Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being ‘a good start?’ Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys. Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Association, which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate existing schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their graduates. Many of these graduates flow into a marketplace that cannot sustain them.

A new report presented at the 2010 Midyear Meeting of the American Bar Association on Feb. 5, concludes: ‘Our interpretation is that race affects a judge’s ability to appreciate the perspective of a plaintiff of another race. Thus, white judges as a group are less able to identify and empathize with African American plaintiffs, making it inherently more difficult to find the plaintiffs’ arguments plausible and credible. This interpretation helps explain why White judges deny African American plaintiffs’ claims so often.

The American Bar Association voted to urge Congress to adopt the Rotterdam Rules, a significant step toward acceptance of international shipping liability standards. The rules, signed by the U.S. last September, would replace the 1924 Carriage of Goods by Sea Act to cover liability for cargo damaged at sea or on land when part of a door-to-door intermodal move. ‘The present legal regimes for maritime cargo transportation are numerous and outdated,’ the ABA said. ‘The Rotterdam Rules will provide greater harmony, efficiency, uniformity, and predictability for those involved in marine shipping.’ Maritime attorney Chester D. Hooper, a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law working group that drafted the rules, said the endorsement is important because the Senate will consult with the ABA about the rules when they come up for ratification. No date has been set for the Senate to take up the rules.

The Commonwealth is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s. These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools. … If all the schools being proposed actually opened, they would amount to an 18 percent increase in the 131 medical schools across the country. By comparison, there are 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association.

Stepped-up immigration enforcement is overloading U.S. immigration courts and undermining the ability of judges to rule fairly because they are under growing pressure to decide cases quickly, experts say. …Just last Monday, the American Bar Association called on Congress to create an independent court for immigration cases because the current system is overwhelmed by an exploding caseload. Said [Malcolm] Rich of the Chicago advocacy group [Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice]: ‘The immigration courts are basically dealing with life and death issues but with the resources of traffic court.’

The American Bar Association spent years studying and debating how to fix the nation’s immigration court system, and this month finally came up with a recommendation: Don’t bother. The lawyers group concluded that the courts are so overburdened and fundamentally flawed that it would be better to scrap everything and start over. At its semiannual meeting in Orlando, the ABA voted to endorse creation of a separate immigration court system that operates within the executive branch but independently from the Department of Justice. The ABA found compelling evidence for change in a 500-page report on the courts that the association’s immigration commission ordered 18 months ago.

The number of people deported from the U.S. annually has grown from just over 69,000 to over 356,000 in the past eight years, while resource-starved immigration judges issue decisions without sufficient time to conduct legal research and analyze the complex cases they are asked to decide. This is among the key findings of a new comprehensive review of the current deportation process by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration and one of the United States’ leading law firms. The study concludes that the system ‘is severely flawed and fails to afford fair process to all non-citizens facing deportation from the United States.’

A recent federal court decision could offer physicians and other health professionals an avenue for relief from a Federal Trade Commission regulation requiring them to implement a formal identity theft prevention program or face penalties.…The Dec. 1, 2009, ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the commission from applying the “red flags” rule to lawyers.…But in a case brought by the American Bar Association, the court found that the FTC exceeded its authority in applying that interpretation to attorneys.

The amount a lender forgives is sometimes called phantom income, because the taxpayer never sees it but still owes tax on it, said Michael R. Ford, a lawyer at Fellers, Snider, Blankenship, Bailey & Tippens, in Oklahoma City. Mr. Ford is also chairman of the professional services committee of the American Bar Association’s section on taxation.

The legal industry offers a useful model. We should set industry goals for the amount of pro-bono work every lobbyist does annually, recognize outstanding contributions, and make this form of public service part of our professional job description—much as it is part of the American Bar Association’s rules of professional conduct for lawyers.

But as the prison population increases, so does the workload of government offices charged with defending lawsuits such as this one: Four prisoners claim Pennsylvania inadvertently canceled all of its criminal statutes when it adopted a constitution in 1790. Not all prisoner lawsuits are outrageous, Lynn Branham notes. Branham chaired an American Bar Association task force that looked at the 1995 Prison Litigation Reform Act. The association in 2007 recommended that Congress amend the act.

Like solo and small boutique law practitioners across the country, [Scott] Sagaria has been better able to adapt to a shifting legal landscape than Big Law firms that had to shed more than 4,600 lawyers nationwide last year. …Such changes in the legal market have lifted Little Law into the largest and fastest-growing sector of the legal community, said Laura Farber, a partner at a 23-lawyer firm in Pasadena and vice chair of the American Bar Association division that monitors trends among small firms.