The View from Minnesota: A Profession on Edge

July 25th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt

Wood R. Foster, Jr., a Minneapolis lawyer and former president of the Minnesota State Bar Association, has written a striking review of recent changes in the legal profession. Foster spent his career as a commercial litigator with Siegel Brill, a small Minneapolis firm. Relatively few lawyers from that background have written about changes in the legal profession, and Foster does so eloquently.

Foster covers the growing surplus of lawyers, which he dates to 2000; fracturing of the profession; stalled diversity efforts; the high cost of legal education; BigLaw and its equally big shadow; and the impact of technology.

With some irony, Foster quotes a column that he wrote in 2000 after holding a series of focus groups with lawyers. “I have found,” he wrote then, “that lawyers are generally reluctant to visualize the profession’s future.” The future, however, arrived anyway. Today, he reflects, “a good argument can be made that the legal profession has changed more in the last 15 years than it did in the 150 years from 1849 to 1999.”

Foster’s views echo those I hear from many practitioners in their 60s and 70s. While academics continue to debate the existence of change, these lawyers have lived it. Their vantage point makes them particularly sympathetic to the newest generation of lawyers. “There really can be no doubt,” Foster concludes, “that it has been a rough ride for lawyers graduating from law school since 2000. . . . [The facts] add up to an unflattering picture of why so many young lawyers are finding it so hard to get the kind of start in their chosen profession that older lawyers like me were able to take for granted during the last half of the twentieth century.”

Give Foster a read. His featured series of articles absorbs much of this issue of Minnesota’s Bench and Bar journal.