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Greatest Lawyer Ad Ever: ‘Trust Me, I May Have A Law Degree, But I Think Like A Criminal!’

Greatest Lawyer Ad Ever: ‘Trust Me, I May Have A Law Degree, But I Think Like A Criminal!’

The Decision: Top-20 Law School At A Discount, Or Top-10 At Full Price?

The Decision: Top-20 Law School At A Discount, Or Top-10 At Full Price?

From The Career Files: Finding Your Passion In The Law (Part 1)

From The Career Files: Finding Your Passion In The Law (Part 1)

Law School Keeps Price-Gouging Students Up Until The End With Outrageous Graduation Fees

Law School Keeps Price-Gouging Students Up Until The End With Outrageous Graduation Fees

Making Law School Millennial-Friendly

Making Law School Millennial-Friendly

An Honest Lawyer’s Advice For Young People: Don’t Go Into Law — You’ll Regret It

An Honest Lawyer’s Advice For Young People: Don’t Go Into Law — You’ll Regret It

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The Decision: Top-20 Law School At A Discount, Or Top-10 At Full Price?

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U.S. News will release its annual law school rankings next week. That means that a bunch of would-be law students will have another somewhat arbitrary look at which schools have the right to saddle them with lifelong debt, and which schools should be begging them to come with money.

So it’s time to fire up the ATL Decision Machine! You know how this works: you email us with the two schools you are choosing between, we tell you what to do, you end up going to the highest ranked school you can get into anyway.

Usually, Lat and I give slightly competing reasons, but he’s on vacation right now, so mwahahaha. Today’s choice is interesting: two good schools, but only one is shelling out any money…

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.07.14

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* Here’s a blast from the past: Susan B. Anthony’s indictment for voting in the 1872 election. Turns out she was a woman. Who knew? [Slate]

* The New Yorker has a cartoon that hits the current state of Biglaw right on the head. [The New Yorker]

* People arguing for Crimea’s right to secede and join Russia may want to check out how much support the pro-Russia party got the last time they voted. [Volokh Conspiracy / Washington Post]

* Key lessons that lawyers can learn from Google. Sadly, “make your logo a cool doodle” didn’t make the list. [Adam Smith, Esq.]

* The long-serving Chief Deputy County Clerk of New York resigned after being disciplined. But what in the world was really going on over there? The web is tangled indeed. [WiseLawNY]

* Idaho considering allowing guns on campus. Because armed students can stop campus shootings. It’s not like trained professionals ever make shootings worse. Rank amateurs should be just fine. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

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From The Career Files: Finding Your Passion In The Law (Part 1)

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Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today, Sunny Choi of Ms. JD interviews lawyers who have found their passion practicing law.

The idea of passion is a seemingly far-fetched one for most people working as an attorney. At some point, 99% of us have regretted the decision to attend law school. Just ask the anonymous 28-year-old who told Business Insider that law school was “a waste of my life and an extraordinary waste of money.” Even the articles on Above the Law will occasionally have you feeling disgruntled about life in the practice.

However, passion is a matter of perspective and it’s very possible to find your passion in, out, or above the law. Part one of this series will focus on the rare breed of attorney who has gone the obvious route and found passion IN the law.

Continue reading at the ATL Career Center…

Law School Keeps Price-Gouging Students Up Until The End With Outrageous Graduation Fees

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It’s almost mid-March, and you know what that means: broke law students are starting to freak out about the costs associated with their upcoming commencement ceremonies.

Most of them have already forked over six figures of government Monopoly money to their law schools, so why on earth are they so concerned about the cost of renting their caps and gowns for graduation?

To be honest, the loan money is starting to run out. While some schools have reasonable rental options (in the $50-$70 range), other schools are foisting very expensive graduation gear upon their graduates in some sort of a “gouge ‘em before they go” cash grab.

But how much is too much when it comes to one-day rental prices? Students at one top-tier law school have described what they’re expected to pay as jaw-droppingly “insane”…

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Making Law School Millennial-Friendly

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Law school applications are down. It looks like the Millennials just don’t want to go to law school. It’s probably because they’re too busy be lazy and texting, amirite?

Or, if we’re not going to jump on lazy stereotypes that have been passed down from generation to generation since Maynard G. Krebs roamed the Earth, maybe there’s something wrong with the way that law schools approach education and the Millennials just happen to be the generation that inherited the sluggish job market that exposed the festering problems within the legal academy.

Many law schools have suggested that more “practice ready” clinical education is the solution. Elie thinks this is basically a marketing gimmick. I think it’s a valuable complement to legal education, but certainly not a replacement for other reforms.

But maybe the answer is not so much about making “practice ready” students, but making “practice ready” professors….

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An Honest Lawyer’s Advice For Young People: Don’t Go Into Law — You’ll Regret It

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An anonymous lawyer in New York City

I’m not sure I’d recommend that a young person go into law.

When I was starting out, it was more of a profession, and your worth was determined by the service you provided. Now it’s become more of a business, and your worth is determined by the fee you’re able to collect.

– An honest lawyer who happened to be passing through Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan when he was photographed by Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York.

(Do you agree with him? Feel free to sound off in the comments.)

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The Great Law School Brain Drain

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I noticed over at the Tax Prof Blog that the LSAC has begun releasing data on the most recent crop of LSAT information. At the Legal Whiteboard, Jerry Organ dives into the data and found that average scores are declining:

Across the 195 law schools in the 48 contiguous states and Hawaii fully-accredited by the ABA’s Section for Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar as of 2010 (thus excluding Belmont, LaVerne, California-Irvine, and Massachusetts-Dartmouth) the entering first-year class average LSAT profile fell one point at all three measures between 2012 and 2013, from 159.6/157/153.5 to 158.6/156/152.5.  The entering first-year class average LSAT profile fell roughly two points at all three measures between 2010 and 2013, from 160.5/158.1/155.2 to 158.6/156/152.5.

The average decline in median LSAT scores between 2012 and 2013 across U.S. News “tiers” of law schools was .98 among top 50 schools, 1.18 among schools ranked 51-99, .72 among schools ranked 100-144, and 1.13 among schools ranked alphabetically.

Which made me want to revisit a post on Associate’s Mind from last year, Top University Students Avoiding Law School, to see if that trend was holding true in light of the above data. The results? See for yourself….

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Caption Contest Finalists: I Was Gonna Go To Court, But Then I Got High

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Earlier this week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this picture:

Let’s have a look at what our readers came up with, and vote on the finalists…

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Homeland Security Detained US Citizen Inside The US, Used Intercepted Emails To Quiz Her About Her Sex Life

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Just recently, we wrote about how the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has been increasingly detaining and harassing people at the border (or near the border) under highly questionable circumstances — and then refusing to comment on any of it. Instead, CBP has relied on a cloak of secrecy to live outside the law, acting out what we’ve come to expect from authoritarian police states. Recently, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of a woman, Christine Von Der Haar, who is a senior lecturer at Indiana University, after CBP detained her at the airport….

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Morning Docket: 03.07.14

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* Dewey know which D&L defendants did the perp walk of shame before their arraignment yesterday? Three of the ex-executives! Even Steve Davis, who quit his job as in-house counsel to Ras al Ghul Khaimah of the UAE last week. [Am Law Daily]

* It’s about half and half when it comes to states that have filed briefs with the Tenth Circuit in support of or against the rulings striking down gay marriage bans in Utah and Oklahoma. Sadly, not everyone can be as fabulous as we’d like. [National Law Journal]

* Abortion clinics are closing their doors in Texas thanks to new legislation, and the total number of clinics in the state come September will be six. Let the Mexican medical tourism commence. [New York Times]

* Illegal immigrants can’t practice law in Florida, says the state’s Supreme Court, but they can in California. Good thing there’s eleventy billion law schools there to accommodate them. [Miami Herald]

* Webster Lucas, the fellow suing McDonald’s over an alleged race-based napkin denial that’s since prevented him from working, has sued fast food joints before. He’s a “vexatious litigant.” [NBC Los Angeles]

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Changes To Government Loan Forgiveness That Totally Miss The Mark

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Whenever the government gets involved with “helping” students suffering under crushing debt obligations, I wonder if “the government” even partially understands how students think.

There is a new proposal in the budget that would bring significant changes to the student loan forgiveness program. Specifically, the “Public Sector Loan Forgiveness” program. Currently, students with massive amounts of debt can sign up for income-based repayment of their student loans. Their payments are capped at 10% of “discretionary” income. If they work in the public sector or for a designated non-profit, the government forgives the rest of their loans after ten years. For those playing along at home, that means that taxpayers pick up the rest of the bill.

Critics on both sides of the aisle (including me) argue that the current system encourages schools to charge whatever they want for tuition, while discouraging students from making cost-conscious choices about their debt. It’s far from ideal, and this new proposal seeks to do something about it.

But since Congress is involved, the thing they want to do to “fix it” is stupid and will ultimately hurt student borrowers even more….

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.06.14

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* Matt Levine describes how Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP should have taken a lesson from its clients and not used email so much while discussing possible frauds. [Bloomberg View]

* Should we be paying law student externs? Well, yeah, we should. That’s also the conclusion of Jay Edelson and Chandler Givens. [Legal Solutions Blog / Thomson Reuters]

* Speaking of Jay Edelson, his most recent high-profile case is a class action charging the now-defunct Mt. Gox — which stood for “The Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange” — with fraud in its loss of hundred of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins. Hopefully he’s not getting a contingency in Bitcoin… because he could end up with about 20 cents for all his trouble. [PC World]

* The Legal Geeks have a podcast analyzing the legal issues involved in the recent Agents of SHIELD episode and podcast with Judge Matthew Sciarrino. [The Legal Geeks]

* Senator Ted Cruz continues discounting the value of a Harvard Law degree. This time on the subject of voting rights. [Election Law Blog]

* The Center for Public Integrity has won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for its work on the black lung controversy. We previously discussed CPI’s work examining the lengths Jackson Kelly went to in fighting to deny benefits to dying victims. Congratulations on the award and the great work! [Center for Public Integrity]

* The picture after the jump is probably not an appropriate way to talk about slavery.

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