first

Opportunities are unlimited, unless you're obsessed with being a BigLaw doc review pawn for 9-13 years of your career (prior to being asked to leave the firm because you had no demonstrable legal skills and a non-existent book of business, despite billing 2800 hours every year).

2= fail.

LOL at the picture

I assume Diaz taught the valedictorian how to enter evidence into the record, the salutatorian how to write a brief ,and the rest the difference between a responsive and non-responsive document?

Nice post. Get back to the issues, Oprah.

Unlimited opportunitites my ass. Going to trade school provides you with more opportunities than going to law school.

Jeez, can we have some more news about summer offers? Is that asking too much?

Mystal stole some kid's lunch for sure.

We should make it mandatory for eighth graders to be visited by lawyers all around the country, particularly by the harried and gruff BigLaw variety.
What better way to reduce the ever-increasing number of law grads being churned out every year.

You hear that Roxanna? Unlimited.

Someone should level with these kids and tell them that if they go to law school they will most likely either not be able to find a job in law, or find a job in law that they do not like.

For those of you complaining about there being too many law schools - that is not the problem. The problem begins here, in events like the one in this article. As long as people want to go to law school, new law schools will propagate to meet the demand and armies of law students will flood the market.

The kids in this article are to be forgiven - I certainly had some illogical career aspiration when I was 12. But the truth needs to come out. But perhaps the biggest offenders are the overly-optimistic impressions given by law school prospectuses.

Thank god more average students are being encouraged to go into law with the promise of high income, interesting work and job stability.

Do they have to eat the school lunch? In the words of Marvin Young, "I'm brown baggin' it."

When lawyers came to my middle school they stressed that being a lawyer was not like tv and that you would spend maybe 5% of your time in the courtroom. They could say 5% with a straight face because they were usually real lawyers and not biglaw lawyers.

Am I the only one who had honest lawyers come to career day at middle school? I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for law school. And in college/law school we all knew that the high paying biglaw jobs would not even reach 5% of time in court.

Don't worry kiddies, I am your friend. I will help you be successful...
Go to the best law school you can, regardless of the price. Your second summer, you'll be something called a "summer associate." Doing real attorney work for important clients. During this summer you'll make enough money to pay for your third year of law school. That fall, the firm you summered at will offer you your first job as a lawyer where you'll make $160,000 a year.. plus bonuses!!! You see, I'll be gone in no time.

Am I only the one who thinks it's terrific that the kid who wants to be a defense lawyer is named Darrow?

ATL has achieved internet nirvana...comment characters that are derived from other comment characters. Beautiful.

I will volunteer some friendly parental advice for fathers and mothers. If your child wants to become a lawyer, I propose you do the following to ascertain their potential success in the profession. Let's say you have a 10 year old child who happened to watch some re-runs of the Paper Chase or LA Law and he/she says "Daddy, mama, I want to be a lawyer." As a parent here is what you do. Tell your child from now until they are 16, they have to forfeit their allowance. If your child asks why, remind him/her that if they want to be a lawyer, they will comply without question. On your child's 16th birthday, buy a cylinder tube box and place a blank sheet of paper inside. Give the box to your child and say congratulations, you are now a lawyer. Your child will be flummoxed but that is to be expected. You explain to your child that in real life, young people throw hundreds of thousands of dollars for a worthless piece of paper known as a law degree. Then, you tell your child to mow the lawn, rake the leaves, wax on, wax off and so forth during ages 17-18. Advise your child that the piece of paper earned on his/her 16th birthday is a passport to perform menial work around the house. Then, if your child still wants to be a lawyer, he/she will have proven to be a natural born attorney.

unlimited opportunities to . . . redact privileged documents!

Why is Stephen Curry in the picture?

I've got to admit, I'm not usually a PE fan, but that comment is hilarious.

I am dissappointed that ATL did not alert us that they would be in Charlotte. I am sure there are many lawyers in Charlotte that would love to meet, in person, the editors of this wonderful website.

These folks are practicing to be law school admissions/recruitment staff. Those are the only a-holes out there that still believe that a JD is a gateway degree to "unlimited" opportunities. Complete bull. A JD qualifies you to be one thing a lawyer and even that is a debatable statement. Sure, if you want to be a carpenter, you can still get a JD, but you will need to learn how to cut wood somewhere other than law school just like the admissions people learned how to lie somewhere other than law school

My favorite is contracts incorporating terms of other documents and, when receiving those documents, seeing many of those terms redacted.

Um....

( . )( . )

That post by PE is so good I think we have an impostor.

"unlimited career opportunities."

O Rly.

Only 29 comments so far and already:

-23 with the funniest comment of the week

-PE with the funniest PE comment ever (though that is obviously a bar set low)

Comments should be closed now. 23 wins. Let's call it a day.

Who is Stephen Curry?

I suppose I should know this already, but are the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools accredited by the North Carolina Department of Education?

While I do not think 23's observation is funny, it is astute as that kid does look like Stephen Curry. Clearly 23 is spending time on the ESPN website when he should be reviewing documents. Get back to work BITCHES

These posts clearly demonstrate that we constantly "See your profession through the eyes of 12-year-olds..."

Well done, PE.

Elicited a chortle.

I await Roxanna's Breadline article about how she scares kids away from the law by "using her time well" and visiting local school to talk about her leagal experience, without showering first and covered in her cat's hair.

Why do people insist on perpetuating this myth that one can do anything with a law degree?

I'm going to use my law degree to become a surgeon! No, an astronaut! No, a veterinarian!

More like, if I don't want to be a lawyer, I'm going to go back to school to become a surgeon/astronaut/veterinarian, and then I'll be a surgeon/astronaut/veterinarian with a ridiculous amount of debt and two extra useless initials after my name. There is no reason to go to law school if you don't want to either practice law, or do something directly related to the law.

@$#% Blackberry - I await Roxanna's Breadline article about how she scares kids away from the law by "using her time well" and visiting local schools to talk about her legal experience, unshowered and covered in her cat's hair.

Why do litigators constantly say they practice COMPLEX business litigation? As if!!!

41 - "complex business cases" was referring to what the Judge handles. And in this case it is actually true. Judge Diaz is a judge on the NC Business Court which only has jurisdicition over "complex business cases."

Speaking of naive, apparently, New York Law School's 1L class (part-time and full-time) is upwards of 750 students.

43 - God help them. (Though currently my T14 (oooh) degree is equally worthless.)

I just agreed to coach a high school mock trial team. I'm part of the problem aren't I?

45 - Nah, those kids likely want to be trial lawyers (QE TM?), so they're most likely to succeed. It's the ones who should go to business school but instead will become corporate lawyers because "you can do anything with a law degree!!!!" that you should watch out for.

". . . learn more about the profession by getting to know a lawyer . . ."?

I assume this involves calling them at 10:00 on a Saturday night and asking them if they're stupid, threatening them by saying "Maybe you just really don't want to be here", explaining that "I will not, I repeat, not, be embarrassed" and muttering something about a "disgrace" and getting their secretary to do it.

As a recently laid-off Charlotte lawyer, I can attest the reason that events like this are happening in Charlotte is because there are a LOT of unemployed lawyers with time on their hands.

Did they mention that to the kids?