William Brewer Jr.
Take it from those of us on the frontline of economic distress in America. This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.
– William E. Brewer Jr., president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, commenting on a new national survey of 860 bankruptcy lawyers. Surveyed lawyers expressed concern about the state of student debt in America, reporting that they are already seeing “what feels too much like what they saw before the foreclosure crisis crashed onto the national scene.”
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, more and more law school graduates are trying to seek bankruptcy protection from their mountains of student loan debt. Bankruptcy? Really?
Now, we know that reading comprehension is tested on the LSAT, but apparently, once students complete the law school entrance exam, that skill goes right out the window. How do we know? Because law school graduates, who freely signed up for student loans as law students, are now trying to shirk their repayment responsibilities. They are the 99% (of people who sign on the dotted line and think nothing of it until it’s time to face the consequences).
All the documents these law school graduates signed and claimed to have read and understood prior to accepting their student loans — well, they had some words to say about bankruptcy. Important words. Here are some of them, pulled from my very own master promissory note:
We will discharge (forgive) your loan if: [y]our loan is discharged in bankruptcy. However, federal student loans are not automatically discharged if you file for bankruptcy. In order to have your loan discharged in bankruptcy, you must prove to the bankruptcy court that repaying the loan would cause undue hardship.
Aww, you think you’ve got an undue hardship, precious little snowflake? Well, think again….
Continue reading “Not Even Bankruptcy Will Make Your Student Loans Go Away”
I’ve never been a fan of U.S. News obsessing over how much money law schools spend on their facilities. I feel it artificially inflates the cost of going to law school in a digital age where so much of what you need can be found online.
But there are some things that you can’t do online. Not yet at least. Like going to the bathroom. Perhaps if Steve Jobs were still alive, the iPoop and the Waterless iPoop would be just around the corner. But we were robbed of that great man.
Maybe all you need to know about the difference between top law schools and not-so-hot law schools really does come down to toilets. At Harvard, they name them after rich alumni. At North Dakota Law School, they barely have them….
Continue reading “Adventures at Low-Ranked Law Schools: Don’t Call It a ‘Toilet,’ They Don’t Even Have Toilets”
Insert face of law school student above.
Instead of hiring a new professor to teach Cross-Cultural Comparison of Masturbatory Prohibitions, I want law schools to start paying six-figure salaries to the people they hire to work in their career services offices. I want U.S. News to include the number of CSO professionals and money spent on CSOs as data points in their law school rankings. I want deans to start asking rich alumni if they would like to donate to help fight mental disability and extreme laziness in career services offices.
Because honestly, the lack of effort put in by career services professionals at the nation’s law schools really seems to be out of hand. Maybe they’ve just been collectively beaten down by the years of terrible job prospects and the throngs of students in need of help. Maybe they believe that there really is nothing they can do, and they are significantly more worried about protecting their own jobs than finding jobs for eager law students. Maybe the lack of institutional support and respect for their efforts makes them feel like second-class citizens whenever the Professor of Impractical Studies That Serve No Clients walks into the room.
I don’t know why we’re here, but when you can’t even trust your CSO to effectively cull Simplicity to remove stupid and insulting job prospects like the ones below, it’s time to change the entire approach to law school career services….
Continue reading “Is Your Career Services Office This Lazy?”
Not shown: the empty bottle of Jack in this guy's carrel.
Last week, I derisively noted that legal blogs were pushing a silly story in U.S. News about great careers that you can pursue with a law degree. No matter how bad legal hiring gets, law schools like pushing the “you can do anything with a law degree” angle, based on the anecdotal evidence of those who were lucky enough to parlay their J.D. degrees into something non-legal.
Obviously, I’ve got some anecdotes of my own.
But here’s a job, a real live job, that’s actually being offered to law students as we speak (or type). If you really want to know “what you can do with a law degree,” take a freaking look….
Continue reading “Things You Can Do With a Law Degree: Bank Teller”
Meet the new Biglaw. Same as the old Biglaw.
As we mentioned in Morning Docket, the Wall Street Journal has a good article about how various recession-era cutbacks have become entrenched in Biglaw. If you have been paying attention or are a current law student, you know the issues: smaller entry-level classes, stagnant salaries, and a partnership track long enough to make a first-year Ph.D. student laugh.
Basically, if you were already a Biglaw partner when the recession hit, you are likely to say, “What recession?” Your profits per partner have probably gone up, despite the general economy’s woes. Other industries use economic downturns to retool their business models and develop new ways to compete. Not Biglaw. It appears that Biglaw has used the recession to fire a bunch of people, exclude new partners, and keep associate salaries and bonuses at recessionary levels. They haven’t developed a new business model; they’ve just found a way to reduce the costs of the old business model.
Biglaw partner: It’s great work if you can get it. The WSJ even found one partner who was so busy loving himself and his life that he appears to be totally oblivious to the struggles of everybody else…
Continue reading “Biglaw’s New Normal Isn’t Great For New Talent”
Despite the media echo chamber saying that the economy is improving, it’s obviously still tough to find work. Especially for lawyers. Everyone says you’re supposed to have a can-do attitude, but we sometimes prefer to think about all the things that you can’t do as an attorney.
Included in that list is getting a paying job at the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ has had a hiring freeze in place for a year now. We’ve heard reports of some thawing — i.e., selected parts of the DOJ receiving authorization to fill a handful of priority positions — but, for the most part, there are hardly any paying lawyer jobs to be had in that division of government.
Instead, U.S. Attorney’s Offices around the country have been posting unpaid Special Assistant United States Attorney positions for some time now. We covered them last May. My colleague (and former assistant U.S. attorney) David Lat defended the SAUSA gigs somewhat, arguing that the nonpaying jobs might not be as bad as they seem. It’s fun, exciting work, and it provides valuable experience and serious professional credibility.
There is a crucial, ominous difference between then and now, though. Previous SAUSA jobs were generally aimed at entry-level or fairly junior attorneys. Now we’ve got a recent opening that’s asking for more.…
Continue reading “The DOJ Wants You, Experienced Attorneys — To Work for Free”
There’s a really funny post up on Constitutional Daily, in which the protagonist — who holds a J.D. from NYU Law and was laid off from Biglaw during the recession — recounts his inability to secure a job at Target. It got me thinking of that other great lie that law schools tell incoming law students: “Yada yada, you can do anything with a law degree… also, I’d like to interest you in partial ownership of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
But many J.D. holders have found out the hard way that holding a law degree only opens doors to “law” jobs. They aren’t degrees of general utility.
If anything, they close more doors than they open….
Continue reading “What ‘Can’t’ You Do With a Law Degree?”
Kyle McEntee (left) and Patrick Lynch (right), co-founders of Law School Transparency (LST).
Late last year, plaintiffs’ lawyer David Anziska pledged to make 2012 “the year of law school litigation.” Anziska, who’s currently spearheading efforts to sue law schools over allegedly misleading employment statistics, told my colleague Staci Zaretsky that he and his team members “want to sue as many law schools as we can to bring them into the fray.”
That’s all well and good — for plaintiffs’ lawyers, and for news outlets like ours seeking juicy stories to cover. But there are other ways to achieve reform. So here’s another thought: Could 2012 instead be the year of law school transparency? Transparency achieved voluntarily, by law schools coming forward on their own to share comprehensive data about how their graduates are faring in the job market?
In the weeks since we wrote about the University of Chicago Law School providing very detailed employment data about its recent graduating classes, based on our interview with Dean Michael Schill, we’ve heard from deans, professors, alumni and students of other law schools, all with similar messages. They believe that their schools, like Chicago, are also transparent about graduate employment outcomes — and they want to be recognized for it.
This chorus of “me too!” messages raises a promising possibility: Is law school transparency becoming, for lack of a better word, “cool”? Will honesty about employment data become the hot new trend for U.S. legal education?
Perhaps. But there’s still a long way to go, as shown by a report issued this week by Law School Transparency….
Continue reading “Law School Transparency: Who’s Naughty and Who’s Nice?”
Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger. I bring tidings of woe not because I’m trying to rob you of your right to pursue a legal education; I’m trying to help you. Call me Elie Stormcrow.
Actually, today The Atlantic is the messenger reminding you of the serious financial peril involved in starting a legal career. The recession might be over but the recovery hasn’t happened for all. And we’re not just talking about the Occupy Wall Street people. No, no, things remain pretty bad for lawyers and bankers. Here’s the money quote from the Atlantic: “In 2011, finance, insurance, and law were the three primarily white-collar professions that managed to shed workers, even as the rest of the economy trudged forward through a slow recovery.”
Yeah folks, even in 2011, the legal economy was still shedding jobs. But it’s not like law schools were spitting out fewer graduates, so… you do the math.
Here, the Atlantic has put things in a fancy chart. Pictures people, it’ll be like an LSAT game: how many people made a terrible investment in higher education?
Continue reading “More Evidence That The Legal Job Market Is In Terrible Shape”
Your bonus is freedom.
Here at Above the Law, we spend a lot of time talking about bonuses to associates working in Biglaw firms. As you might have noticed from our bonus coverage over the past month or so, the size of these payouts is underwhelming to many who are receiving them.
But that coverage only deals with those few, those happy few, who are lucky enough to receive any type of bonus whatsoever. For many in and around Biglaw, their bonus this year will be $0. Their spring bonus will not exist. And they won’t even have Cravath to blame for it.
We’re talking about paralegals. We’re talking about secretaries. We’re talking about government lawyers and law clerks and a bunch of other people who worked really hard in 2011 and might get no bonus at all.
We feel your pain….
Continue reading “A Shout-Out to All The Legal Types Getting a $0 Bonus This Holiday Season”
Disclaimer: I know this is usually an in-house column with tips and tidbits about being a corporate attorney, but there have already been numerous columns about how to network (or not) through the holidays, how to prepare for the next billable year, and how to act at a party. I’m using today’s column to very briefly examine some of the real world negatives and positives going into the end of the year 2011. So, if you want in-house perspective, stop reading now, because that stuff will resume next week. Comments will, however, remain open.
Christmas is in a few days, and all I have on my mind are some heinous local crimes this week. A grown man raped a 9-month-old — yeah, read that again and try to forget it — and an adopted son tried to burn his family to death (succeeding in killing his father and two brothers). A man is being sentenced today for killing his girlfriend and their child on Father’s Day, and a man convicted of murder may go free because some jurors are now saying that they voted guilty in order to get home for the weekend. The local Occupy folks are freezing in their tents, and now just seem even more small and pitiful. Oh, and there is no snow, there has been no snow, and there might not be snow for a while — and this in a place that averages 160 inches of the stuff per year….
Continue reading “House Rules: Holidays, Half Empty – Half Full”
By virtue of writing this column, I’ve seemingly become the shoulder upon which the disaffected cry.
I hear from recent law school graduates who can’t find jobs. (I can’t help.) I hear from law firm associates looking to move to relatively junior in-house jobs. (I can’t help.) And I hear from partners with decades of experience who’d like to replicate my relatively recent move and jump from a big-firm partnership to a relatively senior in-house job. (I can’t help there, either.)
I’m devoting this column to thinking about the third of those three groups: disaffected partners.
The plight of the recent graduate is easy to understand: You’re massively in debt, looking for work, and can’t find a job. I get it. The plight of the associate is also easy to understand: You’re working too hard, not enjoying much of what you do, and have only an uncertain future. I get it.
But the plight of the big firm partner is different: You succeeded at law school, succeeded at your law firm, have hot and cold running associates at your disposal, are being paid the riches of Croesus every year, and are perceived by the world as being wonderfully successful. What the heck are you complaining about?
Remarkably, it seems as though you’re all complaining about essentially the same thing . . .
Continue reading “Inside Straight: A Partner’s Lament”
No glove, no love.
* The Supreme Court will hear Obama’s challenge to Arizona’s immigration law. Upside: we can probably expect a decision by June. Downside: Lady Kaga has to sit her ass out. [New York Times]
* Depressing fact of the day: unless you’re earning six times your law school’s annual tuition, you’ll probably never be able to afford a home. Thanks a lot, student loan debt. [National Law Journal]
* Wilson Sonsini has announced its 2011 partnership class. Of ten new partners, only three are women. At least they’re beating Cravath’s partnership diversity scale. [DealBook]
* Los Angeles is suing to block an initiative that would force porn stars to wear condoms. Why? It wastes taxpayer money, and would be disastrous to spank banks nationwide. [Courthouse News]
* Stephanie Van Groll may be the “tall, young, hot nymph” whose sexting lawsuit against Kenneth Kratz survived a motion to dismiss, but he is still the prize. [Appleton Post-Crescent]
Crushed dreams of employment.
On Friday, we brought you what could be classified as one of the worst law jobs of all time: a job as an unpaid potato chip tester/taster.
And much like the side effects of eating an Olestrafied potato chip, the law school in question has announced that the notorious job was full of crap….
Continue reading “Law School Claims Potato Chip Tester/Taster Job Was Fictitious”
Here at Above the Law, we write all the time about crappy law job postings. A good deal of these awful employment listings come from law school career services offices (which is not at all impressive!).
We recently received word about a law school career services job posting that was so horrendous, so ridiculous, that we could not help ourselves but to write about it. After all, writing about crappy law jobs is like opening a can of Pringles: once you pop, you can’t stop.
And this job — well, let’s just say that it takes the cake, or the potato chip, as the case may be….
Continue reading “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop: New Law School Job Post Borders on Absurd”
At some point law students have to take responsibility for their own choices in professional schools.
Yes, we know that schools purposely mislead prospective law students about the glories of going to law school. And we know that the American Bar Association won’t hold law schools accountable. And we know that the economy is tough and going to school, any school, can seem like a good place to hide for three years.
But there really is enough information floating around on the internet warning potential law students about what they are getting into. If law students choose to disregard that information and instead rely on the fantastical promises of some unranked regional law school, they really have nobody but themselves to blame. You can marry the reformed prostitute, but you can’t be surprised when you find out she’s had sex with half of your buddies.
So, while normally I’d feel sorry for this kid who wrote a “Dear John” letter breaking up with his law school, I also what to grab this guy by the throat and scream, “What did you think was going to happen?”
At this point in time, if you believe what American legal education is trying to sell you, it’s your own damn fault….
Continue reading “Law Student Breaks Up With His Law School”
Thanksgiving is just a few days away. But at the U.S. Department of Justice, there might not be a lot to be thankful for. Most of the DOJ-related news floating around right now is depressing.
A court-appointed investigator, Henry F. Schuelke, just issued what the New York Times described as a “scathing” report on one of the DOJ’s most prominent prosecutions in recent years. Schuelke concluded that the prosecution the late Senator Ted Stevens “was ‘permeated’ by the prosecutors’ ‘serious, widespread and at times intentional’ illegal concealment of evidence that would have helped Mr. Stevens defend himself at his 2008 trial.” Ouch.
(The good news, from the Department’s perspective: a recommendation against criminal prosecution of the DOJ officials involved in the case. That’s something to be thankful for, I suppose.)
Alas, that’s not all for depressing dispatches out of the Department. Let’s discussing the hiring freeze, and the state of Honors Program offers….
Continue reading “A Justice Department Round-Up: Gloomy News”
Back in June, we wrote about Lisa M. Johnstone, a corporate associate in the Los Angeles office of Skadden who passed away in her home.
At the time, we didn’t have the autopsy report (as we noted in our story). But I, and some of Johnstone’s Skadden colleagues, used her passing as an occasion for reflecting on nature of working in Biglaw.
The autopsy is out now. While the cause of death is inconclusive, the toxicology report found no trace of drugs….
Continue reading “Autopsy Inconclusive In Death Of Skadden Associate, But Toxicology Report Is Clean”
Yesterday we brought you the story of a 2L at Cardozo Law School who has taken out Google ads promoting himself, in an attempt to find a summer associate job. Here’s what his ad looks like (as displayed to an Above the Law reader who alerted us to his campaign):
We reached out to Eric Einisman to ask him: What was he thinking?
Continue reading “An Interview With the 2L Who’s Advertising Himself on Google”
