I am not a millennial. I have written a school paper on a typewriter. I have done school research in a library with books. My favorite after-school pastime was playing Dig Dug. Even though I don’t identify as a millennial, I think millennials, in particular millennial lawyers, get way too much bad press. Here’s why I think millennial lawyers are all right.
Not Lazy
If you try to picture a millennial right now, you are probably envisioning someone who is lazy, entitled, coddled, and unfit for the real world. You’ve probably read some news articles about millennials acting that way or saw a meme on Facebook about that too. Well, as is often the case, generalizations about an entire group of people are not accurate.
Clearly, the millennial who works at Microsoft programming the thesaurus in Word does not think poorly about his generation.
What is happening to law grads right now? When I went into law school, Biglaw salaries were moving from $125,000 to $160,000. People were graduating and applying for jobs and getting them. The market was kind of saturated, but not too bad. Millennials graduating today will be telling war stories to their grandchildren about how much they had to work in 2015 to get a job that was paying 1995 dollars.
Source: http://www.nalp.org/0115research
More millennials are opening and running their own practices. More millennials have their backs to the ropes and are fighting hard through tough jobs with higher student loan payments than any practicing lawyer today. If your firm furnishes you with a secretary, a paralegal, a file clerk, and a receptionist, don’t call a solo attorney coddled or lazy.
Here are some counter-generalizations about how millennials are actually going to be a good group of lawyers:
They Understand How The World Communicates
Maybe you are from the generation when people advertised in phone books, or maybe you are from the time when websites became a popular method for attorney advertising. Well, although websites are still a good way to market, there are hundreds of millions of people on social media every day, on Facebook and Twitter and even Pinterest. People have problems and they go to Reddit, the fifth most-popular website in the United States. I’m not endorsing the seeking of legal advice on Reddit, I’m just saying that that’s where people are going, and it’s important to know where your consumers are. Does your firm use a newsletter? Have you tried a business Facebook post instead? Probably no one who is not your mother likes your newsletter so much that they send it to people that are outside of your mailing list. When someone “likes” your business Facebook post, it extends it to people outside your mailing list.
They Understand The Need To Think Outside The Box
Millennials understand what it’s like to have your backs to the ropes, and they know how to think creatively and solve problems. Have you been in court and needed a legal answer and used the Westlaw app or the Fastcase app? Have you ever picked a jury with the iJuror app on an iPad? The issue is not necessarily that all millennials are more familiar with all of the apps, it’s that millennials are more likely to be looking to constantly evolve and change methods and techniques every so often because they are a generation of people who have witnessed the rise and fall of technology enough to know that you should change and adapt. Where older lawyers might stick with WordPerfect and BlackBerries because that’s just what they are used to, Millennials would be more likely to reevaluate things and try new technologies and new ways of doing things because they’ve seen BlackBerries rise and fall, iPhones go from dominating the smartphone market to having around a 20% market share, iPads rise and fall. Millennials use something, and then wait for something better to come along and then use that.
Conclusion
As much as people like the pick on lazy millennial lawyers, remember, Generation X was once thought to be a bunch of lazy slackers. Fred Durst even wrote a song about it.
Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner at the Law Office of Jeff Bennion. He serves as a member of the Board of Directors of San Diego’s plaintiffs’ trial lawyers association, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego. He is also the Education Chair and Executive Committee member of the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section. He is a member of the Advisory Council and instructor at UCSD’s Litigation Technology Management program. His opinions are his own. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at [email protected].
