Gregg Doucette is a practicing attorney in North Carolina and the former SBA President at NCCU Law. He gives a thoughtful look on taking Legal Incubators to the next level.
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One doesn’t have
to look far in the blawgosphere to learn the employment picture for lawyers is
far from ideal.[1] From the entire genre of “scamblogs” to
near-daily tweets about layoffs in BigLaw or the crushing burden of law school
debt, it’s tough being a lawyer these days.
The prevailing
assumption -- of dubious accuracy, in our view -- is that this reflects a
permanent realignment for the legal profession. A “new normal.” After all, the collapse of legal employment
started long before the broader 2008 economic meltdown; if the legal market
hasn’t recovered yet, why expect a turnaround any time soon?
All this “new
normal” punditry rests on the assumption there is a fundamental mismatch
between the public’s demand for legal services and the supply of lawyers
willing to provide them. To the pundits
this is all basic economics: until
supply and demand come back to something vaguely resembling equilibrium,
generations of new lawyers are going to be hard-pressed to find meaningful work
in their chosen vocation.
Yet at the same
time of this supposed imbalance, we see a news story in the ABA Journal on a
spike in pro se litigants who can't afford legal counsel in this recession.[2] Or a column a week earlier in the National Law
Journal insisting all the unemployed lawyers have to do is cut their rates to
get flooded by a mass of underserved middle class clients.[3] That’s all without mentioning the reports in
most states, North Carolina included, finding legal aid programs swamped with
backlogged cases and also turning away folks who aren’t sufficiently poor to qualify
for their services.[4]
The reality is not
an aggregate
mismatch between the supply of and demand for legal services, but a relatively
simpler issue of pricing. New lawyers
need an avenue to keep their overhead low while also training them on the
basics of law practice management, so they can make a living while still
offering rates lower than the $200-per-hour the typical client can’t afford to
pay.
SCHOOLS
RESPOND TO BAD ECONOMY WITH TRADITIONAL INCUBATORS
To their credit,
many law schools recognized the collapse in legal hiring early on -- if only
because the rise in unemployed graduates started to have an impact on their
rankings in U.S. News & World Report, where placement rates at graduation and
nine months after graduation determine one-fifth of each law school’s rank.[5]
Beginning with
CUNY School of Law in 2007, some of the more-innovative law schools created “incubators”
to help graduates start up their own solo firms as a way of addressing the
challenging hiring environment.[6] Similar incubator concepts were already
commonplace at tech-focused universities like N.C. State, [7] giving waves of
entrepreneurs their start throughout the 2000s, but the application of
incubators to the legal field was still a novelty. If it took the typical solo practitioner
three years to build a “stable” practice, the incubators would help
practitioners reach that threshold faster while also providing an additional
source of attorneys offering pro bono legal assistance.
Since CUNY Law got
its program off the ground half a decade ago, law schools across the country
have jumped on the bandwagon, including at the University of Missouri-Kansas
City, the University of Maryland, and Pace University.[8] Here in North Carolina, Charlotte School of
Law announced plans for its own incubator last year, [9] which is getting off the
ground this month.
The exact contours of each incubator vary but
they share certain common features. With
each, the law school is the primary funder through either tuition revenues or
grant receipts; the schools then create a “walled garden” into which recent
graduates are admitted through an application process. Some compensate those participants in the
form of a modest stipend; most also compensate participants in the form of
below-market rent charged for office space and other support services. The time a graduate can use an incubator
typically ranges from 12-18 months, with nearly all providing attorney mentors
on-site, regular seminars on law practice management, and a tight-knit
relationship with the sponsoring law school’s alumni association. And all of the programs (appropriately)
expect participants to devote time to serving pro bono clients.
TRADITIONAL
APPROACH IS NECESSARY, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT
The creation of law
firm incubators is a laudable development, not only for helping newly minted
attorneys get on their feet but also for providing another avenue for generating
pro bono legal service. The only problem
is that they cannot help the sheer volume of new attorneys being thrown into
the marketplace every year.
Why?
Since law schools
are responsible for covering the incubator’s overhead, there is an upper limit
on the number of participants an incubator can admit. Few even attempt to go beyond a dozen participants
because expanding further is not only cost-prohibitive but also fraught with risk: grant funds are never guaranteed, using
current students’ tuition to fund office space for non-students raises ethical
concerns, and providing below-market office space limits the ability of
participants to self-finance the program.
To consider the
impact of that participation cap, take my alma mater as an example. This July the North Carolina Central
University School of Law added 68 new attorneys to the market; historically, about
two-thirds of them will hang a shingle or join a small firm. If NCCU Law created its own incubator
tomorrow and had it accommodate 30 participants, instantly making it one of the
largest incubators in the country, they would still leave at least a dozen
folks from July (and more from February) on the outside looking in.
That number only
grows every single year, and is a problem faced by every law school contemplating
whether to create an incubator program.
A
SCALABLE, OPEN SUPPLEMENT IS NEEDED
A consortium-style
approach, open to graduates of all law schools, is necessary to supplement what
each law school already does on its own.
That’s what the nonprofit North Carolina Small Practice Incubator and
Collaboration Environment is working to create.
Above
all, we will be open to every solo and small practitioner who wants to join; if
more people are interested than space can accommodate, our solution is to add
more space rather than turn people away.
We aim for financial self-sufficiency to enable that flexibility; rather
than pay stipends to our participants, we focus on providing the mentorship,
law practice management skills, and business development expertise for
participants to pay themselves. Being
self-sustaining also enables us to provide service beyond the major metro
areas, where rural citizens have trouble finding a competent lawyer due to
existing practitioners’ conflicts of interest, cost, age and other
factors. In addition, we will serve our
participants until their practices “outgrow” our facilities, giving them time
to fully build a thriving practice before turning them back out into the
marketplace.
Our goals in
creating NC SPICE are threefold: (i) enabling
attorneys to still make a living while charging more-affordable rates and
providing more pro bono service, (ii) training new attorneys on the practice
of law so we can reduce the number running afoul of the Rules of Professional
Conduct or simply providing poor service, and (iii) expanding the pool of competent
solo and small practitioners who provide the bulk of legal services used by
everyday North Carolinians. By improving
the affordability, accessibility, and quality of legal service provided by
these practitioners, North Carolina can lead the nation in remaking how solo
and small practice is done.
But we can’t do
that without your help. As our Board of
Directors works on the initial SPICE Center, we need the insights and advice of
attorneys like you on how we should move forward. If there’s a service we should offer that we
don’t, tell us. If you’d like to serve
as a mentor to new attorneys, tell us. If
you think NC SPICE is a misguided waste of time and energy, tell us that
too. You can reach us through our
website at http://www.ncspice.org/ or
on Twitter by following @nc_spice. We
want to work with each of you, and appreciate your input.
-------------
T.
Greg Doucette is a North Carolina small business attorney who practices in
Wake, Durham, and Orange Counties. T. Greg
is the Executive Director of the North Carolina Small Practice Incubator and
Collaboration Environment (NC SPICE), a first-of-its-kind nonprofit
organization fusing the public interest focus of traditional law firm
incubators with the scalability pioneered in the information technology
industry. He can be reached by phone at
(919) 606-7158, via email to greg.doucette@ncspice.org, or on Twitter at
@greg_doucette.
[1] Tax Prof Blog, “2010-2020
Math: 200,000 Lawyer Jobs, 450,000 New
Lawyers,” 09/06/2012, http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2012/09/deborah-jones-merritt-.html.
[2] ABA Journal, “Lawyers Urged
to Take on More Pro Bono Work to Offset Increase in Demand for Legal Services,”
08/20/2012, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyers_urged_to_take_on_more_pro_bono_work_to_offset_increase_in_demand/.
[3] National Law Journal,
“Underserved middle class could sustain underemployed law graduates,”
08/15/2012, http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202567602357&Underserved_middle_class_could_sustain_underemployed_law_graduates.
[4] Legal Aid of North
Carolina, “Need for Private Attorney Involvement (PAI),” http://www.legalaidnc.org/public/give/probono/About_LANC_Cases.aspx.
[5] U.S. News, “Methodology:
Law School Rankings,” 2012, http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/articles/2012/03/12/methodology-law-school-rankings.
[6] National Law Journal,
“Incubators Give Birth to Flocks of Solo Practitioners”, 09/07/2011, http://www.law.com/jsp/tx/PubArticleTX.jsp?id=1202513553104.
[7] N.C. State University, “NC
State University Technology Incubator,” http://techincubator.ncsu.edu/.
[8] ABA Journal, “Growing
Justice,” Oct. 2012, pg. 30.
[9] N.C. Bar Association, “The
Charlotte School of Law’s Commitment to Training Law Students to be
Practice-Ready Attorneys Drives Our Transactional Course of Study,” 06/28/2011,
http://businesslaw.ncbar.org/newsletters/nbijune2011/charlotte.aspx.
