Welcome. My name is Keith Bybee, I'm a professor at
the College of Law and the Maxwell School. In conjunction with Dean Arterian, I organize
the 1L Convocation Speaker Series. And this is a series that selects distinguished
individuals and brings them to campus for lectures that are open to the university community
but that are really designed for the interest and benefit of the 1L class. And this year's series kicks of with a lecture
by one of our own faculty, Professor Greg Germain. The title of his lecture is Good Lawyer, Bad
Lawyer: What Makes the Difference. Professor Germain joined the College of Law
in 2002. He teaches and conducts research in areas
of taxation, commercial law, bankruptcy and corporate law. He publishes widely on the subject of bankruptcy. In 2009, Professor Germain, working with legal
services, established an internship at the College of Law that is now actually a clinic,
through which 2nd and 3rd year law students work with people going through bankruptcy. Students help gather information, prepare
filings, and represent clients in court. Before Professor Gemain came to join us in
2002, he practiced law for 17 years, first as an associate and Latham and Watkins in
Los Angeles, then as an associate for Landis, Ripley, and Diamond in San Francisco. He was also a judicial extern for the Honorable
Lloyd King, Chief justice of the US Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California,
and later he was an attorney advisor for the Honorable Renato Begley of the US Tax Court. Professor Germain has been around the block,
and he's here to tell you today about his trip. Before I turn over the lectern to Professor
Germain, let me just tell you a few things about protocol. We will conclude today by 12:50 at the latest
so you have an opportunity to get back to your classes. After Professor Germain is done speaking,
there will be an opportunity for Q&A. If you do have a question, I just ask that
you raise your hand and Katie Lipp has a wireless mic, and she'll come over to you so you can
speak into the mic. This will allow your question to be heard
not only by your peers but also by Professor Germain. I also ask that you turn off all of your phones
and electronic devices, so that we don't have any disruptions during the talk. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming
Professor Greg Germain. [applause] Thank you all. My name is Gregory Germain, and I do teach
here in the College of Law, and I know some of you back there are my students in Contracts
this year. The first rule I wanna talk to you about is
that a good lawyer always takes responsibility for his or her mistakes, rather than trying
to blame them on others. And I think that's particularly important
today because you are all here, attending this mandatory convocation during your first
midterm exams. So I'm sure you're not thrilled to be here. And I just want you all to know that I had
absolutely nothing to do with the scheduling of this convocation. [laughter] In fact, it was all Keith's fault. [laughter] So, what I'm gonna talk to you
today about is not very academic. It is not the result of kind of double blind
studies and scientific theories. I'm going to be giving you some opinions that
I have formed as I approach my 30th year of law practice, as to what it is that makes
a good lawyer, and how you can become a good lawyer. And so I want to give you a broad disclaimer,
since I'm a contracts teacher: What I'm about to tell you may be wrong, and more importantly,
it may be wrong for or about you. But I think that what I have to say may resonate
with some of you and may help you, especially next year, when you're selecting classes and
thinking about how to prepare for a legal career. As you approach your first set of midterms,
some of you are probably asking yourself, "Is law school a good idea? Is this a good investment?" After all, it is very expensive to go to law
school, and there has been a broad academic debate going on, especially recently, with
the recession, in law school employment, about whether law school is a good investment. There has been a recent academic study, looking
at how much people make out of their law school career, taking the present value of their
future salaries, based on historic data, and deciding how much is a law degree worth. And the conclusion of this study, written
by two professors, is that the median present value of a law degree is one million dollars,
making it look like a pretty good investment, huh? It's more than that for people who graduated
in the top of their class. And for people in the bottom 25% of their
class, the median value of a law degree was $325,000. Still not bad, but not a great return on investment. But I think there's two important points that
we have to think about when we're looking at an academic study like this. One of them is that these numbers are based
on past data. And we don't know how much people are going
to make in the future, and so your future salaries may be different than salaries have
been and incomes have been in the past. And secondly, these are medians. Which means half of the people make less than
these amounts, and half of the people make more than these amounts. And so we're looking at statistics that don't
tell us much about how much you're going to make over your legal career, and whether law
school has been a good investment for you. What will determine whether law school was
a good investment for you, and I submit it is whether at the end of your career you have
had a fulfilling and lucrative legal career. And so the focus of my presentation today
is how you can develop a fulfilling and lucrative legal career. So what are the characteristics of lawyers
that succeed and have fulfilling law practices? That's what I want to talk about. The first piece of advice I have for you is
not to focus too much on the short term. I see a lot of people, and I was one of them
when I graduated from law school, very focused on going to work for a law firm that had a
fabulous reputation and that paid the highest salaries. You know, I was very interested in going to
a large firm, and I did. I went to work for Latham and Watkins which
is one of the largest law firms in the country. And I left after nine months. One of the reasons I left was some of the
advice that I received after my first week on the job. And so I want to tell you about that. At the end of my first week at the firm, the
firm had its annual retreat, at a very fancy resort hotel, the Ritz Carlton, in Laguna
Nigel, right on the water in Orange County. It's an absolutely beautiful resort facility. I don't think I'd ever been to anything that
kind of fancy, and all the lawyers, from all the offices, about 800 lawyers, flew in for
this retreat. And it was my first week on the job. I didn't know anybody there. And my first evening, I entered the dining
room for dinner, and there were all these tables around, filled with lawyers having
a wonderful conversation with each other. I didn't know any of them, and I saw a guy
sitting at a table in the back of the room, all by himself, an elderly gentleman, and
I thought, "well, you know, he's sitting all by himself. I'll go sit at the table." And so I walked up and I said, "Hi, do you
mind if I join you?" And he said, "no." And I said, "It's nice to meet you. I'm one of the new employees at the firm,
my name is Greg Germain." And he said, "Nice to meet you, my name is
Clint Stevenson, I'm the managing partner of the firm." Well. The next hour, I learned why nobody wanted
to sit at the table with him. He proceeded to take my deposition, finding
out every little facet of my very inexperienced life during that hour, and I didn't get to
eat any of the fabulous shellfish that was in front of me. But one of the questions he asked me was,
"Why did you decide to come to Latham and Watkins?" And I didn't have a very good answer for that. "Well, you know, it has a great reputation,
you know, blah blah blah." I mean, I didn't know why I should pick a
term. But I decided to turn the tables on the managing
partner, and I asked him, "Based on all your experience after all these years, if you were
a young lawyer choosing a firm, what would you look for in a law firm?" And he paused for a minute, I don't think
he was expecting to be asked questions. After all, he was the managing partner of
the firm, but he gave me a very honest answer. He said, "What I would look for is a firm
where I could be involved in the direction of the law firm. I'm a builder, I wanna help build the law
firm, I wanna be involved in management, and feel that I have a role in the success and
future of the institution that I'm working for." And that had a lot of resonance for me, over
the next 9 months, as I looked at this giant boat that was Latham and Watkins, and thinking,
"It's gonna be pretty hard to get up there to the captain's seat, and have any influence
on the direction of the firm." And so I decided for me, that it is so important
to be involved in feeling like I'm a team and in building the practice, and my own practice,
that I really needed a smaller firm. So I went to a smaller firm in San Francisco,
that was a much more fulfilling practice with me than it would have been, I think, if I
had stayed at a large law firm. And so you gotta think for yourself, what
is it, long term, that I'm looking for? Am I looking for a job where it's 9 to 5? I'm looking for a job that is not 9 to 5 and
I'm contributing to the future success of the law firm. And that may have something to do with whether
you decide you want to be at a giant law firm, or a small law firm, or another institution. So what do I think you should be asking when
you are looking to go to work at a firm. Where are you going to learn the most? Where are you going to have the opportunity
to become a partner and to grow as a lawyer? For most of you, your legal careers are going
to be long. I'm now looking back on 30 years of experience. Probably I'll have another 10 or 20 or 30
more. So this is a long endeavor. Your starting salary in your first job is
very unlikely to be the end of the process, and so, thinking about bettering yourself,
for the long term, is far more important than your initial salary that you get right out
of law school. Now, the legal market is quite different than
it was when I graduated from law school. When I graduated, the legal business was growing
very fast. I had basically offers from every law firm
I interviewed with. All the firms were growing at a very high
rate, and so there wasn't a kind of short supply of jobs. I remember one of my classmates, Theresa Woody,
had a job interview at the largest firm in San Francisco at the time, called Pillsbury,
Madison, and Sutro, and she wasn't really interested in working there, particularly. She wanted to interview, but she wanted to
go back to where she was from in Kansas City. She went to this job interview, and they were
a little bit disorganized that day, and they said, have a seat the waiting room, and we'll
be right with you, and she waited and she waited and waited and she went up to the secretary
and said I've been here a half hour, what's going on? They said, oh we have some confusion today,
just have a seat and wait a little longer. She said, you know I don't really want this
job, I really want to go back to Kansas City anyway. And so after another 20 minutes or so, she
left. She just waked out. Two weeks later, she received a letter from
Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro, saying how much they enjoyed the interview, and offering
her a job. So, you know, those were the good old days. I think things are a little tougher now, and
firms are gonna be looking at you and deciding what do you bring to the table? What distinguishes you from the mass of resumes
that all these employers are getting? Some of the things are obvious. Legal skills. Do you have good legal skills? Do you have good knowledge of the law? Do you have the ability to figure out what
you don't know? Are you able to apply the law to facts? Those kinds of things are of primary importance
to an employer, but how do they judge them in the 15 minute interview, or from your resumes,
which after all are not going to have tremendous amounts of experience in them, you're right
out of law school. And so, the hard truth of the matter is, they're
going to rely on your grades in deciding what your legal skills are. If you're at the top of your class, they're
gonna assume you have pretty good legal skills. If you're at the bottom of your class, they're
going to assume you don't have good legal skills. They may be wrong, but that's going to be
the first cut that they make, because that's what they see. So, it's very important to master the subjects
that you're studying in this first year, to put in absolutely your best efforts all the
time, and to do as well as you can. Because that's going to be of primary importance
when you go out on the job market. Secondly, are you reliable? Can an employer trust you to handle a case
properly? In large part, this is about communication
and diligence, and I'm going to talk more about some of my experience in supervising
students and young lawyers when I was a partner in a law firm, about some of the problems
I see with communication and taking responsibility. Work ethic. I think the law is a terrible profession for
someone who wants a 9 to 5 job. There are lots of 9 to 5 jobs around, but
very few good lawyers that I know work 9 to 5 jobs. They have to work on weekends when things
are busy, they have to work at night when things are busy, they have to work in the
morning when things are busy. That's just the reality of the practice. You have to do whatever is necessary to do
a good job on your case and work doesn't come in from 9 to 5. And it means there are going to be times in
your life when you have to put your work ahead of your personal life, and some people don't
want to do that, and I think they have to think seriously about whether the law is really
right for them. There may be positions in the law, kind of
in-house positions, or gov't positions, where you can work a 9 to 5 life, but that's not
true for private practitioners. And so I think that having a realistic notion
of the work ethic is important. Another characteristic is what I call a winning
attitude. By that, I don't mean you need to be one of
those fake happy people that always has a smile on their face. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not one
of those people, and ... But what it means is you have to be able to figure out how to
win your case. It is not the job of your supervisors to figure
out how to win your case. It's your job. One problem I constantly have, supervising
students in law cases, is their failure to kinda take the bull by the horns, to say,
this is my case, and I'm going to look up and find the solution. Instead, I get a lot of questions like, what
do I do, what do I do next, how do I do this, and that's not what lawyers do in practice. If we hire an associate at my firm, we give
them a case and expect them to come in and tell us. To do the analysis. To do the research, to try to answer all the
questions before they come in, so they can tell me, give me suggestions on how to handle
the case. I may disagree with them and say, no I want
to go in a different direction, but I want a self-starter, who figures it out, and comes
in with a solution. Not a secretary or receptionist who just passes
on the client's questions to me. And I get a lot of that in the pro bono and
bankruptcy clinic, where students say, client asks a question, and they just pass it on
to me. Client says they want to know blah blah blah. Well, go look it up! And then come talk to me about it. I want to be here to, I mean, I don't want
you to make the final decisions, as a first, second year lawyer, but I want you to think
about it before asking me the question. You've gotta take that ethic into the practice
of law. It's your case. You've gotta solve the problem, and you need
to figure out a solution. Not just go to the supervisor and say, tell
me what to do. Personality is of course a very important
factor. Successful lawyers are good at generating
business. As a new first year associate, you may not
be expected to generate business, but it won't be too long before you are. And the people that succeed and become partners
and are successful at a law firm are good with clients, and get additional referrals
from the same client, because they handled the case well and they start building what
they call a book of business, which is the coin of the realm in the world of partners
transferring from one law firm to another. And so, being good with your clients, returning
their calls promptly, showing that you care about their problem, and that you're going
to find a solution to it is absolutely of fundamental importance. And your personality in being able to do that
is going to be an important skill that you have to develop. So what did I look for when I was hiring young
lawyers at my law firm? We don't have very much. We have your resume. What do I want your resume to read like if
I'm hiring a lawyer? The first thing I'm looking for is somebody
whose resume shows an interest in my area of the law. So if I'm hiring a bankruptcy lawyer, I want
a resume that demonstrates that the person has some interest in bankruptcy, knows something
about it. That doesn't mean I want to see only bankruptcy
courses, or something like that.... The core bar courses are core bar courses
because they're fundamental courses for the practice of law. So I want to see a resume that shows that
most of the fundamental courses in law school have been mastered. In addition to that, I want to see courses
in my area of specialty. And all of the courses should reflect a plan
and design to show that you're interested in a particular area of law. If I get a resume where people have (woop,
sorry!) If I get a resume where people have all kinds
of scattered courses, that have nothing to do with each other, I think, who is this? What are they going to do? It shows a lack of organization and thought. And so, you're relieved of most of the responsibility
of selecting your courses in the first year. We do that for you. But next year, you're responsible to select
your own courses. And you should do so in an intelligent way. What direction are you going? You may not know exactly what you want to
do, but you should have a pretty good direction, even after the first year. Do I want to be a criminal lawyer or a civil
lawyer? Do I want to be in business law or tort law? You should have a general idea after the first
year, and you should be structuring your curriculum in an intelligent way, to obtain the kinds
of classes and education that you need to be a good lawyer in that area. And we're here to help you with that. All of the professors, I think are more than
happy to get a call from someone saying, Hey, I'm interested in bankruptcy law or estate
planning, and will you help me go through my scheduled and suggest some better classes
that I can take to move in that direction? Or criminal law, whatever it is, I'm not meaning
to pigeonhole you in any particular areas. But take advantage of the advising of the
people that know their fields around here, and ask for help with course selection, and
I think you'll end up with a resume that is much more organized than someone who selects
their classes because they're only the in the afternoon and you like to sleep in or,
you know, only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I also want to see on a resume someone who
shows initiative and is willing to volunteer their time to learn and become a better lawyer. So, I'm very impressed with things like participating
in moot court competitions, writing a good law review article, getting a job as a research
assistant, anything that shows a little extra initiative is impressive. Ok. Let me tell you a little bit about bad lawyers. First of all, bad lawyers don't do research. If you ever find a lawyer that says, I never
do research, you can be pretty sure that that's a bad lawyer. And there are lots of them out there. They hate doing research, they don't really
like talking about the law, and if they ever have to write something for court, they grab
a couple of headnotes out of a secondary source, and cite the headnotes. They don't go back and read the cases, or
read the statutes, or really understand what they're doing. And you're guaranteed to fail. Because at least if you're up against someone
who's a good lawyer, they're not going to just read the headnotes. They're going to read the case, they're going
to read the statute, and that headnote that you cited is going to be taken out of context,
and they're going to nail you on it before the judge. And so, you've gotta do the work. There's no alternative to it, and frankly,
you gotta like doing the work. If you don't like the law, if you don't like
reading it, if you don't like talking about it, if you don't like studying it, you probably
shouldn't be a lawyer. Cuz that's what we do. Number 2: Bad lawyers don't communicate. So let me tell you a story about a local lawyer,
that I had a case with, recently, within the last 2 years. The clients hired this lawyer to file a bankruptcy
petition for them. A very nice couple, having financial problems,
job losses and things like that. They had a house, they had cars, and they
wanted to keep them, and so they filed bankruptcy and proposed a plan that would enable them
to keep their property. Unfortunately one of them lost their job,
they fell behind on their payments to the plan, and they were in default. The trustee, as is his job, moved to dismiss
their case for failing to make their plan payments. Now, what a good lawyer would do is meet with
the clients, figure how whether there's some way to modify the plan based on their new
circumstances, and propose a modification, and not allow the case to be dismissed. This lawyer told his secretary to tell the
clients that unless they had the money to cure the default in full, he would not speak
with them. So their lawyer wouldn't talk to them. They're facing dismissal of their case, which
would mean the loss of their home, and their cars, and a lot of their personal possessions. They're being represented by a lawyer who
won't talk to them to see whether there's a solution, and they heard about my clinic
and they came in begging for help. What do we do?? And I felt sorry for them. I agreed to take their case to try to help
them, and I sent a substitution of attorney to the lawyer, and I said, send me the legal
file. I'm gonna represent them. You're not. Here's the substitution of attorney. Send me the legal file. And the rules of professional responsibility,
which you'll learn next year, say that the old law firm is required to promptly provide
the new lawyer with a copy of the legal file. Well, I called three times and he wouldn't
send me the file. And so I sent him three letters over a month
and a half, and he wouldn't send me the file, so I drafted a complaint to the state bar,
saying that I requested for the last month and a half copies of the legal file for my
client's case, and he won't send it to me, and I sent it to him, saying I'm filing this
tomorrow. And of course the next day I finally get the
legal file, along with a letter saying how offended he was that I would threaten to turn
him in to the bar. The file was a mess, as you might expect,
random papers stuffed in the file, including, right on the top, a letter from their home
creditor saying, if you don't call us back, we're going to move for relief from stay in
the bankruptcy case to foreclose on their house. And of course he didn't call them back, and
so of course they moved for relief from stay. Just gross incompetence. If you're going to be that kind of lawyer,
do us all a favor and drop out of law school now. My god, if you can't comply with professional
standards, if you can't return your client's calls, what are you doing? That is not a professional law practice. You gotta say to yourself, I'm going to do
this business. I'm gonna return my clients' calls the day
I get them. If there's some reason I cant, I'll return
them the next morning. There's no reason to not timely return peoples'
calls. And the same with opposing counsel. We've got these rules here to protect the
clients, and it's your responsibility to make sure you follow the rules. So, return client calls promptly, return calls
from other lawyers promptly, send confirming letters to confirm conversations, to confirm
deadlines. Read and respond to email promptly, and always
meet deadlines and responsibilities. That's the bare minimum that's required for
the practice of law. Bad lawyers don't prepare. Last year, my research assistant took an externship. As part of the externship program here, we
offer an externship class, where they're required to do some projects. One of the projects that he was given was
to go to court, watch the court proceedings for a day and write a journal. And he thought, what a stupid assignment. I'm gonna write a journal, give me a break. So he goes to the bankruptcy court, actually,
and he sits in for a day, and he was shocked at what he found. He found lawyer after lawyer coming up before
the judge with their file, having not read it before going up before the judge, being
asked questions that they didn't know the answer to, and fumbling through the file trying
to find the answer to the question. He said that the whole day there was only
one lawyer that had read the file, and came in prepared, and knew the answers to the judge's
questions. The rest of them were a joke. And that's what I see too. I see all of these really bad lawyers out
there, who don't bother to read the file before they go before the court, and they get what
I like to call battered attorney syndrome when they get there, because they're like
hiding from the judge, who's asking them obvious questions about the case, and they don't know
the answer, and their papers are falling all over the side, and it's an embarrassment to
the legal profession. If you go to court, you gotta prepare. You've gotta review the file before you get
there. You've gotta know what the case is about,
and you've gotta be prepared to answer the judge's questions. There may be a question that you don't know
the answer to, that you have to look up, but not simple questions like, when did you file,
what's the case about, basic questions you gotta know. And if you're arguing a motion, you've gotta
know the law, you've gotta read the cases that you've cited in your brief. It's so common for lawyers to show up to argue
cases, they've cited these cases in their briefs, and they've never read them. And the judge says, didn't so and so happen
in the case, and they're like, yeeeeeah I don't know, your honor, I haven't read the
case recently. You've gotta read the case. That's part of your job. That's one of the things we're trying to teach
you here in law school: When we call on you class, we're trying to get you in the practice
of knowing that you're going to have to respond to a judge's question some day, and they're
gonna be a lot tougher than the ones we ask in class. Bad lawyers don't ever overcome their fears. We all have fears. Some of you have a fear of public speaking. You sit in the back of the class, praying
that you're not going to get called on today. And when you get called on, your mind suddenly
goes blank, and you can't answer any questions. This is very common. Sure there are other people whose hands are
waving all the time, but most people are hiding and we're in the business of communication. We can't hide. I don't think you can be a successful lawyer
without being able to speak in public. That is a fear that you simple have to get
over. You have to force yourself to get over it. You have to sit yourself in the front of the
class and try to participate. You can't hide from it. You have to take a trial practice class, and
videotape yourself responding to questions and see how to improve. It is a learned skill. I was shy, afraid to get up in front of people
and speak when I was in law school. And you get over it. You force yourself to do it and you get over
it. So, fear of speaking is something that can
be overcome. Fear of confrontation: The law is a very confrontational
process. You're going to have people yell at you, and
you're going to have to respond in a polite way and not get flustered. One of the hardest, I think, is a fear of
losing. One I've had trouble getting over. And I wanna tell you about two outstanding
lawyers that I've worked with that kind of illustrate the idea of a fear of losing. These two lawyers were the two top partners
in my law firm. Their names were Jon and Jim. Jim graduated from Boalt law school at the
top of his class. He worked in the criminal division of the
Justice Department for 20 years, and then he was appointed to run the civil division
of the Justice Department. He was very proud of the fact that he never
lost a trial his entire time at the DOJ. He was always impeccably dressed, very smooth,
and he was the highest-paid partner at the firm. Jon had a somewhat similar legal background,
but a very different personal background. Jon came from a blue collar family, he was
a commander of a boat during the Vietnam War, he graduated first in his class, not from
a prestigious law school like Boalt. But he also worked in the criminal division
of the Justice Department for 15 years, and then ran the civil division after Jim ran
it, before he went in to private practice at our firm. Jon had tried many more cases than Jim, and
he lost a few cases. He had about a 90% win record. And he was the second highest-paid partner
in the firm. And there was a lot of discussion in the firm:
Which of these two guys was the better lawyer? Well, I was at a retreat once, and Jim, having
imbibed a little too much alcohol, and in a reflective moment, told me that he thought
Jon was the better lawyer. And he told me that the reason is that the
reason he had a 100% win record was that if there was any chance of losing the case, he
would settle. He did not want to lose a case. He was very concerned about protecting his
record, and very concerned about losing a case. He had a fear of losing. Jon, on the other hand, was willing to take
the tough case to trial. He had the internal fortitude, and the belief
in his case to say, win or lose, I'm going to go forward with this case. And so he had a very good win record, but
he was willing to take the tough case even if it meant he might lose. He wasn't afraid of losing. And I think everyone in the firm pretty much
agreed with Jim that Jon was the better lawyer. When you worked with Jim he was always second-guessing
himself, he wasn't confident in his decision. He was second-guessing everyone that worked
for him, which is a very unpleasant thing to have happen when you're working on someone's
team. Jon, on the other hand, made you feel like
you were part of a great team, and you were gonna win the case. He was Teddy Roosevelt, charging the troops
up San Juan Hill. Everybody liked working with him, and he got
fantastic results because the other side knew he wasn't bluffing. He was willing to take the case to trial,
even if it was a tough case. And most people on the other side weren't
willing to take the risk. They were both great lawyers, but Jon was
the more confident, better lawyer, because he was willing to risk losing. After 30 years of doing this, I don't have
the level of confidence that Jon has, but I try. I try to recognize that all my cases, I am
willing to take it to trial if that's what I have to do. I am not going to settle the case cheap. So, if I can't get a settlement that my client
deserves, we're going to fight it out all the way through trial. That approach, I think, makes me a better
lawyer, and gets better results for my clients. You've gotta kinda overcome the fear. You may lose a case here and there, but you're
going to win a lot more than you lose. Bad lawyers don't build relationships. No one is successful on their own. Our success depends on the connections that
we have with others. Some people are lucky enough to have family
connections. Others have to build connections from scratch. But you must learn to build strong relationships,
and you should start that process now that you're in lawschool. Your colleagues in law school are all potential
referral attorneys. They are potential partners of yours in a
future law firm. When I was not happy with my first job at
Latham and Watkins, it was one of my close friends from law school who said, come and
work at our firm, it's a great place, and recruited me to join the firm. And I stayed there, became a partner, and
we became partners in the same law firm. He not only built bridges with me, but with
numerous other people in the law school who regularly referred him business. He was involved in bar activities. He was involved in training young lawyers
in trial practice. His legal work was always top notch. And everyone thought he was a great lawyer. He built a strong practice and he is now a
professional mediator, aribitrator, getting referrals from other lawyers. And very successful at it. Building those relationships is key. Although you are kind of technically competing
with your classmates, you really aren't. And showing a little courtesy, and a little
respect, and being a good person to the other people that you are in law school with is
as important as your law school studies. The last person I want to tell you about is
my friend and law school classmate, Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson has an entire row of his living
room library devoted to his law school casebooks, all of which, he is very proud to say, are
still in the original shrink wrap. He never opened them. He likes to say he graduated second in his
class, because he graduated in the Spring of his third year, when there were only two
people graduating. He passed the CA bar on his seventh attempt. Which means he was not in practice for the
first three and a half years of his legal career. He worked as a paralegal, at a very low salary,
and he had a family with three kids, and he had a very hard time those first three years. He became a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer,
and he has only tried, in his entire legal career, two cases. He lost both of them. He took them to trial and he lost. And one of them, he was telling me about the
case before it started, and I thought, this is the unlosable case. A 35 year old mother of three is having extreme
headaches, is cross-eyed, goes in to the doctor, and the doctor sends her home with an aspirin. She has a stroke and dies. And he got defensed. [laughs] That takes real skill. So, he's not what I'd call a lawyer's lawyer. But, he is a very good businessperson, and
has developed a thriving practice handling rear-end car accident cases. He's made more money in the practice of law
than anyone I know. He loves what he does. He wakes up every morning hoping for rain,
because if it rains there's going to be more car accidents. He keeps up with all of his referral attorneys,
and he gets a lot of referral from his clients, who seem to get in an awful lot of car accidents. They get into car accidents, and their extended
families get into car accidents. And he has very strong skills outside of the
law. As I said, he's very good at dealing with
referral attorneys and adjusters. He's good with clients, he communicates regularly,
and I think maybe most important, he knows his limitations. After his two defeats, he has not tried any
more cases. In anything that goes to litigation, he refers
out. He's basically an adjuster. He gets the cases in, he writes a demand letter,
he haggles with insurance companies, and he gets a settlement in these relatively small
cases, and in anything bigger than that, he farms out to someone who knows how to litigate
a case. He's done very well in the law, he likes what
he's doing. I think he does a good job for his clients,
except for the two he took to trial. So there are roles in the legal profession
where you don't have to be a great kind of technical lawyer. They're hard to find, and they take a lot
of planning to get into them. And if that's you, you've got to do the planning
up front, to get into a position where you can utilize your skills. But I think for most of you, you've got to
decide, do I love the law? And if you do, if you like talking about it,
if you like thinking about it, I think you're going to find that this is a good business. So, to kind of sum up, in law school you've
got to take the right kind of classes, in an organized way, and get advice from people
on how to do that. You need to seek out the kind of experiences
that will develop your skills and impress potential employers. You need to challenge yourself in areas in
which you are weak, rather than avoiding your weaknesses. You don't want to be like the student who
came to my office in tears at the end of her third year, telling me no one would ever hire
her, and she couldn't blame them, saying, I'm never gonna get a job. Who would ever want to hire me? And I took out the box of kleenexes, and I
tried to be sympathetic. But the truth was, she was right. No one is ever going to want to hire her with
that attitude. If you don't have confidence in yourself,
if you don't seize the law school experience, to better yourself, so that you can explain
to the world what you have to offer, why they should hire you, then I fear you're not going
to have a happy legal career. On the other hand, if you squeeze everything
you can out of the law school experience. If you love talking about and thinking about
the law, if you plan your professional life in an intelligent way, I think you're going
to look forward to a bright future as a lawyer and your investment in law school will pay
off handsomely. And so now I would like to answer your questions. [applause] We have time for one question. Actually maybe we have time for many questions
and no answers, but one question...? Okay, the practice is to raise your hand if
you have a question. Hi there. Yes? Oh. -- You were just waiving goodbye. -- H was warding me off. -- Okay, well, good luck with your midterms. Do well, and I hope to see all of you over
the next couple of years.
