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….
I think that every lawyer feels that they have been employed by Satan at one time or another. It’s just like how criminals end up working for Keyser Söze without knowing it. Whether he’s running your firm from a corner office, or he’s a client you end up representing, most lawyers end up working for the devil at one time or another.
Usually, Satanic jobs and assignments try to appear normal. But that job market is really tight. Evidently, it’s such a buyer’s market that Satan doesn’t feel like he has to hide his true nature anymore. He’s now openly advertising to hire some new associates on Craigslist….
But employers who are trying to take advantage of the desperation in the recent graduate market are real jerks. Trying to get desperate recent grads to work for free (or to actually pay you to work) isn’t taking advantage of a market opportunity, it’s taking advantage of people.
We’ve seen a lot of employers offering to “hire” people for free, but rarely with the kind of pompous overtones of the Craigslist ad below. It’s one of those ads that boasts about a lot of things in ALL CAPS, except for when it comes to paying people….
Industry observers can debate why applications are down. But I think it’s really as simple as what I’m about to show you. People go to law school so they can get jobs and have nice lives. They don’t go to law school for love of abstract learning. They don’t go to law school because of anything that happens in the third year of law school. They go for jobs.
And when there are no jobs, when experienced attorneys are making Craigslist postings like this one I’m about to show you, it makes people think, “Why in the hell would I go to law school right now?”
Let’s take a look at the saddest single dad with a J.D. on Craigslist….
Anyone who’s been following the implosion of the law school bubble is well aware of the fact that many recent graduates have been left floundering when it comes to employment prospects. And given the vast media coverage of the legal academy’s existential crisis, everyone and their mother knows that entry-level law jobs are few and far between. People are hungry for experience, but they’ve quickly come to the conclusion that it’s a real seller’s market out there. In today’s economy, it’s kill, be killed, or work in retail with a law degree (a fate which, for some, may be worse than even death).
As expected, some employers have chosen to take advantage of this situation. Take, for example, the “excellent position” we covered last summer, after a number of tipsters emailed us to express their outrage. The job was touted as providing “valuable experience,” and even though it had a sad little yearly salary of $10,000, some 32 people applied.
In the wonderful world of legal one-uppance, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with an even more audacious employment scheme. Would you be willing to pay someone for legal experience? Because that’s what this Connecticut law firm expects you to do.
Leave it to a lawyer to come up with a way to turn this dearth of job opportunities into a revenue stream….
Elections have consequences, and right now I’m waiting for Republicans to start paying the piper. I’m looking at you, Ted Nugent. You declared, nay promised, that if Obama was reelected, you’d either be dead or in jail within a year. Well, tick tock buddy, we’re all waiting.
In fact, there were many Republicans who promised to do all sorts of horrible things should Barack Obama win. And apparently some of them are following through. Nothing makes a political statement about the vibrancy of our democracy than petulantly firing people when democracy doesn’t go your way.
And heck, we don’t even know how many people will be “not hired” because, “Grrr… we have to pay for our employees’ health care because we were too partisan or stupid to support a single-payer system that would have shifted the burden of health insurance away from private employers.”
At least, we won’t know unless they tell us. Which, incredibly, one solo practitioner apparently did, in a rejection letter to somebody who applied in response to her Craigslist ad. It’s easily the best post-election rejection letter we’ve seen….
If you were searching for employment and you saw an ad proposing that you audition for the job — much like you would if you were a contestant on Top Chef, Project Runway, or ATL Idol — would you still apply? What if the firm was offering $20 per hour for each assignment completed during the audition process?
Those are the questions that we’ve been tasked with today by many of our loyal readers who emailed us about a Craigslist job out in California. This is what the legal job market has come to….
Back in May, we brought you news about a full-time job opportunity that appeared on Boston College Law School’s Symplicity page. Everyone expressed outrage over the position advertised, simply because of its annual salary of $10,000. If you do the math, that works out to about $4.81 per hour, which is well below minimum wage. But apparently our economy is such that at least 32 people applied for the job — a job that didn’t even yield a living wage.
Keeping that tableau in mind, tipsters recently brought our attention to yet another low-paying job. This one is above minimum wage. But even jobs that will get you off of a ramen noodle budget just aren’t good enough these days….
It’s time to take another look at some of the worst jobs being offered to recent law graduates around the country. Most people think that getting a J.D. is a path to high-salaried positions where you work in an office that smells of rich mahogany.
For some people, it all works out. But many recent graduates of law school end up fighting it out on salaries between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. It’s the bi-modal salary distribution curve, folks, and it’s not your friend.
Today, we’re not looking at full-time jobs, though. We’re taking a look at some positions available for people looking to supplement their income. These are part-time positions, but if you are a student or a recent graduate who needs some extra cash, you should check these out.
Item that zero percent of babies needed for roughly the first 3,000 years of civilization.
Last month, I found myself in a store named “Buy Buy Baby.” That’s not a typo. There’s really a store whose very name encourages rampant consumerism for babies before they can even start forming memories.
Needless to say, I was not impressed. At one point, I threatened to buy my baby a wheelbarrow and some duct tape to avoid the stroller hijacking. When that joke didn’t magically make the prices go down, I asked one of the sales clerks what “poor” people do when they have children.
The clerk didn’t miss beat, and said, “You don’t want your baby to feel poor, do you?”
Of course, there is a real answer to the question “what do poor people do.” They go on Craigslist and buy used baby stuff! Because nothing says “broke” like going online and buying crap for your baby that some other baby has already peed and vomited on.
But when you are on Craigslist, buyer beware. And the seller should beware too, because people who buy things on Craigslist might be idiots. That’s something that a local judge in Massachusetts is learning….
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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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.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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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. 
