I Need A Contract Attorney: An 'Ivy League' Contract Attorney

You don't need an Ivy League degree to do contract work.

Usually, when we discuss terrible jobs we’re talking about an employer offering a very low salary (or asking for payment), for a low-level, menial job. This time, the hourly rate is actually pretty decent — at least when you can find the work.

It’s one of the requirements that seems totally ridiculous and newsworthy:

Ivy League or comparable only, please.

This is not going to be a post about how contract work is beneath Ivy league (or comparable) attorneys. This is going to be a post about what kind of a giant douchebag you have to be to feel like your collection work can only be completed by Ivy league attorneys….

Here’s the ad. It’s pretty short (click to enlarge):

Sponsored

The brevity of the ad makes the Ivy League thing even more ridiculous. It’s pretty clear that the guy hasn’t fully thought through what he’s looking for (or at the very least thinks he’ll “know it when he sees it”). So he’s using the Ivy League thing to be lazy and maybe cut down on the number of applications.

Which is, of course, the main reason that the “Ivy league” has the power and prestige that it does. Employers are lazy. It’s a lot easier to say, “Oh, she went to [a really old school in the Northeast],” than to actually sifting through applications and make informed decisions about the strengths of each applicant.

Should the quality of the institution make a difference? Of course. Should that be the threshold factor? Only if you are incredibly lazy. Cutting off your applicant pool at “Ivy League or comparable” is just as lazy as those schools that have arbitrary standardized test score cutoffs for admission. You can make something like the LSAT a factor without allowing it to be the only factor or the most important factor.

And if I may now put on my Northeast elitist hat on, WTF is “or comparable.” This ad, by the way, was on the San Francisco Craigslist, so we’re not talking about a market that is exactly saturated with Penn grads. Stanford? Okay. Berkeley? Fine I guess. But if what you are really trying to do with your “Ivy league” thing is to limit your applications to the most selective and well-known schools, you’re going to run out of comparables really quickly.

But that’s not going to stop people from UCLA from applying… because people need jobs, and in their mind’s eye, why aren’t they “comparable”?

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So, to recap, this lazy employer will probably not limit the number of applications he receives by including a requirement that doesn’t really speak to the job he needs to fill.

Great job, sir.

Contract Attorney-Collection/Attachment Experience [Craigslist]