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Friday, March 24, 2006

Law - Essay on blogging lawyers

I just read this Wall Street Journal article in today's paper, and am happy to find it online in the Journal's free access area. The title: "After (Billable) Hours - Lawyers hoping to escape drudgery trade one form of verbiage for another." Some quotes:

Are all lawyers secret bloggers, frustrated writers or both? More important, should they keep their day jobs?

Lawyers and blogging go together like witches and stoning.* According to a survey conducted by blogads.com, lawyers ranked fourth among both readers and posters to blogs. Many of the best-known blogs, such as instaPundit.com, are run by lawyers. It's easy to understand why blogging attracts the J.D. set: Few professions combine as much creative talent with so much mind-numbing work.

Each year thousands of otherwise perfectly normal college graduates with perfectly worthless degrees in the humanities venture into law school in the hope of landing a paying job that requires no science and little math. Many have been encouraged by college counselors who have told them that law school will "keep their options open"--code for delaying the inevitable for another three years--and it pays better than academia.

Law schools feed this myth because they need paying customers, even as the members of their own faculty are refugees from the very firms to which they are sending their students. Upon graduation, however, many students find that the entry-level jobs they get are little more than glorified secretarial positions. Sure, they pay well, but how many paper clips can you remove from a stack of documents before you start questioning your entire existence?

In the dark hours, writing seems like a natural escape. It's what most lawyers do (when they're not reviewing documents), and though blogging is very different from drafting a prospectus, it's close enough to fool many lawyers into trading one form of verbiage for another.

* Of course this line on lawyers and blogging, and witches and stoning, was my favorite.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 24, 2006 12:06 PM
Posted to General Law Related