New Orleans Doomed

Louisiana in 2100 (predicted)

About 10% of the land in Louisiana, including essentially all of New Orleans, will be underwater by 2100, due to subsiding delta silts and rising sea levels. The engineering effort necessary to make a big dent in this trend is mammoth. Much of New Orleans is already below or just barely above sea level, the state has lost a large share of its wetlands to the sea, and Hurricane Katrina cost the city about half of its population on a long term basis.

If the latest predictions by scientists are even partially correct, Katrina may be just the first significant blow of many to one of the nation's most historically and culturally rich cities.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I bear no ill will for New Orleans, and indeed consider it one of the South's most interesting and worthwhile cities. The authors of the scientific journal article cited by the linked Science News article, at least one from a Louisiana university, no doubt earnestly want New Orleans to survive. And, disaster isn't imminent. The time horizon is for gradual (or more likely sporadic but unidirectional) loss of Louisiana's Gulf Coast over 91 years.

The point the science makes is pretty simple. Sea levels are steadily rising -- steps to stop global climate change and model corrections may impact the rate of sea level rise, but won't stop or reverse it. The Mississippi delta in the vicinity of Louisiana is also sinking, which makes Louisiana more hard hit than many other vulnerable sea level cities. Both the rising sea and sinking land are relentlessly making changes without reversing themselves, not cycling back and forth, at fairly predictable rates. Nothing conceivable is going to stop the sea level from rising or the delta from sinking at some rate. There have been major losses already which we have not stopped with engineering. The scale of the problem is enormous, comprising 10% of the land in Louisiana. The kind of efforts that are necessary for an even partial save of some of the Gulf Coast (perhaps perserving a string of access to Louisiana in the manner of the Florida Keys and saving New Orleans itself a la Venice or parts of the Netherlands) is an immense engineering undertaking.

My headline is hyperbole, of course. But, the point is serious. New Orleans is doomed unless someone does something to save it, and the steps that are necessary to do that on the scale that is really necessary (this report reveals that this scale is much greater than most people had previously assumed) haven't even been really put on the drawing board, let alone commenced in the long process of designing, cost estimating, funding, and building a world wonder class engineering project.

Can America and the world save New Orleans? It is possible. It will cost many billions of dollars. The Denver International Airport and Boston's Big Dig cost on the order of a billion dollars and then is a task orders of magnitude larger. It is likewise bigger than the task of building an aircraft carrier which costs about $15 billion. Forced to guess from the little that I know, I'd estimate that it would cost something on the order of the mid-hundred of billions to low trillions of dollars just to save New Orleans and a little strip of land to access it. No one that I've heard from has talked about that kind of major national investment yet.

Should the investment be made? I'm not even trying to get my hands around that question in this post. I'm simply pointing out a credible report passed on from a respectible scientific journal and explaining the threat it describes to one of our nation's oldest cities, then improving a sense of what would be involved to deal with it in this extended comment. Broad discussions armed with facts generally produce the best results. And, while locals may be most knowledgable about New Orleans' prospects, this problem is on a scale that it can solve on its own (nor can private industry).

Why Is Big Law Big?

Almost one in four law school graduates went to work for large law firms upon graduation in 2008 - a substantial increase from the percentage even a decade before then. Typically, the "burnout" rate for new associates is very high, with something like 80% of them ceasing to be employed by the big firm in four or five years, training and mentoring of new associates is often modest, and new associates are often given very modest responsibility or client contact in a case, despite the fact that they are earning high salaries and are often the cream of the crop academically.

Why have big firms grown so rapidly, and why do they need so many junior attorneys in whom they invest so little and expect so little from (by way of skills and responsibilities, not billable hours)?

Some of big law firm growth is due to the growing scale of big business, but this doesn't explain why firms have become bottom heavy. Leverage used to create high profits per partner explains why firms would like to have more associates than partners, but that kind of leverage only works if a large share of the work to be done can be successfully delegated to relatively inexperienced attorneys, because clients don't like to have skilled work on cases of importance handed over entirely to junior associates.

The bottom heavy nature can modern legal work can be traced to some specific areas of the law that can be deduced from the work that junior associates typically do. Stereotypically, the main jobs of modern entry level associates are discovery practice, due diligence in corporate ownership transactions and legal research. Both of the first two tasks have strong similarities They involve obtaining and processing large amounts of factual information from an opposing party, with a goal of finding needles of important information buried in haystacks of data.

In big case litigation, discovery often drives as much as 90% of litigation costs. In corporate transactions, due diligence is a large part of the legal cost of the deal. In both cases, the vast majority of the information gathered is of trivial importance to the matter, and the opposing party frequently knows what the important information is, but would prefer not to be required to find it and turn it over.

Big law firms are recent inventions. They were virtually non-existent prior to the 1950s, and have grown in number and scale exponentially since then. Big law firm litigation departments were quite small parts of the total enterprise until the 1980s, a time period which also grave rise to many of the transactions for which due diligence is important, like the leveraged buy out.

Relatively surgical changes in civil procedure and the substantive laws that expand the scope of what is relevant in civil cases, in the litigation context, and in securities laws, in the latter case, could, in theory, dramatically reduce these two stereotypical sources of big law firm associate work. It is also theoretically possible that this could be accomplished without necessarily greatly altering the balance of power in the areas of law where they apply.

These changes in the law, in turn, might put a dent in the scale of large law firms, particularly at the associate attorney and paralegal level. This isn't to say that the silk stocking/white shoe law firms that continued to serve big businesses would cease to charge high fees, pay good salaries to the associate attorneys that they did hire, or cease to be larger than their peer law firm that serve smaller enterprises. But, aggregate big business spending on lawyers might fall, associate to partner ratios might grow smaller, and firms that might once have had a couple thousand lawyers might shrink, even in good times, by hundreds associate attorneys and hundreds more paralegals. One also might see more cultivation for partnership of the associates who were still hired.

Would this be a good thing? Probably. But, the real key point is that substantive and procedural law beyond legal ethics (whose conflict of interest rules drive how many clients a firm can have and what kind of work it can do for them) can drive law firm structure.

Are Federal Corporate Spending Limits Dead?

The nation's foremost election law blogger opines at Slate that the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to declare the McCain-Feingold bill limitations on corporate and labor union spending in federal elections unconstitutional on its face, a decision that could also impact Colorado's campaign finance laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court had been scheduled to release a narrow statutory opinion concerning the release of an anti-Hillary Clinton movie made with corporate financing released on the eve of primary season, but asked to have the case re-argued this September (before oral arguments normally start after the summer recess) with full argument of broader constitutional issues presented.

Justice Kennedy, the most common swing vote on the court, issued a dissenting opinion in the case holding that corporate campaign contribution limits are constitutional (Austin) that the parties in the current case are being asked to argue for and against overturning in their re-argument. Votes in other recent campaign finance cases suggest that Kennedy's position now has the votes on the court to turn his dissent in Austin into a binding U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

The reasoning in the case will also likely impact parallel campaign finance rules at the state level in states that have them, including Colorado. Colorado Amendment 27, adopted by the state's voters in 2002, banned corporate and union contributions in the state and reduced the amount that political action committees (PACs) can contribute (recent implementing legislation closed the "LLC loophole" in Amendment 27 as then applied). Colorado Amendment 54, adopted by the states votes in 2008 and currently put on hold by a Denver judge's preliminary injunction also imposes campaign contribution limits, although those limitations were in question constitutionally in the current state of First Amendment jurisprudence.

Colorado Amendment 41, which bans gifts for the personal benefit of public officials in certain circumstances (interpreted to apply mostly in situations that also legally constitute bribes) will probably not be impacted by this U.S. Supreme Court decision, if it is resolved as expected.

Jail As A Business In Alabama

The private enterprise model doesn't always work for traditional government services like jails.

In Alabama earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the Morgan County sheriff locked up in his own jail for contempt for failing to adequately feed his inmates. Alabama allows sheriffs to keep food money they do not spend, and the sheriff reportedly pocketed more than $200,000 over three years.

This exact scenario would never happen in Colorado, where sheriffs receive straight salary compensation. But, the incentives in the private prison context are less clear. Texas has similarly misplaced incentives in civil forfeiture cases (as do many other states). The U.S. Supreme Court held in another case that it is unconstitutioonal for judges to be paid on a proprietary basis such as a percentage of the fines awarded by the court.

3900 Posts

This is the 3900th post on this blog. Its fourth anniversary is July 3, 2009. Make of theses facts what you will.

Two Track Associate Attorney Pay Continues

Of the 22,305 law school graduates, a remarkable 23% (5,130 members of the class of 2008) reported an entry-level salary of $160,000. In contrast, 42% of entry level lawyers reported salaries in the $40,000 to $65,000 range. Once again, the central tendencies are a poor guide to the distribution as a whole: whereas the mean salary is a $92,000, the median salary was $72,000. Further, the two modes ($50,000 and $160,000) are separated by $110,000.

From here.

The bimodal distribution of income from law firms was not in place in 1996, but was obvious in every year from 2000 onward. When I graduated from law school, the going rate paid by big firms for entry level associates was about $80,000 a year in New York City, and varied elsewhere mostly according to the cost of living in the city in question.

The large law firms that drive these salaries are themselves an evolving beast. In the early 1960s, 73% of all lawyers in Detroit who worked in law firms at all graduated from one of five elite law schools, everyone else conducted solo practices.

Fourteen Years As A Lawyer

Fourteen years ago today, I was formally admitted to the practice of law, in New York State. A little later, I would move to Colorado and practice law there. New York State has several hundred more years of history (New York has had a continuous governmental regime longer than the United States, for example), and has spent much of that history at a reasonably high population. This shows in their legal system, which has case law on everything and statutes cluttered with exceptions and anachronisms.* But, both the Colorado and New York systems work well enough, most of the time.

* It isn't just me that thinks New York's legal system can be quaint:

[V]oters might be ready to consider a full-scale constitutional convention to overhaul New York's rambling document - which addresses such minutiae as the size of ski trails and railroad grade crossings but is unclear on leadership succession. Just 12 days ago we noted that it had been 42 years since the last convention. That effort in 1967, however, cost $6.5 million - and not one recommendation was subsequently approved by the voters.

Colorado's constitution has a deeply flawed, overconstrained budget process, mostly due to TABOR, but due to regular "housekeeping" amendments passed by Colorado voters, is comparatively uncluttered with spent provisions and minutiae.