Thank God!
– Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown commenting in response to opponent Elizabeth Warren’s recent jab that she “didn’t have to take her clothes off” to pay for college.
(Actually, Brown posed nude for Cosmopolitan in 1982, when he was studying for finals at Boston College Law School.)
Twenty years ago this September, I started law school not knowing anyone there. More importantly, no one there knew me.
Now, mind you, this was at Boston College Law School, where such things aren’t really emphasized. I mean, it’s not like at that school across the Charles, where people like the Winklevii both wear and file suits. At BC Law, which (at least back then) prided itself on being a kinder, gentler law school, it wasn’t really about who you knew, or who knew you. (Yes, one of those whos should really be a whom, but only someone at Harvard would actually say it that way.)
Still, it’s nice to have people know who are you are, and it’s a useful skill to develop for after school, when you need to know how to market your services as a lawyer.
So three weeks after school started, almost everyone knew my name. You see, I had a secret weapon.…
Continue reading “Small Firms, Big Lawyers: Getting Your Name Out There”
And now things get interesting. As we continue to run through the U.S. News 2012 law school rankings, we get to a crucial set of schools. The schools in this batch are certainly top tier, but they’re not “top 14″; for the most part, though, they charge like top 14 schools (especially the private ones).
So this is the batch of schools where we usually hear questions like: Should I go to this school at full price, or a much lower-ranked school for free? And our answer is usually, “How much lower-ranked are we talking about?”
The bottom line is that when people get into schools like Duke, or Penn, they are going to end up going to that school. But when people get into some of the schools on this list, they do seriously consider other options. Should I retake the LSAT, score better and apply again? How much financial aid am I getting? What’s the job market like in the [secondary market] this school is located in, just in case I get stuck there? Is it worth it to go into this much debt for a degree from that school?
These factors should come into play no matter which law school you get accepted to, but at this point on the U.S. News list, cost factors take on increased importance…
Continue reading “Open Thread: 2012 U.S. News Law School Rankings (16 – 30)”
Ed. note: This is the first installment of Small Firms, Big Lawyers, one of Above the Law’s new columns for small-firm lawyers.
I’ve been working in small law firms my whole career — nearly 17 years. I’d like to tell you that I chose this path for carefully considered and noble reasons, but I can’t. In truth, I ended up on the small-firm path for one simple reason:
A blonde.
Let me explain.
Now it’s not what you think. I didn’t turn my back on a BigLaw career to pursue a flaxen-haired beauty. That would almost be romantic, and this is a serious law blog. Ish. No, the story is a bit more prosaic.
I entered Boston College Law School in the fall of 1991. At the time, I had a serious girlfriend (the aforementioned blonde) who was not going to law school. And that became a problem. You see, like most 1Ls, I got caught up in everything that was new about law school: new friends, new challenges, new vocabulary (I mean really: how many jokes should there be with “res ipsa loquitur” in the punchline?). I didn’t realize it at the time, but I paid too much attention to my new law-school world, and not enough attention to my girlfriend.
So she left me….
Continue reading “Small Firms, Big Lawyers: How I Became a Small-Firm Lawyer”
October is typically a prime wedding month, yet we’ve seen a precipitous and unaccountable prestige drop-off in the NYT over the past couple of weeks. You know it’s lean times when the only Ivy in the batch is UPenn, which has a big-time football program and therefore can’t be academically serious.
Also, witness this rare occurrence: a groom so unprestigious that the NYT can’t even bring itself to befoul its pages with his educational credentials! (LEWW found them here.)
But never fear, we’ve managed to find some wheat among the chaff:
More on these couples, plus our comprehensive list of all the legal-eagle weddings, after the jump.
Continue reading “Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Firm Yet Supple”
A third-year student at Boston College Law School made a very reasonable request of the law school’s interim dean, George D. Brown: Give me my money back.
I say it’s a reasonable request, because it is customary in this country to get a refund when you buy something that is defective in some fundamental way. And the people who won’t give you a refund are usually scam artists or a**holes.
Dean George Brown doesn’t want to pull a Mel Gibson, does he?
Well, the Boston College 3L isn’t sure that Dean Brown will do the right thing. So the student wrote an impassioned open letter to the dean, which was published by EagleiOnline…
Continue reading “Boston College 3L Asks for His Money Back; Hilarity Ensues”
If Boston College Law Dean John Garvey was a J.R.R. Tolkien character, he’d be about to shadow fax in his letter of resignation to the BC administration. Eagleionline reports:
John H. Garvey, Dean of Boston College Law School, will be named the new President of Catholic University of America tomorrow…
The Catholic University of America (CUA), is the national university of the Catholic Church in the United States. Founded and sponsored by the bishops of the country with the approval of the Holy See, CUA states that it “is committed to being a comprehensive Catholic and American institution of higher learning, faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ as handed on by the Church.”
Regular ATL readers know that Dean Garvey has defended the Catholic interpretation of Jesus Christ before…
Massachusetts had another special election this week, though on a smaller scale than the Scott Brown — Martha Coakley Senate race of last month. A member of the Law Student Association (LSA) at Boston College Law School stepped down unexpectedly this month. Polls were open on Monday and Tuesday to elect a new member of the BC Law’s student government.
We hear that there were quite a few contenders for the seat, but one 2L stood out from the rest. From a BC Law tipster:
Normally, no one cares about LSA — they are seen as a group that gives us two free beers once a month at a bar. But for some reason, this kid has been on an all-out assault for the seat.
Matt Maguire was inspired by Scott Brown and ran a similar populist campaign:
He has mirrored Scott Brown’s Senate campaign — running against the “establishment” and using a lot of buzzwords (“I drive a truck,” “the peoples’ seat,” “cutting through the red tape” etc.).
It makes sense. Brown, after all, is a BC Law grad. While Brown was at BC Law, he posed naked in the pages of Cosmopolitan Magazine’s 1982 issue. This, too, provided inspiration for Maguire’s campaign. The scandalous campaign poster is barely SFW (Safe for Work), so we’re putting it below the fold…
In November, we told you about Damian Bonazzoli, who was — at that time — a senior staff attorney for the Massachusetts Appeals Court. He decided to make some money on the side by responding to a Craigslist ad seeking someone to write a term paper.
The Boston College law grad sent along his résumé and said he was willing to write a paper on physician-assisted suicide for $300. The Craigslist poster though was not a lazy Harvard freshman. It was an investigative journalist for Commonwealth magazine, who wanted to expose the “shadowy underworld” of college papers for purchase.
When the journalist confronted him, Bonazzoli was surely embarrassed but said:
“I am aware of no state or federal statute that prohibits such a practice. This is not the equivalent of, say, lying on a federal employment or tax form,” he said. “Could your school take disciplinary action? Of course. But that’s quite different from a criminal prosecution.”
Bonazzoli should have done some research before making that statement, as there is such a statute, passed in 1972.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court was none too pleased to have one of its staff attorneys on the wrong side of the law…
Continue reading “Hard-Hitting Term Paper Exposé Costs Appellate Law Clerk His Job”
Career service offices can be scary places these days, given the tough job-searching environment for law school students. The summer plans of many 1Ls and 2Ls are still up in the air this year, as firm offers are sparse.
Many law school students have given up hope of finding a job. One law school may be giving up hope too. Boston College Law School is considering an alternative to a summer gig: summer classes.
From an email sent out by BC Law Associate Dean Mike Cassidy:
We have heard from many students that the summer legal job market is very difficult, and that if there were an option to earn credit for summer study (while perhaps working in a non legal setting to pay the bills) some students might find this option very attractive, especially if it would help them accelerate their degrees.
So BC students may be able to spend the summer working as Starbucks baristas while taking classes. Are they really raring to finish up their degrees and get into the job market for real?
Continue reading “Boston College Law School Has A Plan For Its Jobless 1Ls and 2Ls”
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
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In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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