Esq. Never

Update: Mission Accomplished

2011-02-14T07:00:00.005-05:00

"Yes," I somewhat exasperatedly replied when a gentleman called about my resume and asked if I recalled applying for a position with his company. I then dutifully gave him a series of stock answers I had memorized to the all too familiar standard questions interviewers are apparently required by law to ask.

I didn't mean to come across as uninterested or even ungrateful for this opportunity, but I was tired. This had been just one of a number of telephone interviews I had entertained over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, I was on the third interview for a promising (and even lucrative) position in what probably could be described as consulting. Furthermore, I was trying to juggle these interviews without jeopardizing my current position.

So, for all you whiners who complain about law school, you should realize that you just need to think positive thoughts and everything will work out...Just kidding. Actually, I loathe the law school cartel as much as ever, but the rest of what I have written is true.

Some of you may wonder why I decided to start this post with such a sanguine introduction. Well, if you've read this blog before, I'm sure you know that a year ago things weren't looking so good. I repeatedly woke up with thoughts of offing myself. I couldn't buy an interview, and I was constantly being pressured to just "network" in order to find myself a great legal position...all while I watched people who barely graduated from colleges that aren't even accredited make great salaries, buy homes, and raise families.

In fact, here's a quote from a January 27, 2010 post:

"Right now, I'm even being strung along by temp agencies with the possibility of getting hired for JUNIOR document review positions."

Yikes. What a difference a year makes.

But what's the point of this post? Well, I never was really satisfied with how I ended the blog. No, I'm not staging a comeback. The current crop of scam bloggers are far more worthy of their blogger sites than I ever was, and I couldn't be more proud of the way they've permeated the media - everything from Slate to the New York Times.

Instead, I just want to provide one final update regarding what happened to me after I left the scam blog movement in order to preserve what was left of my mental health and try to rebuild my life.

In a nutshell, I can finally do what I had endeavored to do from inception of this blog: Declare "Mission Accomplished". Yes, slightly over a year and a half after graduating from law school, I now have a real, salaried, non-legal job in an industry in which I'm interested.

Here is my story:

For those of you who haven't had time to read through all of my prior posts, getting to this point was an arduous and depressing struggle. I left law school unsure of what to do. With few exceptions, the law didn't really interest me. The economy was in shambles and the legal sector, which had never been that healthy (in terms of providing jobs for the non-elite) was experiencing a complete meltdown. I was already toying with the idea of just going into "business".

Like many unemployed recent graduates, I reluctantly (after five years of living on my own post-college) headed back to live with my parents, hoping that I could quickly find a new job. In the hopes of maximizing my employment options (namely through document review), I decided to spend the time and money preparing for the bar exam.

For a few of months afterward, I once again drank the law cartel's kool-aid as I dutifully played the networking game - going to CLE's, having people put me in touch with their lawyer friends, and even taking an unpaid internship with a personal injury firm.

One day while sitting in a converted filing room, struggling to use a typewriter to fill out some superfluous form that wasn't available on-line, I had an epiphany: The law had been nothing but a curse to me. I had continuously sunk time and money into into this pipe dream, and it was time to get out.

By November of 2009, I began my quest to escape this horrid "career path" - not that there were actually any legal jobs to set me off on a legal career anyway. I knew it would be difficult with my three year gap in work experience, the scarlet letter of a J.D. on my resume, and a lousy economy.

I was right. It took me months to even get one interview. I sent out hundreds of resumes and attended career fairs that offered a choice between selling insurance on a commission basis or joining the military. When I did get a rare interview, it was usually because the company was too disorganized to screen candidates properly and almost always ended in disaster. Networking, recruiters, and temp agencies proved to be equally unfruitful.

Finally, in June, I was able to impress two guys with a new start-up enough that they were willing to take me on as a contractor on a trial basis, which is where I left off my blog.

At first things went pretty well. The work was pretty interesting and I was learning new things. The pay wasn't great, but I could work as many hours as I wanted, and I was getting in on the ground floor of something that could really take off.

Unfortunately, it eventually became apparent that I didn't know enough about the industry to take a leadership position in the company, which is what they were really looking for. I did complete some projects that impressed them, and they encouraged me to really take things to the next level. I briefly committed myself to doing this, but I was already working fifty hour weeks, enduring a long commute, and making little money; I just couldn't bring myself to invest anymore into the company.

With a heavy heart, I ended up coming in one day and politely informed one of the partners that I didn't think I could fulfill the role they needed. He was sympathetic and thanked me for my hard work, and so I was back to square one.

I was exhausted, so I took a little time off, but I got a certification that was relevant to my industry and started reading industry publications and even considered starting a blog to demonstrate my knowledge.

Once I started looking for work again, however, it wasn't too long until something landed. I applied for a temp to perm position with a company that was in the e-commerce industry that did similar work to my previous employer.

The most amazing thing was that my resume was actually read and considered by an HR rep from the company. (Usually, the JD was poison to any trained HR professional.) She scheduled a phone interview with me that actually was surprisingly intense.

I then got a call back. I was shocked to learn that there were some hiring managers who wanted to talk to me. I came in and things went so well that there was even the suggestion that they would hire me for a full time position outright.

That didn't happen, but I was offered a temp position working for one of the company's larger clients. I accepted it, hoping that this was the path to finally gaining full time employment in the industry I was trying so hard to enter.

At first things seemed pretty good, but I suffered plenty of indignities. I was constantly reminded of my temp status whether by being excluded from meetings or not having the same access to technology. I even bristled every time I was introduced to someone by my "rank".

It didn't help matters that I was often being bossed around by people who had just graduated college within the past few years...That is people who were still in high school back when I graduated college. I also earned an hourly wage that barely would be acceptable to the average Wal-Mart employee.

Nevertheless, you know what I did? I just shut up and grinned and endured yet this additional affront made possible by my JD.

I did make a few other efforts to find full time employment. I shockingly received a call from another HR representative from a HUGE company who thought my resume was a good fit for the financial analyst position for which I applied a month earlier.

The screening interview went great. The woman was really on my side and said that even if this job didn't work out, she'd definitely be able to find something else for me given my background.

The panel interview didn't go quite as well. The first guy with whom I spoke seemed pretty confused as to why I was even looking at this position. I was questioned about the JD, the gap in my resume, and to paraphrase him slightly "Why in Sam Hill did you spend all that money on your degree?"

That's probably the best question I've actually heard from an interviewer. (Closely followed by, "So you have a law degree...what is that some sort of hobby of yours?")

At one point, he actually tried to help me brainstorm ideas as to how to find gainful employment (elsewhere, of course)!

The last woman with whom I spoke seemed to accept my explanations about law school, but she also questioned me about the cost of attendance. Note: Financial executives don't really want to hire idiots who go into six figures of debt and forgo three years of wages for a worthless degree. Go figure.

Not surprisingly, I never heard back. (Despite promises that I would hear back from HR.) Oh, and that promise of there definitely being something for me, guess what happened...That's about lie 346 during this process.

I also got to a second round interview for another company that was located nearby to where I live and seemed like a great place to work. I didn't seem to have the stats background they wanted, though. Oh, they did promise to be in touch...Yeah, need I say more?

After taking time off for these interviews, I decided to put my energy into getting promoted from my temp role. The company was pretty laid back, the starting salary for full time analysts was pretty good, and I got to work in a skyscraper...and I'm referring to an actual office, not some subterranean dungeon in contrast to temp jobs in some other industries.

After a few months, I finally had my quarterly review with my manager and his manager. I got a strong score on my performance review, and my manager said he was pushing for me to move into a permanent role.

Finally, I got called into the "big boss' " office for my review. I was complimented on my performance and was asked general questions about how I liked the job. I was also asked if I planned to try to get into law...*sigh*....even three months of employment wasn't enough to convince an employer that I didn't want to be a stupid lawyer.

And then...the review ended. I was asked if I had any questions. I actually grew a bit of a spine and asked if there were any plans to make me full time. To which the reply was, "Are you interested in working here full time?"

"No, I'm actually so pleased to live at home as I enter my thirties that I want to make sure I never make enough to jeopardize this dream come true!"

What a question. Pro tip: Always take the initiative to push your boss if you (reasonably) are looking for a raise or promotion.

I was informed that there had to be a specific opening, but that it was definitely a possibility.

A possibility? Great. Three months of work for that. Did I mention that when I joined, HR said I would be on the fast track to permanent employment.

I then decided to take more initiative; I applied for a bunch of new jobs and posted my resume on Monster.

This is when everything changed. Not only did I get slightly less than a 50% response rate to my resume - compared to a .05% response rate in the past, but I had recruiters (both internal and third party) unilaterally contacting me about my resume. Where were you guys for the last year?

I have no idea if this means the economy is coming back, or if I have a great resume, or if actually having a job makes me more attractive to employers. Whatever the reason, it was definitely nice to be courted by employers for once. It was like those old milk commercials in which the skinny loser adds some more dairy to his diet and voila!, he's big man on campus.

I actually got within a hair of landing a job with a big company with a well defined career path and great starting salary, but I was missing one necessary skill set (that I could have obtained through a process a lot easier than getting a law degree).

As things turned out, I actually finally got promoted to a full time analyst position with a salary in the mid-40's and full benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k, vacation, etc.). Good enough for an exhausted man whose other options looked like they were going to pay about the same.

There's still some other options open, but for the time being, this looks like the job I'll have for a while. This would have been a great position if I had taken it back in 2006 instead of going to law school. It's not quite as impressive after taking four years (including the year of unemployment) off from the workforce and incurring more debt than I want to think about. (Thank you IBR!)

Also, I work with coworkers and for bosses who are actual humans, who even care about me from time to time. I have benefits. I'm on a career track. I don't have to go to housing court in the bad side of town or write horrible memos that nobody will read. When I look out, I can see the downtown of a major city instead of the industrial boiler in the bowels of some subterranean sweatshop.

All of this said, I'm obviously upset about law school, and I know it doesn't sound like it, but I'm quite grateful that's it's all over. I'm out. I don't have to work in law, and I can start rebuilding my life and repaying my debt (for the rest of my natural life).

So let's take a look at the final break down:

Number of resumes sent: Hundreds? Thousands?

Negative responses: Plenty, but not anywhere close to the number of resumes I sent out.

First round interviews ending without an offer: 4

Second/Third round interviews ending without an offer: 3

Withdrew application after being asked to interview or further interview: 4

Received and accepted offer: 2*

* - I resigned from the first position

Let's also see how I stack up against the goals I set forth when I first started this blog.

Feel free to check out the post: http://esqnever.blogspot.com/2009/11/mission-impossible.html

Compensation: I said I wanted $40,000; I make a few thousand more. Looks good.

Professional: I wanted a job that required a college degree. This definitely does. It even requires some previous work experience.

Non-Legal: My current manager, who even interviewed me, didn't even realize I had a law degree. I'd say I'm safe on this point.

Minor Points: I didn't need to move. I got a very cheap certification, but I didn't head back to school. There was no bailout via an inheritance or a wealthy spouse, and I'm actually in the industry that I wanted to enter.

I guess that's mission accomplished as I try to fly away from the flaming wreckage that is my legal education and "career".

I kind of feel like a veteran of a war - and yes, I'm well aware that that soldiers have experienced worse things than any law grad - who somehow survived the carnage of the battlefield. He can never forget what he saw. He has wounds that last a lifetime. He may not even feel particularly proud of what he has done, but it's over. He can return back to society. It isn't so much joy that he's feeling. It's relief.

I hope that everyone else out there can also feel the same relief one day.

The End of Esq. [Never] - Final Post

2010-08-09T07:32:00.002-04:00

When I first started this blog, I was not sure what direction it would take. While I linked to the other scam bloggers, I think I saw this blog as more of an attempt to chronicle my quest to find a non-legal job and to occasionally share my thoughts about law school, the legal industry, and, of course, the dishonesty involved in both.

(As it turned out, however, the career search aspect became a secondary concern as my contempt for the law school scam began to take prominence. More on that in a moment.)

One thing I did know from the start was that I didn't want to end this blog until I could triumphantly declare that I had secured a serious, decent paying, non-legal position despite my J.D., work experience gap, and the miserable economy.

I sincerely regret that this will not be the case.

A few posts ago, I informed you that I was taking on a temporary, contract position with a company that was designed to evaluate whether or not I would receive a permanent offer. While I am pleased to report that my "employer" envisions me working at the company well past the initial evaluation period, it is going to take them longer than expected to determine if they plan to take me on as a permanent employee.

While this is a contract position, I still work long hours and have a long commute. This has left little time for blogging. While I have not run out of things to say, I have exhausted my motivation to say them.

Over the past month, I had hoped to receive the final word about the position, my specific role, and my annual compensation. Sadly, it appears that it could be weeks or even months before this is settled. There is also the possibility that in the end, I will not end up working full time with this company.

With no particular date in sight when I can foresee declaring victory, and with little time to blog, I have decided to "prematurely" bring this blog to a close.

As mentioned, I have run out of steam to maintain this blog. After 100 posts, while I may have some additional thoughts to share that may be either interesting or entertaining, I don't know if I can really add anything more of substance. I've made my case as best I could through personal anecdotes and more detached analysis.

In addition, whether this present position works out, or I am just able to finally have some recent, substantive work experience on my resume, I believe I am on the road to leaving the law and securing an actual career.

Moreover, while I stand resolute that the law school deans and their cohorts are as crooked as the day is long, I am somewhat concerned about the cynicism and bitterness that I have expressed in this blog. In all honesty, I do not want to be an angry or resentful person.

I believe most of what I've said on this blog is accurate and defensible. I know that one man's sincere regret is another man's "whining", and I am not oblivious to the duplicitous tactics of some of the law school apologists and administrators. That said, I do not think it's healthy to be a in a bitter feud with anyone - even the more corrupt and miserable elements of society.

I certainly am glad that there will continue to be a scam busting community, and I hope it grows into a larger, more visible organization, but I'm not the right person to be part of this movement. I don't regret most of what I've written, but I do regret some of the occasionally snide and nasty ways in which I've expressed myself.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, this blog went in a somewhat different direction than I expected. With my resumes ending up in oblivion and my networking connections flaming out, I didn't have much to write about regarding my job search.

When "A Law School Carol" unexpectedly garnered national legal press attention, I was pushed into the forefront of the scam busting movement. I hope this event was able to draw greater awareness about the community and in some ways contributed to the success of some of the more popular blogs such as Third Tier Reality, But I Did Everything Right, and the Jobless Juris Doctorate.

I would have never believed that simply by creating a blog and some simplistic cartoons I would be featured in three national legal publications and the Wall Street Journal blog. Moreover, being able to draw hundreds and sometimes even thousands of hits every time I publish a new post has been an honor. Maybe I should write into my law school's alumni magazine to advertise these accomplishments!

I contemplated revealing my law school in my final post, but I decided it wouldn't serve much of a purpose. Listing the school could possibly hurt me in the future, and my objection is to law school as a whole and not specifically Syracuse Law....oh wait, I mean the University of Florida Law...oh, I mean Loyola Law, uh, yeah that's it...

I did, however, plan on posting a narrative about my job search, a closing argument about why law school is a bad idea, and a final farewell after I posted my intended "victory" post. While I don't have the energy to write three full posts, let me conclude with three micro posts within this one:

***

In all, I spent 13 months unemployed since I graduated law school. Eleven of those months were post the bar exam. Eight of those months were months in which I was seriously committed to finding a non-legal job.

I sent out over a hundred resumes. I probably received a total of fifty responses - most of which were outright rejections. I was asked to come in for four interviews for serious, professional positions.

The first interview went well at first but quickly collapsed when it turned out that I lacked the requisite technical knowledge to succeed in the position without additional training. I was annoyed that neither the job listing nor my resume made any mention of serious programing experience. I was also displeased because I couldn't get a hold of anyone at the company to find out my status.

The second interview was a disaster. The security guard didn't even have me in the computer to let me up to the office. The guy who interviewed me clearly had no idea what was on my resume and asked a total of three questions. I had to fight traffic and pay for parking. Obviously, I couldn't get a hold of anyone in the office after the interview. I'm still shocked by the lack of professionalism I experienced.

The third interview was far more professional. The interviewer was the CEO of the company. He was polite and professional but not very friendly. I appreciated that he not only read my resume but also memorized it.

Unfortunately, this was the interview I was dreading. The first three questions were essentially "Why the #$%! did you go to law school if you don't want to practice law?" I actually think I handled these questions well, but his interrogation pushed me into defensive, moot court mode, and made me come across as too adversarial and quick talking throughout the rest of the interview.

In the end, I'll admit that I blew the interview by coming across as too aggressive and over-eager. Though, I don't think the interviewer and I would have gotten along very well, so maybe it was for the best.

While the interview was as professional as could be, and everything that went wrong was entirely my fault, I did become annoyed after the interview. I called the guy afterward, but he kept brushing me off instead of just thanking me for coming in and but saying that they had gone with another candidate. Moreover, during the interview, he actually promised to put me in touch with a networking connection (not a great sign at an interview), but he never followed through despite my requests.

My fourth interview was with my current employer. I actually wasn't expecting to get a job. I had a phone interview with my company, and it turned out that I wasn't at all qualified for the position for which I applied. Nevertheless, they invited me in to talk more about the company.

I didn't think this would amount to much, but I figured I'd go because it wasn't like I had much else to do. I actually considered not wearing a suit, and almost walked out when one of the interviewers took a call during the interview without excusing himself.

Then something odd happened - after I reiterated that I probably lacked the requisite skills to fill the role, he brushed it off by saying that it didn't matter. He then had me interview with another employee. Then he came in and talked to me again. Then I talked to another employee. Then he came in and asked me about my salary requirements. Anything above minimum wage that didn't require me to wear a paper hat sounded pretty good at that point, but I gave him a realistic figure.

He said he'd think about it, and the next day called me back to offer me a contract position that paid around what I wanted (albeit sans benefits and with the requirement to pay the SE tax for the time being) to evaluate my work before taking me on permanently.

The position could generally be called an IT/business position, which is what I wanted. I would prefer it to be a little more development/tech oriented, but otherwise it's pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

I was generally offered this role because my "employer" (technically "client" since I'm an IC) thought I was an intelligent guy with a pretty solid computer background. For the record, yes, they did see the JD as a plus, BUT before you apologists start yucking it up, let me point out the following: 1) This was one 1 of over 100 employers; 2) I presently make less than I did at my pre-law job; 3) I'm not even a permanent employee; 4) I still have a mountain of debt to worry about - IBR or no IBR.

I am, however, very grateful for this job, and I enjoy it. I'm also learning a lot of new thing, which will be marketable should I have to move on. I don't think I will voluntarily do so because there are some great opportunities available at this company.

For those of you still looking for work, I'm afraid I don't have much new advice to offer. Trying to sell yourself as a generally intelligent and capable person is a good idea, but learning some new, marketable skills is really the best approach. Try finding software that is used in the field in which you're looking and see if you can master it to give yourself a head start. If you're a writer, learn about SEO. If you're creative, look into learning about filming and video editing.

Besides that, just keep trying. If you have something to offer, eventually you'll find somebody who will pay you for it.

***

While things seem to have turned around for me, I wouldn't wish this experience on my worst enemy - maybe a law dean or two, but I'm talking about actual humans here.

If you're a prospective law student, I don't know what I else I can tell you that isn't already available elsewhere on my blog to try to convince you not to go to law school.

At the end of the day, if you ignore these warning, I guess it doesn't really affect me. I have my debt and my shame already, but you see, I do care. Maybe you think I'm a loser. Maybe reading my blog makes your blood boil. Maybe you're a pompous punk who thinks that he'll sooner grow a tail than end up begging for an unpaid internship with the local DA after passing the bar. It doesn't really matter; I still don't want this fate to beset you.

In other posts, I've tried to appeal to your reason; let me use this last post to appeal to your emotions.

Aside from those of you who know you want to be lawyers - and unless you've actually worked closely with practicing attorneys, you DON'T know - the people who go to law school are either recent college graduates or dissatisfied young employees who think a legal career will be more lucrative and/or more exciting than their present options. (Law schools prey on these poor souls with the ruthlessness of a lioness picking out and pouncing on a wounded wildebeest.)

If this is you, let me empathize with you. I was fortunate when I graduated college. The economy was doing well in 2004, and I landed a decent paying professional job. In some ways, I had it all. I lived in a luxury apartment (albeit sharing the rent with a friend), I had savings, and I had no debt. I could eat out with friends, and I could pretty much buy (within reason) whatever I wanted.

Yet I wasn't happy. My job was mundane and boring, and while it paid the rent and let me live a stable life, I wasn't exactly rolling in the dough and didn't think I could support a family on my salary. I also envisioned holding a job that was exciting, challenging, and lucrative.

Then I drank the law school Kool-Aid. I believed the data about the average starting salaries. I listened to the anecdotes about appearing in court, working with interesting clients, and researching compelling issues.

Sure, I knew that at the very big firms, the work wasn't that interesting, but I was never all that interested in working at the largest firms anyway. Besides, if the money ever seduced me into taking such a job, I could always move over to a smaller firm with more interesting work later on.

All I "knew" was that there's lots of work for lawyers because everyone needs lawyers, even the average law graduate was making good money, and whatever job I received, it would have to be better than my current job.

Sound familiar?

So I dutifully dumped tons of money into LSAT prep courses and the application process. I researched the schools and essentially felt like I was a senior in high school again, weighing my options as I embarked on a new chapter in my life.

I actually laid awake paralyzed with fear one night, worried that I had blown the LSAT and would have to stay at my job and forgo law school (back then you only had one chance at the LSAT). If only I HAD bombed the LSAT!

Maybe my job was boring. Maybe I wasn't making enough money. Maybe I needed to find a new career path, but the answer certainly wasn't to be found by going six figures into debt and wasting three years of my life all to attend a school that would give me neither practical training nor a pipeline into a new and better industry.

On the eve of law school, I had a good job, my own place, and a positive net worth. When I graduated law school, none of these facts were true.

Let me put it this way, if I had access to a time machine, I would go back in time to find myself sitting at my desk, reviewing law school brochures. I would then rip the glossy brochure out of my former self's hands and throw him to the ground. I would proceed to kick him several times and tell him if he ever even considered applying to law school after this, I'd be back to finish the job.

Sure, I'd probably have a few bruised ribs today, but I'd also probably not be in the process of requesting Sallie Mae to put me on the IBR, so I "only" need to hand over 10% of my salary for most of the rest of my life.

***

With that, I guess it's time to close up shop. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read, comment, or contact me with your stories.

It was an honor to hear from so many people who changed their minds about law school because of this blog, derived some comfort by reading my posts, or just found this blog to be an entertaining way to kill some time at work.

If this blog has helped one person find a non legal job or convinced a single person not to go to law school, then I'm convinced that my efforts have been worth it even if "Esq Never" hasn't moved the law school industry even an inch towards reform.

While I don't have any intention of pulling a "Brett Favre", I may occasionally post articles on Underdog, Esq. if I believe I have anything particularly compelling about which to write, but I wouldn't expect any such articles for a while.

I will leave this blog up (but not add to it) and available until Blogger goes the way of Geocities and deletes all of its pages.

I wish everyone the best of luck, and I hope that all of you who are currently suffering from unemployment and underemployment (thanks to your JD's) end up landing on your feet.

While I don't want to discuss law school or the scam anymore, if I can ever help anyone in the future with advice about transitioning into a non-legal job, please feel free to e-mail me. I can't promise an immediate response, but I'll do my best to check my esqnever at hotmail dot com account and try to respond.

With that, this is Esq. Never - signing off.

Esq, Never's 100th Post

2010-07-26T22:25:00.000-04:00

Well, after nine months of blogging about the non-legal job search and the law school scam, I've finally reached 100 posts. It would be great if I could use this occasion to make an exciting announcement - but I can't. I wish I had something particularly creative for this post - but I've been too busy.

Instead, I'm going to do what every great production of the past has copped out by doing when it reaches a milestone of some sort - A "Best Of" episode!

For those of you who have been regular readers since the beginning (or those who have read through the archives), I'm afraid there won't be much new in the post. For those who may have missed some of my earlier posts, I'm going to try to highlight some of the articles I've enjoyed the most that you may want to check out.

If you've already read these posts, I'm going to provide a few additional comments that you may or may not find interesting.

Thanks to everyone for reading. I hope others have found my blog to be either informative or entertaining.

The Best of Esq. Never

Not Another Law Blog

My very first post. Find out why not all unpaid internships are bad. Mine, for example, finally convinced me to move on with my life and leave the futile search for an attorney position behind me.

But I Have a Law Degree!

I wish I had put more effort into getting more people to adopt this catch phrase. Sure, you know somebody who graduated from Bob Jones University who is doing just fine while you're barely qualified to pick up cans on the side of the highway with you first tier J.D., but you have a law degree!

A Law School Carol

I'm probably the only 2009 law school graduate (at least from my school) to be featured prominently in the National Law Journal, the ABA Journal, the Wall Street Journal (law blog), and the National Jurist.

Is this because I'm secretly some hotshot attorney biting the hand that feeds me? No, it's because I spent part of my year of unemployment creating a cartoon known as "A Law School Carol".

The Thanksgiving Day Turkey

Thanks to law school, I'll probably have to eat crow at every single family gathering for the next decade.

E-Mail Scam Alert!

This is almost as honest as the marketing materials that most of the law schools use.

The Fallacy of the Sunk Cost

Say it with me: There's no use crying over spilled milk. There's no use crying over spilled milk. There's no use crying over spilled milk.

This makes sense, so why do so many people continue with law school or with being lawyers just because they've incurred some associated expenses? My guess is that most lawyers never took an economics class in college. Oh wait, I majored in economics, and I still made this mistake. Never mind.

The Greatest Sham on Earth

"Wow! You passed the bar! Congratulations! Now, let's squeeze you into an overflowing room for one of our fifty swearing in ceremonies this year. See everyone else who is here? You'll be competing against them for the eight attorney positions that are available in the state."

I'm Everything I Ever Hated

I used to be pleased with myself for avoiding falling into the trap of earning a worthless liberal arts degree. Thanks to law school, that's no longer the case.

The Federal Student Loan Program

Speaking of economics. Here's an economic analysis of why the law school scam has been able to prosper and thrive. Hint: Free student loans + shameless law school deans = lives of misery and shame for law school graduates.

Esq. Never's Season's Greetings to Law School Deans

I'll bet you think I don't like law school deans, but this year I actually had a present for them: An Esq. Never original poem.

Pride and Prejudice

Remember how that after Elizabeth married Darcy she found out that his wealth was actually illusory and that Pemberley was financed through his Sallie Mae student loans, so she subsequently left him for that loser who was in the military? No? Well, that's probably why Jane Austen made Mr. Darcy a businessman and not a barrister.

Yes, I'm kind of ashamed I know that much about a romance novel aimed towards women. Another reason why I'm glad this blog is anonymous.

In any event, if you're prideful about going to law school, I can guarantee you that you won't live happily ever after.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Look at this picture and tell me it doesn't send a chill up your spine. Bonus: If you're a recent graduate who still thinks you have a crack at a serious attorney position and can look at this without breaking a sweat, you must be fearless, an idiot, or legally blind.

The Networking Trail of Tears

What's worse? Being a Cherokee who is forced to live in Oklahoma or being an attorney forced to rely on the kindness of your network to get you a job? This is an honest question. I don't really know.

The Craigslist Test

Want to find a used washer, an apartment, or a one night stand? Craigslist can help. Want to find an attorney position - or at least one that pays better than home depot? Craigslist probably won't be quite as helpful.

There are some more recent posts that I think are pretty good, but I assume most people have read them.

I know plenty of people question whether it has been worth my time to run this blog, but if it has stopped one person from going to law school or plays any role in eventually encouraging some reform, then it has been worth it for me.

Law school is a scam. There's no reason for there to be an entrenched system that charges thousands of students so much money while providing a reasonable rate of return to only a tiny percentage of graduates. It shouldn't be allowed to be propped up by unjustified loans and distorted employment data.

I'm glad that I've been able to play a small role in attacking this corrupt system for 100 posts. I also hope I've been able to assist those looking for non-legal jobs. It's been my pleasure to bring you this blog, and I hope you've enjoyed it.

Calico Cat

2010-07-19T14:00:00.005-04:00

Calico Cat was one of the first bloggers to try to expose the law school scam. He did so as a top 10% (at graduation) student from a tier 1 school back in 2004! Imagine what he would have to say about today's environment.

Unfortunately, this forefather of the scam busting movement's site is no longer available, so I have decided to run his salient essay on this blog. (Thank you, Google Cache.)

The lousy post-graduation opportunities for new attorneys are nothing new; it's just that both the economy and COA are much worse today. Don't be fooled. Even if the economy recovers, happy days will not be here again (for lawyers).

Law school: the big lie

(Reprinted from the now defunct Calico Cat blog.)

Every year tens of thousands of wannabe lawyers enter law school. The majority will be extremely disappointed by their career opportunities.

Thus the title of this essay: law school is a big lie. People enter law school with the idea that a law degree is their ticket to a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle. In fact, just the opposite, law school for most is a ticket to a worse financial state than if they had not attended at all.

This news is hard for people to accept, because “everyone knows” that lawyers make a lot of money. Right? Well look at the salaries for government lawyers in your area. They probably start in the 30s. Why would anyone take a job paying in the 30s if law jobs pay six figures? They wouldn’t. After a decade or more of service to the state, you salary will most likely max out in the five figures. That’s a pretty lousy salary for a job that requires three years of graduate school education. There are plenty of people without any graduate education earning six figures, and they don’t have to pay back the student loans that lawyers have to take out in order to pay for law school. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and he doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree.

There are some lawyers who start out with a good salary. They work for what they call “BIGLAW” on the internet message boards. Big law firms pay their associates a starting salary in the six figures. But here’s the sad news: only a tiny percentage of law school graduates will ever get these six figure jobs at big law firms. Unless you go to a top law school, the six figure big law firm job will most likely not be yours.

There are only 14 top law schools. That’s right. Not 10, not 15, but 14. They are, in descending order of prestige: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Georgetown. And that’s it. Go to any other law school, and your chances of getting a big law firm job will be slim to none.

There are also distinct levels of prestige within the top 14. Yale, Harvard, and Stanford are head and shoulders above the rest. Then Columbia, NYU and maybe Chicago round out the top 6. Attending one of these top top law schools will vastly improve your odds. The guy graduating at the bottom of the class at Harvard will have better career opportunities than the guy graduating at the top of the class at an ordinary law school.

Outside of the top law schools, the only law school graduates having decent job opportunities will be those who graduated in the top ten percent of the class and who made law review. Law review and top ten percent are usually the same people because at most law schools the law review members are selected from those whose grades are in the top ten percent at the end of the first year. If like me, your grades weren’t in the top ten percent at the end of the first year, but you managed to graduate in the top ten percent, you are screwed because you weren’t on law review. Furthermore, most big law firms make offers to their summer associates, who get interviewed and hired during the second half of the second year, thus it’s mostly your grades during the first three semesters of law school that determine your entire legal future.

If you are reading this, and you’re a law student who already received your first semester grades, and they aren’t top ten percent, then my advice is to drop out now instead of throwing more money down the law school black hole.

Despite being warned that the only way to get a decent job in law if one attends a non-top 14 school is to make law review and the top ten percent, tens of thousands of suckers will enroll anyway. They think “I will be the one who makes the top ten percent” or “even if I don’t make the top ten percent, things will work out.” Let’s state the odds clearly: 90% of the class will not make the top 10%. You are not the only person in law school thinking they are going to bust their butt to make the top ten percent. 80% of the people start out thinking they are going to bust their butt. And some people from the 20% who are slackers are going to wind up in the top 10% too, because law school grades have a huge random element. One of the biggest slacker/party girls in my first year law school class made the top 10%. She wound up getting a high paying job at a big law firm because the law school gods decided to randomly grace her during her first semester.

The law schools will trick prospective students with bogus statistics about the great career opportunities available to graduates. Don’t believe everything you read. First of all, there are the documented lies, like the admissions brochure for my law school alma mater, Arizona State University College of Law (ASU), which listed the average starting salary for graduates with job offers at graduation from private law firms. But what percentage of the class graduates with a job offer in hand from a private law firm? About 10%? Trumpeting the average salary for 10% of the class is damned deceptive.

I further suspect that some law schools outright lie on their reported career placement statistics. Think about public companies. They have a strong incentive to lie on their financial statements, so that is why they have to prepare their statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, and the accounting has to be audited by an independent public accounting firm. Despite these safeguards, companies like Enron are still caught lying on their financial statements.

Law school career placement statistics do not have to be prepared in accordance with generally accepted principles, and they aren’t audited by independent public accountants. Therefore they can’t be trusted. Don’t be fooled into thinking that because they are “non-profit” they can be trusted, or that they are run only for the benefit of the public. There’s no such thing as no one making a profit. “Non-profit” only means that no one owns the residual profits from the law school, there are plenty of stakeholders making out like bandits. Law schools are run for the benefit of the law professors who have cushy six figure jobs, and the money for their salaries comes from the gullible chumps called law students.

How cushy is a job as a law professor? Law professors earn six figures and only have to work six hours a week. And they get summers off too. How much better can it get? That’s right, law professors are only allowed to teach six hours of classes a week. If they taught more than six hours a week, the law school would lose its accreditation. Maybe some of the new law professors have to spend some time preparing for class, but by the time the law professor has a few years under his belt, he knows the material cold. Some of the older law professors were able to recite the entire textbook without ever even looking at it. In class one day, all the students looked quizzically at the law professor while he recited the exact details of a case that wasn’t in the textbook. Finally this was brought to his attention. It turns out that he was reciting from the last edition of the book. He didn’t even bother to look at the textbook in front of him to see that the case wasn’t in there.

The only time that law professors have to do any real work is when they grade exams. And law school exams are only given once at the end of the semester. So we are talking about two weeks of real work at the end of each semester. And in one case, a law professor at ASU, was apparently too lazy to even put in his two weeks of work and he made up fake grades for the students in his class. When his deception was discovered, all he got was a temporary suspension, and a short time later he was back at law school teaching law.

So we see, law professors have cushy jobs, therefore they have a strong incentive to lie on the career placement statistics because those are equivalent to a for-profit company’s financial statements, and it’s what the prospective law students look at to decide if they want to “invest” in the law school education.

Another fallacy that prospective law students hold onto is that the law degree has some kind of value outside of law. They think, “if I don’t practice law, at least it’s a prestigious degree that will help my non-law career.” This is completely false. Having a law degree hurts your chances of getting non-law jobs. No one wants to hire you if you have a law degree. Because “everyone knows” that lawyers make so much money, they can’t understand why someone with a law degree would want to do anything else but practice law. If you say “I couldn’t find a job practicing law.” which is probably the truth, they will think “this person is a loser because everyone know how easy it is to find a job practicing law, and we don’t hire losers around here.” If you say “I was just exploring my options but decided I didn’t want to practice law,” then they will think “this person has no idea what he wants to do, we want to hire people who know where their career is going.” There is absolutely no way to spin the law degree in a way that it helps you get a non-law job. Hiring managers are looking for cookie cutter resumes, not resumes where people have education unrelated to the job. From their perspective, they’re not hiring a lawyer so they don’t give a crap if you know how to synthesize appellate cases (assuming they even know what “synthesize appellate cases” means, which is unlikely). The only way I have been able to find any jobs outside of law is to leave the law degree off my resume. Whenever the law degree has been on my resume, it has been the kiss of death that prevents me from finding a job.

Finally, this essay would be incomplete if it didn’t discuss the burden of student loans. Whatever salary you make after graduating from law school has to be discounted by the cost of your student loan repayments. The student loan payments are not tax deductible (except to a very limited extent which will likely not apply to you). Your marginal tax rate will probably be around 45%, which means that for every $100/month in student loan payments, you need to have a stated additional salary of $182/month to cover the student loan payments. This means that if your law school education adds $500/month in student loan payments, you are paying $6,000/year in student loans and you need to earn an extra $10,910/year to cover the payments. This means that a $40,000/year job as a law school graduate gives you the equivalent disposable income of a $29,090/year job if you didn’t have a law degree. And it’s a lot easier to find a $29,000/year job with a bachelor’s degree than it is to find a $40,000/year job with a law degree.

Even if you are one of the rare and lucky law school graduates who can obtain a six figure job at a big law firm, those jobs are rumored to be bad. I can’t say much about this because I never worked at a big law firm, but according to what I’ve been told, a large percentage of the partners at big law firms are jerks who treat their associates like garbage and make them work ridiculously long hours. Some of this may be unjustified whining, because I was treated like garbage at a job where I was making $9/hour. Nevertheless, one needs to consider that the ultimate goal of law school, a big law firm job, attained by only a small percentage of law school graduates, may not be the great reward it’s supposed to be.

I predict that some prospective law students will find this essay, read it, and not believe it. Because no matter how much you try to tell a prospective law student the truth about law, they don’t believe it. “Everyone knows” that lawyers make a lot of money, how can this be true? Believe me, it’s true, and if you attend law school you will learn this the hard way. Don’t waste three years of your life and go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can never be discharged in bankruptcy to find out that your career opportunities suck after all that. Please, learn the truth now.

I Joined the ABA

2010-07-17T20:23:00.001-04:00

If learning this comes as a surprise to you, it actually came as a surprise to me as well.

Apparently, while the law school scam is humming along nicely during the recession thanks to an endless supply of federally backed loans, the ABA hasn't been so fortunate. (I guess even recessions have bright sides.)

This makes sense as struggling solos and unemployed lawyers, who need to decide between heating their homes or eating from somewhere other than the nearby dumpster, probably are not in the position to pay the annual $125 dues to the ABA.

Therefore, it looks like Ms. Lamm and her criminal buddies need to engage in some creative marketing techniques to ensure the long term fiscal help of this worthless organization. One such tactic is apparently to offer free one year ABA memberships to "recently" barred attorneys with the hope that many of us will lazily renew our membership at cost the following year.

I put "recently" in quotations because the ABA granted me free admission to the ABA under the guise of congratulating me for passing the bar - a "feat" that is now several months old.

The letter they sent me promises that as an ABA member I'll get networking opportunities, access to the ABA website, and use of the ABA's "economic recovery resources". In other words, I get nothing.

Oh, but they are going to mail me my PRESTIGIOUS ABA membership card. Yes, they actually used the word "prestigious". I didn't realize that being able to write a check for 125 dollars is all it takes to earn prestige.

The most insulting part is that they advertise my ability to sign up for CLE's and that if I send in a survey, they'll match me with appropriate products and services. Pretty much they have to hide behind the veneer of doing me a favor when they're just trying find a way to sell my information to make more money for themselves. Thanks for looking out for me, ABA.

Ah, but it isn't entirely a loss. After all, I received a certificate of membership to the ABA, which can double as a place mat for my Chinese food, and I was able to save a whopping ten bucks on a car rental thanks to some deal they have with Hertz.

That almost makes up for the $90k I wasted on law school. Oh wait, it doesn't.

Carol Lamm, if you're not going to do anything about the law school scam, please just leave its victims alone. Thanks.

Five Weak Reasons for Attending Law School

2010-07-14T00:28:00.004-04:00

Above the Law recently ran an article defending attending law school. They were kind enough to link to this blog, but sadly not kind enough to provide a particularly compelling justification for their wayward advice.

To be honest, I actually think this article may be an example of very subtle satire. Can David Lat really believe that educational trust funds and potential sinecures are really relevant to the debate?

In any event, here are my summaries of his five "arguments" and my brief responses to each point.

Argument 1: Hey, winning the lottery is possible.

Sure, there's a better chance of getting a BigLaw job than winning the Power Ball. Nevertheless, when you win a lottery jackpot, you walk away free and clear with millions. When you "win" a BigLaw job, you still have to work long hours for an annual salary of $100k plus dollars.

Would I have taken a job like this if it was offered to me? Sure, but that doesn't mean it's fun. Many lawyers are miserable and plenty end up washing out of these jobs after a few years.

More importantly, however, is the penalty for not making the OCI cut for BigLaw. In the legal world, it's a loooong way down if you're not in the magic top X% of your class.

If you play the lottery and lose, you're out a couple of bucks. If you lose the law school gamble, you could throw yourself into massive debt and torch your career trajectory for years to come.

Argument 2: You can always become a law professor or work for daddy

If you don't have BigLaw grades, you don't have law professor grades. Plus, do you really want to be part of the law school scam?

Also, we all know that if your name is William P. Buffington III, your old man can find you a law job. He can probably also get you a non-attorney position. This is axiomatic, and anyone in this position already knows he is set for life. This isn't germane to the debate.

As for some of the other jobs listed, sure they're all possible. It's also possible that you could be a PG in the NBA, but I wouldn't risk six figures of debt on that potential opportunity either.

I can't believe people still suggest that a law degree is useful for pursuing "alternative careers". Unless the alternative career they have in mind is in janitorial services or being a "professional companion" to male executives, please see the rest of this site for my rebuttal.

Argument 3: A B.A. in liberal arts is also worthless

A J.D., for many people, is essentially a graduate liberal arts degree. It doesn't teach you anything practical, and aside from the mostly inaccessible legal jobs, it isn't valued by employers.

You don't get out of a hole by continuing to dig yourself deeper; you get out by trying to climb out by working your way up from low level jobs and picking up some practical skills.

Argument 4: Not Everyone Takes on Debt

Yes, but most do. Once again, if your old man can write a check to cover the ordeal, congratulations. This website probably isn't for you. For everyone else, even "a little debt" can still mean big payments for many years in return for a largely worthless piece of paper.

Debt isn't even the biggest problem. Thanks to the IBR, even larger debts are now manageable (if annoying).

The big problem is having a three year gap in your resume and a degree that makes you overqualified for virtually every non-legal position that would otherwise be accessible to you.

Even if you do go the attorney route - for those who aren't at the top of the class - your sentence is a life of toilet law and/or document review slavery.

Argument 5: Pride

I have been introduced as Attorney [My Last Name], and I receive mail addressed to [My Name], Esq. I also live at home with my parents and spent about 14 months unemployed. That kind of takes some of the wind out of the old sails.

I look forward to Lat eventually letting us in on the joke. This article would have been better suited for April 1.

A Present from Esq, Never: Resume Advice for the J.D. Looking for a Non-Legal Position

2010-07-05T22:32:00.000-04:00

Introduction

After reading the title, some of you may think to yourselves that this "gift" is the equivalent of receiving tube socks for Christmas. After all, aren't "resume tips" a dime a dozen on internet?

Others may contend, "Right, Esq. Never. Why on earth would anyone take advice from you - a man who has frequently complained that he couldn't even buy a job since this blog began?"

Well, fair enough, but let me try to respond. As to the first point, it's true that virtually everything from ask.com to pay-per-click ad based "filler" sites host content regurgitating the same basic advice for preparing a resume. In my case, however, I'm offering advice that's specifically tailored to those with J.D.'s, who are looking for non-legal jobs.

As to the second point, it's also true that I've struggled to find employment. However, within the past month or so, I've had three "waves" where I've submitted my resume via job listing sites (probably no more than ten submissions per "wave"), and I have received an interview for a substantive position each time. (Though the interview wasn't always substantive.)

I also met a recruiter at a job fair who practically begged me to apply for an analyst position based entirely on my resume. (I declined because I am not currently in the position to relocate.) Finally, I'm on track to actually be gainfully employed (see my last post) also largely due to my resume.

Now, maybe the economy is getting better. Maybe I, at least, live in a part of the country where the economy is improving. I don't know. It's certainly possible that more is at play here than my resume, but my improved fortunes in terms of receiving interest in my resume began when I made some improvements to it - thanks to some advice I received from a free resume critique at a job fair.

At the very least, my resume isn't seriously flawed, and I want to take the time to help out others who have faced the same struggles I have.

Preliminary Points

Before proceeding, here are some caveats. The university to which my law school is attached is pretty well regarded in the region in which I live. I had a reasonably practical major - economics via my undergrad school's business school. I worked for two years in a substantive position before law school, and I have pretty well developed computer skills.

The good news for those of you liberal arts majors who went to law school right out of undergrad and can barely do anything more than check your e-mail and update your Facebook status on your computers is that I think a good resume can still compensate for limited practical skills.

After all, I'm not really a specialist in anything. Economics requires good math skills and a logical thought process, but I highly doubt that any job will ever require me to calculate the optimal price for a firm to charge in a monopoly market.

Moreover, while I had a solid, white collar job before law school, I was sort of a jack of all trades - I really didn't have a specific position like being a financial analyst or a programmer. Finally, while I have solid computer skills, there really isn't an area or relevant piece of software over which I have mastery.

Therefore, nobody was really going to hire me because I brought a specific skill set to the table.

What Not to Do

With that out of the way, let's focus on how to write an appropriate resume.

At the risk of sounding like some insipid career adviser guru, it's important to remember that your resume really is a sales pitch. Okay, if I heard some CSO slug say the same thing, I'd probably roll my eyes too, but it's true.

Aside from your cover letter (which is usually essential), it's pretty much what every employer is going to use to judge you. It's an advertisement for your "employee services", and it needs to tell your prospective employer why he should shell out tens of thousand of dollars for those services by way of salary, benefits, and taxes. (Particularly because you have so many competitors).

Now, don't take this analogy too far. Your resume should still be pretty conservative even though it's an "advertisement". Use of graphics and other gimmicks should be saved only for the most creative marketing and related jobs.

What you don't want to do, however, is hand in some plain resume that contains only the most basic information about your background. Unless you have a background that immediately is going to catch somebody's attention (e.g. 4.0 GPA in CS from MIT), then you can't get away with this.

If your resume just states your contact information, where you went to undergrad and law school, and that you worked a couple summers at the Olive Garden, your phone isn't exactly going to be ringing off the hook.

Aside from having a "non-sales pitch" resume, the biggest mistake a J.D. can make in applying for non-legal jobs is using his legal resume to pull this off. Nothing says, "I'm just settling for applying to work for your business because I can't find an attorney position," like submitting a resume better suited for a law firm than the business to which you're applying.

CSO's usually advises students to create a resume with this format:

Education

Law School: GPA (if good); Honors; Co-Curricular Activities (Journal/Moot Court); Other Activities

Undergrad: GPA (if good); Honors; Activities

Experience

Most Recent Legal Internship to Least Recent: Bullet points based upon tasks performed

Pre-Law Work Experience and Any Relevant or Impressive Internships

Additional Skills CLE's/Other Practical Experience Interests

This may work well when applying for attorney positions, but it's not going to work for other jobs. Some of you may be thinking, "No kidding, Esq. Never", but I'm not sure if it's quite that axiomatic.

After all, if you're apply for both attorney and non-attorney positions, it can be very tempting to submit the same resume for each. Some people who haven't applied for non-legal positions before may not even have experience using a non-attorney resume. Also, there is a certain logic to using this resume for non-legal positions: Ostensibly, it does tell an employer that you're well educated, intelligent, and that you've spent the last few years working intellectually demanding jobs.

The problem is, as mentioned, that it tells employers that you're really only suited to be an attorney and are not a good fit for the non-attorney positions to which you're applying (particularly entry level positions).

Professional Summary

So what should you do? Well, obviously, I'm not an expert, but let me go through the categories I used on my resume that helped me improve my job search fortunes.

A great way to market yourself is to provide your prospective employer with a brief introduction to your resume. When employers have to sift through reams and reams of bullet point laden resumes, anything that can help focus your "sales pitch" is going to give you an advantage.

First, give your professional summary a title that will grab the reader's attention. If you're a computer programmer, it would be something like:

Computer Programmer with 7 Years Experience Developing Software in Java and C++

If you don't have a specific field in mind, then use a broad term and highlight some aspects of your skill set. For example:

Entry Level Professional with Strong Writing and Editing Skills

or

Business Professional with Excellent Quantitative and Computer Skills

After writing your title, you should then include your professional summary in paragraph or bullet point form. (I recommend a paragraph format, so it stand outs.) Use three or four sentences to summarize your background. Make it sound professional and objective. Do not use personal pronouns.

Sentence 1: Hit the best points from your previous work experience.

Example: Two years as a researcher using VB script and Access databases to organize, calculate, and report data.

Sentence 2 (optional): Additional highlights from your professional work experience.

Sentence 2/3: Undergraduate education - Can substitute additional explanation of work experience if more relevant than undergrad degree.

Example: Graduated from well ranked communications program that emphasized public relations coursework and concise writing skills.

Sentence 3/4: Addressing the J.D. It's going to come up at some point. This is your chance to take "the question" head on and try to explain why you pursued a J.D. even though you don't want to be a lawyer.

Example: Recently received a J.D. [don't say law degree] for the purpose of enhancing [insert skill set here, e.g. analytical skills, writing skills, communication skills, ability to be a heartless parasite (j/k), etc.]

Experience

Now that you've given a summary of your background, it's time to get into the "meat" of your resume. How you approach the divisions within this section depends what type of experience you have.

What you want to do is try to emphasize the non-legal skills you have acquired while downplaying your legal acumen. This can be tricky if most of your work experience is legally related. (If you were a paralegal for three years before law school and then had a bunch of legal internships, I don't know what to tell you.)

Also note, we're including experience BEFORE education in order to help to downplay the law degree.

There are three ways I would recommend dividing this section depending on your experience.

If all you have is legal experience, then you really have no choice, start with your most recent legal position and list them all (see next session for some caveats) under the heading "Experience".

If you have some non-legal experience, but they're only internships or part time jobs, you should divide this section into two parts. The first part should be called something like "Business Experience" or whatever best describes your non-legal experience. You should list this experience chronologically.

The second section should be labeled as something such as "Recent Internship Experience" or "Other Experience". This allows you to chronologically list your legal internship experience while drawing more attention to your non-legal (and with any luck, more relevant) experience while still highlighting important aspects from your legal internships.

For those who were fortunate enough to have worked in a full time position prior to law school, you should divide the "Experience" section into two sections "Professional Experience" and "Internship Experience" both under the larger banner "Experience". This, once again, allows you to draw more attention to previous work experience than your legal experience.

Improving the "Experience" Section

The order in which your work experience appears is important, but there's more you can do to help emphasize your non-legal attributes and downplay (but still receive credit for) your legal background.

Chronology: There is such thing as a "functional resume". That is, a resume that emphasizes skills rather employment history. This may be a tactic some of you can use, but from what I've heard this will confuse if not annoy employers. If you're taking steps to conceal when and where you worked, employers may assume the worst and not consider your resume.

The reason why we're dividing the "Experience" section into subsections is because it allows you to maintain a chronological resume while still emphasizing your non-legal experience prior to your legal experience.

Detail: This is pretty standard resume advice, but don't just list the tasks you performed. Give details about the assignments you were responsible for and emphasize your achievements.

Example:

Awarded 2006 salesperson of the year for most B2B sales in department amounting to over 20% of company's revenue

instead of...

Successfully engaged in B2B sales

If you want anymore advice on this type of writing, most resume assistance sites/books should be able to give you additional information.

Emphasize Non-Legal/Transferable Skills: You need to be careful when explaining the tasks you performed for legal employers. If you worked for an administrative office, a non-profit, a company, or a judge during law school, that's good. It will be easier to spin your experience.

If you worked for a law firm or anything that put you into a courtroom (i.e. a DA or PD internship), you may want to reconsider including this experience. It may be something to mention in an interview (e.g. "I can handle stressful situations thanks to arguing for indigent clients in municipal court."), but try to not confuse a prospective employer.

Skills to Emphasize:
-Writing - particularly getting something published
-Research - particularly computer and on-line research
-Managing projects
-Meeting and speaking with clients

Skills that are Generally Irrelevant:
-Court room observation
-Filling out legal forms
-Arguing/Appearing in court
-Taking depositions

Education

Education should be a chronological listing of the institutions from which you've received your degrees. Usually, this will be your law school and undergrad school though some of you may have a masters in between.

There is still, however, work to do in this section to "de-attorney-ize" your resume.

Law School: I recommend just using the name of the university, noting your J.D., the year it was received and then moving. Listing an impressive GPA (but not class rank) is okay, but nobody cares about Order of the Coif, Law Review, Moot Court, or any of that other garbage in the real world. Also, don't mention that you are licensed to practice law. "Just the facts" and then move on.

Example:

TTT University, Anchorage, AK, J.D., awarded May 2010

Following this, you should list your undergraduate degree in a similar format, but this time do everything you can to emphasize your achievements and degree.

Things to include:
-Major (particularly if it's a practical major)
-Good GPA
-Honors (Latin Honors, Honors Program, Honors Societies, etc.)
-Activities (particularly if you were an officer or leader)
-Relevant courses (computer courses, writing courses, math/quantitative courses, business/finance courses, etc.)

If You Have Room
If you have additional space, you should add any other skills (particularly computer/software skills) you have, volunteer experience, and/or your (appropriate) personal interests and hobbies.

So There You Have It

I'm going to provide you with a sample resume at the end of this post, but this is pretty much the format I used. Am I full of baloney? Maybe, but this formula helped me.

If I don't know what I'm talking about, well, at least you didn't have to pay for this advice. Nevertheless, I sincerely want to help everyone else who is going through this ordeal. Feel free to modify this format as you'd like. There's no magic bullet, but I hope others will see some success as well. Let me know if you think it's useful.

(Look for Part II: More Esq. Never Advice: Cover Letters and Where to Apply)

Example

Ralph Marley
123 Document Review Purgatory -555-5555 - helpme@Iregretlawschool.com

Experienced Sales Professional with Ten Years Business to Business Sales Experience

Ten years as B2B sales professional for fifth largest software vendor in the state. Received multiple awards for outstanding sales performance. Graduate of ABC University with major in communications that offered practical curriculum in client interaction and business writing. Recently received a J.D. for the purpose of enhancing client assistance and presentation skills.

Experience

Professional Experience

Software Company, Anchorage, Alaska, Senior B2B Sales Representative (1997-2007)

-Awarded Salesperson of the year award from 2000 - 2006 for generating the most sales for the company
-Frequently made sales presentations to top business executives that resulted in a successful sale more than 70 percent of the time
-Etc.

Internship Experience
County Office of Revenue, Anchorage, Alaska, Clerk (Summer 2009)
-[Sorry, too lazy to come up with some non-legal spin for a legal job]

Hon. Judge Steven, Anchorage, Alaska (Summer 2008)
-Etc.

Education

TTT University, Anchorage, Alaska, JD, awarded May 2010

ABC University, XYZ School of Communications, Honolulu, Hawaii
BA in Communications, awarded May 1995

Honors: Dean's List, Communications Honors Society
Activities: Assistant Editor, ABC Newspaper

Relevant Courses: Public Relations, Marketing and Advanced Marketing, Web Design

Additional Skills: Quark Publishing, Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver

Activities/Hobbies: Public Speaking Society, Volunteering at Dog Kennel, Amateur Photography

Almost There...Plus, Ranking the Job Search Methods

2010-07-02T17:52:00.000-04:00

Well, folks the end of my nightmare may be drawing near. I recently received word that I've been accepted for a temporary position.

Now, that may not seem like big news, but I have received strong assurance that should things work out, the position will be made permanent. It looks like a great company, and I think if things do work out, I will be in a good position to put my career back on track.

I'm going to hold off on giving any further details or analysis about the position and how I got it until I see what happens at the end of the trial period.

As a bonus, let me break down the levels of success I've had with the various job search methods I've used.

Networking

Grade: D-

This is the bread and butter of CSO and job search guru advice, but I've seen almost nothing but failure from using this method. I've e-mailed, called, and talked with people in person. I've talked to friends, alumni, school officials, former employers, and even potential employers.

Sure, I've received plenty of encouragement, promises, and even a bit of advice, but most of what I've received has been pretty worthless. I've seen multiple promises broken; I've been blown off more times than I can count, and I've even been outright ignored by people who I know.

Sure, the critics will say, Esq. Never, this is probably because you're a huge jerk and nobody you know wants to help you. It's a possibility, but given what I've heard from plenty of others, the majority of job seekers must also be "jerks" and this method simply doesn't work for us.

I give it a D- because I did get put in touch with ONE person who was hiring, but was in a part of the country I wasn't able to move to at the time.

Recruiters

Ranking: C-

These guys (and gals) tend be quite friendly when you first contact them. Once they realize that your J.D. and minimal to non-existent work experience makes it more likely that they could place Dean Matasar on a date with JJD, you'll be lucky to ever hear from them again.

Let's face it, these folks don't eat unless they can place candidates into positions, and this usually means taking cookie-cutter IT, financial, and administrative professionals and dumping them into corresponding positions at big companies.

I got a few temporary employment offers through recruiters...or more specifically offers to be offered to the companies, but none of them actually turned into real interviews.

One recruiter actually called me in to interview me a few days after contacting me. Meanwhile the company filled the positions with somebody else.

Unless you have a cookie-cutter resume (and if you have a J.D., you don't), these people won't be much help.

Job Fairs

Ranking: C+

Job fairs can range from depressingly pathetic - just showcases for commission-only positions with insurance and financial advisory companies - to somewhat helpful - larger events that bring together serious employers.

The best thing about job fairs is that they give you the opportunity to actually speak with people who may have influence on the hiring process. Unfortunately, in many cases, plenty of people manning the booths are just there to promote the company, and it won't give you a leg up in the hiring process. They'll be happy (maybe) to explain the position, but then point you to their website to apply. (If you're lucky, they may take note of your presence at the fair.)

I got a couple bites after speaking to HR reps at a couple fairs, but unfortunately, the positions didn't turn out to be good fits for me.

(Bonus Tip: If you're an attractive woman and don't mind being hired primarily for your looks, you should definitely investigate being an HR rep at these sorts of events. The women at many of these booths look like they also have side jobs as super models.)

(Real Bonus Tip: Many times they have free resume critiques and other workshops that are surprisingly helpful.)

Job Listings/Job Fairs

Ranking: B

I know what many of you are thinking - you mean the black holes into which I've thrown my resume multiple times only to never hear a word back?

Hey, I've been there. Between November and March, I had one single interview. I was lucky if even got rejection letters.

Nevertheless, all of my substantive interviews have come from responding to jobs listings. In fact, virtually all of them have come from using my local Craigslist. I think this is the case because CL tends to attract smaller companies that are more likely to consider those with unconventional resumes.

The key to finding employment via the job boards is to have a resume and cover letter that stands out. How do you write such cover letters and resumes? Well, for only $19.95, you can purchase my new e-book "Esq. Never's Guerrilla Tactics for Making Money off of Desperate Job Seekers"!

Actually, I think I have found a good formula, and I plan to share it for free in a subsequent post.

PSA: Rising 3L's Cut Your Losses

2010-06-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

Let me be blunt: If you've just completed your 1L year and you've learned that you are not in the top 25% (save those from the top 3 schools or who have some incredible family connections), it's probably time to start looking at other options.

In fact, let me be even more blunt - If you're in this situation and you're even considering signing another promissory note with Aunt Sallie Mae and heading back to your TTT this fall, you, sir or madam, are insane.

If people who have the logical reasoning ability to crack 160 or even 170 on the LSAT can't recognize that pursuing entry into a glutted field with anything less than stellar credentials is a bad idea, then I have to agree with the critics of standardized testing: There must be something seriously flawed with the exam.

While the willingness of 1L's to hang around doesn't negate the wickedness of the law school cartel, it certainly does make these students seem like less sympathetic characters. What else do they need? A front page story in the Wall Street Journal with the headline, If You Stay in Law School, You'll Be Unemployed and Living in Your Mom's Basement in Two Years?

Unfortunately, the WSJ hasn't been kind enough to run such an piece, but we have something that's pretty darn close in the US News and World Report article entitled, Law Jobs Will Be Harder to Come By.

In this article, the law school cartel's court statistician, James Leipold (of NALP) admits that's it's going to be ugly for the class of 2011, and he's not exactly ready to predict a return to normalcy in 2012 either. (Though he does leave just enough room for hope so that 1L's and prelaws can talk themselves into going down with the ship.)

If people like Leipold can't come up with optimistic things to say about the legal market, then you know that happy days aren't here again.

How is this particularly relevant to rising 3L's? Well, while any sane member of the class of 2012, who isn't law review bound, should be preparing for his law school exit interview, members of the class of 2011 are in a far more difficult situation.

After all, as the conventional wisdom goes, if you realize after 1L year that LS isn't for you, it's time to cut your losses and move on, but if you've already invested two years into law school, you might as well stick it out and at least get the degree.

I respectfully disagree. Yes, walking away from two years worth of intensive school work (particularly when the third year is the least difficult) with little to show for it is not appealing. Nevertheless, one needs to keep in mind the sunk cost fallacy - it is irrational to make future decisions based upon costs that have already been incurred.

For many people having a law degree and a license is of absolutely no help. They can't find (or really don't want) legal jobs. The J.D. does nothing to help a person find non-legal work. Even trying to bail yourself out with doc review work isn't really an option anymore.

The cost of completing a third year is also prohibitive. At most private schools, tuition alone is between $30 - $50k. Throw in living expenses and the total cost could easily exceed $70k. Upon graduation, the fallacy of the sunk cost can become even more enticing. If you've completed law school, you "might as well take the bar exam". Of course, this little intellectual exercise can cost thousands more in test prep programs, exam fees, and even living expenses.

What's more there's still the opportunity cost of forgoing yet another year (and a summer) of wages. Add up all these costs - plus the interest on the amount you'll need to borrow - and you'll see that "just finishing up your degree" is hardly something you can do on the cheap.

Now, I know the psychological barriers to pulling the trigger and bailing out at this point are high. (To say nothing of the peer - and likely parental - pressure.)

Therefore, let me pose some more modest steps you can take.

It's still summer and the law school beast won't be demanding it's feast of your tuition dollars at least until August. Use this time to search for a job. If you can land something that pays decently and seems interesting, dump your law school faster than the average law school dean dumped his or her sense of decency.

While landing a half decent job that quickly may not be the easiest feat ever, you do have some advantages when compared to the average law school graduate. For one thing, you're only two years removed from either college or full time employment. Moreover, nobody is going to be afraid that you'll just run off and take an attorney position when the economy improves because you won't be eligible to even sit for the bar.

If employers seem skeptical about your decision to drop out, you can at least reply that you had hoped that law school would help prepare you for a variety of fields other than law, but once you realized that it had little application outside of practicing as an attorney, you decided to withdraw. Plus, a little lawyer bashing will warm the hearts of more than a few prospective employers.

If you can't bring yourself to drop out and you don't land anything over the summer, you should dedicate yourself to using your 3L year to find a job. By this, I don't mean occasionally applying for something. I mean putting in as much effort as those of use who are out of school. Network, try to get internships (non-legal), send out a ton of resumes (learn what works and what doesn't), etc.

Pretty much devote as much time as you can without failing out of school. Don't worry about law school. What do you think is going to be more important to your future? Getting a serious jump on finding a non-legal job or getting a "B+" instead of a "B" in Complex Litigation or making the "Octo-Final" round of the "Moot Court Tribal Indian Law" competition?

You guys didn't listen when you enrolled in law school. Now, you have an opportunity to mitigate the damage you've already done to your careers. If those who have already graduated are any indication, those who fall for the fallacy of the sunk costs are, well, sunk.

Good News; Bad News

2010-06-29T14:58:00.000-04:00

I have some updates coming about my recent interviews and other events from the sad tale that is my job search. In the meantime, I thought I'd give you some insight into what I've seen in the job market in recent weeks.

I was somewhat surprised to hear the bad economic news this morning that consumer confidence plunged this month (and has taken the stock market with it). The main reason for the decline appears to be the weak labor market.

Obviously, it comes as no real shock that the economy isn't exactly booming, but at least from my own experiences, things are looking up.

One of the most depressing aspects of the job search used be just looking at the job boards for available positions. Entry level prospects usually only amounted to little more than sales positions or retail management trainee positions.

More substantive roles were available, but they usually either required years of work experience or a well developed skill set - usually acquired by having a practical degree in something like computer programming.

Recently, there have been far more positions available. Many positions also don't have the same strict guidelines they once did. I have found a number of roles where the employer actually appeared to be looking for bright, well educated, and talented candidates rather than someone who fits an inflexible rubric.

Moreover, within the last month, I have probably been offered a chance to interview one out of every ten times I have submitted a resume. Though, I'm not sure if it's entirely due to an improved economy because I've also received some help making my resume more professional.

The bad news, for many others with J.D.'s, is that a lot of the interest I have received in my resume has been based upon my previous work experience. (Though I have kept the J.D. on my resume.)

For anyone else who is pursuing a non-legal career, have you guys also noticed an improved market and better jobs options? Feel free to weigh in using the comments section.

For Shame

2010-06-21T14:23:00.000-04:00

The other day I was talking to an elderly lady I knew. Sadly, she felt compelled to ask the question I dread hearing the most these days, "So, how's the job search going?" I tried to brush it off by saying I was still looking.

Nevertheless, she persisted. She wondered how I was supporting myself, and I was again forced to remind her (and myself) that yes, I am a 28 year old with both a college and graduate degree who lives at home with his parents. She continued to lightly reprove me by reminding me that this was a long time to be out of work and that I needed to find something soon.

Had this not been an old lady, who probably thought she was being helpful, I probably wouldn't have tolerated this line of questioning, but in truth, she was only expressing in words what I'm sure many people are usually thinking when they learn about my situation.

What acceptable response can I possibly give? The myth of the law degree permeates society (at least for people who don't make hiring decisions). Nobody understands just how few legal jobs exist - and just how crummy most of them are. Few people realize that the J.D. will automatically exclude you from many non-legal positions.

It's next to impossible to explain that because of the dearth of attorney positions and the difficulty of transitioning into another field, many law graduates are left in unemployment purgatory where the odds are stacked against them in finding any work at all during a recession.

Over the course of writing this blog, I've written about most of the woes related to attending law school: the debt, the lousy employment prospects, toilet law, doc review sweatshops, arrogant professors, all of the incidental costs associated with attending LS, etc. These are all bad, but the worst part is the shame.

When expectations are so high for law graduates and opportunities are so limited, people are confused. An unemployed lawyer? Something must be wrong here! And guess what? In the eyes of most of these people, that "something" is YOU.

It's amazing the number of people who ignore first hand accounts of just how bad the job prospects are out of law school. I had a friend who went to a TTT law school (and is continuing after his first year) even though he knows all about my situation and that I went to a better ranked school than him.

It doesn't matter if you went to a good school, had average to good grades, or a strong resume, these prelaws "know" that they just have to do better, and they'll be fine.

In the same way, people who don't go to law school will judge you based upon what they "know". Can't find a job? You must either be a real loser or you're just not trying hard enough.

The latter assumption has underscored what many people seem to feel about my job search. It doesn't matter that I've submitted tons of resumes, gone on interviews (which plenty of JD's can't even get), gone to job fairs, and networked with just about everyone I can. This is practically a full time job to me, but no, if other people don't see results, they assume you're just sitting at home watching the Cartoon Network instead of trying to find a job.

There's nothing I can really do to rectify this problem. It isn't like I've been particularly picky when applying for jobs. I've told temp agencies I would accept clerical positions. I've applied (and begged for) entry level positions designed for recent college graduates. I've been willing to accept salaries south of $40k.

The shame game doesn't necessarily end after finding employment either. Suppose I did land one of those low level positions, that's not exactly the sort of thing that's going to be trumpeted in my law school's alumni newsletter. Even if I could get a decent $40k a year, corporate job with room for growth, that still wouldn't impress too many people (even though it'd be a dream come true for me). Heck, if I became a corporate VP making $100k, I know some people would still be disappointed in me for not being a lawyer.

For those who do become attorneys, there's still plenty of shame to go around. If you're paying back loans while finding yourself in small law, people are going to wonder why you don't drive a fancy car and live in a luxury condo. If you're chasing ambulances, you better believe people are going to make fun of you.

How about being a doc review prol? Trying to explain what you do to a non-attorney probably isn't exactly fun. "Well, I essentially click a mouse all day in a windowless basement. Those three years of law school really were necessary for this."

Going to law school certainly is a good antidote to pride. It's hard to be arrogant when you're in your late 20's or early 30's and either living with your parents or barely squeaking by while working a job that doesn't require a GED. There's not too much room for boasting when you spent three years in law only to make less money than you could make with a college degree.

If you're somebody who hasn't been able to reign in his ego through any other means, give law school a try. It'll certainly help bring you back down to earth (and even lower). For everyone else, unless you want to be filled with shame every time anyone asks you about your career prospects, please stay away from law school.

Response to a Commenter

2010-06-11T19:50:00.001-04:00

[Note: This comment appeared in the comments section to my last post. I've decided to address it as a separate post because it raises some important issues.]

Just a question: What exactly is "toilet law?" It sounds like you are saying there is "Big Law" or "Toilet Law" or "Non-Profit/Public Sector Law" and that's it...am I getting that right?

I'm only asking because I will be attending law school (on a scholarship) and would not work in so-called "Big Law."

Don't bother telling me not to go to law school--I've weighed everything and am going, at least as long as I maintain the scholarship.

And on a side note--why WOULD anyone think that a JD would help with a non-law job? I think anyone who would go to law school based on that (or give that any weight whatsoever) is kind of foolish to begin with. The purpose of a JD is to practice law. Of course a job that gains no benefit form that isn't going to pay a premium for you (or even hire you) based on that! Instead, I'm sure most employers look at that and think that you'll just want more money either now or down the road while a "less educated" applicant will not want as much.

Gerald T. Studebaker

Esq. Never's Response:

Gerald,

Thank you for providing an intelligent comment from a pro-law school perspective. I'm sorry that you can't be talked out of going to law school, but I certainly hope that you're somehow able to succeed.

"Toilet law" generally refers to small firms that are not very pleasant to work for. They have low starting salaries particularly when weighed against the average starting salaries depicted in the law school marketing materials. (See some of the links from my last post for examples.)

Moreover, there is very little room for advancement, much of the work involves tediously filling out forms for different courts, and the time one spends in court usually takes place in some of more depressing court rooms in the jurisdiction. I urge you to take a look at Big Debt, Small Law's "about" section also linked in my last post.

I know that you probably think that you'll just work for a mid-law firm or a "good" small law firm. This is not quite as feasible as you believe. Many of these boutique and mid-sized firms don't hire law school graduates straight from law school. In most cases, you actually need to work for Big Law and then lateral over to these firms once your time as a big firm associate comes to an end.

Some of these firms may hire a handful of recent graduates, but in those cases, the graduates will likely have the same credentials that most Big Law starting associates have (either very high grades or a degree from one of the top few schools).

You may believe that you're a shoe in for ending up in that category, but just remember there are currently plenty of unemployed T-14 students, and even if we assume that the end of the recession will take care of this "anomaly", even before the recession, plenty of good law students were in tough shape. (Hence the topic of my last post.)

If you don't believe me, Angel the Lawyer of "But I Did Everything Right!" graduated from a top 30 school with a scholarship (pre-recession). Big Debt, Small Law graduated in the top 1/3rd of his class from second tier, Seton Hall. This was also pre-recession. Both of them ended up in "toilet" law making only slightly more than many college graduates are able to make. They didn't even have real benefit packages (e.g. no real health coverage).

The reason why so many bright students who miss the cutoff for Big Law but are still able to find firm work end up in "toilet law" is because those are the firms that tend to hire. Many small firms are small for a reason, and if they are going to expand they either want attorneys with a pre-existing book of business or at least somebody they don't have to waste time training.

The law firm "mills" that make money on the volume of cases they are able to churn out tend to be the low level personal injury and insurance defense firms. Because they just need warm bodies to keeping pushing the clients and settlements through, they're willing (or at least were willing, pre-recession) to take on inexperienced recent graduates and continue hiring them as older associates burn out and can't endure working for these firms anymore.

As for your query about non-legal jobs. You are correct that there is no reason to go to law school if you don't plan on practicing. Moreover, I'm glad you're going into school recognizing that getting a non-legal job after graduation isn't really an accessible option.

Nevertheless, plenty of law students enter law school every year under the assumption that if that can't make it law, they'll at least be able to market their skills in another field. The law schools certainly do nothing to persuade law students against believing this fallacy. They often highlight the ostensible versatility of the J.D.

Regardless, many students do eventually end up never practicing either because they hate the law or can't find work as an attorney. At my decent, second tier school, the school's own statistics indicated that almost 20% (1/5) of the students went into "business" after graduation! This was also based upon the Class of 2007, who graduated before the market crashed.

The problem with the legal field is that there are so many attorneys and only a limited number of jobs. As I mentioned, before the recession, many of the surplus J.D.'s could find mind numbing temporary jobs working in document review. Now that those jobs are largely unavailable (at least to recent graduates), the only exit for many students is to try to find non-legal positions.

Moreover, a good number of people end up going through law school and realize that being an attorney is not for them.

Once again, I regret that you seem unwilling to listen to some of these warnings, but if you do end up in a position where you either lose your scholarship or don't have the grades to get a good job, I urge you to remain open minded to the possibility of dropping out.

Best of luck,

Esq. Never

The Essential Law School Talking Point: Blame the Recession

2010-06-09T07:00:00.003-04:00

You don't have to tell me that recessions stink. With unemployment hovering around 10% and unemployment for folks under 30 usually reported at about 15%, who knows when I'll ever find a job. Moreover, those statistics don't include the underemployed and people who have just stopped looking for work.

Recessions aren't bad for everyone, however. Those with stable jobs that are largely unaffected by the business cycle (or are living off savings) can enjoy an indirect boost in discretionary income due to the falling price level. Certain speculators can take advantage of depressed prices and eventually profit when the economy and prices rebound. Even scam artists can take advantage of those who are out of work and are looking for an easy way to generate extra income.

Speaking of scam artists, law schools aren't exactly hurting during the recession either. For one thing, the economic collapse has resulted in a skyrocketing demand for graduate education as throngs of dupes flock to the ivory tower to wait out the recession. This has allowed the law schools to keep the scam (and tuition prices) growing stronger than ever.

Not only that, it has given them the cover they need to explain away the disastrous employment prospects that await their victims, err, graduates. "Surely, the law schools aren't to blame for the downturn in the economy," they contend. "Why everybody is hurting, and unfortunately the legal industry has been no exception." Plus, they make sure to add, "Prospective students should not be deterred; after all, the recession will surely be over by the time you graduate. Pay no attention to the plight of the classes of 2009/10."

It's, of course, true that jobs aren't exactly plentiful in any field. Nevertheless, as I pointed in in my "Craigslist Test" post, while there are few if any opportunities for attorneys (at least at the entry level), there are listings for positions in other fields - even in legal support roles!

There have also been multiple Craigslist ads offering salaries south of $40k in which the employer is only willing to consider the most elite applicants. Other firms have sought to hire new "attorneys" at hourly wages comparable to what one could make at Home Depot.

This ugly scenario can partially be attributed to the recession, but the reason why the market for attorneys is particularly atrocious (when compared to other industries) is because it never was all that robust to begin with. When the economy collapsed, the legal labor market got pounded into the ground.

To be sure, aspects of the legal industry were booming during the middle of the last decade. The large corporate firms were raking in the dough, and as a result, graduates from the elite schools, the top 10-20% of the "decent" schools, and a few "affirmative action" picks from the true toilets made their way into the coveted SA positions and eventually landed cushy first year associate positions.

Those who were truly gifted at networking, were born into the right families, or were just plain lucky also did alright. Also, those who were willing to accept the vow of poverty could likely find some DA or PD position to allow them to get the experience of working in the courtroom and to call themselves attorneys.

For pretty much everyone else, the golden age of legal employment wasn't exactly golden. Sure the media didn't really start to notice until their Ivy League golden children were no longer getting wined and dined by the big law plutocracy, but life wasn't so pleasant for the average unconnected graduate of virtually every school below the top 25 schools (and that's probably being generous) during this era.

For one thing, grad plus loans and the IBR plan have only been available since 2007 and 2009 respectively. While tuition was slightly lower a few years ago, going into six figures of debt for a private law school degree was hardly out of the question. That meant that it was easy to rack up nearly half of ones debt in private, non-dischargable loans and essentially become Sallie Mae's indentured servant for life.

But let's put that aside because the debt issue has been "solved". (At least until the the expense of the IBR blows up in the government's face.)

One cliche from that "golden era" was that law students were forced to take the high paying but largely unfulfilling associate positions at large firms in order to effectively pay down their debts. The truth was, of course, that only a limited number of students even had this opportunity.

What about the rest of the poor schlubs who were saddled with just as much debt but less impressive transcripts and/or academic pedigrees?

It's true that between 2004 and 2008, this wasn't an automatic sentence of unemployment and living in your mom's basement. Instead it usually was a sentence of wishing you were unemployed while working in Paul Weiss' poorly ventilated document review basement.

You see, this age of abundance was an era when the bright and well educated were flushed out of the back of law school machine only to work for some ambulance chasing parasite, click a mouse for $35 bucks an hour in a document review gulag, or abandon law altogether, rendering one's entire graduate education worthless.

And you know what? Those really were the good old days! I'm serious. As mentioned, today's toilet law firms essentially want top 10% students from tier one schools who were on law review. (All for the princely sum of $35k/year sans benefits.)

Doc Review gigs now requires experience - meaning entry level attorneys are actually under qualified to click a stupid mouse. I've personally been waiting for almost nine months to get a JUNIOR doc review position that pays $17/hour. We all, of course, know the score when it comes to finding a non-legal job.

Still, while I am left to dream about the days in which I could sit around in some third-world-worthy landlord tenant court or where I could actually be taken seriously at an interview for a job that doesn't require more than a BA, it probably says something about the law school industry when its most prosperous years were still a vile nightmare for most graduates.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at our friend, Big Debt, Small Law. He graduated in 2005, top 1/3 of his class, from a second tier school. His reward? Cutting and pasting some mind numbing motions while representing the dregs of society for some ambulance chasing chop shop. Somehow, I doubt that this lovely career option was in the ol' Seton Hall brochure.

Tom the Temp was around long before unemployment launched into the stratosphere. In fact, his website gained notoriety largely based upon the sheer number of law grads who were being carted into these legal gulags to help the large firms keep up with their reams of discovery during the last economic expansion.

At least back then, watching your career and dignity slip away into oblivion before your very eyes earned you around $35 an hour plus overtime. Today, if you can even find this sort of work, you'll be lucky to make $20. (Experienced "attorneys" only, of course.)

Recall, it was during 2005, the height of the expansion, that the WSJ blew the whistle in its print edition on the fudged employment statistics published by the TTT diploma mills and helped expose the subterranean, doc review sweatshops.

How about trying to jump ship and finding a career outside of the law? Well, admittedly, back before the recession, it seemed like more companies were willing to give those with law degrees a second look (or at least were more forgiving about resumes with an unexplained gap).

To be sure, this wasn't because non-legal employers valued a JD; they just had a smaller pool of candidates from which to draw their "talent". A writer from the now defunct Barely Legal blog successfully transitioned into the corporate world before the crash, but guess what key piece of advice he has for those following in his footsteps:

"[Your J.D.] doesn't entitle you to anything more than you were entitled to coming out of college."

Did you catch that? After three years of law school and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt (and possibly securing a law license), you'd better not expect any special treatment when applying for entry level positions outside of the legal field. Just try going into an interview with any sense of entitlement, TTT Grad, Esq., and see how far that gets you.

On top of that, almost every employer that takes your application seriously for a non-legal position is going to grill you over your legal education to a degree that would impress even the fictional Jack McCoy. This might be the only time in your life that having moot court experience will actually be of any benefit - to help you quickly address a barrage of hostile questions.

Barely Legal claimed that the only way to handle this inquisition is to simply explain that law school was just a detour in your educational development that helped you prepare for entry into the business world. I have found this advice to be pretty accurate.

If you find this account unpersuasive, Calico Cat wrote a few years earlier (also during the same period of prosperity) that the only way he was even able to find a job was to leave the J.D. off his resume altogether. Oh, by the way, he graduated in the top 10 percent in his class* from a tier 1 school.

So, let's assume the economy bounces back tomorrow. Let's further assume that the legal market returns to the way it was before the recession. I'd be overjoyed.

Nevertheless, what would await the majority of graduates of the class of 2011 in this more prosperous environment? Working for toilet law firms for $30-$50k per year. Being able to take mind numbing, document review jobs for hourly pay without gaining any substantive work experience. Taking a job which only requires a BA/BS and therefore rendering three years of graduate education entirely worthless.

Not exactly worth the $150k worth of debt.

Here's the Essential Esq. Never Talking Point: DO NOT GO TO LAW SCHOOL!

*Based upon his final GPA; not his 1L GPA

Prelaws Say the Darndest Things (Part 2)

2010-06-01T15:36:00.000-04:00

It's time for the latest installment of "Prelaws say the Darndest Things!" As always, these are actual quotes from prelaw message boards/forums made by actual future Best Buy clerks and AFLAC sales representatives.

Save Your Yuan

I'm currently deciding between Temple and Villanova, with the hopes to transfer at the end of 1L.

I am interested in international law with an emphasis on China/Asian law. Temple has a LLM program with Beijing for an extra semester. The program is run by Mo Zhang who is known for his academic work in Chinese Law. Villanova has an LLM program in Singapore where you spend 2 years at Villanova and 1 year in Singapore, followed by work in Shanghai/Beijing. Villanova has two professors who are Fulbright scholars in China and Taiwan, but they do not specialize in Chinese law. There is no extra semester at Villanova. Temple has an International Law Journal, Villanova does not.

Yeah, and I'm interested in obtaining the super ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bounce, but even that fantasy is more realistic than your chances of landing an attorney position in international law after graduating from some 2TT with a third rate international law journal.

I guess Villanova is nice enough to throw in a worthless LLM with their worthless JD, but get a clue: Everybody and their brother wants to work in "international law" and a diploma from a school that can't crack the US News top 50 plus a year of partying in Southeast Asia isn't exactly going to put you at the front of the line for these jobs.

There aren't word to describe the foolishness of actually paying for an LLM in International Law (from Temple?!).

That's Crazy Talk!

Q: Would I be able to find a job in Colorado after passing the Bar (and attending University of South Dakota Law)?

A: depends on where you want to work. As a general rule, yeah. unless the school in unaccredited why wouldn't you be able to?

Maybe because very few people these days can find actual attorney jobs or any jobs at all with the plague of a JD on their resumes...Unless you're talking about working at Arby's - but then again, why would having an unaccredited degree hurt you?

But sure, going to a TTT in a state outside of where you want to practice shouldn't pose any problems in the future. Remember, you clearly want to look to prelaw message boards for important career planning advice.

Heckle and Jeckle Discuss the Florida Legal Market

Heckle: I have said this before, I will say it again, there are only 4 law schools in Florida worth considering, and they are UF, UM, FSU, and Stetson. In the future, I might add FIU, but not at this moment. ["Advising" a student looking at Nova Southeastern.]

Jeckle: Not me i want to work in the public defenders office or da's office so im sure most graduates of those four schools would not want to work in local government for 30-40k a year but i would to get the experience for a few years then open up a office.

I reject the notion that one would not be successful unless they go to the "top four" schools in florda. I have a friend that goes to famu and interns for a lawyer that practices criminal law in orlando and graduated from barry. He makes 250k a year handling violation of probation and other criminal cases.

Good grief! The "top four" schools in Florida? Talk about a meaningless statistic. Florida is like everywhere else. The truly elite firms still prefer T-14 students even if they're not local. U Florida will give you a chance (during good times) if you have top grades, but it certainly isn't going to guarantee you a job.

You've got to be kidding about recommending UMiami and freakin' Stetson, right!? You'd be better off hitting the Magic Kingdom in Orlando and converting your money into Disney dollars than wasting three years at those toilets.

Sadly, apparently "Jeckle" seems to believe that that PD and DA jobs are slam dunks. Actually, students who don't hit the top 10% at the "top four" schools will quickly realize that the big firm jobs aren't going to happen for them and by the time they graduate many of them would kill for stable PD and DA jobs (particularly with the public service loan forgiveness).

Oh, and you know a guy who INTERNS for a guy making $250k/year? Guess what, that's as close as you're going to get to the big bucks as well.

That Was Easy!

Rumors of people not being able to find jobs!!! OH MY GOD NO!!!!!!! So you are saying that if someone goes to law school they may not get a job? I heard that argument before and then I went to talk to the other academic programs at my school since a J.D. doesn't guarantee me anything, but it was the weirdest thing apparently M.B.A's, Clinical Psychologists, and even M.D.'s and basically every other academic program can't guarantee a job. Weird right?

Apparently just getting an education doesn't guarantee you a job. I know it is impossible to get a job handed to you if you go to a tier 4, but I came up with this WILD IDEA and sent my resumes into a few firms and actually showed up for an interview and got hired. I know it's a radical concept that you actually have to try to find a job, but that is the horrors of going to a tier 3 or 4 you have to put in an ounce of effort. As you said these t-14 student's probably didn't accept that they might have to put an ounce of effort in and of actually doing something they just female dog and moaning that nobody is handing them a job. Welcome to real life is all I can say. At the end of the day just saying I go to so and so school doesn't matter. You got to put effort in to succeed in life. Shocking concept for spoiled rich kids I know, but some people actually have to put work in.

[In response to somebody having the gall to complain that getting job with J.D. can be difficult...Perish the thought, I know.]

Oh, so all this time, I just had to send in a resume, get an interview, and show up for the said interview. Well, why didn't somebody tell me?!

Yes, this is great advice, prelaws. Dump a ton of money into a bottom of the barrel degree and just assume that sending in your resume to a few firms will get you interviews and inevitably a job offer.

Definitely ignore the number of students who have mass mailed their resumes to firms to receive nary a response back. Don't pay any attention to the fact that there are virtually no entry level attorney positions listed on most job boards - but plenty of paralegal and legal assistant positions available. Just having determination should be more than enough!

Pearls Next to Swine

No tier 4 is going to fail out half their class or do anything much differently than any other school. Is Touro Harvard not even close! If you go to a tier 4 you won't have people chasing you down for a job, but if you put the work in you will get a job somewhere. You probably won't sit on the Supreme Court or Work in Big law, but if you want to a lawyer then Touro will be fine. You won't be living a jet-setting lifestyle, but not many lawyers do no matter what school they go to.

Well, there's actually a pearl of wisdom in this field full of dung. It's true you'll hardly have access to a life of wealth and ease regardless of which law school you attended. But going to Touro vs. Harvard isn't a question of big law vs. small law. It's a question of big law vs. washing cars and changing addresses several times a year to avoid your creditors.

If you want to be a lawyer, getting a degree from many tier 1 schools isn't enough to secure a serious law job. You're a fool if you think you'll get anywhere with a degree from TTTouro, a TTT among TTT's.

Esq. Never: Brilliant Financial Adviser

I need a financial aid consultant because I need to understand what's the best strategy to maximize my situation and get the best aid. I am working and don't have time to figure this all out and I'm under time pressure to get it done.

Allow me to provide some free assistance. Do you have a pulse? If you answered "yes", whichever school to which you've been accepted will be more than happy to accept your virtually guaranteed Stafford and GradPLUS loans to cover the entire cost of tuition and fees.

But here's the best financial advice I can offer. You have a job. Presumably it pays your bills. Once you graduate law school, landing a decently paying job could very likely no longer be an option. You will also owe money to pay for your worthless degree. Please keep your current job and forget about law school.

There. I just saved you hundreds of thousands of dollars and from the possibility of you throwing yourself in front of a train one day.

Hear No Evil

Well, for starters, anyone with the name "lawschoolblows" is obviously biased. Continuing that thought, anyone who finds their way onto a thread for happily admitted new students who are trying to make friends and get excited for their first year at law school CLEARLY needs something else to do with their lives. Shame on you for your negativity and for giving unsolicited opinions that were clearly not asked for nor socially acceptable in this situation. So I am going to disregard most of the comments "lawschoolblows" just made.

[NB: I did not make the post in question using the moniker "Lawschoolsblows".]

Yes, shame on him for trying to save you from a life of debt and despair. Did you have the same attitude when the police officer visited your high school to warn you about the danger of tanking up and wrapping your car around an oak tree?

Just as the prom season inevitably leads to a bunch of drunken hooligans having their remains scraped off the pavement with a giant spatula, the start of a new law school year also features a flood of these naive 1L twits skipping into career perdition.

Blind Leading the Blind

Q: I am trying to decide between The University of Richmond (sticker) and The University of Baltimore (8K/year if I maitain at least a 3.25). Some things to consider....

I want to got into IP law

I would like to work in the D.C. or Richmond area after graduation

My Parents live in Richmond so I could live at home if I went to U of R.

Richmond being private is ~33k/year, Baltimore would be ~34/year the first year, but ~24K the last 2 years once I get residency.

Richmond is 86th in the Rankings, Baltimoire is a T3 school

A: I did campaign fund raising in Richmond a few years back (over 50% of our donors were attorneys), and while this is somewhat anecdotal, I found Richmond extremely well represented at all of the firms there. I would see Richmond and UVA and not much else at most of the firms. Additionally, the alumni network at Richmond seemed particularly active and engaged. I don't think this completely answers your question and I can't speak to anything about DC, but if you want to practice in Richmond going to school there seems like a good choice.

Let me get this straight. One goober is seriously considering choosing between paying full price at a school that's barely in the second tier and taking a measly 8k scholarship from an abysmal TTT. The other chump is egging him on by guessing that some of the attorneys at some fundraising event went to Richmond (likely years ago)?

I can hardly comment on this. All I can say is that at least con artists like Bernie Madoff had to put some effort into their scams. I mean the law school hucksters can't even say their scam is a challenge. Even shooting fish in a barrel has to be more difficult than relieving law school lemmings of their tuition dollars.

Alumni Connections: The Last Refuge of a Loser

Considering they're all about evenly ranked, yeah, alumni is probably the biggest factor. Fact is that employers tend to hire from their own school, and there are probably more people with AU degrees in DC than with WF or GM. Also, AU has extensive internship/externship opportunities (much more so than GM), so you could network while a student.

However, I think Wake is significantly cheaper than American, both in terms of tuition and CoL. For me personally this would be a huge factor, but you seemed to place the most emphasis on working DC so the "safest" bet among those three is almost certainly American.

If you get to the point where you're banking on alumni to help you get a job, you've already lost. (You're also likely working at a place that requires you to wear a paper hat.)

What if...I Destroy My Life?

I don't think I'd be necessarily unhappy in San Diego, but I know that I'd be happier in San Francisco. And that's where weighing the debt versus the preference comes into play.

Plus, and I didn't mention this, Cal Western has a stipulation put on the scholarship and their curve is pretty tough (they drop the bottom 20% out of their 1L, which probably helps to keep their bar passage rate up with the T1/T2 schools). I'm not sure how to consider this, I know I have the dedication and ability that should keep the scholarship, but there is always the "what if". If I had to pay tuition at Cal Western, and I knew that now, I'd absolutely choose USF.

[Choosing between Cal Western vs. University of U. San Francisco]

"The 'What If?' " [???] If you go to one of these schools, it's really not a question of IF you'll come to hate your station in life; it'll be just be a question of the degree to which you hate it.

ABA - They who are about to die, salute you!

Worst. Interview. Ever.

2010-05-19T14:17:00.002-04:00

I've decided to take a hiatus from my hiatus in order to bring you today's post. What's the occasion? Well, I actually (somewhat) recently had an interview. This is rare enough of an event that I would probably take the time to blog about it regardless of the circumstances.

Unfortunately, instead of being able to use this occasion to either encourage my readers or to offer some additional insight into the job search process, the only thing I learned based upon this experience is that there's yet another layer to the frustration of trying to find a job with a JD in this economy.

I'm not sure how many of my readers read (or are at least familiar with) ESPN.com's Bill Simmons, one of the website's better known sports columnists. I have mixed feeling about his columns. There are things I find aggravating about them - such as his ubiquitous references to television programs that are geared towards teenage girls, not middle aged sports columnists - but some of his pieces are fairly insightful.

One feature that appears in his columns from time to time is his rubric for the "Levels of Losing": That is, how hard it is for a fan base to grapple with their team's loss in an important sporting event.

If the defeat leaves you feeling like somebody just punched you in the gut, you're somewhere on the far side of the spectrum. If you're literally crying after you watch your side go down in flames, you're probably at the terminal point of athletic despair. (You also probably take sports a wee bit too seriously.)

The reason why this is a recurring topic in his columns is because every once in a while a city faces a defeat so monumental that a new category has to be added to appropriately capture the anguish of the despondent fan base.

The same revelation also seems to be applicable to the job search. Just when you thought you couldn't possibly see a new low in this miserable process, something new crops up to make you question whether the gulags and mass shortages in the former USSR were a fair trade off in order to have a guaranteed job.

I'm not creative enough to develop a full blown "Levels of Losing" for the job seeker, but here's my abbreviated version (from least depressing to most).

Category 1: Sending out well tailored resumes and custom made cover letters to jobs in which you're both interested and for which you appear to be qualified and never hearing a word back from the employer.

Category 2: Being asked to come in for an "interview" with a recruiter for a position. Of course, the interview is scheduled for two days after you've applied. The recruiter gives you a full blown interview, but he/she is only "interviewing" you to submit you to the HR representative who will make the actual decision as to whether or not to give you a real interview. While all this is going on, the company in question hires somebody else. (Uh, more on this in a future post.)

Category 3: Being asked to come in for a real interview with a company after months without getting any responses. You have a great interview and conversation with the interviewer who works on the marketing side of the company.

Following this, you have a less impressive interview with a guy who works in the tech division. It turns out that they're looking for somebody with a stronger programming background - even though they don't have the courtesy to bother telling you this. Instead, they make up some excuse about the third person who was going to interview you being "unavailable" and claim they'll be in touch. They never call back and refuse to respond to your follow up inquiries.

I thought that was as bad it was going to get - spineless and discourteous interviewers unwilling to let you know they're looking for somebody else and hoping that you'll go away if they just ignore you.

Unfortunately, my recent interview experience introduced me to a fourth category:

At first, things looked quite promising. I had taken some time off from blitzing the jobs boards to focus on reaching out to my network and going to some job fairs (more on this in later posts). I applied for the position in question during a brief spurt of submitting my resume for five jobs. I received no response from the first three, a rejection from one, and a request for an interview from the last - a pretty impressive ratio based upon my past experience.

The job for which I received an interview looked great. It was tangentially related to the law - and I even mentioned the JD in my cover letter, professional summary, and body of my resume - the salary was quite good (at least based upon my low standards), and the position was even respectable enough to divert attention away from the fact that I wasn't actually practicing law.

I recognized that this was possibly my one chance to land on my feet after the entire JD debacle, and I set forth to do everything I could to secure the position. If I was going to miss out on this opportunity, at least I would be able to say I tried my best.

I promptly responded to the request for an interview as politely and (reasonably) eagerly as possible. I then began preparing for all potential questions that may come up. I highlighted my most relevant experience. I researched the company's website to develop intelligent questions and buttress my likely responses. I wrote everything out and rehearsed my "talking points". I even skipped out on another (albeit minor) opportunity in my career search to prepare for the interview.

On the day of the interview, I left my house early to make sure there was no chance that I would get there late. When I arrived, I was about 40 minutes early, so I decided to head into a local coffee shop before the interview.

I usually try not to arrive too early for an interview because it can create an awkward situation. Either they'll sit you down in a waiting area near the receptionist, who would probably rather attend to her work without somebody else sitting directly across from her, or if they put you in a separate conference room, there's pressure on the interviewer to attend to you quickly even though he wasn't expecting you until later. Plus, there's always the risk of the ladies being too distracted to get any of their work done with someone with Esq. Never's good looks hanging around the office. (Well, okay, maybe that last point isn't exactly the world's biggest concern.)

In any event, I ended up leaving the coffee shop about 20 minutes prior to the interview. After the brief walk and going through security, I was about 15 minutes early. This seemed reasonable to me because most employers value promptness, and an employer probably should be prepared for an interview within that time frame.

Despite being in a pretty nice building in the downtown area of the city, the office seemed a bit disorganized; there wasn't really any reception area. Instead, the office manager led me to an empty and somewhat cluttered sub-conference room. To my surprise, despite being a bit early, the interviewer quickly arrived to conduct the interview.

The first bad sign was that he didn't even bother to take the time to print my resume. At the time, I chalked it up to my early arrival and perhaps the disorganized nature of the office. In retrospect, if the guy didn't bother printing out my resume and marking it up, he probably wasn't too intrigued with my candidacy to begin with.

The interview started off well enough. He took the time to give me more background on the position, and I agreed that I would be able to perform the tasks assigned and that I was excited about this opportunity.

Following that, he asked the general "catch all" question, "Tell me about yourself". I picked out three major accomplishments from my experience that were directly on point with what the job description called for. He seemed impressed. So far, so good.

He then inquired about whether I had specific experience in a similar role. It was a bit of a curve ball because I did not, but the job description specifically said "No experience necessary" and nowhere on my resume (that they ostensibly read) did I claim to have such experience. I conceded that I did not, but quickly described my related experience, and he also seemed satisfied and reiterated that specific experience wasn't necessary. I felt like I was still holding on and that once we continued with the series of questions, my intense preparation would start paying off.

He then asked a somewhat irrelevant question about my undergraduate experience, which I answered with a couple of lighthearted (but professional) anecdotes hopeful that I was beginning to establish a connection with the interviewer.

He then looked down at my resume, and I began contemplating which direction he would take the interview. Would he want to talk about my work experience? My computer skills? Why I moved back to my home state?

And then...he stood up, shook my hand, and started heading towards the door. Yes, folks, that's right. This interview into which I had dumped all of my effort lasted for THREE questions and for five (maybe ten) minutes!

I stood up in disbelief. Was this guy serious? He had me drive out to his office for this? As he left, he said he needed to talk things over with his boss and they would get back to me to schedule a second interview. I had a brief optimistic feeling that perhaps they had just called me in to verify that I was the "chosen one" for this position; however, once he quickly added the condition, "...if we're interested," I realized that I had a better chance of getting a call from the Abominable Snowman than ever hearing from this guy again.

Yes, I had come to play and leave everything on the field in order to snag this position, but it seems like I had lost before I even arrived at the office that day. I have to assume that they already knew they either were affirmatively going to hire a certain candidate or they somehow recognized that they didn't want me for the job after scheduling the interview.

I don't know how else to explain it. He didn't bother asking me the "Why law school?" question or about my former job or even the almost obligatory "Do you have any questions for me?" query. He didn't even offer me a business card, which essentially says, "Don't bother wasting your time with a thank you/follow up." (I sent one to the office manager anyway.)

Of course, following in the fine tradition of HR discourtesy, he also didn't bother to tell me that they were looking for somebody else nor did he respond to my follow up a week later - sent via the office manager.

As an aside, if any of you end up in recruiting/HR, could please keep your own experiences in mind and perhaps treat applicants with some modicum of respect. (For anyone currently in this field who reads this blog, perhaps you guys could keep in mind we're not just some lousy products that you don't want to buy at the store. Besides, if you'd like to live a life of evil, there are probably some law school administration jobs that are more lucrative and require less stress.)

Back to the subject of this post: I hope this company isn't this tactless in all of their candidate searches. What if I was black or a woman? This would have had EEOC suit written all over it.

Nothing about this really makes sense. If say they met a candidate (or candidates) who had experience but was (were) willing to accept underemployment in a tough economy, wouldn't his (their) resume(s) have indicated this? If so, why bother bringing me in for an interview before having the chance to vet such a clearly superior candidate (or candidates)?

Aside from somebody with experience, I have a hard time believing that they already interviewed somebody who was so good that it wouldn't even be worth the time to give me a full evaluation. How good does somebody (particularly without any direct experience) need to come across that they could decide beforehand that nobody else even deserves a hearing?

Maybe some of you think that I'm being too generous to myself and that I'm unwilling to accept that I blew the interview. I honestly don't think it's possible. If I had a full interview and didn't come across that great, that's one thing, but only getting three questions? I don't think so. Unless I simultaneously broke wind and insulted the guy's mother, I don't think there's any call for dispensing with me with such a cursory "evaluation".

Also, while I have many weaknesses, I think I'm actually pretty good at interviewing. When I graduated college, one interviewer called me back for a second interview because she said I "brought a lot of energy to the first interview."

Folks, there are many ways to describe me (some of them probably not very nice), but energetic is not one of them. You can think of Esq. Never as kind of a more laid back version of Al Gore. Nevertheless, I am somehow able to make myself comes across as far more engaging during job interviews than I am in most other settings.

In any event, whatever charm I may be able to muster for these interviews clearly couldn't overcome this disaster of an experience.

Maybe somebody's cousin needed a sinecure or I inadvertently ran over the interviewer's dog at some point in the past.

Regardless, there you have it, a category four job search defeat: Finding the "perfect" job - getting invited for an interview - diligently preparing for it - walking into the interview without knowing you're already disqualified - and then being dismissed without even the pretense that they took your candidacy seriously. Oh, and then having them continue to string you along while also ignoring your requests for further information.

I don't know what could possibly qualify for a category five experience. I assume it would include a kick to the groin and being throwing down an elevator shaft, but I really don't want to know for sure.

This blog post is based upon a sports analogy, so let me conclude with another sports reference.

In Major League Baseball, just making the playoffs is somewhat of an accomplishment. This is in contrast to the NBA where half the teams end up in the post season. In baseball, if you make the playoffs, it means that you're only one of four teams in your league to extend your season into October. After slogging your way through a lengthy season, you either ended up as the best team in the division or as the best out of all of the other teams in the league.

When a team clinches a playoff berth, there's obviously celebration both in the clubhouse and in the team's hometown. Nevertheless, the real work is just beginning. Sure, it's nice to be in the post season, but getting wiped out in the divisional series isn't going to impress anybody, and years from now, nobody besides hometown fans and baseball nerds are going to even remember the initial accomplishment.

I've learned that it's pretty much the same thing with first interviews. Sure, after sending out reams of resumes, its nice to have some proof that somebody actually read yours and that they're even interested in considering you for the job. You feel happy for a couple of days, but it's almost meaningless.

Yes, you can't win the World Series if you don't get into the playoffs to begin with, and you can't get an offer if you're not getting interviews. Nevertheless, just as a team shouldn't start making room on their trophy shelf in anticipation of a title during the first round, the job seeker should realize that a first interview is a step toward getting a job, but it's only a very small one.

Hiatus

2010-05-12T16:53:00.002-04:00

Hi, everyone. As most of the regular readers of this blog (or anyone who can read the date of the last entry) probably know, I haven't posted in a while.

Nothing particularly interesting or cataclysmic has happened, but I am taking a break from blogging for a while. Writing lengthy (at least by blog standards) pieces for about half a year has been a bit draining. Also, searching for a job and attending to other projects is quite time consuming. In addition, consistently reflecting on my own job search plight and focusing on the corruption of the law school industry gets pretty depressing over time.

I do plan to eventually return with some new posts, but for the time being (probably a couple weeks to a month), I plan on taking a break from being 'Esq. Never'. This will give me more time to focus on my pro-MSU Law blog (j/k).

See you in a few weeks.

QA with Esq. Never

2010-04-23T15:55:00.001-04:00

Let's go into the weekend with the QA I promised you a while ago. These questions appear in no particular order. I've tried to limit my answers to keep this post to a reasonable length.

How old are you, E.N.?

I am in my late 20's.

What led you start this website?

I sort of touched on this in my first post, but I had some thoughts I wanted to share both about law school and trying to find a non-legal job. I initially thought the main point of the blog would be to chronicle my quest for a job, but given that a lot of my time was spent sending resumes off into oblivion, I focused a bit more on other subject matter. As I became more frustrated with how useless my degree truly appeared to be and learned that many, many other people were in the same or a worse boat, the blog took on more of a "scam busting" flavor.

How did those job fairs work out?

I actually only went to one of the three for which I signed up. I ditched the first two because the paltry number of companies present didn't seem to make it worth the trip. The one I did attend was actually quite good. I plan to blog about it in the future. I did get a few leads, but so far, nothing has worked out. It did help that this particular fair was aimed at a specific industry.

Why won't you reveal where you went to law school? What are you afraid of?

My job search is difficult enough without possibly exposing myself and having an angry law school, alumni, etc. doing everything they can to further frustrate it.

That said, even if I wasn't concerned about my anonymity, I'm not sure I'd really like to get into a fight with my particular school. I've said before that I don't think it's as sleazy as say Seton Hall or NYLS. It is, of course, overpriced and generally a useless institution, but it isn't the worst of the worst.

This really isn't about Esq. Never vs. Law School X. It's about an entire industry that engages in deceptive marketing, exploits the cheap credit that flows from the student lending system, and doesn't really care that its "customers" end up indebted and unemployable.

Why are comments now censored (they used to display immediately)?

At one point I didn't monitor comments. I wanted to allow everyone to voice their opinions even if was the typical "You're a whiner" and "You should have done more research" canards.

Sadly, one person wanted to post identifying information about me and ruined it for everyone. That said, I do not censor comments. They are only on a delay. I recognize this may discourage discussion, but for the time being, it is necessary.

Aside from attempts to "expose" me, I have rejected comments that are entirely off topic, spam, or duplicate posts. If you search through my comments, you will find critical remarks about my opinions and even a decent amount of name calling aimed towards me.

Why are you so hesitant to weigh in on politics?

Personally, I see it as irrelevant. Most people who go to law school have developed some sort of political viewpoint, and by siding with or against certain politicians, I believe I would unnecessarily anger other people who do not agree with me.

I do not see the problems with higher education (and law school specifically) as part of a systemic problem with America. I see it as a bad "product" that deserves to be criticized. Just like there are websites dedicated to exposing "get rich quick" schemes and other ripoffs, I believe this blog serves the same function for the law school industry.

The recession aside, I think life would have been just fine for me had I not made such a bad decision in attending law school. I believe the problems with law school can be solved through realistic changes to how legal education is provided that do not require ushering in the workers' revolution.

That said, I do think there are governmental issues that relate to the problems with law school. Chiefly, I believe the culprit is the limitless supply of student loans. To remedy the situation, I advocate two policy positions. One "left-winged": Allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy; one "right-winged": End the federal student loan program at least for graduate, professional schools.

These measure would cause the COA to plummet, force many TTT's out of market, and probably require the restructuring of the entire legal education system around a more practical model. The only expensive, theoretical institutions that would survive would be the ones that could truly guarantee jobs to their graduates that would allow them to service their debts.

What will happen to Esq. Never when you get a job?

Good question. For the time being, that isn't much of a concern.

Feel free to continue e-mailing me questions, and I will continue this series when I get enough to warrant an additional post.

A Scam Within a Scam...Within a Scam?

2010-04-20T14:00:00.002-04:00

If you've ever read Shakespeare's famous play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, you probably know that it is famous (in part) because it features a play within a play. I'm knowledgeable enough about literature to know that fact. I, however, am not quite sophisticated enough to realize why it is particularly noteworthy.

Nevertheless, while I may be ignorant when it comes to the intricacies of the Bard's greatest works, over the past several months I've become quite adept at recognizing the shady tactics of our friends in the law school and higher education industrial complex.

First, there was Solo Practice University. For hundreds of dollars they promised to give solo practitioners (even those right out of law school) the tools they need to succeed. Of course, those tools consisted almost exclusively of a bunch of (non-state specific) videos for practicing different areas of the law. Like a set of videos for "Do-It-Yourself Surgery", such an approach to learning the law was a bit perfunctory, and the results were more likely than not destined to be rather messy.

Then our friends at Law Crossings started spamming the job boards, claiming they could help graduates find their first attorney positions regardless of whether the applicant's GPA was 2.0 or 4.0.

I watched a story on 60 Minutes the other night where a couple of psudeo-doctors convinced patients with a certain terminal ailment to pony up some big bucks in exchange for a nonexistent cure. You know what? I'll bet those "doctors" would be thoroughly disgusted by Law Crossings.

Seriously. What type of scum bag is willing to further rip off somebody who already is unemployable and under a mountain of debt? They'd honestly be less repugnant characters if they just took your money in exchange for a swift kick to the groin.

So now comes the latest in a long line of swindles. But this swindle actually has multiple layers. (Hence it being a "Scam within a Scam".)

I recently received an urgent piece of mail from some company called ECMC. Prior to reading this piece of mail, I had no idea who ECMC was. In fact, I'm still not 100% sure who they are except that the company guarantees federal loans. Apparently, however, this company was in possession of personal data related to me. It also seems that their crack security team allowed said personal data to be compromised.

Great. So let me get this straight. My law school and Sallie Mae conned me into going into massive debt for a worthless degree. Then for some reason they handed over my personal information to some other student lending company of some sort without telling me about it - though I'm sure it was buried in one of the 39 letters with 8-inch font they send me every week. Now, thanks to their bungling, another con artist has absconded with my sensitive, personal information.

It doesn't end there, though. Even though they insist that no "savings, checking, or credit card account numbers" were compromised (uh, what about SS numbers?) - which there's really no reason they should have in the first place - they're offering 12 free months of credit monitoring through another company.

Now call me cynical, but I can't help it at this point. If important data truly wasn't compromised, is this really necessary? If I sign up for this, how come I anticipate seeing myself being automatically re-enrolled at $59.99 a month once the free trial is over? Sorry, I don't have a lot of faith in a company that uses some doofus playing the guitar in a pirate-themed restaurant to advertise for its product. (Maybe that guy should go to law school - then he'd really have something to sing about!)

So in addition to all my other woes, I have to choose between trusting that recently released inmate #68934 isn't selling my personal data over the internet to some guy in Nigeria or risk spending eight hours on the phone in 12 months trying cancel my brand new credit alert contract.

Is paying that Law Crossings guy to kick me in the groin an option?

All the world's a stage filled with potential law students,
And all the men and women merely a source of revenue;
They have their savings and the ability to sign promissory notes,
And one man in his time can be conned many times,
His indebtedness being seven ages.

-As The Law School Industry Likes It

A Responsible 0L

2010-04-19T16:21:00.001-04:00

I don't know much about relationships, and I'm not going to pretend that I do. Maybe what I do know is based upon watching too many sitcoms when I was younger. Nevertheless, it seems that one problem that frequently arises is a situation where a person enters a relationship that most of his (or more likely, her) friends believe will end in disaster. The person, however, is so enamored with the new boyfriend that she is unwilling to listen to her friends' warnings and ends up distraught and emotionally scarred.

Maybe this scenario is just the byproduct of the crummy (and seriously wussy) TV shows I watched as a teenager. Nevertheless, I think it's a good analogy for the relationship between anti-law school advocates and the hordes of 0L's that have been seduced by the law school marketing machines.

Like a good looking "prince charming", the law school deans whisper sweet nothings about their great educational programs and the abundant career options that await the starry eyed 0L's in three years. This seduction even continues once the students are enrolled in law school.

During my 1L year, I remember professors telling us about what awaits us when we become associates in large firms - as if landing such positions was a given. One legal writing professor even urged us to be kind to our secretaries because they hold more power than they're given credit. Who would have thought that the reason they "hold more power than I do" is because they're actually gainfully employed, and I'd be lucky to get a sales position at Radio Shack?

Like the friends of an enamored teenage girl, however, the scam-bloggers can't get through to these infatuated pre-laws. "It's not true!", the 0L's cry. "They wouldn't lie to us!", they protest. No, it's us - the "losers" - who are the enemy and just out to sully the good names of these fine institutions of academic excellence because we couldn't hack it.

Sadly, when their three years are up, they finally are able to recognize the truth - once it's too late. Just like the girl who spurned her friends' counsel and has learned that "prince charming" has been dating three other girls and is indifferent to her feelings, the new law school graduates are cast out from their delusions only to realize they've been conned by some of the most duplicitous characters in higher education.

I mention all of us this to help explain why it's so refreshing to speak with 0L's who are actually willing to seriously consider the problems associated with attending law school.

Recently, an 0L sent me an e-mail asking me my opinion on whether attending LS this coming year is a good idea or not. With his permission, I have published his inquiry and my response. In order to protect his identity, I have omitted certain identifying information:

Esq, Never,

I have been accepted to [a good tier 1, but not T-14, law school] with a scholarship. It will essentially cost 65k (that includes living expenses). My Stafford loans will cover it all, so no grad plus. I have about 40k in savings as well. [A number of my relatives] all work in large firms and said they would help me out. Do you think it would be a mistake to go? Law school has always been my dream but with the market the way it is right now I don’t know if 65k in debt would be too much. Any advice would be appreciated.

-A Responsible 0L

Dear Responsible 0L,

My advice about whether one should attend LS is almost universally "no".

Because I recognize that such a direct response is unhelpful, let me pose some questions to help you think through your decision.

1) Is the 65k you plan on borrowing truly going to cover ALL expenses from the day you enroll until the day you graduate - including summers?

Remember, all sorts of attendant and unanticipated costs arise during law school. You still need to pay for insurance (including health), car repairs/maintenance, and transportation costs (just to name a few). You should not anticipate making any money over the summers when calculating the COA. Sure if you do get a big firm SA, you'll be able to cover many expenses, but many students work unpaid over the summers - even from good schools.

If your firm doesn't pay for it, you'll need to pay for bar prep, and you'll also need to take into account living expenses during that time period. If you can't find a job well after you take the bar (like me), you'll also have to have cash reserves. Do you honestly think you'll still have $40k in savings when law school is over?

2) How much help will your contacts actually be?

If you're banking on their connections, you'd better know exactly how much assistance they can provide up front. Are they partners? Are they involved in hiring decisions? Sit down with them and tell them that you're taking the risk of going to law school, and you need to know if they can get you into their firms if you're in a bind (e.g. wipe out at OCI). Can they just hand you a job? Will you need to have a certain class rank in order for them to get you in? Get as much concrete information as possible.

3) What do you mean when you say law school is your dream?

Does it mean that you dream about making six figures and working in a skyscraper? If so, recognize that only a sliver of students attain this goal - and many who do eventually "make it" find such positions stressful. There are other paths to becoming a well-to-do professional.

Do you dream of being a Jack McCoy-esque advocate in the courtroom? If so, realize that most lawyers don't spend that much time in full blown trials. Big city DA positions are also pretty competitive and don't pay that well. Also, much of what you'll do for a number of years will be fairly routine hearings and the like.

If you think that LS is going to be interesting, know that most of it deals with reading cases, pulling out rulings and then applying those rules to fact patterns usually involving subcontractors, landowners, and negligent workers. If you enjoyed the political/theoretical aspects of law in undergrad (e.g. critical legal theories, law and economics, constitutional philosophy), know that this will have little to do with your 1L courses and will usually only be covered by electives such as "Jurisprudence".

If you truly will only have $65k in debt and you'll be able to either use your school's rep (and a high class rank) or your family connections to land a good, firm job, then it could be worth it. Just realize that many attorneys are unhappy, and transitioning out of the law can be difficult later on.

Based upon your e-mail address, it seems like you have a good job. If you're bored at work, I'd look to try to find a new position or maybe enroll in a program (preferably part time) that will enhance your business or technology credentials.

Remember, being bored and unfulfilled at work is something you can change. Being in heavy debt and unemployable (as is my position) is a hole that is very hard to climb out of. I have received letters from distraught readers with T-14 degrees who are in the same position.

Also, right now even people at the best schools aren't guaranteed good jobs at graduation. The economy could be better in three years, but it's also possible that the legal market has been changed forever and that the economy could double dip into another recession. Don't attend if you're banking on a better economy.

If you do go, don't be too proud to throw in the towel. If your class rank is low and your contacts aren't working out after the first year (or even first semester), get out and try to get back into the business world.

-EN

I would urge other prospective law students to also spend time seriously considering all the potential consequences of (and alternatives to) going to law school.

The letter writer informed me that he is taking the time to consider the questions I posed in my response.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2010-04-16T07:38:00.003-04:00

It's that time of year again. I'm not referring to the filing deadline for federal taxes. After all, given the employment status of many of this blog's readers, I assume income taxes aren't exactly a pressing issue for most of us. (I guess, it'll be up to others to provide the revenue to fund the federal student loan program that helps prop the higher education cartel.)

While April 15 is usually associated with taxes, this year it's also the date US News and World Report released the 2011 Graduate School Rankings on its website.

Like with most other facets of the graduate school swindle, an established institution will profit from this nation's obsession with higher education while the customers will end up both poorer and not particularly better informed.

To be sure, the rankings will get a significant amount of attention. All of the academics will provide the obligatory condemnation of the rankings as an imprecise tool of measuring the quality of their programs. The schools that get particularly shafted will object even more vociferously while doing their best to spin their decline in the rankings to students - both current and prospective. The schools that are promoted will wear their elevated status as a badge of honor (only to condemn the very same rankings the following year should their fortunes change).

Of course, the law school rankings (and higher education rankings in general) are garbage. The methodology is too subjective. The weights given to certain variables are questionable, and most of the self reported data are likely distortions if not outright lies.

This is to say nothing of the meaninglessness of the actual ranks themselves. What benefit does a student at the 53rd best law school enjoy that a student at the 75th best law school does not?

Sure, there are some general categories. The so-called T-14, the Top 25, etc., but even these general categories cease to be particularly important once you go down the food chain.

Here's the Esq. Never Rankings:

Probably Worth the Money: Harvard, Yale, Stanford

Possibly Worth the Money: The rest of the T-14

Don't Waste Your Money: Everybody Else

What's absurd, however, is that prospective law students will actually make their decisions on where to enroll based upon this nonsense. Some will forgo scholarships just so they can say they went to a ranked school (even if it may not be ranked next year). Some will latch onto a better ranked "national school" because the local school won't offer the same "bragging rights". Everyone will think/hope that their school will eventually climb in the rankings (and thus be a better investment) even though any such movement will do nothing for them.

Let's take a look at this year's rankings to further understand what a sham they are.

The full rankings are only available via a subscription, but you can find a copy of the tier one schools here and the tier two schools here.

Look how volatile the rankings are - particularly in the second tier. Just a couple years ago, Temple was pushing towards the top 50, now it's tied with Seton Freakin' Hall. Marquette wasn't even invited to the party this year as it fell into the third tier.

As for schools that saw significant gains, Pepperdine (while actually decently ranked last year) and Miami were pretty much towards the lower end of the 2nd tier when I was applying, and now they are knocking on the top 50's door.

If that doesn't seem that amazing, then let me pose this query: Whose souls did Hofstra and Chapman have to sell in order to make the top 100 this year?

Admittedly, the 1st tier is a little bit more stable, but let's take a look at the employment figures US News lists. We're really expected to believe that with one exception, no fewer than 70% of the class at all of the tier one schools were employed at graduation? Most even boast employment stats in the 80's and 90's.

The 9 month employment stats are even more absurd. All of the top 50 schools claim to effectively have full employment at 9 months out. Is this true? Not based upon the e-mails and comments I receive from first many first tier students.

The University of Utah even has the gall to claim absolute, full employment at 9 months out. Funny isn't this the same school that admitted it juiced the stats (err, made a mistake) just this year regarding its average starting salary? I assume this is another "mistake".

The second tier employment figures are equally unbelievable. All the second tier toilets claim to also have full employment at 9 months out. This includes the schools that could just have easily been classified as third tier schools.

What's more despicable is that US News and World Report allows about a dozen of these dumps to still be ranked in the second tier even if they are unwilling to provide their data for employment at graduation. Apparently, they can't handle the truth - Nevertheless, US News doesn't seem to let that affect their rankings too much.

This is not to say that the schools that do submit data are exactly trying to play an honest game. I guess omitting data is better than lying about it.

I'm pretty incredulous that 80% of graduates from Seton Hall and DePaul had jobs at graduation. Almost all of the other schools claim about 2/3rds of their students had jobs in hand before taking the bar. I'll personally EAT a copy US News' "Guide to the Best Grad Schools" if Chapman can prove that 90% of its students walked the stage at graduation employed as attorneys.

The one school that may have actually honestly reported this data is U Missouri, which reports only 1/2 of its students graduated with promises of employment. Its reward? Falling from 65 to 93 in the rankings. Honesty doesn't pay in the law school scam game. I'm sure they'll never make that mistake again.

Even if the data that is reported is technically true (a dubious assertion), the rankings and statistics are still garbage. Is a school that jumps (or drops) even more than 10 slots in a given year really that much better or worse than it used to be? There's nothing stopping a school from being much better ranked or even being knocked out of the top 100 in a few years based upon some quirks in the data reported or some unscientific rating of it's reputation.

Moreover, the employment data is a joke. For example, most schools in New Jersey can just throw their graduates into year long clerkships and claim they're employed at graduation even though this make work scheme will leave them destitute the year after. Employment at 9 months out is meaningless. It certainly doesn't mean almost all students are employed as attorneys within a year of graduation. It means that they have some job - any job. Working at Burger King, doing a temporary stint for the Census Bureau, or working at the local "gentleman's club" all count towards that figure.

What does it mean when a school is ranked in the 60's or 70's (or virtually anywhere else for that matter), claims that 70% are employed at graduation, and 95% at 9 months out? It means the school is a waste of money, is run by liars, and that you can always fall back on jobs you could get with or without a GED.

Ask Esq. Never

2010-04-10T20:19:00.006-04:00

I receive quite a bit of e-mail and comments seeking my opinions, thoughts, and (yikes!) even advice on certain matters. People are also occasionally interested in more information about this blog and the anti-law school backlash in general.

I think I do a pretty decent job replying to people when it comes to e-mail, but because I'm always careful to protect the privacy of anyone who contacts me, I never share their often interesting questions on the blog. As for the comments, I admittedly tend to do a poor job of responding to anything other than direct challenges to a position that I take.

Therefore, I would like to publish a "mailbag" post in the near future. I'm not sure how popular this will be, but I figure it's a good time to give this a try.

If you have something that you'd like me to address for the mailbag, please send me an e-mail at esqnever@hotmail.com with "Mailbag" or "Ask Esq. Never" in the subject (or mention in the body of the e-mail that you'd like to have your question included in the blog post).

Feel free to ask questions about this blog, law school, scam blogs in general, the "alternative" job search, or anything else you think is relevant. If you have a comment to which you'd like me to react, please feel free to share it as well. Also, feel free to ask multiple questions (to be answered separately).

Try to keep the question short enough for a blog posts (no more than a few sentences). Also, please don't ask questions that would take an entire blog post to explain.

Questions that are not serious, will not receive serious answers. If you do politely ask a critical question in good faith, I promise not to make fun of you.

I will not answer questions that would compromise my anonymity (e.g. where I live; where I went to school). In order to maintain the philosophical neutrality of this blog, I will also not share my politics or personal beliefs on serious subjects that are unrelated to law school. Obviously, I will not entertain questions or comments that are particularly offensive or obscene.

If I receive enough questions/comments in short order, I will respond with a blog post this week. If it takes longer to gather enough responses, I will wait until later in the month. If this feature proves to be particularly popular, I'll categorize the questions and break up the blogs posts accordingly. If this feature is a complete bust, I'll cry myself to sleep and just make up some fake questions...or I'll just forget about it and turn my attention to other posts.

If you do not note that you want to be included in the mailbag, I'll keep your e-mail in confidence. I'll print your first name only if it appears in the body of your e-mail. I will respect requests to remain anonymous.

Please do not post questions to the comments section. (I have disabled it for this post.)

Thank you, and I look forward to responding to the questions and comments that you send to esqnever@hotmail.com (with "Mailbag" or "Ask Esq. Never" in the subject).

Prelaws Say the Darndest Things!

2010-04-09T07:03:00.006-04:00

Remember the movie The Truman Show? I was personally a little disappointed when I watched it and learned that it had little to do with our 33rd President. Nevertheless, it did present a somewhat interesting concept - a guy lives in a manufactured world only to eventually discover everything he thinks he knows about the world is a farce.

Personally, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish I was on the set of the 'Esq. Never' Show. That way I'd eventually be able to open the door and exit to a world where I'm not both massively indebted and pretty much unemployable.

That's right. Ha ha, guys, okay, I fell for the joke...You had your fun...Can I get off the set now?

Of course, I know this isn't true. After all, if my life was a show, it would have been canceled long ago. Somehow I doubt that even the most voyeuristic audience would tune in to watch me type away at my computer, eat Chef Boyardee from the can, and sit in the corner of my room and cry.

Nevertheless, there is a place where you can go where everyone is so detached from reality that they all live in blissful ignorance about the environment around them. In fact, there are a number of these fantasy lands that exist around the web - perhaps you know them better as prelaw message boards.

Two of the most popular of such boards are Law School Discussion and the Top Law Schools Forums On the sets of the Prelaw Show you'll read fantastic statements that claim that some fourth tier dump is "highly respected" in a certain city or that finishing in the middle of the pack at a second tier school is going to guarantee you an $80k salary at a mid-sized firm.

But let's not just stick to generalizations. For your reading pleasure, I bring you the Top 10 Most Amazing Prelaw Quotes on the Internet...that I happened to stumble across during my five minutes of reading over these boards.

(For anyone who thinks that instead of making fun of these prelaws, I should be trying to help them, let me assure you I've already tried to weigh in. Nobody on these boards is willing to listen to reason. If you don't believe me, try it yourself and see just how receptive these folks are to your objections to law school.)

10. So I have to make a decision between the two. I haven't really heard much about either since they are both Tier 4 schools [Valparasio and Nova Southeastern], however, that doesn't mean anything to me. If you know anything about these two schools, please let me know it would be very helpful.

Because you're confused, let me inform you what "Tier 4" means. It means you're going to mortgage your future by handing over an obscene amount of money to some soulless dean in exchange for a piece of paper that couldn't be worth less if it was a page in a kids coloring book.

9. I am currently Waitlisted at Southwestern and I got accepted into TJSL. I am going to put down the deposit for TJSL but Southwestern is my dream.

Martin Luther King's dream was a united brotherhood of man. Your dream is being admitted to a law school that can't even crack the top 100 (which is pretty weak). Too bad once you graduate, you won't wake up from this nightmare.

8. Yea actually I am debating between widener and TJSL, and I am still waiting on southwestern. I happen to have some time to do a lot of researching of places, neighborhoods, apartments etc. so I would suggest you do that. maybe pick out 1 or two apartments you would like for both cities, I am sending in two seat deposits as well to buy myself more time...if you want any more info let me know

Instead of researching neighborhoods and apartments, perhaps you should take some time to research your future job prospects. I guess you can think about that when the law school apologists are denouncing you for not doing your research in three years.

Sending in two deposits is good idea. Choosing whether you want to destroy your life by going to a crappy law school or by going to a really crappy law school is a decision you don't want to rush.

7. Earlier in my cycle (when I was still considering these three [DePaul/Loyola/Kent]) I began talking to people in the Chicago area about this. They all said the three have made good names for themselves in the Chicago area. Obviously it would be harder to obtain "big-law" jobs from these schools as opposed to Northwestern etc. But from what I understood, it is very possible to reach your goals (considering they are realistic) coming from any of them. I would encourage you to visit each school and decide which you fit best with.

Reach your goals? As long as they're realistic? Well, unless your goal is work in some of the finest document review sweat shops in Chicago, I'd stay away from these second tier diploma mills. Oh, and that's assuming the economy improves. If it doesn't, your goals better include relying on state assistance in order to survive.

6. You don't have to go to a school in the DC area to get a job in Washington; nor do you have to go to a T14 or T20. I've had friends who went to TTT-type schools who have scored DOJ and other nice attorney gigs in the federal government.

Unless your friends went to Regent Law during the Bush administration or have some incriminating photos of an attorney general, I'm pretty incredulous. If you go to a TTT because somebody claims he knows somebody who got a decent job in DC, I think you'll find that to be the case as well. Too bad if you wait until you graduate to come to this realization, that lesson is going to come at a high price.

5. The state of Ohio is boring and too far from a beach. Villanova is better than PSU in Philly. Philadelphia is a world class city and is an amazing place to live. Nova has a great rep in the city and grads do well in the Philly market. Which is a huge market. Go to nova u will like the mainline area and Philly is fun and a change of pace from Cali. It's a great catholic school with a beautiful campus.

Like, man, you totally need to go to law school near the beach, dude! Plus, the amount of fun you have in law school is totally going to determine your job prospects afterward!

Clearly sage advice.

4. Are you serious? I go to a tier 4 and know plenty of people doing well for themselves, someone even agreed to pay me pretty well this summer. I don't know if you are even in law school or not, but either way what you are saying is B.S. [In response to one compassionate soul telling the lemmings not to jump off the cliff.]

You got a summer job? Wow! Actually, that is kind of impressive. Nevertheless, those $10 you're making per hour aren't going to be much consolation when you can't find a job paying more than $40k as an attorney (if you're lucky).

You're right, though. Why wouldn't anyone pay sticker at a fourth tier school? I mean just because tier 1 students are struggling to find jobs doesn't mean that the lower half of law schools are going to be a risky investment.

Oh wait...this can't be a serious post. Thanks for checking in, Dean Matasar - you almost got me!

3. I just got accepted into Seton Hall but via the LEO summer program, does anyone have any information on this program, or attending this fall?

I think Nando has some advice. You couldn't even get into Seton Hall through the general admission process? Game over, man. Game over.

2. I'm officially a class of 2013 Brooklyn Law student!

I just got off the phone with Miss Cleo, and she predicts you're going to be considerably less excited in 2013.

1. I have a low LSAT Score (143) and I was admitted into the Summer Conditional (AAMPLE) Program through Florida Coastal. Can anyone give me their opinions on this program.

Res ipsa loquitur

Notice how nobody on these boards (not limited just to the above quotes) announces that they want to work in document review, or do cut and paste work for $40k for a personal injury firm, or end up in an entry level position unrelated to the law. Compare that to the number of graduates (even pre-recession) who ended up in such positions.

Oh, but it won't be you, my prelaw friend. No, your second tier diploma is special. There's something about your 45 percentile class rank at a TTT that sets you apart. Your lower ranked first tier has something magical about it just because it's placed in the top 50 even though it's surrounded by five similarly ranked schools in its region.

That's right. You're exceptional, and I'll look forward to reading your exceptional anti-law school blog in three years.

Swindled Abroad

2010-04-08T07:17:00.001-04:00

A foolish friend of mine is finishing up his 1L year at a true TTT - that is, a school that is ranked below the Top 100 fold in US News and World Report. He refuses to listen to reason. He refuses to accept that I and many of his other friends that went to "better" schools are now struggling to find employment - any employment.

What is even more disconcerting is that if I can somehow get a job and place of my own by the time he graduates, he'll probably end up sleeping on my couch. He'll also likely eventually bludgeon me to death with a tire iron after weeks of coming home from his job as a bagger at the Piggly Wiggly only to hear me obnoxiously repeat "I told you so!"

Ah, but my friend's lack of discernment regarding the law school scam extends not only to his willingness to spend himself into the red for a TTT diploma. He has also recently decided that it would be wise to spend his summer abroad - paying tuition to his school for the most overpriced vacation available.

If you've ever wondered if the avarice of the law school deans knows any bounds, the very existence of these summer study abroad programs should answer that question with a resounding "No!".

In college, study abroad programs make some sense. Sure, they are often just another stop on the average liberal arts major's trip to academic perdition or a brief and frivolous diversion for those with more serious majors. In fact, I heard about one program available at a number of colleges called a "Semester at Sea", which per my understanding, essentially consists of earning academic credit while on a cruise ship. Your tax dollars at work.

Nevertheless, from a student's perspective, why not spend a semester in Europe, Asia, or Australia? As long as you can swing the travel and other attendant expenses, you're paying the same tuition dollars for an interesting experience.

Moreover, college is more than professional training - even if one takes a practical major - it is designed to help individuals mature both personally and intellectually. Okay, I honestly don't really fully buy that line given that the only thing many college parasites learn is how to use a fake I.D. Nevertheless, college does give young adults the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of some academic subjects, learn what it's like to (sort of) live on their own, and possibly gain a deeper appreciation for world around them.

Studying abroad in college does nothing to frustrate the stated purpose of undergraduate education while only putting students in slightly less advantageous financial positions. Studying abroad in law school, on the other hand, is nothing more than just another element of the overall scam.

Law school's ostensible purpose is to serve as a professional school to give budding attorneys the education and training necessary to enter the field of law. Now, we all know that's a load of nonsense, but that's the story they tell us.

If this is the case, what possible purpose does an extra semester of law school - spent abroad - serve? Having the opportunity to get inebriated in another country isn't exactly worth the price of admission.

I assume the reason why most law students bother taking on the debt for such a program is because they're afraid that they'll be left with a gap in their resumes over a summer when paid (and even voluntary) legal work is scarce. This is a bad idea. Working at the 7-11 will earn you a paycheck; studying abroad over the summer will cost you money and do nothing for your career prospects.

"International Law" is the pipe dream of far too many matriculating law students. Like "Entertainment Law" and "Sports Law", there is very little demand for such a specialization and far fewer opportunities for entry level attorneys to break into these fields - particularly from TTT law schools. While "International Law" remains popular among guileless law students, even many CSO's will admit that this is a difficult field to break into.

The small contingent that does end up practicing in this field consists almost exclusively of people who were bound for BigLaw anyway. Only a small percentage of law students practice at the big firms to begin with (or have the credentials to do so), and only a sliver of that group will end up practicing anything resembling international law.

Anyone who thinks that studying abroad will help one secure a full time position in this field is just fooling oneself. No employer in this competitive field is going to overlook a "B" transcript from a non-elite school simply because an applicant happened to spend a couple of months "studying" in some foreign city.

Moreover, whatever GPA boost a student can earn by studying abroad isn't going to be of much help. Employers are concerned about a student's performance in the first year core courses that are subject to the mandatory curve not some frivolous seminar held at the Timbuktu School of Law. That "A" in "International Peace and Conflict Legal Studies" isn't going to impress anyone.

The only beneficiaries of the law school study abroad programs are the brass at the law schools and the universities to which they're attached.

If you're that desperate to visit a foreign country, why not apply to teach English abroad and get paid? How about finding a job (even a low level one) in another nation - it can't be that much harder than finding one here with unemployment hovering around 10%. Or better yet, just take a vacation without paying the law school crooks thousands more to take their worthless courses.

In fact, just drop out of law school and spend the summer exploring the world. Even if you have to put it on your credit card, it'll be less expensive and more rewarding that two extra years of law school.

If you do plan on completing law school, I would advise you to spend as much time as possible in the U.S.A. After all, if you decide to leave the country in order to flee from your student loan creditors, there's probably no coming back.

NALP Recognizes the Scam...Sort Of

2010-04-05T07:00:00.003-04:00

James Leipold, a representative from the NALP wing of the law school cartel considers this blog (and others) to be the equivalent of talk radio. At least that's the charge he lobs at us in the most recent edition of the National Jurist.

Is Esq. Never the Rush Limbaugh of the anti-law school movement? I guess it could be true - As long as you take into account that I don't have a multimillion dollar contract, my own Lear Jet, any interest in discussing politics (unrelated to law school), a large waistline, or you know, a radio show.

Given the context of his remarks, I think it's safe to say that Leipold isn't an enthusiastic "dittohead" trying to flatter the anti-law school community. Instead, the strong implication is that we're conspiracy minded hotheads looking for a scapegoat on which to pin our woes.

The National Jurist piece itself is authored by the magazine's own head honcho, Jack Crittenden. Crittenden, you may recall, authored an editorial in a previous edition of the National Jurist in which he implied that it was selfish for law students to go to school with the intention of actually having decently paying careers as, well, lawyers. Instead, we were informed that the recession had a silver lining because it forced us money grubbing J.D.'s to turn our attention to the "bountiful" supply of public interest jobs.

Now, to be fair to Crittenden, the current piece is much more even-handed than his last. He not only focuses on the law blogs (particularly Third Tier Reality and Esq. Never), but he also turns to critics of the law school "investment" from within the walls of legal academia - namely Prof. William Henderson of Indiana University and Prof. Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt University.

Of course, for every point he's willing to address from the anti-law school perspective, he finds some way to dismiss or undermine it with some apology for the cartel. Nevertheless, I guess you can't expect much more from a magazine that has about as much in the way of content as it has in the way of advertisements for studying law abroad in things like aborigine law in the Australian Outback.

Crittendon does make an interesting and fair point that the number of law schools has hardly exploded over the past few decades. Nevertheless, given the changes that legal education has gone through (not everyone used to make it through to graduation) and the reduced demand for many traditional legal services, I'm not sure this proves anything. Furthermore, it does not necessarily follow that just because there were numerous law schools in the 80's there are not also too many law school today. (Certainly, the recent spat of new schools - particularly low ranked, for-profit schools - offer some reason for concern.)

Crittendon furthermore recognizes that the cost of attendance at most law schools has become absurdly high. Nevertheless, he hails the ABA for taking the problem seriously and trying to rectify the situation.

What is the ABA's bold plan to tackle the outrageous tuition charged by its schools? Is it to cap the cost of attendance? Lobby for an end to federal student loans for professional schools? Limit the compensation for faculty and administrators? Prevent universities from using law schools to subsidize their other operations?

No! Instead, they have included some milquetoast disclaimer in some guide to law school that nobody reads warning that salaries may be slightly lower than expected. That should take care of the problem.

Still, after cutting through the apologist spin for the industry found in this article, it does appear to admit (albeit through gritted teeth) that - going to law school is a bad investment, the law school marketing materials are replete with distortions, the COA is too high, and that, for the most part, the law schools/legal establishment don't really care.

One of the best examples of this are the aforementioned comments by the NALP's James Leipold.

From the article:

"It's so uninformed [criticism that 90% of students find full time jobs] that it's hard to get upset," said NALP's Leipold about the bloggers. "It's like talk radio."

Leipold points out that NALP collects a very large sampling of recent graduates - 93.1 percent reported their employment status for the class of 2008. Even if everyone who did not report - a statistically unlikely scenario - 84 percent of the class of 2008 still found employment.

Well, that's interesting. As the Wall Street Journal reported (as recently as 2007), schools were reporting salary data based upon only partially reported data:

Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.

and...

A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News.

Furthermore, Mr. Leipold's colleague even admitted:

"We can't validate the figures; we have to rely on schools to report to us accurately," says Judy Collins, NALP's director of research.

Of course, the employment statistics are worthless regardless of whether they're based upon responses of 100% or 10% of graduating law students.

The definition of full time employment is pretty liberal. First of all, full time employment doesn't mean full time, legal employment. Everyone that can't find a job in the law but that lands positions elsewhere that don't require a law degree are still considered employed even if it's no thanks to their graduate education. This also includes taking positions in retail or at call centers.

Even the definition of "full time" is questionable. A large swath of graduating students only find employment in temporary document review, which may have full time hours, but only last for a few weeks to a few months at a time. Moreover, the law schools game the 9-month employment figures by offering "full time" but temporary stints for students who may be unemployed at 9-months out to work at the law schools. Even T-14 Georgetown stoops to this tactic.

There's more to be said about Leipold's dishonest assertion, but look at what even he admits in his next breath...

But Leipold does agree that some law schools can better [sic] with reporting salaries.

"The schools don't do a good job with real disclosure," he said. "There is no incentive for them. Some still report an average. There is 20 percent that earn at the top and then 80 percent earn far less than that. The average is not a useful number."

Well, that's pretty much the freakin' point, Leipold! What good does it do anyone if the law schools (allegedly) accurately collect the data if they then fraudulently report the data!?

The biggest complaint most of us have about the law school statistics is that they create the impression that while the the best students will be absolutely rolling in the dough, the average student will still earn a respectable salary in the law.

Instead of insulting us, perhaps you could help urge some reform in regard to these misleading figures. Of course, keeping the scam going is far more important to the NALP.

I've given Crittendon a hard time, so let's let him have the last word (from the National Jurist article). Remember, the guy who's conceding this relies on the law school cartel's glossy advertisements to pay for his supper. If he's willing to recognize this, maybe you pre-law's should take a second or third look before going to law school:

Starting salaries for entry-level attorneys used to fall into a single bell curve...Today there are two bells - one group that earns between $140,000 and $160,000 and one that earns between $35,000 and $60,000.

That results in a median of $72,000, which few law students earn.

The discrepancies between the two bells are significant, and have led many to point out that students who rely on a school's median or average, may be disappointed when they graduate and land a job far below that.

Job Search Update

2010-03-30T13:20:00.003-04:00

Hi, everyone. Sorry for the lack of updates recently. Like always, I have a bunch of partially completed feature pieces sitting around in the queue. As many of you know, trying to find a job can itself be a full time task.

I don't want to go too long without a new blog post, so let me update you on my job search. With many of my earlier avenues shut down, I'm currently only pursuing the following paths (excluding sending my resume to various on-line jobs postings).

I actually received another bite (re: resume) this week. Unfortunately, it's only a short term contract position and the followup I received from the consulting firm wasn't to schedule an interview, but to note their interest in my application and to find out my availability and salary requirements - let's just say, at this point, I'd be wiling to look the other way on a violation of minimum wage laws.

The good news is that at least somebody bothered to read my resume and initially found me to be a good fit for the position. Also, it actually is a substantive position that could add some much needed recent business experience to my resume for when I return to the full time job search (should I get the position).

A friend of mine works (in a fairly senior position) for a software company. He has shown my resume to HR and hopefully can point me to a position for which I can apply. Like many companies, they do have a preference for recent grads for entry level jobs, but they are willing to consider "non-traditional" candidates. My friend got his job (albeit during better times) after being out of school for a while. With any luck, having somebody on the inside working for me could help me land an interview and perhaps eventually a job.

There's still the possibility of some of the phantom document review work becoming available. I can't believe things are so bad that entry level document review work is only a possibility.

I have registered for a couple career fairs next month. I was going to go to one last month, but my ill-fated interview was scheduled on the same day. I haven't been to a career fair for a while. I guess the benefit is that I can at least speak with potential employers directly. I'll be sure to create a blog post detailing my experience at the job fairs.

I have been considering contacting my former employer to see if I could get some contacts or advice for my job search. I've hesitated to do this because, at this point, I don't really want to move (and my former employer is in another region of the country). The president of the company probably knows some people with whom I can speak where I currently live. That said, if I become desperate enough that I'd be willing to move, I would like to have the opportunity to lean on him for even better contacts in his city. I don't know if he'd appreciate being solicited twice with similar requests.

Also, as a bonus here's a depressing breakdown of the responses I've received to my applications. I've actually lost count of the number of applications I've submitted, so I'm going to err on the conservative side. I suspect the numbers are actually much worse.

Number of resumes/applications submitted: 50
Number of responses received*: 10
Number of positive responses**: 3
Number of interviews : 2
Number of offers: 0

Having a Juris Doctorate degree: Priceless...oh, I mean Worthless

* This includes offers for interviews, followups by actual humans, and rejection notices. This excludes immediate, automated acknowledgments.

** 1 request for more information; 1 general interview for legal temp work; 1 actual interview for a full time position

Student Aid Reform Bill: Nothing Special

2010-03-19T17:00:00.001-04:00

This weekend Congress will not only address the controversial health bill that has been championed by President Obama, it will also pursue passage of a bill that seeks to reform the student loan industry.

At first blush, this seems like a great idea. After all, the student loan industry is an inefficient mess. Moreover, critics of the industry are hailing the measure while our friends at Sallie Mae and Access Group are fighting tooth and nail against the legislation. What's bad for Aunt Sallie has to be good for everyone else, right?

Maybe. The key component of the bill is to eliminate the "middle man" in the process of dispersing and administering federal student loans. That is, instead of private companies like Sallie Mae receiving subsidies to handle the student loan process and having the loans guaranteed by the government, the Department of Education will just handle the process itself.

From the standpoint of irate borrowers who have been harassed by Aunt Sallie and her partners in crime, this may be welcomed news. Such a reform could bring some of the private student lenders to their knees and even portend their eventual destruction. From a spiteful standpoint, many may see this as sweet revenge.

There will also probably be some more immediate benefits to those seeking loans. For example, many of these companies charged high fees for initiating loans. This was one way many lenders made money. Without the profit incentive, the government may be willing to allow borrowers to borrow the amount requested without skimming a little off the top for themselves.

Aside from possibly eliminating some absurd fees and sticking it to our unscrupulous creditors, the bill really doesn't help matters too much, however.

While the bill does push the private lenders out of the federal student loan industry, it does nothing to address the private wing of the industry. Many borrowers who are facing the most trouble don't just have federal loans - they also have private loans. In fact, if the federal student loan portion of the business is ripped away from the lenders, they're probably going to start turning the screws even harder on their private borrowers to try to remain solvent.

Sure, intervening too much with the private lending market may be constitutionally and even economically dubious, but the government doesn't have act quite so radically. All it needs to do is allow private student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy - like pretty much all other debt.

If the administration was truly serious about taking on student lending interests, this would be a far more productive battle to wage than simply playing musical chairs with the process for facilitating federal student loans.

The pending legislation also incorporates a partial expansion of the IBR. It, however, seeks to implement the expansion in the worst possible way.

According to The Project on Student Debt, the proposed changes to the IBR (capping payments at 10% of discretionary income and forgiving all debt after 20 years) will only apply to loans originating on or after January 1, 2014. That means current borrowers who have already snared themselves with student loans will not benefit. In fact, anyone enrolling in law school this fall will only have a semester during which this proposal will bear any fruit.

Now, of course, I have a self interest in seeing the change be made retroactive. Nevertheless, that's not my biggest problem with the proposal. I personally find the 15%/25 year plan currently in effect to be reasonable.

The problem with the change is that it departs from the purpose (or what should be the purpose) of the IBR. The IBR allows students who have already sunk themselves with debt to have the opportunity to live somewhat normal lives while paying back a reasonable portion of their incomes.

By delaying the implementation of the new IBR program, the only effect will be to encourage future borrowers (who currently are not saddled with debt) to enter academic programs knowing they may not be required to pay back the balance of their loans. This creates incentives (or at least eliminates disincentives) for students to pursue all sorts of worthless degrees while allowing the law school and other higher education leeches to continue sucking down student loans dollars with relative impunity.

Why don't we really eliminate the "middle man" and just have the government mail checks to these hucksters directly?

What remains to be seen is just how zealously the government will seek to collect on loan repayments. On the one hand, there is no profit incentive, so the mafia-esque techniques employed by the dons at Access Group may no longer be necessary. On the other hand, student loan repayments are a source of revenue for the government, and the IRS has never been known to shy away from using gestapo tactics of its own.

The IBR is bound to become popular and almost certainly will cost the government money. Hopefully, this means that the feds will be more forgiving about making timely repayments.

Here's hoping some government drone eventually loses my student loan paperwork and the Dept. of Ed stops demanding payments.

Esq. Never urges a vote of "Who Cares?" on the pending legislation.

The Craigslist Test

2010-03-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

"You should have done more research before going to law school."

If you've spent anytime criticizing the law school industry over the internet (or beyond), you've almost certainly encountered the above retort - or at least some variation of it. I'm not exactly sure what it's supposed to prove. If anything it seems to be a tacit admission that law school is indeed a scam - but that the victims got what they deserved.

If it's actually intended to be a defense of law school, it's a poor one.

For one thing, even if we agree that all law students are uninformed naifs who deserved to be taken advantage of, this hardly justifies the existence of the law school cartel - particularly when it's underwritten by an endless supply of federal student loans.

For another, as I've mentioned before, few of us are interested in having a "cyber pity party". All of the sympathy in the world can't reverse the mistake of going to law school. Criticism of the law schools can, however, encourage potential students not to make the same mistake and may even encourage future reforms.

Of course, the assumption that every disaffected law school graduate simply decided to apply to take the LSAT and send in their application materials on a whim (and at quite the expense) is absurd. Many law students do put in the effort to determine if they want to be attorneys. Sadly, most of the information they have is incredibly biased.

Take the employment/salary data that is compiled by the law schools (without an independent audit) and then regurgitated by US News and the LSAC. This data isn't just "slightly off" or a component of "creative marketing". It's a well engineered distortion.

It's not that the average student is only making $70k when the stats claim the average student makes $90k. It's that students are pulling in $40k (or even south of that post-recession) without benefits despite the misleading figures, or that the only students actually earning such "salaries" (once again, pre-recession) were prols working in some subterranean sweatshops reviewing documents. (To say nothing of the schools' attempts to hide unemployment numbers by temporarily hiring recent graduates, counting part-time jobs at Five Guys, or outright lying.)

If you think I'm too concerned with salary data, I submit that the same distortions also are made by the legal media and the schools when it comes to their claims about practical training that the law schools allegedly provide and the overall utility of a law degree.

Moreover, all of this information about law school is being provided by established publications and supposedly august institutions of higher learning. This isn't some fly-by-night internet get-rich-quick scheme. I'm sorry that kids in their 20's are so trusting that they're willing to believe that even if established institutions may embellish things a little that they wouldn't outright hoodwink them out of $100k and sentence them to a life of debt slavery.

If the whole point of law school was to convince me to never trust anyone again: mission accomplished.

Personally, I think I did do a reasonable amount of research before attending law school. I purchased US News' grad school guide. I read a number of different articles about law school. I spoke to people I knew who had enrolled in law school. I spoke to practicing attorneys. I solicited advice from on-line forums. I went to law school open houses (including admitted students day at my eventual 2TT alama mater). Only a scant few of these sources offered any caution about attending law school - certainly nobody conveyed that it would be a complete disaster.

Should I have done even more research? Evidently.

Nevertheless, virtually all sources from the misleading marketing materials produced by the schools to the pro-law school school propaganda found in US News' annual guide to graduate schools to the various pre-law hucksters at undergraduate institutions insist that law school is a good investment.

In fact, with few exceptions, these anti-law school blogs are the only consistent source of criticism against law school machine. (A few more neutral sources such as Above the Law and other less law school focused blogs heroically - but too infrequently - also sound the alarm against the scam.)

Contradictorily (but hardly surprisingly), the same law school apologists, who insist that we've forfeited our right to "whine" because we failed to conduct due diligence before attending law school, seem to hate these blogs (and other internet protests against LS). Where exactly do these law school lackeys expect prospective students to find accurate information (or at least the opposing perspective) about law school? Certainly not the NALP, not US News, not the mainline media, not most older attorneys, and for Pete's sake, not the freakin' law schools.

Of course, the apologists aren't all that concerned about prospective law students making informed decisions. Instead, they're more interested in defending the schools, waxing nostalgic about what it was like to graduate in 1972, or just being jerks in general.

When it comes to incoming law students, however, perhaps the apologists have little to fear. After all, applications are up and law students are notoriously hard headed about listening to those of us who have already been hosed by the LS diploma mill racket.

For example, here's a recent comment I received to a much older blog post:

I just stumbled upon your blog and I am sorry to hear about all that you are going through. I know it must be hard. However, you have some maturing to do. How old are you? This is life. Nothing in life is guaranteed. Sometimes our efforts do nothing to move us forward in life. Other times, we are blessed with things we never imagined. I know you worked hard for your degree and you spent a lot of money to obtain it. But my advice for you would be to take the life lessons you are learning right now and keep moving forward. I am a young woman who has experienced a deep career disappointment as well even with impeccable work experience. I plan on going to law school. But I know it does not mean that I will have a six figure salary. What it means is that I worked hard for something that I wanted in my life and I hope for the best. If the worst comes, then I will take that and make another career move. I do hope you find a position soon. It is very heart breaking to be unemployed and yet highly educated. But also realize that this is life. We are never guaranteed success and fortune. We are not even guaranteed the next day. We however do have to take what we been given and make the most of it. And besides, you never know what will happen in the future. Best of luck.

Now, to the commenter's credit, this is a much nicer note than I receive from most of my critics. Nevertheless, she's still is under the impression that the purpose of this blog is just to whine about my station in life. (Hey, that's only a half truth!) She fails to recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with legal education (if not education overall) in this country, and she could very well end up holding the same bag of law school manure the rest of us chumps are saddled with at the end of her three years.

Obviously, we can't reach everybody, but I can understand that the heavy cynicism and harshly critical attitude that you sometimes (okay - often) find in the anti-law school blogosphere can sometimes undermine our credibility.

For those of you prospective law school students that feel that way - and for those of you who know prospective students that are about to walk the plank - let me propose a neutral test to determine if law school really seems like a good idea. I call it "The Craigslist Test".

I assume most people know what Craigslist is. (For those who don't, it's pretty much an on-line classified ad website - broken down by cities and regions.) One feature with which most law graduates are amply familiar is its job listing section. Craigslist even has a specific section dedicated just to legal jobs.

Here's the test. Choose a city. Choose your city. Choose a better city. Choose multiple cities. It doesn't matter. Now, check out the number of job listings there are for attorneys - particularly for entry level attorneys. Can't find too many? That's not a big surprise. If you can't find any, here's one.

But, wait, that's just the recession talking, right? Well, to answer that, let's move on to step two. Now compare the number of attorneys positions with the number of other positions available. Chances are you'll find plenty of advertisements for financial analysts, accounts receivable clerks, sale managers, etc. - many looking for entry level candidates. Heck, just look at the number of paralegal and legal assistant positions available. The dearth of entry level attorney positions in comparison should be pretty astounding.

Oh, but you protest that Craiglist isn't exactly the best way to find legal employment? Okay, go ahead and try your luck at Monster, Career Builder, or any of the other job boards. Chances are that if you find any listings for attorneys, the employer is looking for lawyers with several years of experience working for big firms.

You see, the reason I chose Craigslist is because that's where you're going to find the bulk of the advertisements for small firm positions, which are going to be the only roles available to most students this side of the T-14. Skadden and co. don't advertise positions on job boards. They use On Campus Interviews, and if you wash out at the OCI game (as even plenty of T-14 folks are doing these days), you're about as likely to get a biglaw offer as Jack Crittenden is to stop carrying water for the law school hucksters.

Even if you've convinced yourself that "Hey, Brooklyn landlord-tenant court doesn't sound that bad" or "I think no fault insurance defense work just has a bad rap", too bad, those jobs aren't available. If you want to live out your dreams of mastering Word's cut and paste feature to update stock legal forms or hang out with dregs of society, it looks like your only option will be to turn to the wonderful world of legal networking. Feel free to search the rest of this blog to find out just how well that works.

So prospective law students, if you think anti-law school scam bloggers are just a bunch of losers who couldn't make it and seek to whine about their problems, then I guess I'll echo the law school apologists, "Do your research." Run through the job boards and any other source you'd like and see just how many entry level attorney jobs there are (plus take a look at the salaries).

Oh, and if you happen to stumble across a fabled entry level attorney job at a mid-sized firm that pays $70-80k, you may want to turn your gaze upward to take a gander at the recently airborne swine now gliding by you.

Failing Yet Another One of Life's Little Tests...Plus Tips for Getting Into IT!

2010-03-12T19:13:00.000-05:00

[Note: I came to this realization before today - I just didn't have time to finish the article until now.]

Well, folks, I think it's time to waive the white flag regarding the job for which I interviewed a couple of weeks ago.

With no call back and no response to my inquiry about whether a selection for the position had been made, I think it's safe to say that the company isn't exactly beating down my door to claim me as their newest employee. I personally find the lack of information annoying. Nonetheless, according to most job search sites, it is not uncommon for most companies to just hope you go away if they don't have any further interest in your candidacy for a position. (But he said he'd call!)

The good news is that I'm pretty sure I wasn't dinged because of the J.D. Obviously, it's impossible to be certain, but multiple people from the company reviewed my resume (containing my law degree) and they still invited me in for an interview. Also, nobody really made it a big deal during the interview. I think if I was a closer fit for what they were looking, they would not have discriminated against me in hiring for the position based about my degree disability.

That said, I am disappointed. Based upon the job description, the position looked like a natural transition for me based upon my prior job experience (though not prior education). Essentially, I would be analyzing internet data through both basic statistical methods and by using tools such as SQL and some light scripting/programming.

In my prior position, I handled quite a bit of data and used SQL and some scripting in analyzing it - though not as extensively as the new position would have required. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to use my prior work experience and also enhance my knowledge of SQL and PHP to allow me to eventually move into more advanced analyst or development positions.

Unfortunately, I felt a little blind sided at the interview. My conversation with the interviewer on the business side went pretty well. It seemed like we were really on the same page about everything; the interview with the tech guy, however, didn't go quite as well.

I didn't think it was a disaster, so when I updated you last time, I still thought I had a decent chance. In hindsight, I probably should have been a little less optimistic. The interviewer kept pushing me on my knowledge of PHP and programming in general even though they weren't mentioned as part of the job description. In fact, both the job description (and my resume) emphasized having a proficiency with data analysis and using SQL.

He also didn't seem particularly impressed with my SQL background even though I was very familiar with it and even used it in my last job. Moreover, he asked about my familiarity with other operating systems and wanted to know if I had any personal programming projects.

One thing I didn't share with you last time is that there was actually supposed to be a third interviewer: a more senior tech guy I believe. At the end of the interview, I was informed by the first interviewer that he couldn't find the third guy. At the time, I didn't think much of it since he said the other tech guy would just fill him in.

Now, however, it does seem pretty odd that the guy neither was around during a scheduled interview nor could be contacted (particularly in the era of cell phones, etc.). My assumption is that the first tech interviewer just told him not to bother with the interview because my programming skills were inadequate.

The biggest disappointment is that this seems to reinforce just how bad the economy is. It's possible that they interviewed a flawless candidate or one of the executive's nephews needed a job and they had no need to further review anyone else's credentials. Aside from those scenarios, however, I think I would have at least had a chance for a second interview in a better economy.

It isn't unthinkable that they interviewed some out of work web programmer or DBA (who was willing to be "underemployed") with decent statistical skills who could handle any necessary SQL or PHP programming with ease.

I don't think I would have had much trouble filling the role - albeit maybe with a period of adjustment. Most of the statistical analysis was pretty similar to what I had already done. I was familiar with SQL, and even its more advanced concepts are pretty easy to pick up. I was familiar with programming and PHP is a pretty straightforward language. Also, the type of things I'd have to do (use PHP to query a database) isn't all that difficult to learn and there are plenty of examples available on the web.

Sadly, in these tough times, companies aren't going to take any risks. There are a glut of well qualified and overqualified candidates for most positions, and those without flawless backgrounds for these positions are going to be at a severe disadvantage.

For those of you looking to get into the world of computers and IT, please know that experience and specific training are critical (particularly during the downturn) to getting into this field.

I'm going to spend the rest of this post discussing some strategies for improving your chances of getting employed in this field. I will link to a few external sites. Please note, I do not make any money off this blog, and I only recommend these sites as potentially useful tools.

Figuring Out What You Want to Do

IT is a large field. It can include anything from networking infrastructure, to web development, to programming. Popular areas include being a network administrator, working with or administering databases, designing and managing websites, and using of a variety of scripting and programming language. Because each area is different and getting up to speed in a specific area can take some time and dedication, it's best to select just one area at first and then pursue the appropriate skills and qualifications.

For the most part, I recommend for the average college educated job seeker (particularly those with a business/research background) to become as familiar as possible with SQL and scripting/programming (particularly web based scripting/programming). This sort of background will open up a number of doors in the business world for analyst and other positions where such knowledge is prized. Unlike most development positions, the amount of training and experience you will need will be less extensive.

Where Can You Learn These Skills?

Acquiring different skills will require different approaches. Because my focus is on SQL and light programming, I'll direct my advice towards these skills.

There are a ton of books, videos (usually web based), and tutorials available. Resources from the first two categories usually cost money (though a trip to the local library could help alleviate the cost). I also don't have any great recommendations. I purchased a couple books on PHP and web design, but they weren't particularly notable.

For the most part, I recommend sticking to free resources on the web to at least learn the basics. There a number of site with tutorials and free videos on Youtube.

The best site for learning the basics of areas like SQL and PHP is W3Schools. This site presents pretty straightforward step by step training and quizzes on how to learn various languages. If you can master each step and perform well on the quizzes, you should be able to develop a good background in a number of useful areas.

While this is a great site for learning the basics, even the mastery of all of the information it contains probably will only give you the knowledge base to work in positions where SQL, PHP, etc. are components of the job and not the job itself.

How Can I Demonstrate These Skills

One question that came up during the interview was whether I had a portfolio I could show to demonstrate my knowledge of PHP, etc. I had actually heard before that this can be a critical step in landing a development role. Because I wasn't under the impression that programming would play such a critical role in the position, I was unprepared to provide any samples.

If you're looking to enhance your resume, setting up some simple "e-commerce" applications on a web server can be a good way to do so and get some actual hands on experience in scripting.

If you don't want to start from scratch. Here are a couple good web tutorials about creating some simple applications: http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/1; http://www.phpwebcommerce.com/

Operating System Diversity

This is also something that blindsided me during the interview process. Many web servers use Linux and many more nerds (i.e. the guys who are helping to make the hiring decisions) love Linux.

I was asked if I knew Linux during the interview. I'm really not sure how this was relevant, but aside from using a GUI interface once or twice, I really wasn't too familiar with using the OS.

This is probably tangential to more important skills, but installing Ubuntu (or another popular version) of Linux on another computer or by partitioning your hard drive may be a good idea. At the very least, you could honestly say you've worked with the OS, and if you can pick up some understanding of the commands and working with internet applications, you'll probably have passable knowledge.

Becoming a Real IT Professional

Unfortunately, most of these steps can only help you land positions that are tangentially related to IT. Unless, you're particularly disciplined and motivated, it can be quite difficult to really acquire the knowledge necessary to transition into the field - particularly its programming/software engineering wing.

Virtually all advertisements for software engineering/programmer jobs want people with knowledge of C++, Java, JScript, Ruby on Rails, SQL and about hundred other languages or applications. How on earth is an average person supposed to acquire that knowledge especially when one needs to find a job in a reasonable amount of time?

I seriously wish that I could have spent the time and money I wasted picking up my worthless J.D. to learn programming and working with databases instead. Of course, this lends itself to another problem, where does one acquire this knowledge?

I don't know of any great answer to that question. One answer is to try to pick up a second B.S. degree in computer science or information systems, but this is an expensive and time consuming undertaking - particularly if you're going at night while working during the day. Most of the on-line schools are also pretty expensive and virtually all of them are also geared to be four year programs as well.

There are some certification and training programs, but the quality and price of many of these are suspect.

The only one I found to be somewhat reasonable - and I know this sounds like some thinly veiled marketing ploy - is called Hands on Technology Transfer (HOTT) - hey, I didn't come up with the name.

I'm just providing the link for those who are interested. If you think I'm trying to snag a couple of bucks from you, feel free to just Google the company yourself. (If I was going to scam people, I'd start "Attorney Dreams" anyway.)

In any event, the reason I'm referring you to their site is because, it's the only company I can find that has regularly scheduled training in a variety of areas that can help you get into IT. I specifically linked to the PHP training.

The price does seem a little steep, but then again, I wasted twice as much on my worthless BAR/BRI course. It does seem that a course that lasts a whole week (of full day classes I believe) would be enough to provide rigorous training and help you build a portfolio of work samples. I don't, however, know if it's a reasonable substitute for a semester long college course.

Aside from going back in time and choosing a better major, I don't know what other advice to give.

If anybody out there who is "in the know" wants to offer additional advice, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me at esqnever at hotmail dot com if you're interested in writing a guest post.

If I can ever land a document review job and make some money, I'd probably enroll in one or two of HOTT's courses to help me transition into the computer industry.

I will, of course, keep you apprised of any updates with my job search.

It's Payback Time!

2010-03-05T15:31:00.001-05:00

No, readers, Esq. Never isn't about to go out and settle the score with the law school deans and their apologist sycophants once and for all as the title may suggest. Instead, I'm writing about repaying student debt. Specifically, I'm writing about the new Income Based Repayment Plan (IBR) that allows graduates with federal loans to make payments based upon their annual incomes.

I have mixed feeling about the IBR. I definitely appreciate most of its provisions. After all, if it wasn't for the IBR, I'd probably be writing Escudero Nunca from Costa Rica right now. I do, however, fear that it may create some new problems down the road.

For those of you unfamiliar with the IBR, it's a new loan repayment plan that ONLY applies to federal loans (excluding Parent PLUS loans). It DOES NOT apply to private loans.

The one nice thing about graduating in 2009 from law school (and I do mean the ONE nice thing) is that we were the first class that could borrow the entire cost of attendance via both Stafford and Grad PLUS loans (both part of the federal program). This means, that the entirety of our educational debt for law school is subject to the IBR.

The key provision of the IBR is that it allows graduates to pay back their federal loans as a percentage of their income. Moreover, for repayment purposes, one's income is considered to be one's adjusted gross income less 1.5 times the poverty level (based upon family size). The statutory percentage is set at 15%, but because the income that is being assessed is less than one's actual take home pay, the effective rate for most people is around 10%.

If one's income is low enough, it's actually possible to have monthly payments of $0. Moreover, income is determined based upon a person's tax return. In lieu of using a tax return, a borrower can also petition the lender (and can always consolidate with the Dept. of Ed.) to use an alternative method for assessing one's annual income.

This can be particularly useful if a person's income declines over the year and is not properly reflected by past tax returns. It doesn't appear, however, that if a person's income increases over the year that he is obliged to report the higher income until the next annual assessment.

Aside from people with incomes that may fluctuate wildly (usually those who are self employed and independent contractors), these repayment terms are very favorable and will allow many debtors to enjoy a pretty normal lifestyle without the crushing penalty of debt.

There are some problems with the system. Married couples must either use their jointly reported incomes or file separately to use the IBR. (Filing separately can cost some families more in taxes than they would otherwise pay.) This marriage penalty seems unnecessary since it should be easy enough to separate each spouse's individual incomes particularly since the Dept. of Ed. permits borrowers to prove their incomes via other means besides using past tax returns.

The other problem is that interest continues to accrue (but not compound) on all loans except for subsidized Stafford loans (and the subsidy lasts for only three years). This means that one's debt can balloon considerably over time if one sticks to just the minimum payments. This can make getting future financing for something like a house more difficult in the future. (Not because your credit rating will be hurt if you make timely payments under the IBR but because your debt to income/asset ratio is going to be uglier than Dean Matasar wearing a Speedo.)

As I joked in A Law School Carol, the IBR is great...as long as you don't plan on getting married or owning a house for the next 25 years.

These, however, aren't my biggest concerns about the IBR. The marriage penalty is unfair, but it's not like most of us TTT losers are going to get a chance to get married anyway. (Driving your old '87 Ford Taurus back and forth between your "job" earning $15.25 straight at the local doc review sweatshop and your mom's basement isn't exactly the best way to woo the opposite sex.)

As for the accruing interest, the choice is left up to borrower as to whether he wants to just make the minimum payments or wants to try to pay down his debt before the Battle of Armageddon takes place. Moreover, if a person goes into public interest work, he can have his debt forgiven in ten years and can see his debt forgiven after 25 years (possibly 20 under a proposal by President Obama) if he works in the private sector.

The real problem with this system isn't that it doesn't provide relief to borrowers. It does. The problem is that it continues to perpetuate the current corrupt system. The only difference is that it begins to shift the burden from the borrowers to the tax payers.

The law school deans (and their higher education cohorts) aren't necessarily evil; they're greedy and self important. By that, I mean that they don't necessarily relish seeing their former students thrust into poverty thanks to high monthly loan repayments and unhelpful degrees. If that is what it takes to allow them to rule over profitable educational empires, so be it, but if they can have the same results by sponging off a less visible source of revenue (the US Treasury), then they'd probably prefer that.

Save the IBR, we could otherwise be witnessing the destruction of the law school scam. Tuition at some schools (even some absolutely horrendous schools) is approaching $50k a year. Throw in living expenses, and it's hardly unreasonable to believe that plenty of students could graduate with debt closing in on $200,000 or more in just principal.

On top of the debt, the legal market is still collapsing. Firms aren't hiring summer classes. Those who do get hired are getting deferred. Federal jobs are getting record applicants. States are having trouble funding their DA and PD offices. Small firms are hardly hiring and are offering starting salaries south of $30k a year. Document review work has all but dried up in most cities (and many projects require years of experience).

This combination of absurd debt burdens and limited (if not non-existent) job opportunities is a recipe for mass defaults on students loans. That's the sort of thing that could get a lot of attention and force the law schools and their phony statistics to come under greater scrutiny, which would either force most of these dumps to close or require some massive reform as to how law schools (and probably other areas of higher education) operate.

The IBR, however, is going to provide an escape hatch for most entry level attorneys who are getting hit the hardest by the collapse of the legal market. It'll also provide a bit of a cushion for those with a mixture of private and federal student loans. In fact, the ABA recently proposed helping out older borrowers by encouraging the federal government to buy up their private debt and allow the borrowers to pay it back as Grad PLUS loans (and thus benefit from the IBR).

Over the long term, the low monthly payments are going to deprive the government of significant revenue. Moreover, the hit to the treasury is going to be even harder when the government needs to write off all of the forgiven debt (either under the 10 or 20/25 year plans).

Of course, the real effect of the IBR won't be felt by the taxpayers for decades, which, of course, buys the law school cartel and their buddies plenty of time to continue jacking up tuition and churning out worthless degrees with relative impunity. If they can actually get the government to assume to the private debt, they'll have muted the only constituency that's still is at serious risk for default.

With manageable monthly payments, the law school industry is rightfully banking that most of its graduates will just grumble about their experiences but end up finding other work and moving on. If the economy picks up, all the better. The mistake of going to law school won't hit individuals as hard as it used to while the law schools and allied companies will continue to be able to feast on the continuous flow of student loans.

For those who love to throw out the canard that law schools should be absolved of their behavior because students should have done more research, this is something that should be of concern to you. In the past, you guys claimed that we should have to pay for our educational myopia. Thanks to the IBR, now you'll also have to pay for our mistakes and what we call the Law School Scam.

The Networking Trail of Tears

2010-03-03T07:48:00.001-05:00

In analyzing U.S. history, the average American Indian probably views our nation's past with some reservation. (Okay, that was bad.) You don't have to be particularly PC, however, to recognize that the white man has broken many a peace treaty.

Likewise, if you're the typical job seeker (particularly one searching for an attorney position), you've likely encountered your own share of broken promises and disappointment. Some of the broken promises are explicit - somebody promising to do something for you and failing to follow through. Others are more implicit - somebody giving the impression that he can do something for you and then offering little more than cliche advice and well wishes.

In honor of Jay Leno's return to late night, I've decided to offer my Top 10 greatest networking disappointments...What? It's the other guy who has the Top 10 list? Well, I'm still going to do it anyway.

Please note, I actually needed to sort through a number of networking failures to actually narrow things down to only ten. Also, this does not include the reams of resumes as to which I have received no response.

10. Rejection Never Felt So Good

This was a quasi-networking situation. I learned about this business opportunity via an e-mail list to which I used to subscribe. I hadn't actually graduated law school yet (and it was a non-legal position that they probably wanted to fill immediately), so it should come as little surprise that I received the typical "Your credentials are indeed impressive...but take a hike." letter.

What actually is surprising is that I received any acknowledgment at all that I submitted a resume! Maybe by mentioning my affiliation with the organization that ran the e-mail list, I put myself on the inside track to actually getting a rejection letter.

Until my recent interview, this experience had the dubious honor of being the highlight of my job search.

9. Talking to Industry Insiders...and Hearing Nothing Back

One suggestion career strategists usually make is to talk to people involved with the industry in which you're interested. I suppose this is reasonable advice, but my two contacts (within IT) weren't exactly a great help.

One guy literally had no advice. He pretty much just worked his way up from the call center and didn't have any special training for his analyst position until he actually got the job. He was, however, able to depress me by letting me know that he had a pretty good job despite not even bothering to attend college.

The other guy had some advice for me, but he also hadn't really done much to get his position. The only thing I really learned was that he had a much better network than I do because apparently some family friend handed him his current position.

He did say he'd put me in touch with some contacts, but even after trying to follow up, he never really came through.

He did, however, put me in touch with some recruiters...

8. The Recruiter: A More Professional Method of Getting Rejected

My friend put me in touch with two IT recruiters. One guy was apparently a heavy hitter in the industry...Obviously, I never heard anything back from him.

The other guy was the typical run of the mill recruiter working for a larger firm. At first he seemed quite willing to help me out even though I explained my background in detail before talking with him.

After reviewing my resume, he said that the type of positions for which I'd be the most qualified would prefer someone with an engineering degree. Oddly, he couldn't have told me this beforehand, but at least he kept me on the hook.

When I asked if there was a specific area of my tech knowledge which I could improve to be more employable, I heard nothing back. I understand the guy isn't my personal consultant, but you'd think if I could improve my resume, it would give him a better chance of placing me and earning a fee. Given that I did get at least one tech related interview, I don't think I'm entirely unemployable in the field.

7. Harvard, Yale, Standford or Take a Hike

Now we're getting into the good stuff - searching for attorney positions.

First up is a friend who had a relative at a big firm. I've spoken about this before - that non-attorneys don't realize that the big firms are entirely inaccessible to anyone without the right pedigree.

Most of the time I tell people who have contacts at the big firms that I don't think I'd be a good fit for such a firm and that while I appreciate their assistance, it isn't worth their trouble.

This friend was insistent, however. Not surprisingly, when he got back to me, he informed me that his contact said unless "[Esq. Never] went to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, there was nothing [she] could do for [me]."

That's right, even if you were a good student at the other lowly T-14 schools, you could go pound sand. Are you taking notes TTT bound law students? I'm not making this up!

6. Alumni: Brothers of the Bar

When career services realizes that your class rank makes it more likely that you'll win the Powerball drawing than land a job through OCI, instead of telling you to drop out and cut your losses, they instinctively urge you to talk with alumni.

Well, I live in the suburbs outside of a major city; outside of where I went to law school. I found an alumnus with his own firm in the town next to mine. You'd think this brother of the bar, this fellow 2TT alumnus, this fellow native son, and even local politically involved figure would be interested in talking to a fellow alumnus. No. No, he was not. He wouldn't even return my messages.

Glad to see that loyal alumni base that my school was always talking up coming through during these tough times.

5. CLE's: Meet the Pros...Get Blown Off By Them

CLE's are a great way to kind of learn what should have been taught to you in law school and meet with practicing attorneys, right?

Sort of. In my experience, most of the attorneys just share anecdotes and refer you to the written materials for actual information. I don't think any attorney who saw my resume was too impressed with CLE courses.

Moreover, the networking advantages of these session is pretty overstated. For one thing, the speakers while interested in talking about the law, aren't too interested in doling out career advice. Every time I asked, "How can I get into X law?" you could see their frustration with the question. This probably happens to them all the time.

Most of the time they provided general advice to just try to find some guy to work for to pick up some experience (as long as it was a guy other than one of them, of course) or to go out and get my own clients. Well, thanks. That was worth the price of admission. At least I got some pizza out of the deal.

Moreover, most of the other participants at these introductory classes were fellow recent graduates or solos struggling to find new practice areas to eek out some base living. Not exactly people looking to take on full time attorneys.

The only contact I made was with another student who helped turn me onto another vain attempt to try to find a legal job....

4. The Attorney Hard Labor Fantasy Camp (aka An Unpaid Internship)

Well, I guess some of my networking paid off. It helped me land an unpaid internship. (At least I didn't have to pay for it.)

I was told upfront that the position wouldn't lead to permanent work. Nonetheless, I thought I'd learn some valuable skills, maybe make some good contacts, and even have my boss recommend me to other attorneys.

The only thing I really learned was how awful it is to be a practicing attorney. This is actually what led me to abandon the law altogether. I guess, it did kind of work out for the best. (Too bad it took me months of boring labor and a miserable commute to figure that out.)

3. Anything Can Happen (Sadly, Most of the Time It Tends to be Bad)

Over the years, I had gotten to know a man pretty well who was very excited about my decision to become an attorney. He lives in the jurisdiction in which I currently live. He was a very outgoing person, and he was really in my corner in trying to help me find a job.

In fact, one of his close friends ran his own firm. This also wasn't just some solo shop. It employed multiple attorneys (but was definitely not an elite firm).

He talked this guy up while I was in law school and promised to put me in touch with him. It took a while, but after I took the bar he eventually got in touch with the guy...or actually his friend's wife...make that his soon to be ex-wife.

Apparently, his friend was in the midst of a bitter divorce and was doing everything he could to hide his assets including trying to dissolve his firm. Needless to say, he wasn't hiring.

Regrettably, I had an indirect falling out with this man and was no longer able to avail myself of his assistance.

(Pro Tip: For all you law students with "guarantees" of good jobs once you graduate, just remember, anything can happen.)

2. Like Father Like Son

What's better than knowing someone with a friend with his own firm? How about knowing somebody's whose dad runs his own firm.

My contact wasn't exactly my best buddy, but we were definitely on good terms. We also went way back and had quite a bit in common. He's a young attorney who works in my jurisdiction for his father's reasonable sized firm.

I figured this would be a pretty decent way to start off my job search and build my contacts, so I asked if he wanted to get together for lunch. He e-mailed me almost a minute or two after I sent out my query and seemed very excited to get together.

While it was nice to catch up with him, he was unable to really provide me with any contacts...except for his dad. He did, however, say that his dad would be happy to speak with me and that I should e-mail him and see if I could set something up. As an established attorney, he should be able to point in the right direction or at least have some good contacts. (I also somewhat knew his father.)

I wrote him a polite and relatively short e-mail asking for about 15 minutes of his time. Guess what? No response. I then e-mailed my friend to see if his dad was particularly busy or if he would be able to speak to him for me. Remember how my friend got back to me in about a minute the last time I contacted him? Well, this time, the delay was a little longer...like, forever.

I even ran into my friend's mom (who is still married to his dad) at one point and talked to her about my job search plight. She wished me luck and made no mention of asking her husband for assistance.

If family friends are blowing you off for informational interviews, you know this is a tough field.

1. Just Because I Said "Send Me Your Resume" Doesn't Mean I Have to Read It

I had another close, family friend who was also interested in seeing me land a job. He had a good friend, who is also a lawyer. This guy has his own firm. My family friend has often availed himself of this man's legal services. (My own father even once used his services.)

In addition, this attorney is involved in the local bar and was pretty well known in town (and the surrounding community). You know, one of those "give back to the community" guys.

The family friend talked to the guy about me and explained my situation. The attorney gave him his contact information and told me to send in a resume and cover letter.

I prepared both of them and had them reviewed by other people who thought they looked great. I dutifully mailed both to him and waited two weeks without hearing back.

I then called up his firm and politely explained the situation to his secretary. The result? He was unwilling to even take my call. He just instructed his secretary to inform me that if he was interested, he would get in touch with me.

As you can guess, that day never came. Moreover, he wasn't even willing to offer me the opportunity to clerk or serve as an unpaid intern for him. Heck, he wouldn't even give me 5 minutes to maybe give me some advice or explain why he couldn't do anything for me.

Bonus: I already covered this guy, so I left him off the list, but if you want to hear about another networking failure, check out my old post about "My Loyd Braun". (Where do I find these people?)

So there you have it, folks. That's not even a complete list of my networking failures. It isn't easy to network for any job, and it's even more of an uphill battle in the saturated and inaccessible market for attorneys.

Now, I know some of you are probably thinking, "Get real, Esq. Never. We all know you're a pathetic nerd who couldn't network himself out of a paper bag. Your examples prove nothing but your own awkwardness and lack of people skills."

I'm not going to defend myself as some back slapping, glad handling, 20 something version of Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, I have been able to make and maintain some friendships and contacts over the course of my life. Moreover, I've even had non-legal success in networking. I once was able to secure a paid summer internship (take that University of Dreams!) where most of the other interns went to more elite colleges through contacts I made.

If you want to dismiss these examples as outliers or just part of an insufficiently aggressive networking campaign, be my guest. If, however, you're plugging through law school and the bar because you're convinced your networking skills are vastly superior, well, good luck to you. You're sure going to need it.

Bad Dreams

2010-03-01T21:14:00.001-05:00

Recently, I haven't been one to post twice in a day. In fact, I'm lucky if I post twice in one week, but I just couldn't pass up commenting on this:

An anonymous commenter tipped me off to the University of Dreams. Apparently, it was also recently profiled in the Chicago Tribune.

With a name like "University of Dreams" you'd have to believe that this is just another silly on-line school trying to get a slice of Aunt Sallie Mae's pie. You'd be wrong, however. No, the "University of Dreams" is much worse than that.

It's a program designed to let you buy your way into a summer internship program. No, it isn't just a consulting service to help you land a good internship. It actually guarantees you an internship. All for the low, low price of several thousand dollars. (More than a semester's tuition at some schools.)

Yes, people are now desperate enough to PAY to work for someone. Remember that Simpsons episode where Lisa tells Bart that in the nation of "Rand McNally" hamburgers eat people? That fib was even less strange than this.

Look, I'm a chump. I bought the law school snake oil. I even paid my own transportation costs to commute to an unpaid legal internship or two. Still, paying several thousand dollars to do work for someone else? That's just absurd.

I remember that when I was in college, students would settle for unpaid internships while most would try to finagle at least a minimal hourly wage. People are now actually parting with the big bucks just so they can say they did something interesting over the summer?

It used to be a bad joke on JD Underground that the market for attorneys was so bad that pretty soon we'd be paying practicing attorneys to work for them. After learning about this program, I'm not so sure that day is too far off.

Maybe, I should start "Attorney Dreams". You can work for a plaintiff or insurance defense firm for $2,000. Criminal defense and wills and trust law is going to cost you $5,000. If you want to work in the skyscrapers that house the major corporate firms, it's going to cost you $10k. (Please add $2,000 if you want to work in entertainment or sport law.)

I wouldn't even need to collect all the money upfront. I could offer installment plans or even loans. "The University of Dreams" offers both. You only need to put up $900 to be approved for their generous financing plan, and then it's only payments of $248 a month for the next three years!

Unless, I'm now living in a bizarro world where someone is also going to pay me to watch TV and play video games, I'd like to thank "The University of Dreams" for reminding me what a nightmare the higher education system in this country has become.

(NB: Anyone who is interested in the Esq. Never internship program, please e-mail me ASAP. It's only $10,000 per person. I won't even make you do anything. Act now!)

Unnecessary Enemies

2010-03-01T15:23:00.000-05:00

Over the past year, the number of news articles and blogs that have been published in order to draw into question the wisdom of going to law school has been impressive. The popular legal tabloid, Above the Law, consistently urges people to stay away from law school while at least eight blogs do the same on a daily basis. The National Law Journal, the L.A. Times, and the Wall Street Journal (among other publications) have printed stories or op-eds assailing the ABA and the present law school system.

While much of this coverage has been met with strong support by those who have been wronged by the law school industry (and a number of neutral observers), there has inevitably been a bit of a backlash.

Obviously, this exposure is unwelcome news to those who profit off of the industry, but there has also been some criticism from those who are (at least allegedly) detached from the law school profit machine.

Most of these people are satisfied, practicing attorneys. To them, these attacks are foreign to their own experiences and are offensive to the career that they enjoy.

In some cases, these are just those at the top of the legal food chain taunting us with what amounts to little more than "Nya, Nya, a boo boo! I got a 170+ LSAT score and yooouuu didn't!" In other instances, it's simply the reality-challenged response of some old codger who graduated law school back when he could also go to the county fair and get cotton candy, a soda pop, and ride the Cyclone and still get change back from his nickel.

Admittedly, however, there are a few legitimate voices out there of people who truly enjoy practicing law. They didn't necessarily go to the best schools or get the best grades. Nonetheless, they were able to make it as attorneys and couldn't imagine doing anything else.

While they may not appreciate some of the commentary from the anti-law advocates, I don't think these people should necessarily be opposed to us.

Why? Well, I think most of us would agree that the world needs at least some lawyers. Our criticism is really aimed at how legal training is currently provided.

If anything, the prevailing system makes it more difficult for people who truly want to be lawyers to actually realize their dreams. The heavy debt load and glut of lawyers makes finding reasonable entry level work quite difficult.

What good does it do for anyone (save the law school industry) to throw so many attorneys (many of whom just want a job not a calling) onto the market with such punishing debt loads?

What sense is there in defending a system that doesn't even train budding attorneys as to how they should practice their future craft?

Aren't plenty of potentially good attorneys and caring advocates flushed out of the back of the law school toilet because they weren't able to pull off a top LSAT score or nail straight A's on a bunch of theoretically focused exams that bear little resemblance to the actual practice of law?

Why should those with a passion for the law have to compete with reams less interested graduates who went to law school in search of high starting salaries, stable careers, or versatile degrees - based upon the distorted statistics and information provided by the schools?

I had no business going to law school. Some people do. That's fine, but wouldn't we be better off with a system that taught these people how to be attorneys and didn't try to rope the rest of us into handing over our student loan dollars only to have all of us fighting over the limited number of entry level positions?

Interview Update

2010-02-25T18:23:00.000-05:00

I had my interview, and as promised, I'm providing you with the details.

The position was for a computer company. It's not a development position. It's more of an analyst position, but familiarity with databases and programming concepts are required.

I met with two people (not simultaneously) to discuss the position.

The first person worked on the business side of the company. We had a good discussion about the company, my background, and my interests. For the most part, the focus was on my prior full time work experience where I detailed some of the analysis and computer skills I had developed at my previous position. I think I was able to convey both my aptitude regarding and interest in the main functions of the position.

I would reveal to you how I handled the "Why law school?" question. The question, however, didn't really come up (at least not in the way I expected it would). Eventually, the first interviewer noted that a number of my internships were related to the law. I actually took the opportunity to explain how those positions and law school helped me obtain and enhance a number of transferable skills. He seemed to wholeheartedly agree, and aside from asking how I liked my law school, he didn't raise the subject again.

The second person to interview me was a tech guy. He was harder to read, and it seemed like his role was mostly to vet me on my technical skills. I think I was able to demonstrate that I had adequate IT knowledge as well as the ability and desire to learn anything else computer related that was necessary.

After going over my resume, he did wonder why I went to law school if I wanted to get into the tech world. I just informed him that I wanted to go to grad school and that the JD was a versatile degree. I think he was more curious than skeptical, and he didn't seem to have any problem with my answer. He seemed more concerned with just making sure I had the appropriate technical background.

The three things on which the entire interview seemed to focus were:

My previous work experience
My interest in the company and the position
My computer background and skills

For the most part, it was a pretty straightforward interview. I think this looks like a great job that would allow me to get into the industry in which I'm interested and help me glean some additional computer skills in which I am also interested.

Obviously, I'm not guaranteed the job, but I'm glad that I appear to have a strong enough background that some companies aren't going to concern themselves with my unorthodox academic path.

If I can't secure this position, I'm at least encouraged to forge ahead looking at computer related jobs. Even if it requires a little bit more self-study, I think I can eventually find a job I'll like.

I'll keep everybody posted.

Updates

2010-02-22T07:39:00.006-05:00

As most of you know, I'm usually not one for short posts, but until I find out how this recent job prospect turns out (one way or the other), I don't think I'm going to have time for any "feature" posts. I'll try to provide some shorter posts (like this one) until then.

Also, I know that my posting rate has declined remarkably from about once a day in November to about once a week this month. When I first started this blog, I was trying to sort out how I was going to proceed with my job search now that I was convinced I didn't want to be an attorney.

I, therefore, had a lot more time to post articles, create youtube videos, etc. Recently, I've become a lot more proactive with my job search and other endeavors, so I've had less time to invest in this blog. It isn't that I don't have a lot to say, it's just that I don't have as much time to invest in writing as I used to.

Moreover, I really prefer writing long, detailed or creative articles, so it sometimes takes a while for me to create publishable material. I probably have about half a dozen partially completed articles on everything from insurance sales to my bar prep experience sitting in the queue.

In any event, I want to thank everyone for their well wishes regarding my upcoming interview. It will be held later this week. I don't want to give too many details rights now, but I promise to share as much information as possible as I move throughout the process.

Some questions were, however, raised in the comments section of my last post that I'm willing to address:

I did work, full time for two years before enrolling in law school
The job is in the computer industry - It isn't a development role, but it does require a strong quantitative and computer background
I applied via a listing on an on-line job board - no special networking connections - I did submit both a cover letter and a resume

As mentioned, I will be sure to update everyone on my response to the "Why law school?" question in addition to any other pertinent information.

Also, Esq. Never may receive some additional media exposure in the near future. I'll be sure to keep everyone apprised.

Good News

2010-02-18T16:42:00.004-05:00

I was going to prepare a cynical post for today, but my heart just isn't in it.

Why? Well, I actually had a bright ray of sunshine beam into my otherwise depressing quest to find a job today...or something like that (metaphors aren't my strong suit).

Today, I was asked to come in for an interview. This is a serious, full time position that is not law related at all - in the non-legal world, I think it's called a "job".

Obviously, I can't count my chickens before they hatch, but after sending out reams of resumes with nary a response (not even a rejection letter), this is exciting news. At least I stand a chance of somebody reading my resume.

I'll keep you posted with how I handle the inevitable, "Why on earth did you go to law school?" question.

Also, here's a little bit more good news for all my fellow job seekers. I left my J.D. on my resume. While this may be a fluke, those two letters apparently don't automatically relegate your resume to the circular file.

I have a lot of preparation to do for this interview, but I'll do my best to get another "feature" article out in the near future.

Hands-Off Education

2010-02-14T21:16:00.003-05:00

Was anyone's driver ed experience like this...?

The instructor walks into the classroom and greets everyone. He informs the class about what a great decision they made in choosing his school and that he looks forward to spending the year with them.

Somebody in the back groans and wonders aloud why they have to spend such an excessive amount of time in class to learn how to drive. The instructor appears sympathetic and apologetically notes that this is the minimum amount of instruction the National Association of Driving Schools permits. He then smiles slightly to himself, and a student in the front row swears she hears him mutter, "Plus, I get more money this way..."

Despite his alleged misgivings about the duration of the course, he does make sure to emphasize the value of the classroom instruction. Again, the class murmurs amongst themselves and an incredulous pupil or two inquires as to how much time will actually be dedicated to operating a motor vehicle.

The instructor dismisses the question by noting that all students will spend a brief time in a simulator that replicates the driving experience. After seeing the shocked looks on the faces of his students, he adds that a few will be allowed to operate an actual automobile under the supervision of an instructor, but these select students will have to decide if they want to drive in the city, in the suburbs, or on the highway.

Now that he has explained the school's approach to driver's ed, he instructs the students to open their text books. Once again, however, he is interrupted. The students want to know why their books are filled with narratives of other people's driving experiences rather than any sort of instructions as to how to operate a motor vehicle or information about the rules of the road.

Irritated, the teacher says that simply memorizing rote instructions and the transit laws won't teach them anything about being effective drivers. The students refuse to relent. They inform the instructor that previous graduates did just fine on the exams by purchasing third party materials that did nothing more than provide step by step instructions and straightforward explanations of the rules for driving.

Exasperated, the instructor grudgingly concedes that some of their protests are valid, but he insists that he must conduct his course in this manner in order to properly prepare the students for driver's license exam. To buttress his justification, he begins to read aloud a sample problem from the state licensing exam:

"Bobby gets into his car and heads towards work. He begins to back out of his driveway as another car comes traveling along down his street in a densely populated area at 35 MPH. After leaving his driveway, he approaches a stop sign (lacking any supplementary information) and prepares to make a left turn onto a busy street. After successfully making the turn, he receives a cell phone call from his friend, Jack.

After traveling on the main street for 1/2 a mile, Bobby then seeks to merge onto the highway. He enters the on ramp and sees a yield sign. After merging onto the highway, Bobby sees flashing emergency lights behind him. Once the situation has resolved, Bobby continues until traffic slows. He notices that all other vehicles are merging to the right, and a police officer is present, directing traffic away from the left two lanes.

Discuss all traffic related issues Bobby faces on his way to work."

After he concludes with the example, one wise acre points out that they will still have to take a supplementary course in order to properly prepare for the driver's license exam. The instructor surprisingly acknowledges this with a sardonic smile. "Yes," he says, "I look forward to teaching that course as well."

There's a reason why this doesn't remind you at all of your driver's ed course: Because this is an absurd way to teach anybody how to do anything! If driver's ed operated like this, we'd all have about a 50% chance of dying on the roads on the way to work in the morning.

Now, I have enough respect for my readers to believe that you all recognized where I was going with this story faster than the average political science student is able to recognize that Animal Farm is an allegory of the history of the Soviet Empire - which, given the current economy, doesn't actually seem so bad right now.*

I also recognize that like with any spoof, the subject matter that is being lampooned is a bit more complex than its detractors give it credit.

Nonetheless, I don't think I'm too far off the mark. Driving schools teach people how to drive. Typing schools teach people how to type. Clown colleges even teach people how to be clowns. Why on earth don't law school actually teach people to be lawyers?

Sure, if the so-called T-14 schools want to bill themselves as academic programs that can't deign themselves to do anything that might suggest that they bear any resemblance to trade schools, so be it. Their students can go off to fancy law firms that want to hire exceedingly bright people to mold into their images. This may be the route tomorrow's elite law firm partners, federal judges, and legal academics should take in order to enter into the upper echelons of society of which us plebeians who couldn't crack a 170 LSAT score can only dream.

For the rest of us TTT graduates, this sort of pretentious hogwash has little relevance to most of the fields where we're likely to end up. People looking to file for bankruptcy, seeking a protection from abuse order, or who need somebody to defend them on their 4th DUI want somebody who knows how to file the right paperwork with the court and what to say and do during a hearing. They don't care if their lawyers can properly IRAC a hypothetical scenario in which somebody's house is simultaneously consumed by two different fires or if they can establish the policy justifications for a utilitarian rather than a retributive approach to crime.

If the employers and clients who are likely to hire us want attorneys who know the law, know the proper procedures, and know the rules of courts, why are these treated as tangential aspects of American legal education? As I alluded to in my above parody, only a small portion of law school is even dedicated to learning how to practice in a simulated environment (trial advocacy classes, etc.). Hands on training (such as clinics and externships) are usually only available to a select number of students, and even if you learn the basics of practicing in immigration court or representing the state in criminal/municipal court, you're only getting experience limited to that one practice area.

Some have said that even for attorneys who work on smaller issues, having a theoretically rigorous education is still necessary. I don't buy it. I worked for a personal injury law firm doing most of the tasks (save appearing in court) that the practicing attorney would have done. When I filled out complaints to submit to the court, there was plenty of research to do regarding the medical issues involved and the facts surrounding the case, but there was precious little legal reasoning involved.

In fact, let me give you the one line of law I included in each of the complaints: "Defendant X had a legal duty to do Y. X breached his duty of care because he didn't do Y. Ergo, X was negligent and the actual and proximate causes of Z's injuries."

You know what that's called on a law school torts exam? A "C-"...if you're lucky. At my office, it was standard cut 'n paste boilerplate.

I'm not joking. I just took a look at an old document I have on my computer to verify this.

Also, while I tend to consider most PI firms to be chop shops, this one was actually a pretty legitimate operation. It was run out of a nice downtown office. The attorney had a great reputation among the local bar, and he even treated me like a human being. We're not talking about some bottom feeder law office run just outside of the projects here.

I found the same dearth of legal reasoning when I interned at a big city prosecutor's office. Having confidence in court and knowing the law was far more important than being able to craft some fancy legal argument for entry level ADA's. Heck, the office just gave all of them crib notes on how to handle most disputes of law anyway. (Not like you couldn't just look these things up using rudimentary high school research skills.)

The one area of practice where it seems like legal acumen and well crafted arguments would be most helpful is appellate advocacy. I do not dispute that well reasoned argumentation is necessary in this field. I just don't see why this requires three years of theoretical-based education.

For one thing, the cynic in me believes that most judges are going to see legal precedent, etc. the way they want to see it regardless of the arguments presented to the court. (If constitutional law isn't just a euphemism for political theory, then I'm really a Supreme Court clerk with too much time on my hands.)

Moreover, appellate advocacy isn't that difficult. You look up the relevant cases, pull out the pertinent arguments, and then analogize them or distinguish them from the present fact pattern. The people who usually win those moot court and advocacy competitions are gifted writers and natural showmen. I don't know if you can teach this in the classroom, but three years of law school certainly isn't the road to improving such skills.

Now, I know I'm no law professor. Maybe I'm just missing that part of the brain that would allow me to recognize what a service learning "legal reasoning" is to America's budding attorneys. Maybe it's a secret they let you in on at Harvard and Yale. Perhaps if I had a financial stake in being able to hold onto a four hour a week job that pays six figures, I'd think differently.

Sadly, I am but a commoner, who never was permitted entry into the ivy covered campuses of America's truly elite schools. Please, therefore, bear with me as I humbly offer my own reasoning as to why I respectfully disagree with any defense of the current law school curriculum:

If you can safely operate a two ton weapon that can reach speeds of over 100 MPH after the state gives you your driver's license, it's inexcusable that you can't competently represent a client after the bar hands you your license to practice law.

Class dismissed.

* NB: Esq. Never is not a commie.

The Free Rider Problem

2010-02-08T18:00:00.000-05:00

Recently, my less-than-computer-savvy mother somehow downloaded a nasty piece of malware to her PC. This bugger is what is often referred to as a "rootkit". Without wasting too much time with the details, it's essentially software that's so malicious that even experienced systems administrators often times don't bother trying to remove it. Instead, they just back up all necessary data and reformat the hard drive and reinstall the operating system.

This sort of malware usually disguises itself as a benign program (a trojan) and then when installed proceeds to wreck havoc. If not properly removed, it will usually install all sorts of annoying programs, compromise the security of the system, and cause the OS to operate slowly. If it's improperly removed, the symptoms may not be evident for a while, but the infection will eventually begin to pose problems once again. Essentially, it's a "gift" that keeps on giving.

I think this is a pretty good analogy for law school. It seemed like a good idea at one point. It was probably a dumb idea to go through with it, but the administrators did everything they could to dupe you into attending just like the virus' programmers are able to snooker unwary users into downloading their software. Now that you've loaded yourself up with the debt and wasted three years, it is virtually impossible to put this menace behind you. Sadly, however, there's no option for reformatting and reinstalling in the real world.

Moreover, law school is definitely the "gift" that keeps on giving. First, you get to spend three miserable years learning from some pseudo-intellectual professors (i.e. people who have the same worthless degree you have) about theoretical concepts only tangentially related to the practice of law. Then you leave school realizing you owe more in student loans than some people do on their houses. Then you have to spend even more money learning how to take an exam that's required of you before you even have the ability to practice. After that, you learn that even with a degree/license, there are few (and mostly low paying) jobs for attorneys. Then you learn that non-legal employers aren't exactly thrilled about hiring people with your "advanced" credentials.

This isn't an exhaustive list of the miserable revelations many law graduates are sadly forced to discover. Some of you may think, can it possibly get any worse? Well, if you've experienced (or are yet to experience) all of the above, let me assure that the curse of law school isn't done doling out its punishment quite yet.

No, as if unemployment, a life time of debt, and losing every shred of dignity you once held isn't enough, almost all law graduates have to deal with another nuisance: The Free Rider Problem.

The Free Rider Problem is manifested in every moocher who comes out the wood work as soon as it is revealed that you're now a licensed attorney (and often times even beforehand). It's kind of like when people get hit up by friends and relatives after they win the lottery. The only difference is that as a law school graduate, you just won Beelzebub's lottery and all you have to share is ignorance.

Maybe if you're a 1L and someone solicits your advice for the first time, it feels kind of good. You feel proud that people look to you as an authority. Well, guess what? You're not an authority. Chances are the average legal secretary could offer better advice than you can, and she isn't going to have to explain to the bar why she once engaged in the unauthorized practice of law if she ends up giving advice to the wrong person.

Things don't really change once you're an attorney. The only thing that may change is that you can get your licensed yanked or face a malpractice suit for letting the moochers push you around.

Just because the stakes are higher, doesn't mean that the parasites will leave you alone (even if you politely explain your professional obligations). No, in fact, once you're a full fledged attorney, it's open season.

I can't tell you the number of times people have just assumed I'm their personal legal question and answer database. I guess this must be what it's like to be an attractive female who has to endure the unrelenting and untoward advances made by the dregs of the male gender.

People have asked me how to file a complaint with the state's consumer fraud division. (I was actually asked this by a paralegal - "You'd know better than I would, my friend.") I have been hit up for advice on changing one's name, analyzing a child custody agreement (that I hadn't even seen), and getting dual citizenship. People have asked me to write their wills and sue their landlords. One person even thought I could give her a lecture on how HIPAA works while another wanted me to write a threatening letter on her behalf.

This sort of thing must be particularly annoying to practicing attorneys. Unless they can parlay this free advice into getting retained as a paid attorney, talking about work probably isn't what they want to do during their free time. (Maybe I should try to become friends with an executive at Sallie Mae and try to convince him to write off some of that debt 'cause buds help each other out.)

In my case, however, I don't even know what the heck most of these people are talking about. Okay, maybe I usually understand the theory behind some of the dilemmas they're having, but I certainly don't have the practical knowledge to help them out even if I were so inclined.

Personally, I think it would be funny if I could get away with just doling out a bunch of bad advice. "Sure, Ralph, getting into a street fight with your friend sounds like a great idea. You can guys can definitely disclaim liability for any injuries that result"; "I, Esq. Never, certify that Mr. and Mrs. Smith hereby devise all of their assets to the Workers World Party and give custody of their children to Big Bird."

The state bar or the court that decides the malpractice suit against me may not be quite as amused.

Some of you may be thinking, "Wait, Esq. Never, you dummy, why don't get off your duff and try to learn some of this law and procedure, so you can't actually do something productive instead of sitting around complaining."

First, of all, do I come over to your blog and heckle you? (Well, usually, I don't.) Secondly, here's my three part response. 1) I really don't want to be an attorney. 2) Setting up a solo operation and learning the ropes isn't an easy feat. 3) Most of the people who are looking for advice are looking for free advice - hence the "Free Rider Problem". As soon as I mention a fee agreement, they'd make a run for it like an ABA president runs from an honest debate on the problems with her organization. (Hey, maybe, this is a good tip for ridding yourself of free loaders.)

Of course, don't feel bad, fellow barristers. I recently read an advice column about a garbage man who kept getting hit up by friends to help dump their over-sized refuse for free. He just worked for the garbage company; he didn't even own the truck!

Well, if garbage men don't have to do pro-bono trash collection, I don't see why we need to give away advice for free. Particularly, when most of recent law school grads don't have any advice to give away in the first place.

Pride and Employment

2010-02-04T13:42:00.001-05:00

This is a follow up to two of my recent posts. In Pride and Prejudice, I urged readers to put pride in the back seat wherever they are in the law school process (applying, enduring, or graduated). In Honesty is the Best Policy, I further urged readers not to lie to try to finagle an interview.

How are the two connected? Well, let's start with the last post. The temptation to lie is quite strong because if you went to law school full time during the past three years and you don't want/can't find a decent legal job, you're in for an uphill battle in trying to secure non-legal employment. As has been stated time and time again, a J.D. makes you unqualified for most non-legal jobs, and a three year gap on your resume will likely also keep you from getting interviews.

Some of you may be puzzled. Where does pride come in? After all, if you're looking at non-legal jobs, surely you've put pride in the backseat by deciding to forsake the "prestige" of being able to call yourself a lawyer.

I'll address this in a minute. Before moving on, let me note that I'm certainly not an expert as to what to do next. After all, I'm presently unemployed and living at home with my parents. I have a lot of experience with what doesn't work, but not too much with what does. To bolster my credibility, let me urge you to read this entry from the (now defunct) Barely Legal blog before continuing with this post.

If I could choose one sentence from the entire article, it would be this: "You don't deserve anything because you have a law degree."

It may take some time to fully understand that point. In fact, the author's fortune in apparently getting interviews for and eventually accepting a solid white collar job may be somewhat misleading. It appears that he was able to wrap up his job search before the economy fell into the tank (and the job market got so bad). For whatever reason, he was able to get interviews with his law degree on his resume and then was able to spin the degree.

Sadly, until the economy picks up (which should be a while), employers are going to be inundated with resumes. Most of them probably aren't going to have time to satisfy their curiosity by wondering why somebody who has a J.D. or three years missing from their work experience is applying for their open position.

You see, according to the aforementioned blog post, you simply can't think of yourself as anything more than a college graduate with a couple extra meaningless letters next to your name. (Unless you have some post-college work experience.) In my opinion, however, this is actually only the best you can think of yourself.

Unfortunately, it may be necessary to take another step down the old dignity ladder - particularly if you go down the "three year gap" route. You're not just merely a college graduate - you're a college graduate who didn't do a darn thing (save some periodic internships) over three years.

Yes, sadly, this means you're even less qualified than the average recent college graduate. Does that stink? Sure, but fighting reality won't do anything for you.

What you need to do is try to find jobs with employers that aren't going to be that concerned about the three year gap and just want to hire reasonably intelligent people with college degrees OR find a way to mitigate the gap in the resume.

I have some suggestions, but obviously, I can't speak from experience. These seem to be the best options at this point.

Document Review

You may be thinking, "Wait, I'm trying to leave the law!" As any doc reviewer will tell you, document review has precious little to do with actually practicing law. It has a lot more to do with making enough money to keep your unemployable posterior off the streets.

Nevertheless, it may offer you an escape hatch through which you can escape the stigma of your J.D. For one thing, it'll allow you to start bulking up your work experience on your resume. True, extensive document review experience can often be seen as the kiss of death in the legal world. In the non-legal world, however, most employers don't really know what "coding documents" is. If you can spin it in the right way, you could make it look like you have the professional/white collar work experience for which many employers are looking.

If you can't parlay the doc review experience itself into the "professional experience" that is a prerequisite for many corporate jobs, there can be other benefits. One of the main reasons people go into document review is because it usually pays pretty well. If you can keep your expenses down, it may be possible to save enough money to help finance one's exit from the industry.

Some people have used their document review earnings to open a solo law firm - not recommended. If you're not inclined towards the law and have some other business plan, you could use your earnings to underwrite a non-legal venture.

If you're not so entrepreneurialy inclined, you could also use the money to invest in yourself. You could find a certification or training program that will help you acquire practical skills to help you transition to another industry. You could do this either in between document review projects or or even possibly at night while still earning an income.

The big problem with this strategy at this point is that document review jobs are harder than ever to get. If you don't have experience, it's particularly difficult. Not only that, the wages for document review have plummeted since the recession started. It may be possible to make the same or similar money without suffering in a document review sweatshop.

Back to School

This ties in with the previous suggestion. Obviously, it's advisable not to take on any additional debt if possible, so financing continuing education with earnings from other work (like doc review) is probably a good idea.

The last thing you want to do, however, is simply pick up another worthless diploma. Be very weary of any program that won't teach you practical skills. Even degrees like MBA's or masters in economics should be suspect. If you don't have something practical to bring to an employer, you'll have to market yourself solely on the strength and credibility of your degree. As we've seen, that doesn't work too well with a J.D. My understanding is that while an MBA is more practical and versatile, there are plenty of TTT MBA's who regret their decisions as well.

Certification programs in various areas of IT, culinary skills, and other vocations are probably the best road to take. Just be careful not to be scammed again. There seem to be a lot of fly-by-night on-line schools looking to separate students from their money.

I heard about one national computer training company with "campuses" around the country. It recently went bankrupt, but all it did was prepare students for various certification exams related to the Microsoft operating systems and servers. The company charged a whopping $20k for this education. The exams and books to self-study for them will only cost you about $1,000 -if that. (They were also quick to put students in touch with Sallie Mae to finance the COA.)

If you can't learn a skill set on your own, ask professionals in an industry what they recommend to get the training you need. The best bet is probably a local community or state college certification/training program.

The most important thing is leaving the program with actual practical skills that will make you attractive to employers in your new field at a cost that won't cause you to rack up significantly more debt.

Entry Level Training Programs

If you've had it with school and don't want/can't find document review positions, you'll need to find an employer who isn't all that concerned about your resume. Most opportunities that are specifically targeted to recent college graduates are out. They're usually looking for bright people they can develop from the ground up right out of school. If being three years removed from college doesn't nix you from their pool of candidates, having a gap on your resume will likely do so.

This is probably also true for many companies that don't have a specific program for recruiting college students but who are willing to consider recent graduates with no work experience for a position that has become available. A resume with such a gap in experience is going to be strewn aside like a law dean tosses aside whatever scruples he may have ever had.

Some companies have training programs that aren't necessarily looking for recent graduates or even the best and the brightest. (Sometimes they actually want people who have been out of school for a while.) These usually take the form of management training programs where you'll usually start off assuming assistant managerial functions and learn different areas of the business.

Companies I've heard about that have such programs are Wal Mart, the Honey Baked Ham Store, Blinds to Go, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car (among others). Sure, supervising the installation of discount blinds or scolding some frat boys for "ralphing" in the back seat of the compact car they rented for spring break isn't exactly what you were thinking when you signed that seat deposit over to that TTT dean, but let's face it, now is not the time to be picky.

Sales

Sales isn't for everyone. In fact, if you're gifted in this area, you probably have what it takes to network yourself into a better job. That said, these jobs will usually take anyone with a pulse. Usually they entail cold calling people, harassing everyone you've ever met, and/or making presentations to sell people insurance, financial instruments, or something else they could probably easily buy for themselves if they just logged onto the appropriate website.

Often times you'll need to get some sort of license (e.g. insurance, Series 7, etc.) depending on what you're selling. You'll need to be able to endure a lot of rejection and have a persuasive personality. In most of these jobs, your take home pay will be commission based.

Service Industry

Yes, at the bottom of the list are jobs you could probably get if you only graduated high school. In fact, they are jobs you could probably get if you just didn't have what it takes to graduate high school (i.e. two brain cells to rub together).

Some positions, by themselves, can be reasonably lucrative. For example, being part of the waitstaff at a fancier restaurant pays the bills for many young folks.

One, however, shouldn't overlook less lucrative options. While stocking shelves or loading trucks is a pretty darn pathetic position to be in after seven years of education, it could be your path to a decent corporate job. You see, companies want to hire people who are familiar with their products and services. Many times they will promote from within. If you do a good job and learn the ropes at the lower level, with your education, you should be a prime candidate for advancement to a position that offers more responsibility.

Prior Work Experience

If you have prior work experience in a professional field, now is probably not the time to think about switching to another non-legal industry. Both your resume and the job market are currently stacked against you. Try to get back into the field in which you have experience and do everything you can to spin your J.D. as an enhancement to the credentials you already have.

The only time a J.D. is really beneficial to a non-practicing attorney is when it's coupled with other skills and experience. Try to take advantage of this to set you apart from other candidates with similar non-legal credentials. A good idea to accept the same salary that someone with similar credentials (but no J.D.) would accept.

My Strategy

Personally, I'm going to try to continue pushing my previous work experience and spin the J.D. as best I can. Obviously, I've had little luck with this approach, but I'm also open to accepting document review positions. Unfortunately, these aren't as accessible as they once were, but I may have a project soon. I would then seriously considering using my profit from such a project/projects to get some training in another field or start my own enterprise.

The most important thing at this stage is to be realistic about how employable you are. I had a friend who just couldn't recognize how worthless a J.D. is. He kept urging me to look at executive positions that paid around six figures. He seemed to reason that just because top law grads could command salaries at that level (or above), the business world would be willing to pay anyone with a J.D. a similar salary.

Sadly, that's not the case. As I've said before, outside of the legal world, a J.D. is essentially just a fancy liberal arts degree. I might as well have pursued a Ph.D. in art history.

If you don't have anything to offer, but your J.D., then you really don't have anything to offer. It's best to shrug your shoulders, start at the bottom, and start trying to rebuild your life than continue chasing a dream that has morphed into a nightmare.

I Was Once Like You

2010-01-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

The Legal Dollar is a great blog. For those of you who sometimes (or often) think the "Scam Busting" blogs are too filled with hyperbole for your taste, TLD is less geared towards law school bashing and more towards personal financial decision making for lawyers/law students. (Though the best financial advice would probably be don't go into debt in the first place to attend law school.)

Recently, the blog had a good post about the financial risks associated with enrolling in law school. One thing that caught my eye was the following anecdote:

When I mentioned that I worked with a lot of young lawyers and the job search was becoming more difficult, one of the potential students interrupted me and said very loudly and bluntly "That's not true." (Wilson's outbust of saying "You lie!" during an Obama speech had happened not too long before, so I got a little sense of something like deja vu.)

I assured the student that I had been working with recent graduates for several years and the task of helping them get jobs had indeed become more difficult in recent years. They countered by saying that my comments were not in accord with what they were seeing in law school admission materials. To this I suggested that they might want to drill down a little with regard to what a "90% employment rate after graduation really meant."

They also preferred to believe the numbers put out by the law schools with regard to starting salary. They did not even want to believe the NALP median numbers and started trying to suggest to me reasons why the NALP numbers must be wrong.

Ah, the arrogance and naivete of the prospective law students. How sad that one day, with their hopes of living a stable lifestyle thanks to an advanced degree dashed, they too will lash out at the scam only to be admonished for their "lack of research" and "entitlement mentalities".

Nonetheless, I can only be so harsh towards these sorry lambs being led to the slaughter. You see, sadly, I too was once like them. I don't think I ever thought that six figures was in the bag just because I was able to sign my name to the check for my seat deposit (and a subsequent promissory note). I did, however, believe the data about the median starting salaries. I thought the employment figures were accurate. I even believed that my law school was interested in providing practical training and that its proximity to many large firms and businesses would give me numerous employment options.

Most embarrassingly, I even believed that my school's career service office had any real interest in helping me actually secure a career.

It's really a good thing I'm not a woman. Otherwise, I'd probably take every half soused goon at his word that he's really an internet-start-up tycoon even though he drives an '85 LeBaron and lives in a studio apartment on top of a bowling alley.

More than just accepting the distorted marketing materials produced by the schools (and industry publications), I also never really liked the occasional naysayers that popped up on discussion boards like Law School Discussion.

Back when I was applying, there wasn't nearly as much anti-law school information as there is now. It wasn't until after I started school that the infamous Wall Street Journal article came out where Law is 4 Losers and Loyola 2L were quoted and where a number of law school administrators admitted their statistics were based upon partially reported data.

In fact, I don't think it was until after I was already enrolled and taking classes that anti-law school advocates starting aggressively encouraging students not to attend law school (particularly the TTT's). This is when I was exposed to the infamous chart I printed earlier (reporting high salaries for some, low salaries for many, and middle range salaries for few). This is when I first heard about students from tier 2 and even tier 1 schools struggling to find substantive legal work (pre-recession). This is also when I first heard about the subterranean document review sweat shops.

As I mentioned, I was pretty incredulous of these claims. Surely, I thought there couldn't be that many students who resent going to law school. Those who were in document review must have just gotten in over their heads with debt and/or wanted an easy way to make some quick cash. It couldn't be true that so many students who missed the OCI cutoff had few other options for permanent employment other than toilet law or abandoning the field altogether. Surely, those people who took low paying, miserable firm jobs were people who were unwilling to leave the greater NYC metro area.

Moreover, the few anti-law school advocates with whom I came into contact did not come across well. One poster on Law School Discussion who went by the moniker "Wiimote" (referring to the Nintendo console) repeatedly posted on the message board that anyone who goes to law school is going to get hosed. I don't really disagree, but he never bothered putting his remarks in context. (Did he even go to LS?) He also never bothered engaging anyone who had any serious questions for him.

I don't know if 0L's currently deal with people employing similarly ill-advised tactics. Perhaps some of them see current anti-scam bloggers that way. When I've (rarely) ventured into the pre-law forums, I have tried to be as non-combative and charitable as possible. Nonetheless, like a sober man trying to deter an addict from continuing in his vice, I've been swatted away by the very people I'm trying to help.

Despite my differences with the OL's, I recognize that I was once like them. Still, for those of you considering law school, please realize that you can one day be like me.

It's easy to be incredulous of the idea that law jobs are hard to secure outside of OCI. You may be convinced that you'll never end up in document review. You might believe that you'll have the skill and savvy to go solo from the start, and of course, if all else fails that you'll know how to spin your law degree to help you land a solid non-legal job.

It may seem that way from where you're currently sitting. I thought so too.

Now, however, I know that going to CLE's and receptions gets you at best "well wishes" and at worst brushed off - certainly not solid leads for jobs. I've diligently scanned the job boards finding plenty of positions for legal assistants but precious few for practicing attorneys (and almost all at pay well south of $50k). I've personally investigated going solo from the start only to realize the expense of starting a legitimate practice and the difficulty of independently learning the necessary law and procedure while making enough to survive.

I've been referred to attorneys only to either get blown off or to learn that they simply can't/won't hire additional associates for their small firms because it's not economical. I've been unable to work with other contacts because their firms/organizations simply won't hire me because I didn't go to the right school or make the top 10%.

Right now, I'm even being strung along by temp agencies with the possibility of getting hired for JUNIOR document review positions.

Of course, I've sent reams of resumes and cover letters to non-legal employers with nary a response. Not only do I have an undergrad business/econ degree and a tech background, but I also worked for two years. I've applied for a number of positions that were actually related to my responsibilities at my former job and couldn't even get interviews.

Also, if you think I didn't have much of a candidate profile before law school, you're wrong. As I've mentioned before, I only searched for jobs for a few months post-college and had a number of interviews, multiple offers, and accepted a job for a position in which I was one of a hundred candidates. I don't say this to brag; I say this to assure you that the "x-factor" here is my law degree/three year experience gap.

Obviously, when I "open up" like this, I'm inevitably going to get a comment about "whining". I don't say this to elicit your pity. I say this because this is the frustration I (and many, many other law graduates) have experienced first hand. I didn't believe the warnings before or even during law school. Now I have no choice but to believe them. I'm living them.

Unless your personal goal is to also have an anti-law school blog on blogger.com one day, trust me this is a warning, not whining.

Honesty is the Best Policy

2010-01-25T12:55:00.003-05:00

You don't need to tell me how frustrating it is to find a job when you have a J.D. When you throw in the lousy economy and the fact that I'd like to find a somewhat respectable non-legal position (for which I'm supposedly "overqualified"), the situation is downright maddening.

I've written before about the great dilemma: whether to remove the JD and have a gap in experience on your resume or keep it on and be dismissed as over-educated before you can even get an interview.

This isn't a pretty choice, and veering in either direction can leave you unemployed and without any interviews. It's particularly bad if all of your professional experience is law related. I can imagine that if you've actually worked in law for a few years, dropping your JD, etc. from your resume isn't even an option anymore.

This situation leaves the job applicant with a strong temptation to lie. I've joked about this in the past, but it was only a joke. Lying on your resume is a bad idea.

This doesn't mean you can't skillfully market yourself. Only including relevant education and work experience (as long as it's labeled as such) is fine. After all, if you have a computer science degree and you're applying for a programming job, why include the JD if it's not at all relevant? If you were treasurer of both a controversial political club on campus and later the treasurer of your student government, you may want to include the club only if you're looking to work for a like minded organization and just mention your time as student body treasurer for all other positions.

Lying, however, will get you into trouble. Interviewers may eventually push you to bring up your JD or any other aberrations they see in your resume. If they do, be honest and explain away these issues as best you can. (I provide a hint for dealing with the JD in the post I linked to above.)

Moreover, lying out of the gate is even a worse idea. Once you go down that road it'll be hard to stop yourself before you're caught. What are you going to do, extend the date for which you worked for a company through law school? What if they call your former employer? Not only will you be busted by the potential employer to which you're applying, you'll ruin your good name with (and likely future references from) your former employer as well.

Are you going to make up a job? Do you plan to give your friend a cell phone and ask her to greet everyone with "Vandelay Industries!"when it rings? (This didn't work out too well for George Constanza.) This is the age of the internet; are you going to build a fake website for your fake company? Don't even think about using a real company when all of their contact information is available online.

Are you going to claim that you spent the last three years caring for a sick relative, backpacking through Europe, or helping out poor people in a foreign land? Not only is this particularly sleazy - not only lying about law school but also emphasizing altruistic personality traits you clearly don't have -but you'd have to find a company that would value this sort of experience. Most hard nosed corporations aren't looking for "free spirits" who decided to live abroad for three years to forgo being in the workforce.

Plus, wouldn't such avenues (at least in the latter two cases) naturally lend themselves to some stories in which your co-workers may take an interest? You better hope you can keep your story straight.

"So, Ralph what was it like to travel around Europe for three years?"

"Oh, it was great - I went to London, St. Petersburg, and Sydney."

"Uh, isn't Sydney in Australia?"

"Oh, I meant, uh, Sydney, Italy - it's a small town with, uh, good pizza...Speaking of which, who wants to get a slice?"

This also alludes to an additional problem - keeping the lie going. Don't other people know you went to law school? Better hope you can keep your parents, classmates, and (yikes!) exes away from your boss. Are you just going to continue on for years at a company telling tales about what you did during your three years "not at law school" and be able to keep your mouth shut any time a legal topic or (heaven forbid!) the issue of law school comes up? What if there's a job or promotion available where having work experience and a JD would be an asset?

Sure, this could make for a funny sitcom. (Hmm, NBC, call me. This can't be worse than the junk you're currently airing.) Nevertheless, it won't be very fun in the real world where you'll have to walk around on eggshells.

Also, don't forget, if you're a licensed attorney, you're still subject to discipline or disbarment for any misconduct you commit even outside of your role as an attorney. You may not care about practicing law, but having a professional license suspended or yanked isn't the sort of thing that you probably want on your record regardless of the jobs for which you're applying.

Above the Law recently reported that an attorney got busted for doctoring his transcript. He was later caught when he applied for jobs with his real transcript. Now, you may think this guy got sloppy. Maybe he did. There an old saw, however, that says: If you never lie, you don't have to worry about remembering what you said (or did) in the past.

We don't have much, my fellow law school scam victims, but let's at least keep our integrity.

Pride and Prejudice

2010-01-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune can easily blow it by going to a TTT law school."

Okay, well, maybe that's not how Jane Austen's most famous literary work begins. I wouldn't know. I was assigned to read this grandmother of all chic lit back in high school in my senior year English course, but I never actually got around to completing the assignment.

Why am I telling you this? Well, the senior year English course in which I enrolled was an AP course. This was the last time - prior to law school - I both overestimated my academic aptitude and the benefit of being in a "prestigious" program.

For those of you who think this blog entirely ignores the consumer side of the law school scam, this post is intended to address the 0L mindset's role in this national debacle. I've written in the past how law school admittees can be compared to infomercial scam victims - sympathetic characters, but not entirely without blame.

I, of course, am not excusing the conduct of the law schools and company. As I've mentioned in the past, even if law school students are as unsympathetic as drug users, this doesn't absolve the schools from their culpability in taking advantage of the situation.

Returning to my English class example, as I mentioned, there are some parallels that exist between my decision to take AP English and to enroll in law school. I was under the impression that just because I had done well in previous English courses (including honors courses) prior to my senior year, I would do well in AP English. After all, I thought I was a good writer, liked to read, and had a robust lexicon.

Sadly, I was unprepared for the rigor of the AP course. The class required us to read full English novels and write 10-15 page papers on alternating weeks. This was in addition to the regular vocabulary, grammar, and other lessons we had to keep up with in the class. Of course, this was also on top of my course load of calculus and other AP courses as well as the little diversion of the college application process.

I'll be honest, folks; I had bitten off more than I could chew. This led me to hand in some*ahem* perfunctory papers and often fall behind with my reading (leading to some equally impressive reading quiz scores). Hence my failure to ever actually read the titular book associated with this blog post. (Hint to high school students: Trying to bypass reading the book by watching the BBC mini-series = a BAD idea; trying to sit through that sucker is worse than actually reading the darn thing.)

Now, of course, this post isn't really about that dreadful book. (So long female readership...) No, the title instead refers to a key problem for 0L's and law students: Pride. (I'm not sure where the prejudice comes in - maybe I should insert some Polish jokes.)

If you don't like my mangled quote from Jane Austen at the beginning, how about this verse from the Old Testament?

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. (Prov. 16:18)

Just like I thought my modest success in pre-AP English courses meant that I was prepared for the rigors of the class, I arrogantly felt that my undergraduate success, decent LSAT score, and interest in the social sciences would make me a successful law student. I would make the top 10% of the class, and even if I didn't, I'd be able to work hard in my internships and extracurricular activities and build an impressive resume that would afford me great employment opportunities.

If you've been reading this blog, you probably know this story turned out more like a Greek tragedy than an Austen novel where everyone lives happily ever after. It's not exactly "Oedipus marrying his mother" bad, but I'd say "I'm probably going to work doc review until they toss my corpse aside to make room for another coder earning $13.50 straight" bad is bad enough.

But I digress. You see, just because you earned a 3.9 in anthropology from a second tier liberal arts school where they wouldn't give a bag of lettuce less than a B+ in any given course, doesn't mean you're going to dominate your torts class. We're all real proud of you booking your "Feminist Mythology in Ancient Multicultural Societies" class, but I'm afraid that isn't going to prepare you for writing top notch law school exams.

For too many pre-law students, pride gets them into the law school mess in the first place. Everybody thinks they'll be in the top 10%. Even at schools where everybody is smart (save the truly elite institutions), only the best students will get the "good" jobs.

Another aspect of the pride principle is the average 0L's lust for prestige. Just like taking an extra AP course may have given the impression of a more elite transcript, earning a law degree from a good school is seen as quite the accomplishment by many. Sadly, getting a "C" in an AP course kind of takes the luster out of being in the top English class and being a permanent temp worker kind of tarnishes the old "Esq." title.

On virtually every pre-law message board, "prestige" is the key word. Everyone seems to think that going to a good law school (usually anything in the first two tiers) and eventually becoming a licensed attorney is the path to professional respectability. To be honest, many equally clueless people do regard law school and the title of attorney to be impressive. Trust me, they'll be less impressed when they learn that you're living under a highway overpass and the only thing between you and starvation is Burger King's recent decision to sell double cheeseburgers for a buck.

Of course, the problem with pride isn't limited only to the decision to go to law school. It also usually rears its head when it comes to the decision to stay in law school. To once again analogize LS to my ill fated enrollment in AP English, I actually had the opportunity to get out of my class.

There was an honors class that met at the exact same time my AP class met. I wouldn't even have to adjust my schedule, but I was stubborn and didn't want to face the indignity of being demoted from an AP to an honors class. (Though, in my defense, the students in the honors class had to perform in a play in front of parents and classmates. I don't have any problem with public speaking, but acting is another story. Esq. Never is also Thespian Never.)

Too many people in law school also fail to read the writing on the wall. Even though they're miserable, aren't in the top 10%, and don't even have much of a desire to become attorneys, they continue to plod along. This is part of the reason why the fallacy of the sunk cost is so powerful. Nobody wants to be labeled a "drop out" or "quitter". It's tough to give up on the idea that one may go through life without a coveted graduate degree. Nevertheless, that's simply pride talking. Ignore it. Pride may encourage you to move forward, but it's not going to be able to help you pay back those loans later on.

Worse yet is the idea that so many people think that they're the ones who can make it without top grades or great connections: I'll be on moot court; I'll be on a journal; I'll be on trial team; I'll flirt with the interviewers. Even if you do any of these things (and the last option isn't even available for graduates with 'Y' chromosomes), nobody is going to care. Law students with great extracurricular activities and internships are a dime a dozen.

Of course, if you do land a (non-OCI) legal job aside from document review after law school, it'll likely be for a low level firm that won't pay well or offer much opportunity for advancement - to say nothing about the lousy and unprofessional working conditions.

Here. once again, pride can play a role in making a ruinous decision. Everyone knows you're a lawyer, and everyone "knows" that lawyers are hotshots who make the big bucks. Clearly, you need to forge ahead and take any attorney position you can get just to save face.

Sadly, I haven't been able to check my pride until getting to this point and already doing some serious damage. Sure, working in a cubicle may not be fun, but it's certainly better than appearing in court during the day while living in a cubicle at night...and by a "cubicle", I mean a cardboard box near the subway.

Pride can take you to law school, keep you there, prod you into a depressing career, and eventually "throw" you off the GW bridge. I don't want to see that happen to any of you. Please quit while you're ahead...or at least before you entirely sink your life.

"Public Interest" - The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

2010-01-19T08:25:00.001-05:00

For those fearing a screed against pro-bono or public interest legal services, fear not. I put the term in quotes for a reason.

Martin Luther King day is often touted by some activists as "A Day On, Not a Day Off". (Thanks to law school and the recession, every day is a "day off" for me.) As my belated public service for the holiday, let me take some time to warn you about the tantalizing allure of going to law school to pursue a public service career.

You see, with an overall saturated legal market and a recession that has hit the legal industry particularly hard, the days of law schools (particularly those near the bottom) being able to enroll students with promises of solid (if not astronomical) starting salaries may be nearing its end. This means the schools may have to eventually shift their marketing campaigns.

One tactic that has begun to take shape is the idea that public interest law is a viable alternative for those unqualified for or uninterested in the private firm route.

The best example of this is the University of Massachusetts' justification for acquiring one of the Bay State's two unaccredited TTTTT law schools (Southeastern Law). Tuition will supposedly be set at a "bargain basement" price of around $20k. Not exactly a steal (at least on the consumer's end), but UMass claims this will allow its student to pursue careers in public interest law.

I'll leave it to you to figure out exactly how borrowing $60k in tuition plus living expenses in costly Massachusetts translates into the ability to take a post-law school vow of poverty.

This little wrinkle aside, there's a larger fallacy at play here: The notion that public interest jobs are some sort of default for any TTT graduate who's not particularly interested in raking in the dough. The implication is that the only thing stopping the rest of us cold-hearted ghouls from being public interest lawyers is our lust for filthy lucre.

Right. Does anyone think that the sorry schlubs from Suffolk or other local TTT's are working at the local Burger King because the smell of flame broiled all beef patties beats helping out poor people? "Boy, it's pretty embarrassing wearing a paper hat and serving up Whoppers, but anything is better than doing public interest work."

Of course not. The reason why such graduates languish unemployed or underemployed rather than become public interest attorneys is because these positions are just as competitive as more lucrative private positions.

Don't believe me? Well, my half decent T2 school had a special program for a select group of public interest students. Essentially, they got either full or partial scholarships in return for a promise that they'd spend a certain amount of time after graduation in public interest jobs. Here's the rub, they only needed to spend part of the period actually in public interest jobs. I can't remember the breakdown, but it was something like five of the first seven years post graduation.

The reason? Because public interest jobs are so hard to come by even for good students. These students were selected based upon their high LSAT scores, GPA, essays, and dedication to service. They most likely did well in law school. These were not UMass' envisioned TTTTT flunkies trying to enter public interest law by default.

I saw a number of students with good grades and solid public service credentials pour their hearts into applications and essays to get grants for public interest work only to get rejected left and right. The US government's honors program is just as competitive as any big law SA program, and even DA and PD jobs are no longer as accessible as they used to be except for maybe some sparsely populated areas (i.e. not MA or NYC).

We hear quite a bit about how so many people could use the assistance of legal counsel who can't afford it. Surely there must be plenty of demand for public interest lawyers. Yes, if you're willing to give your services away. The problem is that many recent grads (as well as plenty of more seasoned attorneys) aren't that much better off financially than these needy clients. Few organizations/agencies are willing to pay us to provide this legal support, so we can't afford to be public interest attorneys.

It's kind of like the constant attempts by people to procure free legal advice. I could have a great solo practice if all I did was dole out free legal advice to people. Of course, once I ask for any money, these "clients" would decide that they can just figure things out themselves.

Pro-bono service and helping your friends out with legal issues is nice, but sadly, "good will" is not part of the Sallie Mae lexicon, and having a big heart won't stop them from breaking your knees (or put food in your belly).

If you're wealthy beyond your dreams and want to get a law degree to do good for the less fortunate or you're so enlightened that you eschew the material things of this world (and can live with your parents for life), then you'll have plenty of opportunities to help people out.

If, however, you're a normal person who is somewhat attached to the idea of living under a roof, having running water, and eating, don't fall for the law schools' promises of public interest work - unless you consider helping a law school dean make his mortgage payments on his third house to be in the "public interest".

Even if You Win, You Lose

2010-01-14T21:53:00.001-05:00

Anyone who reads this blog knows that Above the Law it isn't. That is, Esq. Never tends to focus on life on the wrong side of the legal industry train tracks rather than the world where associates get annual bonuses worth more than my car and would never dream of purchasing a suit off the rack from Goodwill.

No, usually we focus less on attorneys whose large corporate clients allow them to own nice downtown condos and more on "attorneys" whose court referred clients help them pay to heat their vans/homes parked down by the river.

Today, however, let's take a look at those who have "made it" in the legal profession. No, this isn't a sour grapes post. I'm not sure if working 90 hours a week performing associate level grunt work is exactly my thing. I do, however, know that actually having a job that's affords me a modicum of dignity while earning a salary that may give me a shot at paying off my debt some time before the sun implodes most certainly is "my thing".

Besides, I fully accept what I've been told a number of times: Those T-14 kids who reflexively understood that the LSAT passage about Harriet Tubman was a "whimsical analysis of an iconoclastic figure from Antebellum American history" are clearly our superiors. We're really quite impressed by you guys - honest.

Nonetheless, is a legal career that doesn't require one to click a mouse in a windowless basement like a retarded chimp really all that it's cracked up to be?

I'm actually not going to dedicate this post to the insane hours big firm attorneys need to work or the dry nature of most of their tasks (reading over SEC documents, etc.). I'm also not going to pick on the court room aspect of a successful practice - hauling oneself from court to court and dealing with obnoxious and annoying clients.

Instead, let me turn to an organization called Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers. For those of you unaware of this organization, it's essentially a support group (found in most states) for the multitude of attorneys each year who fall under the sway of the bottle, pills, or seriously consider offing themselves (probably much to the glee of the lawyer-joke spewing populace).

Congratulations, everyone, we've selected a field which not only requires three years at overpriced, fraudulent "trade" schools and taking on more debt than the Democratic Republic of the Congo but that also likely ends with a trip to the Betty Ford Clinic.

What? You think this is just an isolated group that caters to a small segment of the profession? Perhaps you can then point me to "Systems Administrators Concerned for Systems Administrators"? Can you explain to me why every law school orientation I've heard about has a presentation by a representative from LCL before students even have their first classes? How come the freakin' number to their hotline is on the back of my Bar ID card?!

I still remember the poor schlub who was responsible for the presentation at my orientation session. I assume he had to further shame himself by sharing his story with us as part of his community service plea agreement. Apparently, the stress of law firm life had led him to become such an addict that he had resorted to drinking mouthwash!

You see - the long hours, demanding and arrogant firm partners, absurd clients, stressful court sessions, insufferable colleagues, and everything else adds up to a create a career that isn't too fun. In fact, it's so "not fun" that it drives an inordinate number of our "brothers of the bar" to depression, substance abuse, and even suicide.

I don't recall thinking, "Gee, I really think I'd like to join a profession where after driving myself deep into the red to face bleak job prospects, I'll also have the elevated chance of my family finding my body in a near catatonic state after sucking down a bottle of Listerine all night."

Yet, here we are.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

2010-01-13T16:34:00.005-05:00

Sorry that I haven't had too many "feature" posts for while. I have some partially completed drafts sitting around in the queue. I hope to have some longer, more interesting posts out soon.

In the meantime, I thought I'd help publicize this well known (though not well enough known) chart depicting the bi-modal distribution of starting salaries out of law school.

I was inspired by a post by Exposing the Law School Scam, which linked to an advertisement by a firm looking to pay an attorney with a decade's worth of experience, $40k!

Yes, soak in this chart 0L's - this is the career you've chosen. Here the "winners" get six figure salaries (and 80 hour work weeks), and the losers get to represent other losers fighting their 6th DWI conviction all while living at the local bus terminal.

Do you think that if you miss the cutoff for working for the big firms at OCI that you'll just "settle" for 80k working for a mid-sized firm? Guess again. You might as well prepare your resume to work for the closest Big Foot sanctuary because entry level jobs like that are equally mythical.

Transitioning to a Non-Legal Career

2010-01-12T19:21:00.003-05:00

Here's a short article about trying to pursue a non-legal career. Unfortunately, it isn't very detailed, but it does encourage the job seeker to adjust his strategy.

Usually, we hope that all of our accomplishments alert an employer to our general capabilities and compatibility with a position. Unfortunately, if the way we present those accomplishments makes us look qualified for a career in a different field (e.g. law), we have a problem.

If that's the case, we have to find a way to highlight what in our background makes us a good fit for the position to which we're applying. For example, if you clerked for a judge, you should emphasize your writing and research roles rather than the area of the law in which you gained experience.

Essentially, our resumes need to be a sales pitch as to why the employer should hire us. It should not simply be an autobiography that lets us bask in our own achievements. We always need to be sure to spin our experience to fit the position for which we're applying.

In other words, I think the article is telling us to lie...(j/k - I think).

Repackaging for Non-Law Career

Three Evil Cousins: Freddie, Fannie, and Sallie

2010-01-09T07:30:00.001-05:00

The following is a special guest post by JD Underground poster Diorama900 (a graduate of a T-14 law school ):

I have seen numerous bloggers criticize the ABA for its continued accreditation of law schools that are not needed in the legal market. No doubt, the ABA deserves condemnation for its refusal to protect the kids who enter these schools with no chance of getting jobs that will pay enough money to help them retire their law school loans. I was “lucky” – when I got into law school, a friend of the family was a law professor and he warned me that despite the $10,000 per year scholarship from Cardozo, I was better off paying full sticker at a T14 than getting a free ride at TTT. (Of course, even going to T14 was one of the big mistakes of my life, but that’s a different story.)

I think, however, that the bloggers are missing an important point of the story: The ABA is a culprit, but perhaps not even the worst culprit. Forget the deans at NYLS and BLS who need ever-increasing numbers of suckers to bleed dry. Worry about their enablers such as Sallie Mae.

The housing crisis presents a good metaphor for what is happening at law schools and many of our august institutions of higher learning like the University of Phoenix. I’m pretty sure that no one who buys a mortgage deals with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae directly, but everyone deals with them indirectly. Say you go to a mortgage broker for a loan. Also, say that you don’t have sufficient cash to buy that house you really want. The broker doesn’t care and he doesn’t have to care. It’s not his money that you’re borrowing. He is going to package your loan with 100 other loans and sell them to Freddie and Fannie who will package them with another 10,000 loans and sell them to China.

Why do you think so many loans were made to people who ultimately couldn’t pay? The brokers didn’t care about the credit standards as they didn’t have to worry about repayment once the crap moved onto Freddie and Fannie! Freddie and Fannie provided the brokers with the capital without any of the responsibility. Why didn’t Freddie and Fannie care? So many reasons – they bribed Congress with $200,000,000 in lobbyist money in their successful efforts to avoid regulation, for one major reason.

Politically, all parties were to blame. Most of that $200MM went to the Democrats; George W. Bush pushed the “ownership society” where he thought that if more minorities bought houses they would become Republicans; Alan Greenspan, the most craven politician in D.C., pushed too-easy credit for years. For those of you with powerful political opinions, I have equal contempt for both sides. How does this apply to the law school crisis? Replace Freddie and Fannie with Sallie Mae and Matasar and Joan King with mortgage brokers.

It costs you as much to go to some TTT like BLS as it does to go to Yale and yet in any rational market this wouldn’t be the case. This is because BLS doesn’t have to care about whether or not its students pay back the loans. That’s Sallie Mae’s problem. If BLS had to lend its students its own money – just like a mortgage broker who actually had to worry about the creditworthiness of the borrower – you would see BLS be much more careful about lending money to its students. And they wouldn’t dream of charging as much for tuition, if they even remained in business.

Will this change? Well, Freddie and Fannie just got an open lifeline from the federal government – lobbyist dollars very well spent. Sallie Mae is no less powerful. I was formerly an attorney with one of the major bailout banks and I can tell you that their political reach is without peer. Just like when the UCC gets redrafted, it is always redrafted from the perspective of the lenders, so too banking regulation. Rest assured, Sallie Mae will be taken care of when bankruptcy laws are revised, not the students who borrow from it.

Like the mortgage crisis, this is yet another well-intentioned government program gone awry. Who can argue with providing students with an opportunity to get an education? Well, there are thousands of TTT graduates with worthless degree who can. Sallie Mae didn’t help anyone except the hustlers who exploited the system. Just like Dubya’s ownership society and Maxine Waters and Barney Frank saying five years ago that Freddie and Fannie were well run and well-capitalized, that no regulation was necessary, that they provided the underprivileged with an opportunity to own a home. The cold, hard facts remain: some people should rent an apartment, not own a home, and some people shouldn’t go to law school.

Admissions Video Propoganda (Richmond Law)

2010-01-07T09:18:00.008-05:00

Update: If you look at the comments section, you'll see there are a number of Richmond graduates who have weighed in. Whether all of these comments are the genuine opinions of Richmond alumni is questionable. Nevertheless, I remain incredulous that I just so happened to pick on the one TTT that's playing an honest game. In fact, after re-watching the video I'm pretty sure I'm not.

If there are honestly some happy Richmond grads, fair enough. I'm sure Brooklyn, Seton Hall, and Loyola (LA) also have their defenders. The fact of the matter is that the implication that the school's proximity to national firms and large corporations will lead to solid employment opportunities (except for the top of the class) is misleading. Emphasizing the city life (particularly of a dump like Richmond), the on campus activities, and the scholarship credentials of the professors are absolutely irrelevant.

Every school claims to have "practical training". Everyone touts how wonderful their career service office is, yet outside of the elite schools, I've never heard a kind word about a CSO. (In fact, the only reason why the CSO's at the elite schools were effective is because they could just hand their student job opportunities. Now that the economy is in the tank, even their scams have been uncovered.) Studying abroad in law school is simply absurd.

All of these "soft factors" seem to be present at every other school, yet they haven't kept non-Richmond students out of the doc review or PI salt mines or the unemployment line. Trust the comments if you'd like, but don't say you weren't warned.

Okay, class, today we're going to begin our lesson with a video. To get the most out of this post, turn off the lights, turn up the sound, and click play on the above Youtube video. When you're done, please continue reading the next paragraph.

If you watched the clip, you know that it's an admissions video for the University of Richmond School of Law. Now, I don't know anything about UR Law. I'm not picking on them because I think it's a particularly fraudulent school - honestly, I haven't heard much about it good or bad. It's probably not the Seton Hall of the South, but let's face it, I think it's fair to be skeptical of a school that's ranked #77 according to US News and makes some pretty bold assertions in its promotional videos.

I actually just typed in "law school" in the Youtube search engine to see if A Law School Carol is among the first results - fortunately it is on the first page, which means some 0L's looking for information about law school will stumble upon it. Unfortunately, for UR Law, their video also popped up, and I decided to take a look.

It has been a while since I've viewed an admissions video. Now, however, instead of viewing it through the lens of an eager 0L looking towards a new career, I'm looking at it through the eyes of a man who has been shot out of the back of the law school garbage chute.

The law school apologists rebuke us for not doing more research before we enrolled in law school. I'm not exactly sure where an 0L is supposed to get a realistic view of the post-law school employment outlook- aside from these blogs, which the law school defenders do so loathe - but it definitely isn't found in these marketing materials.

Let's take a look at what this lower ranked, tier 2 school promises by analyzing the above video clip.

Part 1: The University of Richmond Experience

In the first minute of the video, a number of different UR personalities appear on screen promising an environment that is supportive, welcoming, and with unparalleled scholarship. Now, there's nothing wrong per se with making these assertions, but it's amazing how the much law schools try to emphasize factors like these in their promotional materials.

It's very nice that professors and staff are supportive of the students - though I'd wait to see it to believe it - but things like this really have little impact on the primary purpose of a professional school: getting a job. Nobody is going to hire you because your professor patted you on your head or even published some esoteric article in the New Mexico Journal of Environmental Law and Spelunking.

Part 2: Career Options

This is where the video starts to become absurd if not downright offensive. After an unnecessary video montage, a narrator begins to talk about how Forbes magazine has ranked Virginia as the number one state for business - whatever that means. (I'm a little skeptical of "official" magazine ratings these days.)

First of all, it's Virginia not Richmond that has received Forbes' accolades, and I'm pretty sure a lot of that business success is due to the high tech rich area of NORTHERN Virginia (i.e. an area not exactly next door to Richmond). Second of all, why does this even matter? This is a law school, not a business school.

The school apparently wants us to make the logical leap that if Virginia is doing well economically and Richmond is the capital of Virginia, ergo Richmond is thriving economically. If you don't want to argue with that iron clad logic, let's hear them out as to the rest of their justifications: The narrator claims that Richmond is home to a number of international and national law firms, large corporations, and various other potential employers.

Right, of course, to have any shot at these heralded law firms, a graduate from a 2TT like Richmond is probably going to need to be at least in the top 15%. What about everyone else? How about those great corporations? Sorry, having a law degree makes you either unqualified or overqualified for any of their employment opportunities as well.

Maybe the video should have mentioned if those mega-firms had any need for temporary document reviewers. It could have at least given us a tour of the local PI firms and debt collection agencies. I think that would be a lot more helpful in deciding if URichmond Law is the place to go.

Part 3: Richmond: Cultural Hub of the World?

So, of all the things one could think to talk about regarding law school, the third thing on their list is apparently to extol the thriving culture of the city of Richmond. Uh, we are talking about Richmond, Virginia, right?

I don't know what cultural attractions they're talking about. I'll take their word about the robust night life because from what I've seen, I don't think I would want to even be in Richmond after dark. I remember in college some friends were trying to find a hotel to spend the night in Richmond. They pulled into one motel parking lot to ask about spending the night and some guy came after them with a baseball bat! That must have been the welcoming committee.

I'll spare you the rest of my anti-Richmond anecdotes, but once again, what on earth does this have to do with law school? Even if Richmond is "the place to be", I don't see what it having some restaurants and shops has anything to do with securing employment after graduation (ignoring the obvious joke).

Part 4: It's Like Going to College Again

So, the fourth thing they can say about their school is that you can essentially relive your college experience with a close knit community and all of the amenities of the undergrad campus. Uh, you do know that you can join a gym, buy a museum pass, and find way to make new friends for a tad less than the price of mortgaging your entire future, right?

Part 5: It's Pretty Much Like Any Other Law School

Richmond has some court houses. The school or at least its satellite campus is near those courthouses. Right, so was my school and most other schools I visited. Not exactly impressive.

I also thought that the comment that U Richmond is the only law school in the city was pretty weak. Yeah, I'm sure that will give one a leg up over students from William and Mary, Washington and Lee, and UVA when it comes time for hiring. Funny how they emphasize being in VA when it suits them and specifically being in Richmond when that claim makes them look better.

Part 6: All Roads Lead to Document Review

The next section gives an overview of all the academic paths a student can take like picking up an additional degree (two worthless diplomas are better than one) or work for some institute for developing unmarketable skills.

I found the "Institute for Actual Innocence" to be a particularly funny title. As opposed to all those other defendants, their clients are actually innocent.

Judge: Do you have a plea?

Intern: Your honor, my client actually is innocent.

Judge: Well, why didn't you say so? Case dismissed.

Part 7: The Keys to Admission

There's some more malarkey about U Richmond having a collegial environment, but then we get a real treat, the Assistant Dean of Admissions tells us how to get into into this illustrious institution of higher learning.

She tells that she that she wants to admit applicants who bring something special to the table (something that distinguishes them). I was about to retort - like an LSAT score that won't further erode their US News ranking - but then she goes on to claim that it's not just about the numbers.

Here, however, is the best part of video with the best unintentional humor I've seen in a while. As soon as she finishes saying "...it's what you have besides the numbers that excites us", the camera immediately shifts to a shot of a black woman. Hilarious. Translation: It's about the numbers unless you happen to be able to help us out with meeting our diversity quota.

Part 8: Unemployment Services

There's actually another unintentional admission in this segment. The narrator says that the school is there to help students from the first day until they are admitted to the bar. The next interviewee is the representative from career services. Translation: Once you're out the door, good luck actually finding a job.

There's some more junk about one on one career services counseling - I'll save my own experiences for a later post. They also carry on some more about the professors and clinics.

There is, however, a choice quote that I find amusing:

One student claims that you'll learn what you're going to be doing after graduation while still in school. Really? They have course work on document review, collecting unemployment, and working at the local mall? Maybe they're right, they do offer practical experience.

Part 9: Goof-Off Abroad

Do I really need to say anything? How on earth does studying abroad assist you in gleaning legal skills. Everybody knows this is this just an expensive vacation designed to boost a sagging GPA. "Ordinarily, we wouldn't hire somebody with you class rank, but wait, what's this, you studied abroad in Guatemala this summer? Welcome aboard!"

Part 10: Conclusion: Come to Richmond Law; We're Not Like the Others

One professor claims that Richmond is dedicated to providing practical experience to students, but she really only mentions court room experience. My school's idea of practical experience was essentially to throw us all into a bunch of trial practice classes. Of course, most attorneys don't actually spend a lot of time conducting full blown trials, so this experience isn't really all that practical.

There's also a federal judge who claims that every student who has worked for him has performed at the A+ level. Of course, that's probably because, as a federal judge, he literally only works with A+ students. Tough luck for everyone else.

Finally, the assistant dean of admissions claims the Richmond law school experience is all about outcomes and they want to help their students get whatever results they want. Well, what I think most of their graduates want (or will eventually want) is not be saddled with six figures worth of debt and to have some viable employment prospects. Sadly, unless Richmond tells them to find something else to pursue, I don't think their graduates' wishes will come true.

Now, I've given Richmond Law a hard time in this post. I think if you produce indefensible marketing materials which will persuade students to hand over their futures in return for a meaningless degree (regardless of whether they "should have done more research"), you deserve such ridicule.

Nonetheless, Richmond is hardly alone in producing such nonsense. I'm sure even the bottom of the barrel TTTT's have similar videos promising their applicants the moon. Of course, at the end of the day, when the debt has piled up and the young maiden of law school admissions, whispering sweet nothings into your ears has morphed into the shriveled hag of law school graduation, yelling obscenities at you as she pushes you out the door, the results will be the same across the board: The law school administrators will shrug and say you should have done more research beforehand as they hand you a quarter and tell you to call somebody who cares.

University of Richmond Law STUDENTS (past or present), have I been unfair to your school? Is the city of Richmond some sort of legal Xanadu that we should all pile into the car and head to a la the Joad family in the Grapes of Wrath? Is Richmond really one of the few schools that actually provides you with practical training that is truly marketable at graduation? Or, as I suspect, is it just another TTT ripoff factory? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.

Government Contracting

2010-01-06T09:00:00.001-05:00

Just a short post for now, but one of my "fans" in the comment section mentioned that getting a federal government job is actually pretty difficult even if it's for a non-legal position.

I think he's pretty much correct. The people I do know that have been successful getting into "government" work have been government contractors.

There are positions all over the country (none really seem to be legal positions), but the bulk are in the DC metro area.

I don't think they qualify for the public interest loan forgiveness under IBR because you're working for a private company that has a contract with the government.

While, the federal government has USAJOBS for federal government positions, there isn't an equivalent system for contractor jobs.

The Washington Post, however, has a pretty good listing of contractor jobs. If it's something you're interested in, you should check out this resource. You can even search for jobs in your area.

New Year: Where We Stand

2010-01-05T14:10:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone. Well, it's time to look forward to a new decade...that last one didn't work out so well (for those of you who have not been following the blog for long).

My new year's resolution is to focus on the job search aspect of this blog...for one post. Sorry for the sporadic updates recently, but I have a bunch of fun things in the works - including yet another animated video.

In this post, however, I'm going to make good on my resolution and update you on where we (and by that, I mean "I") stand in terms of my job search.

Recruiters: I've actually had some success going down this road. I was referred to two NON-legal recruiters. One responded back to me. The other has not. The fellow who responded to me was away from the office, but he got back to me quickly and said he was happy to work with me in regard to my job search, so there must be at least some hope for me. In addition to my resume, I gave him the rundown of my background - including the JD - and he's still interested!

I'm as giddy as a fat girl finally being asked to the dance...or, uh, something like that.

In any event, the other guy is pretty much a top tier recruiter, so I'm not sure if I stand much of a chance of working with him. He may only work with top candidates. Apparently, having limited formal training in the field in which I'm interested, a three year gap in one's resume, and an irrelevant (at best) graduate degree may cause me to fall just short of being a top tier candidate.

I'll report back with any advice I may glean from the first gentleman. I'll also keep you apprised of any progress I make via this avenue.

JD Underground? I'm referring to the content of my resume rather than the popular bastion of misery where graduate's whose law school dice roll "snake eyes" end up.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was leaning towards only mentioning my JD if it seemed like the position was one where a law degree could at least be spun as an asset for the position to which I was applying.

I've decided that when I talk to people about jobs in their field (rather than applying through a job board/website), I'm going to be upfront and mention my law degree. I assume that for all but the most cursory interviews, my law degree (and what I've been doing for the last three years) is going to come up.

I'm not interested in lying - and I really wouldn't have any plausible excuse for what I was doing anyway. I'd only leave my law degree off my resume (in the relevant education section) to help me get an interview in the first place and afford me the opportunity to explain away the degree.

When it comes to potential employers or other contacts I speak to directly, I already have their ears, and I don't want to them to think I'm intentionally misleading them by failing to disclose my JD. I, therefore, have decided to be a little bit more willing to share my graduate education experience.

Policy Positions - I've maintained that "networking" does work (at least to some degree) outside of the legal arena. I think I have some recent proof that buttresses my opinion.

A friend of mine recently let me know that a friend of his knew about some policy research positions that were becoming available. As someone who (sort of) worked in this area and as a field where a JD can actually be useful, these positions are always worth a look.

The primary position in which I was interested was related to economic research. Unfortunately, it looks like there may have been some miscommunication, and I'm not sure if this position is still available. I'm waiting for a followup. The other position was interesting, but I don't think it's something for which I'd want to move.

Anyway, I guess this is how networking is supposed to work. A friend of mine thought about me when he heard about these opportunities. He put me in touch with his friend. I spoke with his friend, and he gave me the contact information for his friend/contact who would be making the hiring decision. In cases where the position actually still exists, this seems like it would work out even better.

Computer Skills - For those of you out there who are under the impression that I spend most of my time behind the computer screen being unproductive, well, you may be right that I spend most of my time using the computer, but occasionally I am productive.

For example, I recently purchased some books about web design, PHP programming, and MySQL. I've spent a good amount of time recently learning about/reviewing these topics. I don't know if I could get to the point by learning on my own to become a full time developer, but if I can find a company that's will to train me, I think I could make a quick transition into such a position.

In addition, I think it'll make me more marketable for a business position with a e-commerce/IT company.

I'm holding off on pursuing any specific certifications until I talk to some more people in the field to see what if anything is particularly desirable at this point.

Job Postings - I don't know if it's the recession or my current resume that's holding me back, but virtually all my applications have fallen into the abyss. I haven't even received rejection letters.

I've changed tactics a little bit by applying for positions without my JD on my resume and by shortening my cover letters. I've already discussed my JD, but I think my cover letters were also causing me some trouble.

I think I wrote some pretty good cover letters for the jobs to which I applied. I had a bunch of people read them and they agreed. I even followed the format my law school suggested for writing them. As proud as I may have been of them, they probably were too long for most people to bother reading.

I actually saw this idea on another blog (which I can't remember), but I shortened my cover letter to about a paragraph getting right to the point and outlining my skills but not adding too much other information.

I'm not sure how these new tactics will work, but for the couple jobs to which I've applied using them, I haven't had any real luck.

Government Jobs - At first I was opposed to seeking a position with the government. I'm pretty interested in getting into the corporate world. Under the IBR, however, the government will pay off your loans in 10 years. Plus, if I have a position where I can actually glean some skills - learning about government contracts, financial analysis, db management - I may actually be quite marketable to private sector companies in 10 years once I'm out of debt.

Resume/Network - I'm working with a b-school grad to better structure my resume. I'm not sure I agree with all of the recommendations I'm receiving, but it can't hurt to have another perspective.

This person has also opened up her local network to me and has agreed to put me in touch with people who she knows who work for companies in which I may be interested.

Another friend has also promised to get in contact with some people he knows who work in e-commerce (one who lives in my town) to see if they'd be willing to have an informational interview with me.

As you can see, I have a lot of avenues to explore. There's nothing too concrete right now, but I think with the new year upon us, it's time for me to more aggressively move down these roads and see if there's any fruit to pluck.

Readers - comments, questions, advice, vitriolic name calling - as always, the comments section is open.

Law is for Losers

2009-12-30T06:02:00.002-05:00

The title of this post isn't just an accurate description of the type of person who ends up in our august "profession". It's also the internet moniker of one of the most hilarious bloggers to ever rip into the law school industrial complex.

Law is 4 Losers (aka Skadden Farts) has had a number of different web presences in the five years since graduating law school. His latest incarnation is as the author of Big Debt, Small Law, a site that skewers both the law school industry and the New York City legal community (particularly the small law toilet firms and big law document review sweat shops). The blog lay dormant for a few months, but it is now back with a hilarious look at the after-scammer scavengers over at Solo Practice University.

I assume many of my readers have already taken a look at the new post, but if you haven't, it's definitely worth your time. If you like Esq. Never (or probably even if you don't), you'll love Big Debt. (Feel free to think of Esq. Never as the poor man's/law school grad's Big Debt, Small Law.)

Also, take a look at Law is 4 Loser's profile. He went to a tier 2 school and graduated during the boom times with a top 1/3rd class rank after 1L year and a top 15% rank at graduation. His reward? Five years of alternating between NYC's illustrious personal injury chop shops and handling doc review for the big boys in their infamous boiler rooms. Remember, study hard, kids!

Sadly, Law is 4 Loser's road to destruction led through one of the most depressed locations in which you could possibly live this side of Serbia: Newark, New Jersey. Like my dad queried when I once ordered the fried shrimp platter at a rest stop Bob's Big Boy, "Man, what were you thinking!?"

Now, of course, I can't get too high and mighty. After all, I'm in pretty much the same situation except for the fact that my tier two diploma apparently doesn't even qualify me for a document review position. Nonetheless, by attending a school in a much nicer location, at least I had a window seat on my plane ride to career perdition.

Seton Hall, L4L's alma matter, suffers from some other problems. For one thing, I had never really heard of Seton Hall before I began learning more about law schools. The only thing I knew about it was that at one point one of dorms burned down and a number of students tragically died when they failed to evacuate in time. While that's probably a good analogy for what going to law school is like, I'm not sure that's for what you want your institution to be known.

Furthermore, when you compare SH's career statistics with my school's CSO's numbers, you'd think that my 2TT employed Honest Abe himself - and trust me, that's saying something.

For instance, Seton Hall has the audacity to actually claim that students who work in NON-legal fields make at least an average of over $75k a year (Class of 2007). Apparently, the class of 2008 did even better with those entering the business world making a median starting salary of $125k a year.

Do most MBA programs even boast starting salaries that high? Unless SH graduates an inordinate number of students who end up becomimg international arms dealers or high end escorts, I'm pretty incredulous.

Seton Hall Law: Where your most difficult decision at graduation will be whether you want to make six figures at a big law firm or become a corporate tycoon.

No wonder tuition is over $40k a year.

In any event, welcome back, Law is 4 Losers. I'm glad we can once again add your voice to the anti-law school choir. I'm sorry that you have to toil away in a dungeon, and I'm particularly sorry that you had start your legal career in a city where Seton Hall is one of only the many tragedies to beset it.

In other law blog news, please welcome the Jobless Juris Doctorate to the scene. She has a great post with this choice quote from New York Law School's Dean Matasar:

“We own our students' outcomes," Matasar said at the AALS program. "We took them. We took their money. We live on their money. … And if they don't have a good outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcomes of our institutions. If they're not doing well ... it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the drat place down. And that's a moral responsibility that we bear in the academy.”

What? Haven't the law school apologists informed us that graduates have gotten what they deserve. Does this Dean actually have more sympathy for us than those folks who graduated in 1972 (and dagnabbit if they could find a job so should we)? Maybe so, but until he's willing to make good on his suggestion to place the "Going out of Business" sign on the NYLS, I'm not about to sing his praises.

Readers, please don't be misled. The sorry state of the legal market isn't confined to the greater New York metro area. No, Esq. Never attended law school away from the "Capital of the World", and he any many of his former classmates are currently weighing their options as to whether to accept first year associate positions at Baskin Robbins or the Honey Baked Ham store.

Law School and Drugs: Everybody is Doing It

2009-12-29T16:06:00.003-05:00

Esq. Never is back after the Christmas weekend. I hope everyone had a great time with their friends and families. Most of all, I hope that any 1L's who read this blog made the decision to cut their losses and drop out - it's the best Christmas present you can give yourself.

I would wish the law deans a merry Christmas, but everyday is Christmas for those guys. Besides, those grinches were probably too busy with their annual raids on Whoville to bother celebrating - and I can guarantee you their hearts didn't grow three sizes that day (their bank accounts, maybe).

An odd criticism this blog receives is that it's just a virtual plea for sympathy. For some reason some folks believe that I'm hosting a cyber pity party for my tale of woe and sorrow.

I recognize this may just be an extension of everyone's favorite aspersion: "You're a whiner". I also acknowledge that I've invested more time in criticizing law schools than I originally intended. The main focus of this blog is supposed to be exploring job opportunities in fields outside of law for those who hold a JD.

Nevertheless, most of my overt "moping" is usually intended to be (perhaps poorly executed) self deprecating humor. My condemnation of the law school industry is not intended to be an extension of my own dissatisfaction with my current station in life. Instead, the points I make are applicable to a broad group of law school graduates.

If I was a lone loser who erred in going to law school and everyone else was doing fine, very well. Given the attention this blog has received and the fact that this message has been repeated across the internet, I don't think that's the case.

Even if I was seeking sympathy, what good would it do? It won't erase the debt or reverse my experience of the last three years. At best, there's the remote possibility that somebody would take pity on me (or even be impressed enough with this blog) and offer me a job. Of course, because I wish to retain my anonymity, I probably wouldn't even accept such an offer.

Contrary to popular opinion, I concede I made a mistake. Like George Bush would likely contend, I feel I made a mistake with the best possible information I had at the time. (More on the availability of information in a later post.) Nevertheless, I agree I do need to take some responsibility for my bad decision.

This, however, is largely irrelevant to the despicable way in which the law school industry conducts itself. One's objection to the law school industry is not dependent on his sympathy for the plight of the various lemmings who were convinced to dance to it's pied piper tune.

If you think that charging obscene prices that force students to endure a lifetime of crippling debt in return for meager job opportunities and only the most minimal practical training is A-okay, that's your business (probably literally). I, however, believe that most reasonable people would recognize this to be an absurd and corrupt business practice.

One commenter once compared the relationship between the law schools and their victims to tobacco companies and smokers. Personally, I think a better analogy would be between drug pushers and drugs users - and not just because it makes the law schools look even more wicked.

You see, I have zero sympathy for people who use recreational narcotics. (Well, there goes half my audience.) It's stupid, it's disgusting, and it's illegal. Furthermore, there no lack of information telling you that that most of these drugs won't just lead to serious serious psychological and health problems, they can very easily kill you. Even if you can evade the Grim Reaper, you probably won't also avoid the slammer.

Everyone pretty much knows that drugs are dangerous and illegal. If somebody faces the consequences of his stupid behavior, I'm not going to be particularly moved. Sure, I believe in second chances, but for the most part, drug users brought their situations on themselves.

Despite my lack of sympathy for most druggies, I don't believe their foolish choices excuse the actions of their enablers, the drug dealers. The dealers are wretched criminals who profit off of human misery. They full well know the ill their "products" have wrought upon society. They, however, do not care - as long as their ill gotten profits continue to flow.

Personally, I think these pieces of human debris also get what they deserve. May they rot in jail for the rest of their miserable lives. (I wonder why I didn't get a call back for that public defender position?)

The same is true for law schools. The deans, et al. know perfectly well that their graduates end up heavily indebted, working document review jobs, etc. They simply don't care. They have no compunction about destroying the lives of others as long as they can profit.

It doesn't really matter how naive, arrogant, or stupid admitted students may be. Knowingly destroying somebody's life for one's own personal pecuniary gain is simply untenable.

As you can guess, I honestly believe that the law school deans and their confederates are simply bad people.

If, per chance, I am wrong, then perhaps this blog (and others) will encourage the law schools to take an introspective look at their conduct. Perhaps, they will voluntarily agree to cease printing their exaggerated employment figures. Maybe they will make law school more practical and truly train people to be attorneys. Perhaps they'll warn students about the limited career prospects for those who don't make the cut at OCI. Who knows? Maybe tap dancing pigs will perform at the the ABA's ceremony announcing the closure of all non tier 1 schools.

Of course, I doubt I'm wrong about the law schools' motivations. If that's the case, then I hope that I (in a small way) can help put pressure on the ABA to independently audit the law schools' bogus statistics. I hope this and similar blogs can encourage legislation to force law schools to adhere to the same standards for reporting statistics as financial firms are currently required. I want to provide further impetus for mainstream journalists to make it clear that law school is, at best, a very risk investment. If nothing else, I hope that any 0L who stumbles across this blog won't just think twice but three or four times before enrolling in law school.

Just as I'm perfectly happy to see drugs dealers exposed and hauled off to jail to pay for the destruction they've caused, I think it's equally appropriate to see the law school scam exposed - both to shame the industry and to warn the next batch of victims of the destruction that awaits them - regardless of how foolish the victims may be.

Oh, and no, I wouldn't mind a few law school deans being dragged off in shackles to Club Fed to face the same fates as Michael Milken, Bernie Madoff, and Ken Lay for their fraud and deception.

Season's Greetings to Law School Deans

2009-12-24T06:00:00.005-05:00

Note: I had planned to write an open Christmas letter to all the law school deans. Upon reflection, the letter was too bitter - even by my standards, so I've opted for an alternative piece to celebrate the holiday season.

Twas the Night Before Christmas (Law Dean Version)
by Esq. Never

Twas the night before Christmas for one shifty law dean
As he looked in the mirror and wondered "Am I really that mean?"

"No, I'm simply a businessman", he brashly declared
"Can I be blamed if so many students enrolled unprepared?"

"Why am I somebody these bitter grads do so deplore?
Have they never heard of 'caveat emptor' ?"

Suddenly he realized he wasn't alone as he turned around quick
And to his surprise, he saw a not-very-jolly old St. Nick

"Dean", a glaring Santa blunty stated
"It's perfectly fair for you to be so ardently hated"

"But why?" queried the Dean to the overweight elf
"Does it have anything to do with my promises of wealth?"

"Those salary stats are a lie not in part but in whole
For this you deserve a suitcase worth of coal"

"But", the Dean protested, "on average our graduates make 80 grand!"
Replied Santa, "... if those figures are calculated in South African Rand!"

Mr. Claus took out his laptop to navigate to Craigslist
He wanted to show the Dean some job postings he may have missed

"Look at this" Santa said, "Grads can work per diem for 50 bucks a day"
"They'd be better off on a farm pitching bales of hay!"

Said the Dean, "Come on, there's plenty of great work in temporary document review!"
Santa replied, "They'd have more dignity cleaning the monkey cage at the zoo!"

"At least they'd make good money," the Dean stood resolute.
Santa scoffed, "22 bucks an hour to work for some brute?"

Santa began to deliver a powerful speech
Hoping somehow the Dean's grinch heart he could reach

"Dean, who enters law school to code documents in a dungeon beneath the city
Or to chase ambulances for a chop shop that is as corrupt as it is gritty?"

"Does anyone come to a TTT law school purely for intellectual edification?
Certainly not at the price of a life time of negative amortization."

The dean indignantly asked, "Why do I care what you think?
There's an endless stream of student loans from which I can drink."

Replied Santa, "Careful dean, I'm more powerful than you know
I can do far more than just say, 'Ho, ho, ho' "

"Are you threatening me, Santa? Will you cause me to die?"
"No, Dean, I'm going to make it so you can no longer lie."

The dean was distraught about what he now had to do
He was forced to reveal that the employment stats were horse poo

The salary figures were adjusted to the 40k range
He had to admit the number of unemployed students now dancing for change

And to this very day nobody really knows
The true story as to why that one TTT finally had to close

Merry Christmas to everyone - even all of the law school apologist grinches out there. I'll be back after the Christmas weekend with plenty of new material.

-Esq. Never

Weekend With Bernie

2009-12-20T06:30:00.000-05:00

This was a pretty interesting week. A bunch of journalists and bloggers linked to this site and its Youtube videos. I received some interesting correspondence, and the recent traffic to this blog and my various Youtube videos has been tremendous.

Despite all of the attention Esq. Never has received, I never thought I would be contacted by a celebrity! That's right, former financier to the stars (and current felon), Bernard Madoff checked in with Esq. Never this week.* Apparently, Bernie unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) isn't a big of fan of this blog or its related endeavors. Nevertheless, assuming e-mails are as rationed as phone calls are in prison, I decided to allow Mr. Madoff the opportunity to express his thoughts for all to read.

Esq. Never,

I recently came across your blog and "Law School Carol" videos while perusing the Wall Street Journal on-line. Let me be blunt, you sir should be ashamed of yourself. Not only did I waste valuable minutes of my web surfing allowance here at Club Fed reading/watching your drivel, but I found myself becoming enraged at your miserable attitude.

It's people like you and the other complainers that are the reason why I am being unjustly incarcerated by the government. None of you whiners understand a thing about risk and doing adequate research. Didn't anyone tell you law school washouts or my investors that life isn't fair? Now society wants those of us who have been able to exploit this axiom to suffer. I thought this was America!

Fortunately, there seem to be voices of reason out there to counter the caterwauling on this blog . In the comment section beneath the ABA's story about your little video, a few real Americans decided to weigh in.

For example, one commenter noted "Please don’t whine about the shiny school brochures and things you “heard” from others or what the dean told you. Do you really believe everything you’re told? I hope not. If you do and now you have a crippling student debt and either no job or a poorly paying one, then you’ve learned a valuable lesson – do your research!"

I told my lawyers I wanted to use something similar to that line, too, but no, they said the court wouldn't buy it. Is it MY fault that my investors were foolish enough to believe what I told them or that they were swayed by some silly prospectus my firm produced?

Furthermore, I really like this guy, "This sense of entitlement is disgusting with law school grads now. Sorry mommy and daddy can’t always make it right, Gen Ys and Mills. So many of you go to law school for the wrong reasons and then cry because you can’t back out of the debt and misteps you made and the lack of critical thinking skills used to make such an important decision. If you want an absolute promise or guarantee in life, commit a felony and go to jail."

Right on, my friend. I wasn't even working with you selfish youngsters, and I still faced this entitlement problem: "Some admission officer convinced me to borrow a lot of money in order have better career options; some investment guru promised a strong rate of return if I invested my life savings with him - Now *I* feel entitled to have that promise upheld." You people make me sick!

There were some great points in there about actually doing research. Come on, just because the ABA, NALP, US News, and the law schools themselves all publicized respectable starting salaries and great employment statistics is no reason to take those claims at face value. You should have realized that there's no way those statistics were reasonable.

It's the same thing with my company. I mean it was mathematically impossible for me to provide my clients with the returns I claimed through any legal process. Somebody even complained to the SEC as early as 1999 about my tactics. How dumb were these people? They didn't even seem to care that I didn't allow them to have on-line access to their own accounts or that I sold all of the the company's holdings for cash before the end of each period to avoid making disclosures to the SEC.

After ignoring all those red flags, now those crybaby investors are whining just like you losers!

Also, kudos, to Dean JoAnne Epps (most likely speaking on behalf of all law deans) for dismissing the idea of an outside audit of law school salary/employment statistics. I did the same thing when some whiners complained about my firm's failure to use an outside auditor. I just made up some malarkey about the need for secrecy and that my brother was taking care of that in his role as chief compliance officer. Claiming that collecting the data would be too hard is a nice touch. Who's going to disprove you?

I hope you have the courage to post this dose of reality, Esq. Never! I especially want to encourage the deans to continue with their great business model. I mean, I wiped out the savings of old people and even some not for profit institutions, but I don't think I ever drove anyone into debt. I mean inducing a bunch of young people to mortgage their futures on some illusory promises of employment, that's just ruthless! I LOVE it!!!

Plus, hiding behind the cover of being a not for profit champion of higher learning is just pure genius. (Though I am intrigued by the for profit schools trying to get a piece of the action.) Oh, and the fact that you can reap your revenue almost exclusively through an endless stream of government guaranteed loans just brings a tear to my eye.

So here's some lessons, members of the entitlement generation: Never trust anyone (not your financial consultants, not the guardians of higher education, and for the love of Pete, not lawyers!); Caveat Emptor (even if that doctrine has technically been abolished) - if what you pay for doesn't work out, tough luck; and if you're going to brazenly rip people off, make sure you use a non-profit vehicle to do so.

I should have taken my own advice: The Bernie Madoff School of Law - I like the sound of that! Alas, I'll never have that chance because apparently government lawyers won't go after their own but are willing to come down hard on those of us in the financial sector.

-Bernie

P.S. - If any of your readers are looking for legal work, let me know. Because the government has seized my assets, I can't really pay them anything, but just think of the experience they'll build. Plus, I write great letters of recommendation.

* Correspondence may not have actually taken place.

The Federal Student Loan Program: It Seemed Like a Good Idea

2009-12-18T16:17:00.002-05:00

When the federal student loan program was started, I assume no one thought it would one day produce a class of well educated but generally unemployable young adults. The idea probably seemed like a reasonable compromise between a system where only those who could afford higher education (or were willing to sacrifice in order to afford it) and a costly system where the government would entirely subsidize the cost of attendance.

Under a student loan regime, students would have easy access to federal loans and would then repay the money with interest with the money they earned from their higher paying jobs. Unlike a system of government subsidies (or nationalized higher education), the government would not have to pay for every twenty something to go to college and eventually be forced to engage in some form of rationing to curtail the otherwise unchecked demand. The system could also be seen as more "equitable" than the then existing laissez-faire model.

Sadly, the law of unintended consequences eventually reared its head. I assume for a while the system worked as planned: students borrowed, got better jobs, and paid back their loans. The problem is that thanks to the lower cost (at least in the short term) of deferring payment to attend college, the number of people pursuing higher education increased.

This not only diminished the value of having a degree but also increased the demand for higher education. The higher the demand, the higher the price a supplier can charge its consumers. The easy credit in addition to the chorus echoing from society that "education is the key" has driven higher education prices into the stratosphere.

As the cost of education has increased, government loans often were not enough to cover all expenses. In order to take advantage of the public loans, student often have to also resort to borrowing private loans, which usually have less favorable terms than the federal loans. (Within the last few years, graduate students have been able to borrow the entire cost of their education by using GradPLUS loans.)

This flood of abundant credit has also encouraged another economically inefficient practice: Rent Seeking. Rent seeking takes place when an entity seeks to profit by taking advantage of the (usually artificial) economic environment rather than through the production of actual wealth. As long as schools can convince students to attend their institutions, they can tap into an almost limitless supply of these government backed loans (and often residual private loans).

Law schools have particularly benefited from this student loan system. Law schools are relatively inexpensive to run when compared to other graduate programs (there is no need for expensive labs unlike for the sciences and medicine). There are few barriers to entry - no upper level mathematics or science requirements. Law has a relatively revered role in the American intellectual tradition and has been commonly seen as the path to wealth for those who were neither mathematically nor scientifically inclined. Like other graduate programs, the devalued undergraduate degree (particularly in the humanities) has made the law degree more attractive.

The rent seeking phenomena has been particularly evident with the rise of a multitude of new law schools. One for profit company has opened three new law schools within the past several years. Drexel, Liberty, and LaVerne all have relatively new law schools. The UMass system is looking to acquire a currently unaccredited law school while the SUNY system is mulling the addition of a new law campus at Binghampton.

The ability to draw from this reservoir of easy credit is at the heart of the problem. New schools enter an already saturated system and current schools charge ever increasing prices for degrees that are ever decreasing in value because there's very little capping demand.

Things have become even better for the law schools. Private lenders can lend with impunity because their debtors no longer have any protection in bankruptcy (except in the most extreme circumstances). The GradPLUS program makes it possible to borrow the entire cost of a legal education from the government will minimal barriers.

What's more, while the Income Based Repayment (IBR) plan has been a great relief to borrowers, it's also something law schools most likely applaud as well. Not only does it slightly mute some of the resentment against them from recent graduates, but it also shifts the burden from the borrowers to the tax payers.

Under the IBR, borrowers need only pay 15% of their adjusted gross income less 150% of the poverty line every year (for all public loans - including GradPLUS). After 25 years, the remaining debt is forgiven (though possibly taxed). If a borrower works in the public sector or non-profit sector for 10 years, his loan is discharged after 120th payment.

Dissecting the new repayment policy is best left for another post, but for all those who shrug their shoulders at the law students who "should have done more research" before they borrowed so much money, now the law schools are coming after you. The law schools will now be reaping "profits" (I know they're "non-profit") not only off the backs of their students but also off of the backs future tax payers.

Like a typical rent seeker, they don't really add any value to the economy. Instead, they are scavengers and parasites simply taking advantage of a federal program gone awry. It's not like there is more demand for attorneys or an increased number of jobs to warrant either more schools or higher prices for receiving J.D.'s.

If we can't agree that the law schools are crooked, can't we at least agree that they are economically inefficient?

Recruiters

2009-12-17T13:16:00.003-05:00

Some of my readers have *ahem* politely encouraged me to move away from dealing with the recent news stories and related criticism. I agree. I would like to get back to the focus of this blog a bit more. I'm not sure why so many people read a blog they don't like - in the words of Lisa Simpson "Why would they show up just to boo us?" - but in any event, thanks for the constructive criticism.

Today, I'd like to to discuss working with recruiters -sometimes known as headhunters. One decent piece of advice I did receive from my career services office is that entry level graduates from law schools really can't make use of recruiters. The reason is that as recent graduates we "don't have heads to hunt".

This is reasonable advice. There's little value to recent graduates (of any institution) aside from their degrees and whatever honors or achievements they earned while seeking those degrees. Therefore, a firm or company doesn't really need a middleman to help determine if a recent graduate will be right for the job. The employer can just evaluate the applicants course of study, internships, etc. It's also fairly easy to advertise an entry level position and have a number of recent graduates apply for it.

For those of us with pre-law, professional backgrounds, however, there may be some benefit to working with recruiters. You see, while the path to becoming a first year associate is a narrow one (you either get recruited at OCI or your don't), there are a number of different avenues people with some substantive work experience can take to get into different fields. For example, I recently spoke with someone with only a few years of work experience who was looking to relocate, she spoke with a headhunter who was able to get her a bunch of interviews (which led to a job).

One thing to keep in mind is that recruiters usually make their money by collecting a fee from the company which hires their recruit. This makes it more expensive to hire a recruited candidate rather than one who applies to the company directly. In this economy, with so many people seeking work, this could put you at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, given the volume of applicants, head hunters may be a good way of sorting through unqualified candidates and zoning in those who reliable head hunters have recruited.

If nothing else, if a head hunter is willing to work with you, it seems like there could be other benefits besides possibly landing some interviews. A recruiter is likely to offer you significant advice on both your resume and your sales pitch. After all, the more marketable you are, the more likely he is to place you and collect his fee. He may also be able to help spin your law degree with employers in ways that you are not able.

I'm going to speak tonight with a guy who's going to put me in touch with some friends who are recruiters. I'll let you know how things work out in later posts.

Readers, have any of you worked with recruiters/headhunters in the past? Any advice or information you'd like to pass along? Please post in the comments below.