Skill Over Salary | Fighting Bullies: The Case for a Career in Plaintiffs' Law - Bill Reid - S10E28

0:00Young lawyers most enjoy their careers the more responsibility they get. What is going to happen when those jobs are not there anymore? When clients say, I am not paying 20 lawyers hourly fees to go look at this database of documents when Claude can do it in two hours. On the margins, that takes down the need for manpower, and I describe in my book that that pyramid could become a wine bottle. You could argue that it might become somewhat of a diamond where there's more people at the top. We might end up with the$25 ,000 an hour lawyer. We could end up with that. Imagine a world in which we are now on chat GPT-12 and Claude-14 and all of the tasks of junior lawyers can be performed in hours.

0:48Who is going to be best capable to use those tools? On today's Legally Speaking podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Bill Reid. Bill is a senior founding partner at Reid Collins, a formal federal prosecutor, a two-time benchmark litigation U.S. Plaintiff Litigator of the Year, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, and the author of Fighting Bullies, the case for a career in plaintiff's law. Over the course of his career, he has prosecuted precedent-setting cases and recovered billions of dollars in complex commercial litigation. This episode is not just about plaintiff's law, it's about how the legal profession defines success, why so many talented young lawyers are funneled down narrow paths before they really understand their options, and what it actually takes to develop real trial judgment in a profession increasingly shaped by leverage, efficiency, and now AI.

1:43For our UK and international listeners, think of this conversation about claimant side trial work, professional information, and whether a system is set up to produce great courtroom lawyers. Welcome to the show, Bill. Good to be here, man. Looking forward to it. Ah, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the Legally Speaking podcast. And before we dive into your career and all the great things you're getting up to, we have a couple of quick fire icebreaker questions for you, which is firstly, what is your favorite beverage? which I think I might know because we just chatted about off air. And what is your preferred choice of footwear on a typical work day?

2:15Good questions. I'd go with red wine. Burgundy is probably my favorite, but anywhere old world would suffice. And, you know, I live in Texas, so I've got boots. Ah, there we go. Love it. Good old Texas boots. Good, good, good stuff. Okay, now what's one piece of legal tech or everyday technology you now rely on that you would have seemed unthinkable about using many years ago when you started your career? I didn't even have AI on my radar when I started my career because I'm older than dirt. But even like a year and a half ago, I thought AI was a joke. And now I use AI routinely every day. And it's only getting better every day.

2:55Like today is the worst version of it. Tomorrow will be better and so on and so forth. Absolutely. So let's go back to the beginning though, Bill, if we may. Would you mind telling our listeners a bit about your background, career journey? Yeah, just fill us in on some of the stories along the way. I would say that like a lot of young lawyers who are just starting in the profession, there wasn't really anything to read. There wasn't really much guidance. And school did not provide me much of a roadmap for what to do with my legal degree. In other words, like school is very good. And again, I'm speaking to the American legal education system, which, you know, I'm a professor at UT.

3:34but it's very doctrinal. It's very theoretical. And it's hard to understand how you might take all that knowledge and actually pursue a career that is fulfilling. And so basically, I had to figure it out for myself. And I think that describes most people's journeys. So in doing that, and in order to optimize my courtroom experience to be a courtroom lawyer, I decided early on to go become a prosecutor, which was around year four or five of my career. after I'd worked for a judge and after I'd worked at a regional law firm. And in prosecuting criminal cases for the U.S. federal government, I was just unfulfilled, right?

4:14Victory, winning was not really winning. Victory simply meant that normally a young, impoverished young man would go to prison for a long time for really no great purpose, but more importantly, for no great benefit to me. So it was actually depressing. So when I left the government after three years of being a prosecutor and began my career path as a claimant side lawyer, I began to marry true purpose with reward. And to me, that was like, no one told me about this in law school. I had to kind of figure it out for myself. But like the first time that I represented, you know, kind of a, let's just say, overmatched plaintiff or, you know, claimant against an institutional defendant, won the case, got a contingency fee and made my client happy.

5:05I just felt like the stars had aligned and I just kind of figured out, hey, this is what I want to do. this is what would be fulfilling to me. Let's march forward then to your book and talk about the sort of career myths, if we may, because your book takes aim at a very sort of entrenched idea in law that the best young lawyers either go into big law for money or public interest for meaning. So why do you believe that is such an incomplete, in many cases, damaging way to frame legal careers? It essentially excludes being a claimant side lawyer. No one in law school ever said to me, you know, Bill, you could choose to exclusively be a claimant side lawyer if you would like to be.

5:44And so the way I, well, the path to writing my book started from the fact that I'm a professor at the University of Texas Law School. I teach one class a year. The second to last class each year is a class entitled Advice I Wish Someone Gave Me. You know, when I was sitting in the audience of a class. Of course, no one gave that to me. And I can assume that this is similar in the UK, but in the US, tenured faculty at the top 26 law schools in America have on average 3.7 years of private practice experience. So they don't have a lot of real world experience to give to young lawyers. And by and large, the experience that they have comes from having been an associate in big law.

6:31The reality is that what big law does in the U.S., which I can speak much more authoritatively to, is that it deprives young lawyers of really the experience that they need to figure out what is best for them, what would make them fulfilled for a career. And as I like to say, you know, if you're going to practice 2 ,000 hours a year for a 30 to 40 year career, you're looking at 60 to 80 ,000 hours of your life. So if you spend that time towards a goal that you won't be proud of, you won't be satisfied by and end up being depressing, kind of like when I was a prosecutor, you can then begin to understand why an overwhelming number of lawyers in the U S anyway.

7:14And I assume the stats are similar in the UK suffer from extraordinary depression rates, suicide rates, substance abuse, Because when you enter a high stress profession like the law and then you marry it to a lack of purpose career, like representing all the same people that you would rather see held accountable, then you can begin to see why maybe a claimant side career could be more rewarding for at least some. And I think that's really the blind spot of law school. And that's why I wrote my book to essentially give people a broader framework within which to think about how to pursue a career that would be most fulfilling to them.

7:55and I love that you talk about the fulfillment piece I mean we've had representatives of law care which is the largest mental health charity for lawyers in the UK come on and talk about you know how they've been oversubscribed and underfunded because of all the reasons that you've mentioned before where people are highly stressed maybe you know turning to alcohol and various other bits and pieces so it's great that people are actually producing resources trying to you know basically improve things because I now want to talk about the big law sort of conveyor belt that I know you sort of touch on because you've described the wider system as very much a conveyor belt to big law.

8:27Where do you think then law skills are failing students most when it comes to showing them what real trial career can look like before they're part effectively set? I think law schools in the, and again, in the US, and I know the system in the UK does involve a apprenticeship component. And I honestly think an apprenticeship component to US legal education would be a huge step forward. So in some respects, I think that the UK system, as I understand it, is a little less subject to the conveyor belt as described in my book. But in the US, you have a bunch of law professors who've never lived in the real world running these law schools that are purely academic doctrinal paths to learning law, which undeniably lawyers need to know the law.

9:14I'm not disputing the concept. But when it comes time to figuring out career paths, the law schools seem to defer in large part to big law and allow them to dictate the timing of on-campus interviews, the structure of the offers made. And we now have this concept of the, I think it's called the jumbo offer or whatever it is. So big law has now moved on-campus interviews to mid first year of a law student's three year postgraduate career in the US. And then they offer these jumbo offers that essentially require a given student to commit solely and exclusively to a single law firm, which deprives them of the ability to do what I think the English apprenticeship system allows, which is the ability to sample a number of different career paths to decide which one is right for you.

10:10And so where I think law schools bear some culpability in this conveyor belt is that they're not actively in any way preventing the big law firms from doing whatever it is that they feel is in their best interest. Now, there is a symbiosis here, and that is that we in America graduate about 40 ,000 lawyers a year, which is already too many lawyers for how many jobs there are. And one of the biggest ways to employ law students, if you are in elite law schools, is to give a bunch of your students over to big law. And then now you get to say that you succeeded because they have a gainful employment path upon graduation.

10:55But that doesn't really measure what I think the true measurement of success ought to be, which is what do those lawyers think about their career five or 10 or 15 years out? And are they truly satisfied or are they calling that helpline you mentioned earlier because they're suffering from burnout and fatigue because they chose the wrong path, not having really thought about it too much? That's such an important point. And I think, you know, one of the things that you argue that sort of experience beats salary early on, you know, a lot of people chase going to big law, don't they? the attractive big ticket money that's available to them that's widely marketed in all the media public publications and so forth.

11:35So in a legal world, then where sort of the real courtroom exposure can be surprisingly rare, what choices should young lawyers make if they generally want to become first rate litigators rather than just service large cases from a distance? Well, again, your system kind of requires your young lawyers to elect a path that would either lead to the courtroom and become a barrister or in large measure, go to like a solicitor firm where they, I think, know they'll be doing more of the kind of paperwork and more of the client interface. So we don't have that concept in the U.S. And so lawyers are, I guess, in some sense, more free to choose their path.

12:15But again, I think you said it best and I said it in my book, experience beats salary. And so what I like to say to young lawyers is wherever you're going to go on your path, talk to someone that is on the path that you're about to choose, who's call it three to five years ahead of you on the path. And if they are giving you a good sense that they are getting the type of experience that you would like for yourself, they are getting access to the courtroom if they're pursuing a courtroom path, or they're getting access to real responsibility and real client relationships if they're pursuing a solicitor path.

12:52If they are getting meaningful responsibility. And all the studies showed this. Young lawyers most enjoy their careers the more responsibility they get. And for whatever reason, it seems to me that these things run in inverse proportions. In other words, the more salary you get at the outset, it seems like the less responsibility you would get. And so it becomes somewhat counterintuitive to young lawyers to reject the prestige of the big law or the magic circle firm in favor of the kind of less prestigious path that would get more responsibility. If my career is any example of this, I would say that by choosing experience over prestige, young lawyers can optimize their flexibility as their career proceeds because the real problem, and I think it's getting exacerbated with the advent of and I know we're going to talk about that, is that it's real difficult for young lawyers to get real meaningful experience.

13:55Without meaningful experience, it's difficult to gain your sea legs as a practicing lawyer in whatever path you choose. It's important, isn't it, that you don't get blinded by just the headline on the salary. It's about, like you say, when you're early into your career, acquiring your craft. You always talk a lot about skill stacking. That comes on to my next question that, you know, wherever you go, if your job moves, or you start long in the days where you start at one firm and you retire at that firm. And, you know, there's so much optionality out there now for the legal world, different career paths, different routes, so forth and so forth.

14:28But wherever you go, you want to be acquiring skills and stacking that and building your experience and your value so you can transfer that and hopefully build on that. And you're building momentum to sort of push yourself forward. So building on what you're saying there, then what point do young lawyers realize they're not building the skills that they thought they were building and what keeps so many smart lawyers stuck on a path they already suspect may not be right for them? Well, I think you're excluding a whole percentage of lawyers. I describe one in my book, her name is Abby, who quit the practice of law, right?

14:59So I think, and again, I don't live other people's lives. I can't really tell you their subjective thoughts, but I can tell you that the facts kind of bear out, at least in the US, that a very large percentage of lawyers who begin their career in big law leave in like three to five years. If that three to five year big law path actually gained them some level of responsibility and experience that they then could take somewhere else, then I wouldn't be so opposed to it. But my belief, informed by speaking to lots of young lawyers, is that that three to five year big law path is essentially very high stress, very high salary, but very low responsibility and experience.

15:44And so my advice to young lawyers is, you know, you've already got all the prestige in your fancy law degree. You've already got a nice, what other people call resume, what I call piece of paper. So now it's time to go get that experience so that you can put it to work for yourself. And that will give you so much more optionality at that three to five to seven year point in your career where you really figure out, hey, this is the path I want to go on. Because if you want to be a courtroom lawyer and you have no courtroom experience, you're dead, right? Like I like to talk about this all the time.

16:19If you needed brain surgery or a family member needed brain surgery and you walked into the hospital and the surgeon's like, well, my good friend, this is my first rodeo. I've never really done this before, but let's give it a go. You'd be like, no way, I'm not doing that. Right. And that's the same way clients are when choosing a courtroom. Again, it's great context. And, you know, really appreciate you sharing that. I guess a simplified question, you know, what is the psychological cost of the wrong work? You know, people go into these big law firms, great intensity as a young lawyer, not necessarily real accountability, you know, that real judgment, which again, with the advent of AR, which we'll talk about, you know, people are expecting more of that human judgment, you know, what is that psychological cost to the lawyers early on in their careers getting the wrong work?

17:01Well, I think you're seeing it in the people calling your helplines and the people that are suffering from all sorts of mental health problems in the US. But here's the way I like to frame it, right, for young students. And I think that this is where at least law school in the US does not really do a great job in helping young lawyers think about their career path. But I ask a series of questions in some of my talks to young lawyers, and they're would you rather questions. Like, would you rather represent the banks that nearly destroyed the world economy in 2008 and make a really good living doing it?

17:34Or would you rather be a claimant side lawyer in pursuing claims against those same banks? And I think most people, if they gave it much thought, would be like, well, on that issue, I think I'd rather be on the claimant side. Right. Well, let's take a different example. And it's not really what I do, but it's just this is not you should do what is best for me. this is how you should think about what is best for you. Would you rather, for example, represent the polluter who dumped whatever chemical into the local water supply that poisoned and stickened thousands of people? Or would you rather represent the claimant side of that and get those victims back some money?

18:12Would you rather represent the patent infringer or the company who is the victim of the patent infringer, et cetera? You can go down that list forever, But I really think those sorts of questions help young lawyers figure out what might sustain them for a 60 to 80 ,000 hour career. Today's episode is brought to you by Clio. If you're spending more time managing your practice than practicing law, it's time for a change. Clio is the intelligent legal work platform built for modern solicitors. Combining context aware AI with trusted legal research to help you work smarter, not harder. Switching is easier than you might think.

18:52Clio's dedicated migration teams handle your client and case data every step of the way, so you can focus on what matters most, your clients. Plus, award-winning support 24-5 via live chat, phone, and email means help is always on hand when you need it. Visit clio.com forward slash UK to find out why thousands of UK solicitors trust Clio. Now back to the show. great framing as well and i can imagine you know it really gets people to think a little bit more than just be necessarily just so transfixed on this is the chosen path to go or this is where i must go in big law or this is what i should be chasing and actually like you say giving that fulfillment making them really deeper think why why why why why and like you say putting that time attachment to it as well okay let's talk about your firm because you built a firm culture that rejects a lot of this sort of methodology around the prestige success making partner all these things again we see banded around what is the biggest lie young lawyers are told about status in the profession and why does that lie survive for so long so i've thought about this question a lot and and you know it's part of my speech but i don't know that it's so much an affirmative lie like an affirmative misstatement as opposed to just no one really talks about the real issues So when I say like I can't really say law school is putting out this message.

20:17But what I would say is that I think many law students, at least in the U.S., are left with that dichotomy that you described a moment ago, which is either big law and high salary and prestige or public interest and very low salary and perhaps not as much prestige. And it's that dichotomy that law students are left to believe. No one affirmatively comes out and says, these are your two paths, but that is what they're left to believe. And so the purpose of my book is really to highlight this third category, that claimant side litigation is a way to marry prosperity with purpose, if that makes sense.

20:58Yeah, no, what a beautiful outlook and way to look at it. And so we've teased throughout the discussion AI. So now, of course, we have to talk about AI in the future of what law firms and billing models might look like, because you've also argued that AI is going to put serious pressure on the billable hour model. Why do you think particularly large law firms are structurally more exposed to that shift than perhaps some of the smaller firms? And what does that mean for those who win and lose legal talent over the next decade, in your view? Well, that's a great question, Rob. And I feel like a lot of folks in the tech world were perhaps the canaries in the coal mine saying that, you know, AI was coming for the billable hour and the structure.

21:37But I feel like I might be one of the first lawyers to have written a book. And, you know, obviously my book is now going on a year old. But the reality is that when you start to think about what AI will do to the law profession, you have to begin to understand the business of law. So in my book, I did take some effort to describe how big firms work, how their economic models work, and how they make money. And I described it as a pyramid scheme in the sense that there are very few, let's just call it, you know, corner office rainmaker partners at the top and a lot of kind of, you know, minions at the bottom.

22:16And the way that big law makes money is what I like to call sending 20 bodies to solve the five body problem. In other words, there are very few businesses in the history of mankind that became more profitable, generated way more revenue and way more bottom line profits through inefficiency. If you start to think about it, the billable hour model rewards inefficiency. What does AI do? It forces efficiency. So I just had dinner literally the night before last with two of the U.S.'s most prominent trial lawyers on the big firm side. They're friends of mine. And we were having this discussion about what happens to the billable hour model when the 20 lawyer, you know, solution to the five body problem, which may be a two body problem with AI, is no longer possible.

23:12Well, I think we can all agree that what it means is fewer jobs. It also deprives young lawyers of what limited responsibility they're able to get, thereby, in my mind, actually making it even more imperative to young lawyers to gain that responsibility early. because at the end of the day, if in three to five years, me and one associate can do the task of what five or six lawyers take today, that makes my boutique firm of 40 claimant side lawyers so much more powerful and so much more profitable because we can do so much more work with our 40 people. Whereas if you look at big law, and this is a problem for law school too, because when you start looking at this conveyor belt that I described in my book where 40 ,000 graduates are coming out a year, a lot of them go into big law jobs and feeding that pyramid scheme.

24:09What is going to happen when those jobs are not there anymore? When clients say, I am not paying 20 lawyers hourly fees to go look at this database of documents when Claude, you know, 17 can do it in like two hours. And so I think that that on the margins takes down the need for manpower. And I describe in my book that that pyramid could become a wine bottle. You could argue that it might become somewhat of a diamond where there's more people at the top, but you might end up, and this is the discussion I was having the other night with these two very prominent lawyers, probably whose names you know.

24:50And we might end up with the$25 ,000 an hour lawyer. We could end up with that for those that want to cling to the old hourly fee model. But we won't have our teams of 20 lawyers all billing thousands of dollars an hour. And by the way, these two lawyers are in the $3 ,000 an hour range at the upper echelon in the US. And how does that sustain itself with a 20 person team in AI? I just don't see how it's possible. Well, let's dive a bit deeper and to get your thoughts then on that, particularly with AI coming in, stripping away a lot of that routine work you know it's very much known for you know efficiencies i think it's going to be even greater than that as it develops and enhances so many ways that ai can be used to transform industries not just legal of course and you know so that legal work that we used to train junior lawyers what does that mean for how the profession then develops the things that we probably need in light of the tech revolution coming in judgment advocacy you know trial readiness you know who is most at risk of being left behind here well there's a lot to that question rob okay so let's just start with, if you want to be a courtroom lawyer, getting into the courtroom is an imperative.

25:57There's no substitute for it. You can't learn by watching. You have to learn to be a courtroom lawyer by doing. And so in order, and I really think that I know a lot of KCs in the UK. And I think that the program by which junior barristers are brought up is that sort of program. And I said, So I think that in many ways, the UK system gets it so much more right than the US. You have to be much more deliberate in the US to achieve that courtroom status because, well, first of all, you're not forced into this solicitor barrister decision at the outset of your career. You're also in the U.S. And then you're also basically likely to choose if you go to a prestigious law firm in the U.S., likely to choose a big law career path at the outset.

26:51And, you know, these law schools in the U.S. brag about sending two thirds of their graduates to big law. I'm pretty well known. I think that's shameful, actually. But if you don't get that experience, I like to ask students today in 2026. Imagine a world in which we are now on chat GPT-12 and Claude-14 and literally all of the tasks of junior lawyers can be performed in hours. And who is going to be best capable to use those tools? People that have actually done the real work before, right? So now the next generation of young lawyers, they don't have that advantage of having actually done it the old-fashioned way.

27:35So they don't have the same framework to gauge, is this AI solution the right one? That's just one piece to it. But when you get to the point where now we're in 2031 and we have all these advanced AI models, what is the one career path that is immune from AI? I believe that courtroom lawyers will still exist. No one's sending a laptop into court to go put it on like verbal or audio to go talk to a judge or to a jury. It's not happening. So the one career path that at least seems to me to be safe for the short term until we send robots into court is to be an effective courtroom lawyer. And the only path to doing that is to actually do it.

28:22I like that I like that do you think we could potentially be sending robots into courtrooms just being a little bit devil's advocate here could you ever see that happening you know we talk we read a lot about AI judges and everything else you know do you see that or is that just bonkers to you it's it's crazy to me that that would ever occur but who knows man I don't know what the future holds I could tell you this though when you say AI judges I really think that judges, at least in the US and I assume in the UK, are very underpaid and overworked. And I think the efficiency that will come to the judiciary through AI, and they're already starting to see it, but imagine a world in which instead of trial in two or three years, which is a pretty aggressive trial plan for a highly complex case in the US, imagine a trial schedule that is like six to nine months and discovery is like a month because AI is so powerful.

29:16Well, in that world, I think that everything moves faster. And that would then, again, all paths point to the experience of being a courtroom lawyer is going to be a skill that I think will remain valuable. Now, it's not for everybody. And it's only going to employ so many people. But to me, like that's the sort of career path that young lawyers need to find. And it's not the only one. But all I'm saying is, and I don't have all the ideas, but young lawyers need to figure out how they're going to use AI to their advantage and not get wiped out by it. Okay, so I just want you to sort of think back to three skills that you believe you have that have made you the successful lawyer you are today.