The Legal Profession in 2019: Exclusion Or Delusion?

Tech Law Crossroads
This post was originally published on this site

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth

About a week ago, I published a piece entitled Profession in Crisis, which summarized a recent ABA Report on the status of our profession offered and discussed at this year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco. In that post, I focused on the Report’s statistics reflecting the lack of diversity in the profession, the lack of women in leadership positions and the alarming rate of suicide, depression and problem drinking within our profession that the Report revealed.

I also cited Daniel Rodriguez’ conclusion offered at the session in which the Report was discussed: young people are no longer interested in becoming lawyers. In my mind, the statistics in the Report and Dan’s conclusions were alarming and suggested a profession in crisis. (Particularly since so little progress has been made on all these fronts for so long).

Many of you read the post and commented favorably and even offered suggestions to make the post better. Some of you respectfully disagreed with some of my conclusions or offered other helpful commentaries. I thank you all who took the time to do that.

But apparently, the post and my conclusions didn’t sit well with at least one commentator who runs a well known and heavily marketed consulting service. This person somehow believed the best response to the statistics and my conclusions would be to hurl insults and resort to name-calling rather than respond meaningfully.

 

In a long, meandering rant, he called me a “massively clueless tech zealot” for suggesting that a high rate of suicide in the profession and the lack of progress with diversity and women in leadership is alarming

In a long meandering rant, he called me a “massively clueless tech zealot” for suggesting that a high rate