[AnthonyMouse]

You go to work for a law office. You don't know how to be a lawyer, but you know how to make coffee and schedule appointments and read English text, so you make coffee and schedule their appointments and check their briefs for typos and grammatical errors. You learn how to be a lawyer by watching lawyers work all day for several years. They pay you a pittance, have fewer embarrassing errors in their briefs and don't have to make their own coffee or schedule their own appointments.

[freejazz]

That's incredibly naive, you don't learn how to be a lawyer by watching lawyers do lawyer things. In the UK - that's what you do as a first year associate... after THREE YEARS OF LAW SCHOOL and their version of the bar exam. It is true that some US states will allow a bar applicant upon the certification of a firm. But there, the firm is essentially certifying that they provided the equivalent education. Have you seen a bar examination? It would not make sense to anyone who hasn't studied law, and even then, everyone taking it pays $4k for a preparation program that only makes sense to someone who has spent three years in law school. I'm not sure how you think that knowledge gap will be closed by somebody who just watches and spell checks.

For example, lawyers write. How is it possible for this person to develop their writing? Typically in law school, you spend an entire school year in one class developing your legal writing. Writing briefs from scratch for your professor, so he can IN DETAIL explain what you did right and wrong. Do you think a firm is going to invest this time in such an individual? I don't think that is a likely circumstance.

Nevertheless, what you describe is essentially an internship, which law students typically do their 1L and 2L summers. Oddly enough - the minimum wage has nothing to do with it. They are jobs where you are either working at a large firm and getting compensated at the same rate you would as a full time(180k a year - not too shabby for a fresh grad), or you are working at a smaller firm and probably for free... Nowhere is the minimum wage getting in the way.

I can see why the other poster kept taking up the issue with you. I can't imagine an actual situation where it's as you describe.