Craigslist, Law Schools, Legal Research

The Lowest Job A Lawyer Can Get Is Now 'Law Student'

A T14 law student is asking experienced attorneys to do homework assignments for cash.

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Are you out of work and unable to get even the document review companies to look your way? Did you graduate from a lower-ranked law school and want the opportunity to prove you could have played with the big kids at a T14 school? Or maybe you just always thought elite law schools should work more like football teams in the South. Well, you’re in luck, because a T14 1L has taken to Craigslist seeking an experienced attorney (or at least a 2L/3L) to go ahead and tackle his or her homework assignment.

Once again, Craigslist found a way to lower the bar on the outlook for the legal market.

Go ahead and keep reading if you want to know where to send in your résumé. We won’t judge…

Just kidding, we’d totally judge you. Some NYU 1L is having a hard time with legal writing and decided to turn to the free market:

Just say “Obamacare sucks” and Paul Clement will write it for free.

This can’t be real, right? Paying someone else $350 to write a short assignment is ridiculous. And maybe times have changed since I went there, but this was a pass/fail class when I went to NYU. I hope that’s no longer the case or this moves beyond ridiculous into a purely stupid waste of resources. On the other hand, law schools are supposed to make students “practice ready,” and how better to prepare students for Biglaw practice than encouraging rampant delegation and throwing away far too much money on simple tasks.

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This kid also deserves some accolades for strategic thinking. Last year, the world learned the benefits of outsourcing your own work when an American programmer was outed for earning “several hundred thousand dollars a year” while actually paying a Chinese consulting firm $50,000 a year to do his job while he watched cat videos on Reddit. Perhaps inspired, Jay Edelson hired an actor to secretly be the worst summer associate ever, and one of his phony transgressions was hiring an unemployed attorney for a pittance to do his work for him.

And we read about clients committed to moving legal services to temps in order to keep costs down on a weekly basis. Speaking of temps, how long could this assignment take? Maybe five hours? That hourly wage tops anything I’ve seen from the contract attorney market for some time. So maybe this job isn’t the lowest job a lawyer can get after all. Money-wise anyway. When it comes to self-respect this is still pretty bad.

So perhaps this kid isn’t a bad student as much as sitting on the bleeding edge of practice development. Celebrate the ingenuity!

Just don’t complain when he figures out the going rate for experienced attorneys is much lower than $350 per assignment.

1L Student Appellate Brief (Greenwich Village) [Craigslist]

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Earlier: This Firm Hired An Actor To Play The World’s Worst Summer Associate

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