: Law School or $1000? appeared first on Law Street.

About four years ago, one of the professors who gave me recommendations for my applications to law school described the institution to me as “trade school.” I imagine that my professor completed his legal studies quite some time ago (a hunch supported by his shock of white hair), because fewer and fewer legal beagles out there seem to share that assessment these days. Consider, for instance, the American Bar Association’s ongoing Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. The ABA formed the Task Force in the summer of 2012 to ascertain how law schools, and the Association itself, should address recent problems in the economics and the delivery of legal education. In comments submitted for the Task Force’s consideration, legal practitioners have frequently raised the issue of whether law schools presently do a good job of preparing students for legal practice. A consensus seems to be emerging that the answer is no.

As The Economist magazine recently noted, American law schools don’t exactly strive to teach practical legal skills, since firms traditionally train new attorneys themselves. Many in the legal academy believe in principle that the doctrinal approach that law schools generally take is a positive good. Syracuse University law professor Kevin Noble Maillard, for example, has argued that “law school is not a trade school,” that “people go to law school, pay tuition and graduate to become many things: educators, business leaders, politicians and, yes, attorneys,” and that law school “prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers.”

Yet in these belt-tightening times, law firms are increasingly loath to pick up the academy’s slack (if only because clients are getting tired of footing the bill). I, for one, can’t say I blame them. My application referee may not have been quite on the money when he described law school as “trade school,” but more’s the pity. The constant refrain I hear from practicing attorneys is that they learned little or nothing about legal practice in law school, which defies common sense. Lawyering involves a lot of hands-on work that can’t be taught in the abstract, from drafting contracts to persuading clients of the right pleas to enter or claims to file. Given that an increasingly expensive legal education is almost universally required of anyone who wants to enter the profession, it’s only logical that law school should put greater emphasis on practical skills.

Professor Maillard’s position strikes me as rather misguided. He tellingly prefaced his statement with “at the risk of sounding ‘liberal artsy’”—which is exactly the point. There is no logical reason why law schools should consider it their mission to “emphasize educated citizenship.” That goal seems much better suited to undergraduate programs, which in any case cast a much wider net than law schools do and will thus reach more of the societal leaders of tomorrow. Training those leaders to have certain knowledge and to think in certain ways is desirable—but not all such budding public figures go to law school, and American law students have to go to college first anyway. It would make more sense to let them learn “educated citizenship” while earning their bachelor’s degrees and learn how to practice law in law school.

Some schools have already begun getting with the program, establishing practical skills courses and requirements. The ABA’s own Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has received a petition to amend law school accreditation standards. In addition to requiring J.D. students to earn 15 academic credits in experiential courses, the proposal would also require each student to take at least one law clinic or externship in order to graduate. This seems like an eminently wise proposition. Every time I’ve heard a lawyer tell me that he or she didn’t learn anything about legal practice in law school, I’ve wondered, “Didn’t you do any clinics?” Lawyers themselves seem to agree that clinic work is one of the main means by which law students can learn how to be attorneys while still in school. In a 2004 ABA study, lawyers who had been practicing for two or three years rated clinical courses their third most useful law school experience—behind legal jobs during summers and the school years, and ahead of legal writing courses and internships and traditional doctrinal courses.

So if clinics have so much potential to prepare law students for legal practice, then why are so many of them graduating from law school so operationally clueless? After a bit of digging, I found that—as I suspected—clinical training isn’t as widely accessible as it could or should be. According to data from the ABA and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), only 15% of law schools presently require or guarantee legal clinic experience to all students. Yet according to Robert R. Kuehn, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, the same data indicate that 84% of law schools have the resources to offer clinical opportunities to all of their students at little or no additional cost in higher tuition.

So I look favorably on the proposal made by the aforementioned petition submitted to the ABA. Requiring all law students to get at least a taste of what lawyers actually do on the job will help make sure that graduates are ready to do what they are studying to do. It can also help give prospective law school applicants a better idea of what they may be getting themselves into—when they still have a chance to avoid it.

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Featured image courtesy of [walknboston via Wikipedia]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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The world we live in today makes it hard for any twenty-something to find a decent-paying, full-time job. Although we may search and search, many of us retreat back to school, taking on more debt while seeking higher education.

Even so, we have all accepted unpaid internships with the hope that there is a sliver of a chance that we may be hired as a full-time employee. Despite working for free, we expect to be treated along the same lines as any other employee, entitled to certain rights such as lunch breaks, vacation days, and freedom from sexual harassment, right? WRONG!

David Yamada reported that a New York Federal District Court held that an unpaid intern could not bring a sexual harassment claim against her employer, Phoenix Satellite Television US, Inc., under NYC Human Rights Law. The complaint alleges that the plaintiff, Liuhuan Wang sustained injuries as a result of quid pro quo sexual harassment and sexual harassment in the form of a hostile work environment created by her supervisor Zhengzhu Liu.

As a 22-year-old student at Syracuse University, Ms. Lihuan claims that during her four weeks at Phoenix Satellite US, Mr. Liu had almost complete supervisory authority in the New York and D.C. bureaus. Ms. Lihuan’s complaint alleges that Mr. Liu had a history of sexual harassment throughout his employment with Phoenix Satellite and he would prey on female employees just starting their career in America and lure them to his hotel room where he would grope and kiss them, and attempt to have sex with them. He is accused of insinuating that in order to have a successful career, female employees and interns at Phoenix would have to submit to his unwanted sexual desires.

Ms. Lihuan claimed that Mr. Liu had similarly invited her back to his hotel after treating her and several co-workers to lunch when he was in town. After asking her to stay behind to “talk about her job performance,” Mr. Liu guided Ms. Lihuan back to his hotel room, under the guise of an work-related issue, and attempted to grope and kiss her, forcing Ms. Lihuan to push him back and leave the room immediately.

Her grievance is due to the fact that she believes her refusal of Mr. Liu’s sexual advances is the reason she was denied full-time employment. The complaint also mentions that a fellow Syracuse student, Qian Chen, worked for Phoenix and was also sexually propositioned by Mr. Liu. Perhaps Mr. Liu and the people over at Phoenix Satellite need a visit from this guy.

The U.S. District Court judge, Judge Kevin P. Castel, ruled that Ms. Lihuan could not bring a valid claim of sexual harassment under New York City Human Rights Law against her employer because her lack of compensation rendered her unable to meet the employee status required by the statute.

Using federal and NY case law, the district court determine that unpaid interns are not employees as defined under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or NYC Human Rights Law. The district court stated that remuneration or the absence of remuneration is an essential element to determining the existence of “the employer-employee relationship.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) supports the U.S. District Court’s position that sexual harassment laws don’t cover interns unless they receive “significant remuneration,” according to an EEOC spokesperson, Joseph Olivares.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Phoenix denies that Ms. Lihuan ever applied for a position and Mr. Liu is no longer with the company. This wasn’t the first case, and it surely will not be the last. Although the workplace dynamic for unpaid interns is already changing, maybe it’s time to take another look at the rights unpaid interns are entitled to while working. Perhaps something slightly more than a video at orientation.

And no live demonstrations are necessary.

And remember, its not just women who suffer from sexual harassment in the workplace.

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Rob Anthony is a founding member of Law Street Media. He is a New Yorker, born and raised, and a graduate of New York Law School. In the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, “We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive.” Contact Rob at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Melissa Gira via Flickr]

Robbin Antony

Rob Antony is a founding member of Law Street Media. He is a New Yorker, born and raised, and a graduate of New York Law School. Contact Rob at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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