Shpoonkle your lawyer?

Good Day Readers:

For the videos to make sense a little background is required.

In the United States a family of internet sites collectively termed, "Law School Scam Blogs" have recently emerged suggesting law faculty professors, staff and administraters, as well as, the American Bar Association et. al. knowingly inflate/misrepresent employment prospects for new graduates usually facing non-dischargeable repayment of huge student loans. Not being lawyers we're unable to comment whether this situation exists in Canada.

One of several American legal blogs we monitor is Shilling Me Softly (www.shillingmesoftly.blogspot.com) founded and operated by Kimber Russell a recent graduate of Chicago's DePaul University law school licensed to practice in Illinois. That's where we first found the reference to Shpoonkle (www.shpoonkle.com - God only knows from where that name came!) created by New york law student Robert Niznik - an eBay style lawyering site if you will.

Solicitor Scott Greenfield (Hull McGuire PC - Pittsburg, Washington, SanDiego) took exception with an e-Bay type clearing house concept for legal services on his blog Simple Justice (www.simplejustice.us) suggesting it denigrated the world's second oldest profession. The other videos come from Mr. Greenfield's site. " Streetwalking Lawyers of Aurora Avenue" is by far the most hilarious video we've yet seen about attorneys!

Perhaps we should send a copy of this posting to our "Dear Friends" at The Law Society of Manitoba who are constantly in need of a little levity?

Here's the debate between Ms Russell and Mr. Greenfield.

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk

Sidebar: Another favourite legal site is Hot Steet Justice (www.hotsweetjustice.com) written anonymously by two presumably hot, sweet lawyers working for BigLaw in New York City. As soon as we get a chance we're going to write columnists "Legal Tease" and "Sweet Hot Justice" to inquire as to the authenticity of their articles. Regardless, they sure are funny along with the accompanying photographs. They've got a great concept only problem is they don't publish frequently enough.
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Notwithstanding today's rosy reports of a modestly rebounding legal services market, there are still thousands of current 3Ls who are mere weeks away from graduation, and it's safe to say that only a lucky few have secured legal employment. That's why it's puzzling to read the vitriolic responses to New York Law student Robert Niznik's solution to his own employment woes: A website devoted to helping lawyers and clients find each other. Whimsically named Shpoonkle, this site is a sort of mash-up of Match.com and eBay where clients post their legal issues and lawyers who have registered for the site can bid on those cases.

One might expect that a future unemployed attorney who goes to such lengths to forge an innovative career for himself would be lauded for his efforts. Not so much, as evidenced by Scott Greenfield in his popular blog, Simple Justice:

Any lawyer who signs up for this service should be immediately disbarred, then tarred and feathers [sic], then publicly humiliated. It doesn't matter how awful a lawyer you are, how pathetic your business, how grossly incapable you may be in getting any client to retain you. Those are all good reasons to apply for the assistant manager's position at Dairy Queen. This is worse.

Harsh words, indeed. But Mr. Greenfield is operating from the false assumption that those attorneys seeking clients from this type of online service are incompetent and unable to obtain clientele any other way. What about young attorneys who simply have no funds to start a traditional solo practice because they are already carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-dischargeable student loan debt?

Greenfield continues what can really only be classified as a rant when he questions the value of offering legal services for a reasonable fee:

The putative explanation for this effort is that legal services are too expensive for most people, and this ugly-named website will match up clients with lawyers who can provide the needed legal services for a price they can afford. It is the elevation of price over quality, on the one hand, but for consumers who can't find an affordable lawyer otherwise, that may not be the worst thing. There is certainly an argument to be made that no lawyer is better than a bad lawyer, and that money paid to a bad lawyer is money flushed down the toilet.

Rather, the concept is a perfectly reasonable next step to the de-professionalization of legal services, where the purchase of legal services is no different than buying a widget at the big box store for the lowest available price. From the perspective of the cost-sensitive consumer, it probably seems like a great idea. The client isn't concerned with the lawyer's actual (as opposed to self-attributed) competence in a particular area of law or in general. The client wants one thing only: a lawyer willing to do the work at a price he can afford.

I don't know where you've been, Greenie, but the legal "profession" has been on the downslide for some years now, and once the ABA opened the door to legal process outsourcing, we've seen plenty of services previously done by expensive attorneys being shipped offshore to be done for pennies on the dollar. And that is all at the clients' behest, as they have finally awoken to the fact that legal fees have been wildly overvalued for decades, and much of the work can literally be done by any creature possessing opposable thumbs.

Why shouldn't client demand drive the market for legal services, especially nowadays when we have such a surfeit of licensed attorneys? Why is the mere notion of using technology to pair needy clients with attorneys who need the work comparable to working the corner, as Mr. Greenfield so eloquently puts it?

Are we really willing to don the hotpants and walk the boulevard? Are we that far off from actually doing so? Are we willing to close our eyes and let those among us do so, and thereby reduce our profession to the streetwalker level?

Let that be a lesson to all you aspiring attorneys out there: If you have to stoop to lawyering simply to earn a living, you're no better than a dirty, dirty whore. You might as well skip law school altogether and go straight to working the pole. There's more than one way to make it rain!