Earlier this week, we asked readers to submit possible captions for this photo:
Let’s have a look at what our readers came up with, and then vote on the finalists….
Continue reading “Caption Contest Finalists: Futures Made, Bank Accounts Crippled”
These days, all anyone cares about are employment statistics. Law schools are getting sued over them. Law school rankings are dropping because of them. Law school administrators are losing their jobs over them. It’s at the point where even average joes are aware of the problems law school graduates are having when it comes to getting a job. Dear Lord, when is the madness going to end?!?
Probably as soon as ads like this stop showing up in the most curious of places….
Continue reading “Caption Contest: Futures Made, Bank Accounts Crippled”
Hello guys. Here at Above the Law, we value your commentary and interaction. Well, not yours (you know who you are), but most of you guys.
We’re bringing back an old feature and starting some new features that will highlight your content and commentary.
Let’s start with the old stuff: we’re rebooting Pls Hndle Thx, our ATL advice column written by Marin. We’d like you to send your questions to advice@abovethelaw.com. If your question is picked, you’ll get a t-shirt, mild ridicule, and the sometimes quite helpful advice of the ATL community of readers. All questioners will be kept completely anonymous, of course.
The new thing we’re doing is a series of Google hangouts with prominent law students, professors, and law firm recruiting personnel. We want your stories of success and preparation for our panelists to grade. How did you get into law school? How did you get your job? What steps did you take to prepare for law school before your 1L year? Again, there’s swag for people whose submissions we use. And there’s the fun of having, say, your method of bar preparation graded by the president of BARBRI.
Above the Law has more readers than ever before, and user-generated content has always been a big part of the offerings here, so email, text, comment, tweet, or leave a status update about what you think we should be talking about.
Ed. note: This is another installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today Casey Berman of Leave Law Behind, a blog and community that focuses on helping unhappy attorneys leave the law, discusses the second step attorneys can take to leave the law. (The first step can be found at The First Step in Leaving Law Behind – It’s the Money, Stupid.)
As we discussed in the first article of this series, through Leave Law Behind, I work with many intelligent attorneys who nonetheless are unhappy and want to leave the law behind and do something else. They want to change their life and their work and their focus with the goal to be more satisfied, more confident, and happier.
I tell them the first step in leaving the law behind involves getting a handle on their money situation. They need to become as confident and exact as possible in understanding (i) their expenses, as well as any (ii) safety net and other sources of financial support they can call upon if needed.
The second step in leaving law behind? Before getting one’s résumé ready or applying for jobs or networking, the second step often involves getting over law school. Or in other words . . . cutting your losses. Or to be more blunt: Move on. Stop living in the past. Stop thinking you need to eke out more of a return on your law school investment. Focus on the road ahead.
Law schools, don’t expect your applications to rebound anytime soon. The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) recently released data showing that fewer people took the February 2013 LSAT than any administration of the February test ever.
Forever ever? Forever ever. In fact, the number represents one of the smallest amounts of test takers since 1988.
1988, folks. The Berlin Wall was still up. People were listening to Rick Astley and not ironically.
The reduced number of test takers is certainly a result of students beginning to question the value proposition of law school. But some of it is undoubtedly the result of intelligent students questioning the value proposition of being a lawyer.
Would you want to go into a field that hasn’t seen a starting salary raise since 2007?
Continue reading “If Associates Don’t Get A Raise, Expect Even Fewer LSAT Takers”
* Celebrated litigator David Boies thinks the Supreme Court is going to rule in favor of gay marriage in a united front — which is helpful, since in March he’s arguing in favor of gay marriage in the Prop 8 case. [USA Today]
* “What we had to do was do more with less.” Archer & Greiner had to lay off 14 attorneys and 27 staffers thanks to the firm’s rapid overexpansion via mergers. This is why we can’t have nice things. [New Jersey Law Journal]
* In New York / Concrete jungle where dreams are made of / There’s nothing you can’t do / Now you’re in New York / Law deans will try to inspire you / But rankings will ruin you / Hear it for New York! [New York Law Journal]
* If you’d like to save the world by working a public-interest job, you’d better consider Penn Law. Its LRAP now covers all IBR loan payments over 10 years for a total savings of up to $140,000. [National Law Journal]
* But then again, if you’re not interested in public-interest work, you can always get a temp job, where you’ll allegedly make as much as “a mid-level associate at a small or medium firm.” [U.S. News & World Report]
* Because Lindsay Lohan’s lawyer was called out by a judge for a performance that was almost as piss poor in his client’s in Liz & Dick, he contacted a local firm to step in and assist him. [L.A. Now / Los Angeles Times]
The new U.S. News law school rankings, which we’ve been covering extensively in these pages, contain all sorts of interesting tidbits about the ranked schools. For example, in each school profile there is an “employed at graduation” figure, which “represents the percentage of all graduates who had a full-time job lasting at least a year for which bar passage was required or a J.D. degree was an advantage.”
That seems like an important and useful piece of information to know if you’re going to pay or borrow a six-figure sum to attend law school. Comparing the employment rates of different schools would be an important part of one’s due diligence when selecting a school.
Among the top 14 or so-called “T14″ law schools, which one had the highest “employed at graduation” rate? The answer might surprise you….
Continue reading “Who Has the Best ‘Employed at Graduation’ Rate Among the Top 14 Law Schools?”
‘What, no power rings for the Law School Avengers?’
* In case you didn’t catch this yesterday when it was announced, Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, is currently being held for trial in New York City. This will be the most unbiased jury in the world. /sarcasm [New York Times]
* According to Justice Anthony Kennedy, democracies shouldn’t depend “on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say.” Well then! I suppose we should look forward to the uprising. [The Big Story / Associated Press]
* Cooley and Winston & Strawn are working on the $600 million sale of everyone’s favorite store for slutty Halloween costumes, Hot Topic. Apparently that store still exists. I had no idea. Good to know! [Am Law Daily]
* Proskauer Rose is now the most powerful Biglaw firm in the sports world. It just goes to show that even if you’re too awkward to play ball, it doesn’t mean you can’t hit it out of the park in court. [Sports Illustrated]
* “I would love to blink and wake up in 10 years and see where all this ends.” Unemployed law grads are probably saying the same thing, but hopefully these law school law firms will be beneficial. [New York Times]
* A group of legal heavy hitters — “The Coalition of Concerned Colleagues” — submitted a cutting letter to the Task ABA Force on Legal Education. Next time, try “The Law School Avengers.” [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* If it’s proven that enough Native Americans find the Redskins team name offensive, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board may cancel the mark. Would it be offensive to call the TTAB Indian givers? [National Law Journal]
* An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but benchslaps are another thing entirely. Sorry, Gibson Dunn, but your document production “mistake” was “unacceptable” in Judge Paul Grewal’s courtroom. [Bloomberg]
‘I’d be happier if I weren’t poor.’
A little more than one year ago, Elie and I asked our readers what they would have done if they hadn’t gone to law school. The answers in the comments were varied, but in light of the state of the job market for entry-level lawyers, this was the one that stood out the most to me then, and stands out even more to me now:
“Shoot myself. It would have been quicker and less painful.”
While that may be incredibly depressing, it speaks to the feelings of a new generation of lawyers, many of whom have been languishing in unemployment and drowning under heavy student debt loads for months, and in some cases, years. Now, if you’re lucky enough to be complaining about the size of your Biglaw bonus, these circumstances aren’t applicable to you. But unfortunately, as we all know, money can’t buy happiness. Regardless of your standing in life, law school still might have been a bad decision for you.
Which brings me to this question: all things considered, are you still happy you went to law school?
Continue reading “Open Thread: Are You Still Happy You Went to Law School?”
The end of February marked nine months since graduation. That’s nine months of résumés. Nine months of cover letters. Nine months of retail hell. Nine months living in my parents’ basement. And it is finally over. That’s right, my loyal readers, I will no longer be bitching about the lack of legal jobs in 2013, as I am now gainfully employed.
Before you start asking questions and speculating in the comments, let me just field a few of the likely questions. First, no, I will not be filling a position as office bitch. Unfortunately, I was vastly overqualified for the job. Second, no, I did not open my own firm, so I will have to wait until later to grow a pair as you’ve suggested time and time again.
And third, yes, it’s possible for a graduate of an “unaccredited” (read: accredited) law school to get a real job….
Continue reading “Gradenfreude: My Law School Is Going To Be SO Pissed At Me”
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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.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
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?
Keep reading »
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