A couple of days ago, an attorney sent in an email to the New York State Bar Association listserv. Like many people, the attorney was looking for a job. He decided to ask the listserv for some helpful tips:

Subject: [nysba-nonres] (somewhat) new attorney still seeking first FT position From: [Redacted] To: nysba-nonres@lists.nysba.org

Its a difficult time for new lawyers graduating with gigantic student loan debts and a bad economy. I’ve been searching for two years sending out hundreds of resumes and applying for an online jobs every chance I get but it now seems hopeless.

I’m a Fordham Law School graduate and have an internship working at a small bankruptcy/divorce/immigration firm and also have been doing debt collection in state court and attending 341 hearings as a per diem attorney. I also have an interest in criminal law and litigation and therefore took hands on courses in law school: civil litigation drafting, trial advocacy, fundamental lawyering skills, criminal procedure.

I want a full time position but contract work would be helpful also.

If anyone has any suggestion as to where to apply or what to do please advise.

Everybody tells you to network to find a job in this economy. But what if you don’t know anybody? One can understand how the state bar association listserv could seem like a viable option to a recent Fordgam graduate.

Were the employed attorneys helpful to the young Fordham ram? What do you think?

A Berkeley Law student has sent along an administrative e-mail that will confirm any preconceptions you have about the dirty hippies there. Boalt Hall Berkeley Law Professor Bob Berring sent an e-mail out to students Monday asking them not to indulge in “feeding frenzies” in study areas and to clean up their own crazy food messes, due to “the limited number of overworked custodians at the law school.”

Berring says Berkeley can’t “hire extra teams of custodians” right now to tend to the dirty Berkies’ common areas.

On today’s Morning Docket, we mentioned that Dean David Van Zandt at Northwestern Law is reminding deferred 3Ls that they do not need to make monthly payments on their loans until they start working, leading a commenter to say:

Unless this financial mess eases, next to fall are the law schools. Deferring loan payments means the schools (especially the weaker ones) will start operating in the red. Just like the big law firms have discovered, operating in the red gets old fast—and eventually leads to dissolution. Fewer law schools is not a bad thing, and in fact may be unavoidable.

That seems a bit too gloomy and doomy to us. But apparently, Berkeley is keeping its budget lean by recruiting its students to do janitorial duty. Here’s an excerpt from the Berring e-mail sent out to all students, with the subject line “Food, Vermin and You. A Serious Plea for Help:”

The Student Center was built and furnished to a high standard in the hope that it would be enjoyed by you and future generations of folks like you. We are off to a bumpy start. Currently it appears that there are major feeding frenzies in a space that was designed primarily to be office and study space. Folks have been leaving seriously gross food messes on the tables in the lounge and conference rooms, on kitchen counters and in the sink.. If you leave out open food containers, rodents and roaches, who are even luckier than the ones in library, inevitably show up. Someone has to clean this mess up… This is not a complex message: clean up after yourselves.

Berkeley isn’t the first law school with a “seriously gross” problem. Remember the “Cravath” bed bugs at Columbia? But based on what we’ve seen previously at UCLA, maybe rodents are the more appropriate California problem?

See the full e-mail, with detailed cleaning instructions, after the jump.The pop culture references sprinkled throughout (i.e., study rooms as dirty as “Seth Rogen’s apartment”) lead us to believe Berring’s more hip than hippie.

In our first two installments of 2008 law school stories, we looked back at our favorite law school students of the year and important trends. For our third post in the series of four, we’re indulging in one of our favorite topics: law school listservs.

When tightly-wound law students use the e-mail list as their forum for airing grievances, the back-and-forth can get rather catty. A mixture of Type A personalities, the desire to procrastinate, and extreme law school stress has resulted in some explosive exchanges in 2008.

Whether you call them list servs, list serves, listservs, listserves, list-servs, or list-serves, we call them extremely amusing. Find out which three law schools made the “Best of” listserv list, after the jump.