Perhaps treating job seeking like online dating isn’t such a bad idea. Many readers were skeptical when a New York-based 3L posted a Craigslist ad seeking employers who matched his criteria for a perfect boss. To “be considered for this opening as [his] new boss,” he wrote in the ad, employers had to satisfy 21 requirements — such as not being a lunatic, jerk, or screamer — and be willing to pay for his services.
One ATL reader wrote:
Boy, today’s generation of law students really do feel entitled. The real world is really going to smack this guy around.
In fact, some members of the “real world” actually liked the ad. The law student has an interview this week…
Maybe finding a job should be like online dating, with job seekers putting up advertisements describing their perfect match.
That’s the approach a law student in New York is taking. The 3L placed an ad on Craigslist this week, titled “3rd Year Law Student Seeking Competent, Sane, Paying Legal Employer.”
According to the student’s self-description, this 3L is the perfect legal employee, with “excellent, substantive experience in the legal field”; their “own Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis password and unlimited access to both databases” (courtesy of the student’s school?); “a lot of experience drafting contracts, including very complex and lengthy contracts”; “high work ethic”; and “good social skills.”
This stellar job seeker will not accept just any job. The 3L writes:
In order to be considered for this opening as my new boss, in addition to being willing to pay for my services, you must also meet all of the following criteria:
There are 21 requirements. Number 1: “You must not be a lunatic.”
Are you a bankruptcy attorney who needs to empathize more with your clients — e.g., by declaring bankruptcy yourself? Check out this job posting — which won’t be our Job of the Week anytime soon — courtesy of that gold mine of employment opportunities, Craigslist:
Bankruptcy Attorney Position (Dallas)
Small Consumer Bankruptcy firm in Dallas looking for new associate attorney. 50-60 Hours per week, with some travel to Fort Worth required. Salary: $40,000.
If “travel to Fort Worth” is required, you need to add another zero to that salary. This is not the kind of income that will help you pay off massive educational debt (non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, at least for now).
We’ve done a number of posts on terrible job offers. You can pretty much go onto Craigslist once a week and find some firm trying to get legal services on the cheap. Usually, it’s a firm or a solo practitioner that’s trying to take advantage of the legal recession by lowballing prospective associates.
Yesterday, an ad went up from a Pro Se litigant looking for legal help. This guy isn’t willing to hire a lawyer to represent him, but he’s got no problem finding one to do all the work:
Recent law school grad needed for research by Pro Se Litigant in areas of civil law including contracts and due process. Please include resume with your response. PayPay will be method of payment. Please indicate which legal search engine you will be using.
Wonderful, so not only does this guy want you to do all the work, but he also expects you to pay for your own Westlaw or Lexis access.
What’s this guy going to pay you for this opportunity?
I’ve had a crush on you for almost twenty years (and you deservedly made fun of me when I got tongue-tied in front of you), but it never seemed appropriate to move on it. Either I was dating someone, or you were in another city…
But now! Our careers seem to have settled in DC. I’m single. Politico and Eliot Spitzer tell me you’re single. We have so much in common: I love the law (even civil procedure!) and can’t get enough of it. I like books and baseball and poker and New York City and Medici pizza. I admire Thurgood Marshall. Like you, I love the Federalist Society. My mother was the first bas mitzvah in her Orthodox synagogue, but I’m relatively non-observant. We disagree on some First Amendment issues, to be sure, but I’ll never ask you to watch a dogfighting video. Ok, you’re smarter than me, but I’m no slouch (like you, I turned down Yale Law), and I’m cool being Mr. Ginsburg to your Ruth Bader if you are.
This is not a joke. I am gaga for Lady KaGa. I understand you have other priorities in the next few weeks, and Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald would be scandalized if we started dating, but I’ve waited for you this long, I can wait until after the inevitable investiture. Just send me a signal: mention your love of the Mets in your opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I’ll know to send you a dinner date invitation for the first Friday in October. We’ll go for Chinese food at a restaurant better than City Lights.
Finally, some suspense for the Kagan hearings: Will she mention the Mets? Tune in and find out.
We interviewed the Craigslist poster about his wacky plan….
What do you think the resale value on your law degree is? Earlier this year, a San Francisco lawyer put his degree up for sale on Craigslist and found out.
The Georgetown grad was miserable working for a large law firm in Silicon Valley. So he quit and posted his degree in the Craigslist “For Sale” section for “the bargain basement price of $59,250″ — the current value of his student loan balance — or best offer. He hoped to get rid of the piece of paper with “the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success.”
Back in March, the best offer had come from a documentary filmmaker who offered to give the miserable lawyer $50 to “piss on the diploma and then set it on fire.”
That would have been a serious markdown on the $100,000 degree. We checked back in with him this week and found out that a slightly better offer came along…
We’ve done a lot of stories on terrible legal jobs advertised on Craigslist. But they keep getting worse. Last week, a posting went up that was so bad it was possibly illegal:
Entry level plaintiff’s civil litigator wanted (Downtown San Diego)
We are looking for aspiring, licensed lawyers with a passion for trial advocacy on behalf of consumers and injured victims in San Diego county.
Candidates should be 0-2+ year attorneys. The office atmosphere is professional, busy, collegial, and we are located in downtown San Diego. This position offers the unique opportunity to join our team and learn every aspect of civil litigation. The successful candidate will be expected to be eager to try small-to-moderate injury cases to a jury within only a year or two of joining the firm. Respond only if you have a strong desire to learn how to litigate and try cases, and have the strong work ethic to keep up with the rather large learning curve.
Email:
1. Cover letter
2. Resume
3. Writing sample
4. References
The starting salary is $1,600-$2,000/month
***Please: If the starting salary is too low, please do not respond.***
If everything works out great for you, you could make $10/hour. But at the bottom end, you could wind up making $6.67 an hour. Minimum wage in California is $8.00. I know some people think that recent law school graduates are worthless, but this is a bit ridiculous…
In a cover story last year for Washingtonian magazine, on the subject of lawyer incomes, Kash and I posed a question: Are lawyers like white-collar auto workers?
Answer: no. Autoworkers are better paid. Check out this latest job listing, from craigslist for Orange County:
Full time associate attorney start at $12 an hour.
Salaries in the legal profession may be experiencing some deflation, but $12 an hour for the holder of a J.D. is… ridiculous. As one of the many readers who sent this to us observed, “I made this much in high school.” Said a second: “They’re looking for an associate who will work for $12 / hour. At that rate, one might as well go for an In-N-Out gig. You’ll probably get benefits there.”
Our obsession with Supreme Court clerks is longstanding, dating back to our blogging for Underneath Their Robes (where we used to profile SCOTUS clerks). And it seems we’re not alone in lusting after the Elect.
Apparently oral argument makes people think of other oral activities. Check out this “Missed Connection” from Craigslist:
Law clerk at SCOTUS honest services argument – w4m (Supreme Court Building)
We were both there to hear the honest services arguments, which were fascinating. You were siting with the law clerks, I think, so I’m wondering if you’re one of them. You looked slightly older and more mature than the rest of the people you were sitting with. You’re quite handsome and I enjoyed watching you as you followed the arguments. Too bad you left at the case break–I’d been trying to catch your eye. (I was sitting in the front row of reserved seating.) I promise that if you agree to meet me for dinner that I won’t mention Black or Weyhrauch. What say you?
If you’ll forgive the quibbling, this posting is subpar; it’s missing some information. First, the poster has omitted her age (which typically goes after the “w4m”). Second, she offers little identifying information about herself (e.g., “I was wearing a red scarf”).
Third, she offers little identifying information about the clerk, other than that he’s “more mature” and “quite handsome.” We suspect that every male Supreme Court clerk fancies himself “more mature” and “quite handsome.”
Typically a missed connection involves, well, a “connection.” The lack of identifying information suggests that no such connection was forged here. But we admire the poster’s effort.
This is not, by the way, the first time a CL “Missed Connection” has arisen out of a Supreme Court argument.
I know a lot of readers think we have an ax to grind with the University of Michigan Law School (even though we take pot shots at Head Coach Sweater Vest at every opportunity). We like Michigan. Maybe if more U-M Law students trusted that, a certain student would have come to ATL instead of the police. At least then she wouldn’t have been (immediately) charged with a crime for her involvement in a prostitution scandal that also implicated a U-M Near Eastern Studies professor:
The case came to light in April when the student went to an Ann Arbor police station to report she was assaulted by [Professor Yaron] Eliav after they met at a hotel on the city’s north side.
The student told police she was advertising sex acts online via Craigslist to help pay tuition costs. For an in-state student, U-M Law School tuition is $41,500 a year; out-of-state students pay $44,500.
The student told police she reluctantly agreed to allow Eliav to strike her buttocks with a belt, but got upset when he slapped her in the face twice, reports said. She said she suffered vision problems afterward, but did not have any lasting injuries.
Even the Ann Arbor police couldn’t keep from cracking wise about the law student’s “term-time job”:
The rarity of how the case began – with a law student showing up at the police department’s front desk to report she was assaulted while committing a crime herself – was not lost on investigators.
“Perhaps she should have cracked a legal textbook before coming in to the police station to talk about this,” Ann Arbor Detective Sgt. Richard Kinsey said.
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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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 traditional job application and interview process can be impersonal, and applicants often struggle to present themselves as more than just the sum of their GPAs, alma maters, and previous work history. ATL has partnered with ViewYou to help job seekers overcome this challenge. ViewYou NOW Profiles offer a unique way for job seekers to make a personal, memorable connection with prospective employers: introduction videos. These videos allow job candidates to display their personalities, interpersonal skills, and professional interests, creating an eDossier to brand themselves to potential employers all over the world. Check it out today!
Perhaps treating job seeking like online dating isn’t such a bad idea. Many readers were skeptical when a New York-based 3L posted a Craigslist ad seeking employers who matched his criteria for a perfect boss. To “be considered for this opening as [his] new boss,” he wrote in the ad, employers had to satisfy 21 requirements — such as not being a lunatic, jerk, or screamer — and be willing to pay for his services.
