Holy Crap, Job Searches, Law Schools

Homeless Lawyer Secretly Lived In Public Defender's Office For 5 Months

If you think you've seen the worst of the plight of recent law school graduates, you ain't seen nothing yet.

By  
on

Some members of the legal profession are homeless by choice. Take, for example, the Cardozo Law student who decided to live on the streets of New York City because his life was too perfect and he wanted to challenge himself. That was absurd and especially insensitive, because other members of the legal profession are homeless because they feel like they truly have no other choice.

If you think you’ve seen the worst of the plight of recent law school graduates, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Today, we’re going to introduce our readers to Mitchell, a recent graduate of UC Hastings Law. Like most new lawyers, Mitchell was eager to get a job, any job, to avoid the career killer that is an extended gap in one’s résumé. A week after he took the California bar exam, Mitchell was offered a job as a public defender in Silicon Valley — likely at the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office — that was contingent upon bar passage. There was just one problem: Mitchell lived with relatives in Antioch, which is about a two-hour drive (with traffic, but when isn’t there traffic on California highways?) and a three-hour commute on public transportation from the SCPD’s Office.

Although the commute was untenable for him, Mitchell accepted the job anyway — after all, no one in their right mind would turn down an offer in this brutal job market. He started work immediately, but his living arrangements were still up in the air.

What was he to do? If he rented an apartment and later learned that he’d failed the bar exam, Mitchell would be out of a job and stuck with a lease he wouldn’t be able to afford. He was reportedly “completely weirded out” after meeting some “really creepy potential roommates” via Craigslist. Should he have sucked it up and kept looking for a roommate until he found the right one? Probably, but these encounters made him feel so uncomfortable that he promptly ended his roommate search.

“My pay was modest, so I didn’t want to commit to a $2,000 per month lease to learn four months down the line I was out of a job,” Mitchell said in an interview with Kia Croom of SFGate’s Get to Work blog. “Here I am a starving lawyer, fresh out of law school and completely broke.” Mitchell’s experience is like that of so many other recent law school graduates — they’re all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed until they discover that they’ve been thrown into a profession that’s quickly crumbling beneath each step they take before they can even really get their footing. It’s sad, and far too many recent law school graduates’ careers have ended this way before they’ve even had the chance to get started.

Feeling like he’d been left with no other options, Mitchell found himself living out of his office, and occasionally out of his car. Mitchell continued sleeping at the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office for 150 days — five months. You may be wondering how he was able to pull off sleeping at a government office for such a protracted period of time. SFGate has the details on Mitchell’s travails while living as a homeless lawyer:

Sponsored

The rookie attorney’s technique was masterful. He’d stick around the office until the last person left. His desk was re-purposed as both his dining room and bedroom. There he’d enjoy a nightly Stouffers meal for dinner, watch his favorite shows online and eventually fall asleep upright in his chair. Each morning he’d go to the local health club to work out, bath and iron his clothes before reporting to work. On weekends he stayed with relatives in the East Bay, who were oblivious to the fact he was homeless.

“There were many nights when co-workers worked late hours and I ended up sleeping in my truck in the health club parking lot,” he said.

Mitchell’s stint as a homeless attorney came to an end when he found out that he passed the bar exam, ensuring that he’d be able to keep his job at the Public Defender’s Office. He eventually decided to gather up his scant belongings and rent an apartment in Santa Clara. On the plus side, while he was living out of his office, Mitchell was able to save $12,000, a sum that surely makes many recent law graduates in a similar position squirm with envy.

We hope the Santa Clara Public Defender’s Office will take pity on Mitchell’s poor soul — now that the news is out that he’d been sleeping there for months, we imagine his superiors won’t be too happy about it. Perhaps it’s a good thing that he was able to squirrel away all that cash, because he may be out of a job much sooner than he thought.

Silicon Valley attorney lived out of his office for more than 150 days to save on rent
[Get to Work / SFGate]

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , , , ,