<p>These are a couple of experpts from a blog called "Big Debt, Small Law" that is making quite the stir around the NYC legal community (and perhaps beyond). The blog is essentially the rantings of a contract lawyer, describing his life as an attorney. While it is clearly intended as a rant, it is good reading for anyone considering practicing law, taking out tremendous law school loans to go to law school and still hoping to make enough money after law school to pay back those loans (particularly from law schools with less-than-stellar on campus recruiting). I have taken the liberty of editing out cuss words with asterisks.</p>
<p>Here goes:</p>
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In a couple short weeks, a new wave of hapless lemmings will crack open the shrinkwrap on those heinously overpriced casebooks, boot up their laptops for some heated note-taking, and commence their voyage down the road of America’s most overrated, miserable, and saturated industry: the practice of law. A pompous, overpaid professor will saunter in and begin blathering and bullying them about some obscure case, reveling in her power like a college calculus student picking on the 4th grade arithmetic class. So begins another bumper crop in this endless harvest of shame.</p>
<p>Remember those days? The boundless excitement at joining an “elite” profession, envisioning oneself captivating jurors with soaring oratory and seating “surprise’ witnesses like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? Or maybe flexing those legal muscles as a powerful DA a la Jack McCoy, cruising around crime scenes and picking up spent shell casings with a pencil tip? Sending rapists and murdering scum up the river and then meeting “the boys” for a well-earned victory beer before firing up the Ferrari to head home?</p>
<p>Sadly, for most incoming One L’s that isn’t how this dreadful mistake will play out, despite propaganda to the contrary in those glossy admissions brochures. Instead, most will cold-send bales of resumes into a dead chasm of silence, eventually scrounging for document review temp-work at rates lower than a truck driver, bricklayer, or garbage man earns. Or there’s the “networking” farce, where you print reams of resumes on that creamy, ivory cotton-weave Staples resume paper and shove them in the face of every gray-haired loser at an alumni cocktail reception. I attended one of these once, and the first older-looking guy on the scene was gang-rushed and sent to the hospital as a horde of recent grads bum-rushed him with an avalanche of cover letters! I believe he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter, having choked on a peel-and-eat shrimp during the melee. I later learned he wasn’t even a lawyer, but instead a catering director merely there to inspect the buffet. Such are the risks one runs when overseeing events for desperate law school grads. Just posting a craigslist ad for an entry-level lawyer is like strolling into Ethiopia with a box of Dunkin’ Dounuts and saying: “Hey, anyone here got the munchies?” </p>
<p>In NYC as I write, the rates for most temp projects are $28 an hour straight time for admitted attorneys, with no health benefits, no paid leave, and zero opportunity for advancement. Packed elbow to elbow in stifling broom closets and windowless backrooms, these “losers” (many of whom are laid-off graduates of so-called “elite” schools) stare into the alkaline glow of their monitors and click thru reams of the dullest, driest, most pointless sh<strong>paper mankind has ever produced. Many arrive home at night with their eyes weeping blood. The fun quickly wears off after the twelfth hour of scanning a Global Broker-Dealer Bilateral Sub-Agreement to see if Paragraph 14(b)9vii contains the word “if” as opposed to “shall.” Picking fly **</strong> out of black pepper would be a more intellectually stimulating (and probably better paying) job.</p>
<p>Juvenile and petty rules, often arbitrarily applied, dominate these projects. Internet access is strictly forbidden, with most case managers disabling the web browsers. Cell phone use and textingare limited to emergencies only. Of late, even talking to one’s neighbor is taboo, since clients are getting more cost-conscious and every second of billable time is haggled over and hard fought. The desks are littered with rotting Chinese take-out containers, festering cups of day old instant coffee, Ramen noodle styrofoams, and the other sundry cuisines of the dirt-poor.</p>
<p>Most law grads are little more than over-leveraged liberal arts losers, who compounded the mistake of a worthless bachelor’s degree withan equally worthless (and much more expensive) JD. Often paying half (or more) of their after-tax income in student loans, I’ve witnessed the utter desperation and hopelessness that many are suffering: single moms stealing milk from the coffee fridge to take home for their children, working 80 to 90 hours a week when bone-tired to make the rent on a ****hole studio in Queens, enduring endless degradation and abuse by the sociopathic, greed-fueled scum who operate these modern day sweatshops, and the occasional outburst of pent-up anger that ends in security escorting one off the property. The project’s over- for you! Quickly replaced, there is an endless supply of desperately indebted losers just dying to take these miserable jobs, since no alternatives exist.</p>
<p>Hell, even craigslist ads for paralegals and secretaries are now expressly stating “No JD’s need apply.” Gee whiz, Wally, why would a lawyer apply for a paralegal job? Here’s a hint: how many nurse or paramedic ads do you see that state “no licensed physicians please?” How many stewardess jobs warn “no pilots need apply?” The AMA and other legitimate professions are experts on the iron laws of supply and demand, and regulate their professions accordingly.</p>
<p>Bad as they are, these temp jobs (even with the recent plunge in rates and overtime) still pay far better than small ambulance-chaser firms, many of whom have cut salaries into the low 30s (annually) in this gruesome bear market. The supply of lawyers outstrips the number of available jobs by an absurd ratio, and this problem continues unabated since the ABA will accredit anyone who opens up a lawschool in the spare bay of his garage.
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New York’s also-ran diploma mills like Brooklyn, Cardozo (called Car-Bozo by employers), Pace, St. John’s, Hofstra, Touro, and the infamous New York Law School (whose motto is a chagrined “no, we’re not NYU”), are essentially fathering a new breed of white-collar underclass: heavily indebted, sporadically employed, poorly paid, bereft of health insurance and stuck in dead-end temp jobs that pay lower hourly rates (after student loans are deducted from salary) than many unskilled day laborers earn. These “schools” charge Lamborghini prices for a clapped-out Yugo with 4 flat tires and sawdust in the gearbox. Talk about cash for clunkers! When you push these “jalopy” JD’s into the traffic of this employment market, be prepared to get run off the road.
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