Different schools of thought exist when it comes to cover letters for job applications. Back when I applied for legal jobs, I took a “do no harm” approach, using the cover letter merely to transmit my résumé, transcript, and writing sample. But jobs were more plentiful back then.
In a tougher legal job market, employers expect more from cover letters. For cover letter advice from an in-house perspective, see David Mowry’s post. For cover letter advice from a small-firm perspective, see Jay Shepherd’s post.
And for an example of how not to write a cover letter, keep reading….
Sometimes Yale, you know, Jesus Christ. You guys have a laudable committment to intellectualism and free thinking, but sometimes — to explain this in terms you’ll understand — the relentless egalitarianism mixed with a thinking man’s skepticism reveals a reflexive sense of superiority even as you try to appear post-classist.
In the common tongue, I mean to say that you Yale Law School types are just as crappy and elitist as any other ivy, and that’s never more obvious than when you pretend not to be.
And I can prove it. Another publication was trying to do a fluff piece on “impressive” Yale law students, which is stupid. But the Yalies decided to organize a “boycott” of the fluff piece through their listerv, which is somehow even more self-important and douchey….
Earlier this week, we discussed L.A.-based patent attorney Andrew Schroeder. For those who missed out on the first go-around, Schroeder penned a couple of blistering assaults on the quality of the USPTO’s work that were brought to the attention of University of Missouri Law Professor Dennis Crouch, who posted them on Patently-O.
But the story does not end there. Yesterday, I received an email from Andrew Schroeder pointing me to his blog post responding to Crouch (and, to a lesser extent, me). I found Schroeder’s original work to be professionally over the line — and at times a little offensive — but also very funny, so I was excited to see what the maestro of meltdown letters would say to his critics.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of an expensive trip
That started from the Mediterranean
Aboard this gigantic ship.
Biglaw partners have to get together somewhere to hash over the business. Usually they meet in the lavish home office or rent out a hotel somewhere. In good times, that might be a luxury hotel in an island paradise. But I’ll bet no one would dare risk the PR blowback of holding a partner circle-jerk in a tropical resort in this economy, right?
One firm decided to see that bet and raise it. They’ve rented one of the most luxurious vessels in the world for a Mediterranean cruise. The ship be… sailing?
Let’s see whose partners are going on a “three-hour tour,” shall we….
In terms of the legal profession as a whole, breasts are a topic we all know and love. Some breasts are so large that people have allegedly been fired and forced to sue over them. Some breasts are so large that people file motions over them because they’re too distracting to be seen in a courtroom. In fact, some lawyers’ breasts are so large that their cleavage alone is recognized as “empowering,” and can be seen as a “career enhancer.”
Wait… what? Why weren’t we told about this before looking down every few minutes to check to see if we were showing too much cleavage became an ingrained habit? Because it’s bullsh*t, that’s why….
The job market for entry-level lawyers isn’t a very welcoming place, and while it’s better to be underemployed than unemployed, you might have to take some blows to your self-esteem in the process. It’s not a big deal, because you’ve realized that beggars can’t be choosers.
Take, for example, the case of the recent law school graduate who was only able to find a job as a paralegal. Hey, at least you’re at a law firm. Endless hours at the copy machine? You relish it. Redacting documents until you’re high off Sharpie fumes? Bring it on. Creating binders until you’ve got more paper cuts than you can count? Meh, that’s what Band-Aids are for. Being forced to feed your boss as he pressures you to join him in a polygamous romp and become his “third wife”? Uhhh…
Let’s meet the woman who claims she had to turn down her employer’s polygamous pleas, in a sexual harassment suit that she slapped him with late last week….
A few weeks ago, a young woman named Penelope Soto became an internet legend after she was caught on camera flipping a Florida judge the bird and telling him to go f**k himself during a court proceeding. Soto’s behavior earned her a 30-day stint in jail for contempt of court, but she apparently changed her ways at a later hearing and convinced the judge to vacate the month-long sentence.
But not all mouthy defendants are so lucky. Some of them do go to jail. Take, for example, the case of Brian Noval, a Florida man who in 2009 called a judge a c*ck — twice. Why do all of these things happen in Florida? Anyway, Noval’s antics were captured on film, and he earned himself 120 days in the pokey for his indiscretions. Noval only served four days of that sentence before the judge decided that this cocky defendant had learned his lesson.
As we all know, the internet is for porn, but it’s also for wonderful videos like these. And thanks to Daniel Tosh of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, sometimes the stars of embarrassing viral videos are given the chance to redeem themselves on cable television. Ms. Soto hasn’t been given the opportunity to participate in one of these yet, but Noval was featured on the show last night.
For reasons that escape me, we never covered Noval’s incident in 2009, but now that he’s been brought back into the pop culture limelight, we’ve got some funny videos to entertain you with….
We’re in that soft part of the second semester where things are generally calm on the law school front. Most 1Ls have figured out that they don’t need to be really paying attention yet, and the ones who haven’t are quietly plugging away in the library, oblivious to the outside world. The 2Ls are making plans for the summer (whether at a firm or visiting mom). And 3Ls without jobs are in the quiet, catatonic state where they haven’t fully processed what’s about to happen to them and they’re kind of wafting through campus waiting for somebody to wake them up and tell them it was all a dream.
Usually, the law student freak-out machine doesn’t get cranking again until April, which is why today’s campus “controversy” feels a bit like a tempest in a teapot. Essentially, a group of law students are accusing their student government of misusing their budget. We’ve seen this kind ofthing before, but this time there’s a twist.
Yes, I’m shocked, SHOCKED that the people who run for law school student government did something to try to make themselves look more important than everybody else….
I keep telling people, if I just did my thing of making controversial statements that draw attention to myself, but called myself a “Republican” who happened to be black, I’d be a sitting Congressman right now instead of a blogger.
Well, maybe I’d need to buttress my “controversy” with being factually incorrect and an unwillingness to admit that I’m wrong. But I’m close to being enough of a train wreck to be a Republican candidate of color. Let me just… sorry… get this water right here… ahhhh.
Like me, current GOP crazypants darling Ted Cruz went to Harvard Law School. He apparently learned the same lesson there that I did: never let facts get in the way of a good story. In a 2010 speech, Cruz said that when he was at HLS there were more Communists on the faculty than Republicans.
Now, that is clearly an outlandish and incorrect comment, said for effect to an audience that doesn’t know any better. But, in classic modern GOP fashion, when confronted with this ridiculous piece of rhetoric, Cruz stood by the statement.
Because for reasons passing understanding, it’s not enough to say that the faculty at Harvard Law School is overwhelmingly liberal (true), now they have to be Communist (not true) in order to gin up the requisite amount of hatred for Northeastern elites that Cruz (a Canadian who went to Princeton and then Harvard Law School) wants his constituents to feel….
Say what you will about the Cooley Law School Rankings, but at least they are internally consistent and objectively applied.
We’ve written before about the ridiculous National Jurist Best Law School Rankings. Many law bloggers have written about this list that looks like it was put together by getting the Sorting Hat drunk on goblets of fire water and forcing it to name law schools until it passed out.
We’ve all tried to reason with the National Jurist, but it turns out that effort was not unlike trying to convince an infant not to poop while you’re eating. We’d have been better off just ignoring it and cleaning it up later.
The publication came out with an “edit” yesterday, and while its revisions did a good job of highlighting how stupid these rankings were in the first place, I’m compelled to write about them just so nobody is fooled into thinking their “updates” have actually fixed anything….
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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Different schools of thought exist when it comes to cover letters for job applications. Back when I applied for legal jobs, I took a “do no harm” approach, using the cover letter merely to transmit my résumé, transcript, and writing sample. But jobs were more plentiful back then.
