The skill set required of a modern lawyer is daunting. When I started practicing, back in the Pleistocene, you needed to be able to speak an intelligible sentence, write an intelligible sentence, and know enough law to distinguish yourself from a second baseman.

Now you’re liable to need an undergraduate degree in a specialized discipline, language skills that enable you to take a depo in Spanish or Farsi or Xhosa, a knowledge of electronics advanced enough to enable you to operate a smart phone, scan documents, and make airline reservations, and a familiarity with computers that only Steve Jobs had 20 years ago. A job applicant who showed up with the qualifications I had when I arrived in this county in 1971 would not get an interview today.1