Going To Law School

i'm still doing public interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMvARy0lBLE

Believe me two years from now you'll be telling us how you "actually think bankruptcy is really interesting" and you will half mean it. Ha. Law school.

haha, true. only substitute "ERISA/Employee Benefits" for "bankruptcy" and that was kinda my l-school story. (i don't do ERISA work, for better or worse.)

Oh man. That video has been making the rounds all week. About to lock myself up for the weekend to start a paper for my Foundations/Philosophy of Law class and a canned memo for Methodology. Still seem to be surviving and enjoying it. Working simultaneously in two systems in most classes is perplexing at times, and the Civil Code of Quebec weighs a fucking tonne (slogan: all the law you'll ever need, and a lot of shit you'll never read) but I'm already surprised by how much I'm digging studying law for its own sake - instrumental uses aside.

Plus, in November I get to start doing legal research for the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies. Yay?

It would be nice to be around people who don't make or understand specific performance and binding precedent jokes, mind you. They don't warn you that it's a black hole of humour.

actually, it may not seem so at the time or immediately after graduating but law school DOES inculcate a certain useful way of looking at issues and problems. dunno whether that by itself justifies the $100K+ price tag (esp. including the opportunity costs of spending 3 years of your life at whatever l-school you're attending).

It would be nice to be around people who don't make or understand specific performance and binding precedent jokes, mind you.

if you say the constitution is a living, breathing document . . . i may have to kill myself.

"I am incredibly committed!" "I think you should be committed."

lol

Seriously. Fact patterns about whether or not publicly-owned companies that gov'ts own majority interests in count as "government" per Charter claims are fun, but they shouldn't be to sane people, right?

gah. you'd think going to law school, doing post law school training, doing my traineeship and actually qualifying as a lawyer would stand you in good stead but the further out I get from my last legal position the less and less attractive I become especially in this buyer's market. increasingly feels like the last two years have ruined the 7 years of hard work I put in beforehand.

has anyone here taken 'a career break' of however long and successfully re-entered the profession? doesn't help that my technical ability is rotting by the day

what I need is basically someone who is willing to take me on as an NQ but accept that I've probably regressed to the level of a second year trainee. the worst thing is, I know 3 months hard work in a law firm would bring me right back up to speed it's just communicating this to employers without sounding like 'herp derp I've actually forgotten a lot of my training and I'm not commercially aware no more'

can you just bluff it, get in the door and then quietly bring yourself back up to speed

nb I know nothing about how any of this works

gah New York Civil Practice in 3rd year is like the part where you get to the top of the mountain and you can see the valley of shit below.

Volunteered as a fake-witness this weekend for the mock trial that was a Fourth-Year friend's Civil Litigation final. Was actually kind of fun, notwithstanding the fact that I was mostly doing it to avoid studying for Civil Property/Droit des biens or contemplating doctrinal nuances of arguments for and against no-fault product liability regimes in Quebec.

Midterms hit a week from tomorrow. Civil Property / Torts / Constitutional M / W / F, Contracts the following Tuesday. It's about to get very interesting... :S

Thank the lord this is almost over. I was just diagnosed with dyspraxia - I always thought I was just lazy and spacey (or as the fam would say, 'useless'), but makes sense considering the utter hell this experience has been. The only classes I've done well in require creative legal thinking (litigation classes mostly). Too bad finals asking to develop interesting ways to sue people were few and far between; not sure creative problem solving is even valued in the legal field, seems like school trains us to be mindless paper-shuffling drones, which I'm clearly very bad at being.

Anyone have any advice on getting litigation work with crummy grades (3.2 GPA)? Possible hope?

not sure creative problem solving is even valued in the legal field

it is. your GPA is fine. the problem is the difficult market for emerging first-year lawyers. keep your head up; you'll be okay.

Ugh, take-home exams are fucking hell. Now 28.5 hours left to write another 5 pages of my paper and cobble it into something coherent, then a brief episode of freedom tarnished only by having to edit my note.

i feel like a rotting husk of a former man. will law school give me back my humanity?

― burt_stanton

officially survived first semester, although final finals should never be take-homes - the impetus to actually bust yr ass on a 2500 word paper on philosophy of law, hart & fuller and the distinction between law and morality is not something easily conjured.

two weeks of freedom before diving back into the fray.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/business/09law.html

The problem is really the same in any professional field, maybe you'll make your mark as a student but once you get started in the workplace the people upstairs make no note of whatever might be special or different about you. This is a bad practice, it happened to my brother, but it happened to friends of mine in practically every professional field.

I think people single out law for this because attorneys are an easy target for people who can't succeed at anything. Don't let anyone discourage you in any professional field!

had a job
job fell through

sorry : (

sucks :-( do you have a backup plan?

:( That blows.

As of yesterday at 10AM I have officially finished first year (after a 24 hour constitutional take home exam) and am applying (semi-fruitlessly) for research assistant positions with profs. Law jobs aren't things people have, per se, until after second year, because the combined degree is a 3.5/4 year program, but still, the prospect of not doing something vaguely law-y for the summer makes me nervous. Foot in the door early, etc. etc. But all in all first year wasn't that awful. Hoping to end the year with an A- or two and some mixed Bs/B+s but I don't want to jinx it before marks come out in two weeks.

So yeah, looks like I'm graduating in the top 5% and jobless. Pretty frustrated right now. Will get over it. But feel like I wasted the whole year that I could have spent looking for jobs, lost the chance to apply for clerkships, etc. Also no idea how long it will take me to find something else.

In a larger sense I also feel like in my monomaniacal pursuit of grades (a not unreasonable pursuit considering the employment stats from my school) I've kind of lost sight of what I actually want to do or what I even want out of life.

Perhaps I'll have some time to reflect/regain perspective in the next few weeks.

oh dude...

i had a really good friend graduate from a decent but not top 10 school last year & the place she clerked the previous summer ended up not hiring her (they didnt hire anyone). it took her some time but she still found something great, keep your chin up.

haha i guess this also means that burt_stanton wouldve been graduating law school...

I now return from my self-imposed ILXile to issue the single most satisfying "I told you so" of my entire life.

I told you so, dude.

Now revive a bass technique thread and give us your second most satisfying "I told you so."

No, don't really do that.

And I drunkenly award TWU an OTM. OTM.

This, i assume, is like watching my future in slow motion. Managed to snag a part time research position with a prof for the summer, provided he likes my first week of product. Drawing blanks on everything else. Grades finally get released tomorrow.

Well in any case, I'm done. Woot!

Got a new job. Doing securities litigation -- plaintiff's side, meaning we'll be representing pension funds and such, so it actually even has a slightly public interest angle. Weird though -- I think the mind of 2001 me would be slightly blown if I went back in time and told him I was going to be a securities litigator.

will you write me a will if I give you an end table?

Yay for jobs! I'm writing memos about 18th century German contract theory and the evolution of individual rights. Which is slightly less public interest-y then I'd like, but once I get my summer schedule in order, I'm going to see if a couple of local NGOs need any pro bono research help.

will you write me a will if I give you an end table?

― Latham Green, Thursday, May 26, 2011 3:46 PM Bookmark

Don't know jack about wills. Although eventually I'll get to it in my bar study, so I'll get back to you.

i decided not to write on to a journal and am already feeling like it's a decision i'm going to regret. i wasn't eligible for law review, but hopefully not doing a secondary journal doesn't hurt me too bad.

Are Journals really that important? I feel like a decent number of people are involved with various journals up here, but there isn't the sense that it is *mandatory* for future success.

i'm honestly not really sure. law review is definitely a big deal, especially for judicial clerkships and biglaw, but neither of those are things that i want to do. i think they're definitely helpful in showing that you're willing to do thankless work and that your editing/writing skills are strong, but hopefully the fact that i spent a couple of years in journalism before starting law school does that for me instead.

I really don't have a good sense of how things work in Canada, but in the US Law Review (or whatever your school's main/top journal is called) is just unreasonably, disproportionately beneficial to your career, probably moreso than anything else you can do. Beyond that, stuff like secondary journals and moot court can help but are nowhere near the kind of benefit. It's partly just prestige for prestige sake, which is especially weird if you grade onto law review, since that makes the prestige kind of redundant to your grades.

However since you didn't do the writing comp, you might want to consider moot court/mock trial if you can still do it. Some litigation firms seem to value it.

Depending on what Moot you do, don't certain sectors pay attention? i.e. Jessup and international work, etc. etc.

Many days lately I've spoken almost no words to anyone other than my wife or people on the internet #barstudy

One foot in front of the other, man. Soon enough you'll be billing far too many hours for far too little money.

Studying for the bar exam has forced me to come to the conclusion that I do not want to be a lawyer. I'm going to finish this out because my family and friends have been supporting me, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to do this for a living. Probably should have developed my original career in retrospect since ... I actually enjoyed that and was good at it. :{

When I'm in my suit sitting around other lawyers and students I feel like a ticking time bomb wrapped in houndstooth.