[JBlue42]

Thanks for the insightful comment.

I might be missing something about the part regarding unpaid internships. Is this because those internships do, or can, pay so well (my former roommate IIRC was bringing in a couple thousand a week over the summer)? I don't really know the content of what those interns do but it seems if it's something that someone would be paid to do as a job that they should be compensated. CA has strict rules about that stuff because they have been, and still are, abused (see the entertainment industry).

Overall though, whether lawyers or other professions, our move away from apprenticeships and other sorts of on the job training or investment in employees has most likely been detrimental. When you read complaints about us Millenials job hopping and 'having no loyalty' a quick peek behind the curtain should reveal that it's not only economic (esp. given student debts) but you learn rapidly how merciless companies can be.

[caffeine5150]

On internships, there are different contexts. One can clerk at a law firm during law school and be paid for it and a starting attorney at a firm is often arguably paid more than they are worth making them akin to an intern (the firm is investing in cultivating future attorneys for their firm). These are the opportunities I am suggesting are shrinking dramatically, but still exist. The intern context I’m speaking about is in the context of small firms such as my 6 partner transactional firm. California sets out a set of requirements for a unpaid internships to be legal. Essentially, it must be an educational experience where the intern is not really engaged in productive work for the benefit of the business. Our firm is not in the position to create an educational experience for an intern without tangible benefit to the firm. At the same time, the services they might provide to our firm are not important enough to us to merit paying them even the minimum wage (plus deal with other employer hassles and risk). Transactional work (e.g. negotiating a SaaS agreement) is particularly challenging in this regard because it doesn’t require much low-level work as compared to litigation or M&A work. All of that said, I’d be happy to mentor a new attorney in negotiating and drafting commercial agreements in exchange for them say, organizing my forms library. I believe that this would be a mutually beneficial arrangement and I don’t think there is much likelihood of abuse. New attorneys are capable of evaluating the benefits of this arrangement and leaving if it doesn’t work out. Entertainment is a peculiar example where there is unusual desperation to get into the industry and unusual concentration of power in individuals in the industry (and many egos and *holes). I’ve heard of production companies where the interns not only didn’t get paid, but had to pay the company e.g. $30k. I’m sure there are industries where these unpaid internship restrictions provide some important protections and I’ve no illusions about businesses’ capacity to take advantage of people, but in my context, I think it’s preventing what would be a useful arrangement to help address a critical need.

[JBlue42]

That makes more sense now given the specific context of law. I guess it's a field most that us non-lawyers are unaware of in terms of how it operates internally. Thank you for clearing it up!