Worried about your future as a lawyer? Be glad you aren’t French.

The Paris Bar held its second Conference on Law and Economics last week, metaphorically rounding up the usual suspects — multinational corporations, globalization trends and greedy American professionals — to berate and bemoan them at Paris’ ornate Palais de Justice. Any such gathering of French intellectuals, politicians and lawyers is a giant petri dish of bad ideas, some of which inevitably wander across the Atlantic.