Last week, we began our look at alternate careers you can explore with your J.D. if you find that you just don't have it within you to actually practice law, per se. Yes, your friends and families will think you're crazy and that you've wasted your time and hard-earned money-especially if it's your parents who have wasted THEIR hard-earned money. But the bottom line is that thousands of J.D. graduates each year will never go into actual legal practice. So, despite what the naysayers will complain about, you're not alone in wanting to explore an alternative career.
Publishing Careers
One of the big options for J.D.'s who don't want to practice law is in the field of legal publishing. This is a multi-million-dollar industry that employs thousands of attorneys throughout the U.S. and the world. It's also an industry with dozens of options within the field.
For example, there is the world of textbooks. These are generally written by attorneys who are well-established in their respective fields and who have some formal academic and writing training. Writing such a book on your own when you're fresh out of law school might prove to be futile; your lack of experience will not endear you to book publishers, whose bottom-line is, "Will this book sell?" More than likely, yours will not.
But that doesn't mean that you can't break into the textbook industry. This field employs thousands of expert editors who, at the very least, must know the intricacies of "legalese," the language of lawyers. Moreover, these editors must sometimes "translate" the legalese of the authors and turn that language into something simpler for lay readers, or at least first-year law students, to handle.
On the other hand, oftentimes these books cannot and should not be altered. The legalese should not be changed in many cases, especially if a professor/writer is trying to make an intricate point about a detailed and complex matter of the law. In these cases, the publishers' editors and proofreaders will be lost. They lack the expertise to realize if the author has made a spelling or grammar error. Would a publisher's average proofreader realize that the sentence, "She was a summer of counsel and then externed elsewhere," is a complete thought and very understandable to legal readers? Probably not. That sentence looks like a train wreck, but grammatically there is nothing wrong with it. And more than likely, it would take someone with legal expertise to understand this. An author might become irate with a publisher for changing such a sentence; so the publishers hire plenty of specialized editors with specific sets of skills.
The boom of the Internet has given new life to legal publishing over the past few years. Dusty old tomes cluttering valuable space in law offices are slowly being replaced by the mouse and the monitor. Stacks and stacks of yellowing paper were first replaced by the floppy disk and now the CD-ROM. There are countless websites devoted to the law and, like our own LawCrossing, to legal professionals.
Several publishing companies have made Legal Codes for the states available for years, and over the past decade, the laws within those books have made their way onto the Internet. While this conversion requires plenty of work by programmers and web designers, people with legal knowledge are also required.
Before they make their way from the books into their online version, these laws need to be checked and double-checked. And who better to do that than an attorney with (at least) a basic understanding of the law? It's not as simple as taking the Workers' Compensation Code, for example, and copy and pasting it into one gigantic HTML file. That would work, technically speaking, but it would only give users a clunky document with which to work. Instead, the documents are broken up into sections.
Researchers-again, these researchers are mostly attorneys-must track the laws and all applicable amendments. Publishing an out-of-date law enters into dangerous territory; it not only looks bad from a public relations point of view and will not help a publisher win over customers, but there could be potential legal ramifications involved if a trial lawyer uses outdated information in court.
With printed books, there's somewhat of an expectation for things to be out of date. That's why we were always instructed to check the pocket parts first before diving into the statutes themselves. But on the Internet-with its ever-growing immediacy-people expect legal sites to be up to date. The major legal online publishers realize this, and they employ thousands of attorneys to constantly monitor state and federal goings-on to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of every single section of law on their sites.
It's not just a matter of reading law journals or scanning the Internet to find new amendments to published laws. The major legal publishers have liaisons who work in conjunction with state and federal secretaries, officers, information keepers, etc. There is indeed competition among the publishers, and anything they can do to get a "scoop"-to get their website updated with a new law or amendment before their competition does-is fair game.
Usually, knowing the instant when a new law or amendment has been passed or repealed is not enough. Legal researchers need to keep abreast of all legislation from inception onwards. Many legal websites now have sections devoted to future laws or laws on the way-laws that are passed but not yet codified. Attorneys are needed to find those laws and, in many cases, write commentary about them.
Online legal publishers also employ attorneys in their customer service departments. The customers in these cases are attorneys 99% of the time, as very few other people have the need to look up tort provisions, for example. Paying customers often need help finding particular laws or amendments, and the customer service departments' attorneys are there to help. Paid subscriptions to these sites can be extremely expensive; for that kind of money, customers expect top-notch customer service, and talking to a machine is not an option.
Online legal publishers know what they're doing. They bait you in law school to use their product for your research for free, knowing full well you'll be a slave to that site by the time you get out of school. At which time you or your employer will have to pay for it. For this reason, legal online publishers often employ many attorneys to go to the law schools and get the students hooked. In this capacity, the publishers' attorneys are part salesperson and part trainer, part public relations guru and part savior. It makes you wonder how students did their research 10 or 20 years ago, before the advent of the Web.
Of course, legal publishers employ attorneys in more traditional roles as well. Perhaps you don't want to work at a firm, yet you have a love of contracts. Online subscriptions often are written contracts which must, of course, be closely examined down to the last letter. What if a customer wants to cancel service, for example? What if they want to add additional users without being charged any extra money? These matters must be thought out in advance, and usually they are; they're contained in the contract.
As you can see, there are plenty of jobs in the legal publishing industry for attorneys. It's another field with a large number of lawyer-employees who simply did not see themselves in a traditional legal career. Someone like yourself perhaps. These jobs are out there to be had, and at LawCrossing we want to help you find them.
On LawCrossing it is very easy to search the jobs. This is definitely the most user friendly website. David
Facts
LawCrossing Fact #101: Your satisfaction is our satisfaction. We want to make you ECSTATICALLY HAPPY!
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