(Part 2) Best legal profession books according to redditors

Uneducated people are less likely to see where they're lacking in terms of knowledge. An educated person is more likely to realize when they aren't as knowledgeable about a topic and will adjust their tone accordingly.

Watch someone like Deepak Chopra talk about quantum mechanics and he will make claims without any hesitation, without any context to what he says. If you took him at his word, you'd think everything he claims is just accepted by everyone and a universal fact. Watch a PhD physicist talk about the same thing, and they will constantly be saying "we think", "evidence points to", etc. Constantly pointing out that we don't actually know and that this is our best guess right now.

That is one of the major intangible benefits of a formal education: Self-awareness and self-reflection. It can also be achieved through self-education, but it's harder to tell if someone's standard of self-education is actually decent or not. That's why we rely on degrees.

An absolute statement in a subject from somebody who is highly educated in that subject has much, much more weight than somebody who does not have an education in that subject. That much should be very clear and uncontested. It's a little different with hard sciences, because evidence is key, but for something like ethics, thinking you're somehow more knowledgeable in the field of legal ethics than a board of people that have spent most of their adult lives in the field you're questioning is just inane.

Go ahead and give this a quick skim through and realize how much there actually is to legal ethics. It's not this simple thing, otherwise they wouldn't need a board of specialists to decide whether or not something was ethical. (I realize this is a US legal ethics, and it's in Canada, but the principle is the same.)

Edit:

Just to give you an idea, I'll link a few books from the Duke Law School quick write up on legal ethics.

Annotated Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Eighth Edition, 840 pages, 7x10.

A Legislative History: The Development of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, 1982-2013, 951 pages, 7x10.

Legal Ethics in a Nutshell, 576 pages. This is an intro book.

ABA Compendium of Professional Responsibility Rules and Standards (2016), 716 pages.

I could keep going on, but I belabor the point. Saying you know as much about legal ethics as a lawyer that specializes in legal ethics is like saying you know as much about cardiology as a cardiologist practicing at a teaching hospital.

Congratulations on striking out on your own!

Pick up a copy of Jay Foonberg's How to Start and Build a Law Practice. Foonberg's old and some of the information is outdated, but it's a pretty big book with a wealth of info for new solos. There's also Carolyn Elefant's Solo by Choice, and blogs such as Elefant's My Shingle, Lawyerist, and /u/KeithRLee's Associate's Mind.

I think standard advice for new solos is that networking is king. Your best business as a new solo comes from referrals from other attorneys. Build relationships early. Also, make connections with strong mentors in every area you practice in, especially if you have limited experience in that practice area.

If you haven't made an office-space decision yet, read up on the benefits/downsides of virtual offices (i.e. working out of home and meeting clients in Starbucks) or of office sharing (you don't have to partner up with another lawyer; just rent an underused corner of a larger office to save on rent).

Also, join/post on /r/lawyers. It gets more traffic than /r/lawfirm.

> I'd be very surprised to hear that a justice has his or her mind completely made up from the outset of every single case. Some or most cases, maybe, yes.

This is because the Justices are necessarily generalists. Orin Kerr has a really fascinating interview about how the idea that a Justice can just decide his or her ideology can get them from point A to point B is pretty much an illusion in a vast majority of cases.

> Perhaps I am an optimist, but I imagine most of the justices do order their clerks to conduct a metric fuckton of research on the merits of the arguments of both the appellant and appellee.

Speaking as a former, non-SCOTUS clerk, I can tell you that the briefing of the parties matters a ton more than independent research by clerks. You'd never have enough time. And from a judicial economy sense, it's clear why: the parties (especially at that level) have likely turned over 99% of the rocks to make the best case on the appellate issue before the Court. You're so unlikely to discover something new.

And, from reports of clerks (also this one) delays in getting opinions have less to do with research and writing and more about consensus building. You'll almost always find that the briefs share a great deal with the briefing of some party (or amicus). Deviations occur where there's a negotiated middle ground.

The best advice I can give you is to find out what Noam Chomsky believes, because that's like taking a bullet train to the truth. Or I can just tell you. He's an syndicalist, a market abolitionist, and a contractarian (I'm assuming).

I think you should read as many of his books as possible. But other than that I would suggest reading The Social Contract, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, and The Concept of Law.

Go read your exams and see where you lost your points. Your Professors should be able to point out what you were missing.

Also, if your school has them, always go over old exams from the course. I'd normally read them a few weeks into the class. Then, when things popped up that I recognized from an old exam, I would double triple circle star that topic.

You should definitely spend the $30 and three hours to read Peter Wendel's Deconstructing Legal Analysis.

We'll probably never fully replace lawyers with computers.

However, there is the possibility that technology could allow the same amount of legal work to be done with drastically fewer lawyer hours worked, cutting into lawyers' billable hours, decreasing society's overall demand for lawyers and driving down their wages. The lawyers at the top of the totem pole would flourish, but there would probably be more lawyers floundering at the bottom doing document review (until that is completely automated) and temp contract work. Many would probably leave the profession.

There's a good chapter on this in a recent book on the future of the legal profession. The author generally agrees that the legal sector will be hit hard by automation and it will very much be a "feast or famine" environment, with partners in Biglaw becoming even wealthier while wages in the rest of the profession fall.