Going To Law School

fennel, what prov are you in? I always forget there are more Canadians on ILX than I remember.

Stuck in the final 24 hours of a factum for my Supreme Court advocacy class which was supposed to be fascinating and awesome and mostly is except group work is the worst and trying to write a 35ish page factum with four people is actually probably way more difficult/tedious than just doing it yourself. And thus. I'm resigning myself to not fiddle too much with the sections I didn't write and won't be arguing, esp because the class is Pass/Fail but it is taking substantial amounts of restraint sometimes.

Gonna slip blissfully in the mindless detail work of citations after scarfing down dinner and hope that helps destress.

hey alex, i'm in BC. vancouver to be exact. i assume you're at mcgill? what are you looking at after school?

had a nice conversation with one of my two real friends at law school. was a little reassuring. seems like something i might be able to ease back into. needs some thinking in the meantime.

i understand family law proper is hellish. but i wonder if family law mediation would be fundamentally different than family law. i wouldn't even have to practice family law 3 years to be a certified mediator in BC; it can be any area of law and then just a few accreditation courses.

Just need to randomly bitch about some litigation bullshit that is getting to me -- people I'm working with on a brief keep doing two really annoying things: (1) making what I'd call "gotcha" arguments, like "Defendants don't address x, therefore they acknowledge that our arguments on that point are correct" (so obviously not true! do you really think the court will fall for this?) and (2) neurotically addressing every single nitpicky point the other side raises. Sometimes you can just let a bad micro-argument go and trust the court to see it.

hoo boy, me no big lawyer no more, but i vaguely remember in one of my litigation classes you concede a point by omitting it in your answer when it's addressed in the plaintiff's complaint, which is really just supremely lazy since all you need is a one-sentence form answer to keep it alive ... is that what they're doing??

but it's a motion to dismiss, not an answer

you definitely do not concede a point by omiting an arugment on it from your motion to dismiss - you can file a motion to dismiss that addresses only one point and still preserve all other arguments

ok, i'm not even sure why they'd be bringing that up in the first place.

how do you like being a practicing attorney? i've been tossing the idea around of jumping back into it.

It's alright. I like being p-side, some of my work is interesting, and my firm is relatively humane with hours for a nyc firm. I'm still less happy than I was working in my bottom-of-the-barrel newspaper reporting job but that job wouldn't have supported a family. I get the feeling there are a lot of happier jobs than mine.

I think what I hate most about lawyering is (1) you are stuck in an office for many hours staring at a computer screen, which sucks to an extent no matter what you're doing and (2) you have to dervote enormous attention to boring details, which combines with the stress of all the consequences that follow if you fuck up those boring details.

(1) making what I'd call "gotcha" arguments, like "Defendants don't address x, therefore they acknowledge that our arguments on that point are correct" (so obviously not true! do you really think the court will fall for this?)

How common is an explicit "lol do you really think the court will fall for this?" in responses to such arguments? I've seen a lot of subtle working-the-refs-without-seeming-to on a legal blog I follow, and wondered if any of it blows up into actual "you gotta be fucking kidding me and kidding the judge too."

ppl who know what they are doing should strive not to do it. not professional and betrays insecurity imo. just write the argument. a couple days ago i found an opinion somewhere where the judges called out one of the parties for snarky tone.

er, insecurity betrays u? what i'm i trying to say? i'm so tired.

one of my major goals in life is to never go to law school. so far so good.

i think being a lawyer is cool for people who want to do it, but too many people like me -- who don't want to be lawyers -- seem to get sucked into it. i don't want to be one of those people.

Trying to edit an 80 pp brief down to 50 right now, and I'm fighting people attached to every insignificant little half-point-scoring line. I had a really annoying argument with a junior partner about a moment where he thought he was "using defendants' argument against them" but doing so was actually perversely kind of double-cutting back against us.

xp Tell everyone you communicate with regularly that if you say something like, "I really want to help people in a meaningful way, and I think law school is a good way to make that happen" they are to hit you in the head with something until you recant your statements. Same thing if you start talking about "alternative legal careers" (hint: there are like five job openings for alternative legal careers and all five of them were just filled while I was typing this).

hey, that line got me a nice scholarship at my law school! too bad I believed it at the time. :{

xxp to hurting. that sounds maddening.

i can kind of sympathize with the young buck wanting to approach his case from a more creative angle, which is probably what he thought the law was all about before becoming a lawyer

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323664204578607810292433272.html

if you don't have a subscription this link should work

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/10/31/number-of-lsat-test-takers-is-down-45-since-2009/?mod=trending_now_3

Here’s some spooky news for law schools. The number of law school admission tests administered in October is down nearly 11% from the previous year, according to new data from the Law School Admission Council.

October LSAT takers numbered 33,673 versus the 37,780 who sat for the test the year before. It’s the fewest number of October test takers since 1998 and the second-lowest figure going back to at least year the 1980s. The half-day LSAT is given four times a year in annual cycles starting in June.

The figures are the latest sign that the law-school bubble hasn’t stopped deflating. Law Blog reported in August that law-school applicants are down 12.3% and applications are down 17.9% compared to a year ago.

The number of test takers peaked four years ago and has been on the decline ever since. The total for June and October is down 38% from four years ago. And the October total alone is 45% below the 2009 peak.

Suck it, law schools.

thanks, obama

suck on my L-SAC

"I didn't always agree with Scalia, but he was brilliant," and other complete bullshit you learn to spout in law school, such as "I really want to do transactional work, although I think lit could be interesting too,"

Things I Have Never Said for $1000

but otm

should i become a lawyer?

Absolutely not

Why do you ask

facing a bit of career frustration, which i had a more directly marketable skill set, plus i think i would be interested in learning about more about the american legal system. also being a lawyer is about writing -- albeit, in a dry way -- and debating and hey

Those are the classic bad reasons for wanting to be a lawyer iirc

Haha no law school is about writing and debating

Lawyering is about whatever job you get after the bar and rarely is there much writing or debating afaik

When I was having some of those feelings you describe I went to a graduate engineering program instead because my employer would reimburse me for it and it turns out that was a much better decision

tombot is correct

If you’re a lawyer, you can break any law you want to once a month. That, I think, is a pretty sweet perk.

We interrupt this revive for a brief side trip down memory lane:

you can find out a lot about the LSATs online. Yahoo it.
― don weiner

it's not a good job for people who love writing or debating or for those who don't enjoy career frustration or for those who just want to learn about the american legal system.

do you enjoy stress?

i mean would you go to medical school just because you are curious about the human body? i don't think so

do you want to permanently damage your ability to enjoy reading a book by learning to read too fast?

also did you not read any of the thread above in which you participated that was about the shitty employment prospects for lawyers??!

i'm thinking about applying to law school, for a few reasons:

1) my specific area of focus as an academic librarian has been on copyright and licensing issues in libraries & archives, higher ed, & scholarly publishing, and while many librarians working in this subfield do not have JDs, many of them do, especially the leaders in this subfield, and having one could benefit me professionally, probably bringing higher pay and certainly more authority in the work that i do.
2) there is a pretty good law school at the university where i work and i would have free tuition because of my employee benefits
3) i am generally not very happy at my current job (due to bad management/culture, not the content of my work, which overall i enjoy) and there are few opportunities to work elsewhere, and moving in the next few years is not really a possibility because my family is very much rooted here. getting a JD could be a good use of my time when i otherwise might be wasting it miserably. i.e. if i have to be in this unsatisfying job for 3-5 years i may as well get a free law degree out of it if doing so would benefit me.

all that said i really don't want to go back to school. i already have a graduate degree, and i hated library school and it wasn't even that hard, just a pain in the ass. i asked my close friend who has a JD from this particular program and he strongly recommended that i don't do it, he hated it but how should i know necessarily that i will?

what was your experience like? is it interesting, fun, rewarding? was it stressful? did you find it miserable, and if so, was it worth it?

Hey Marcos!

I have a lot of thoughts on that subject. For starters, I think the economics of the decision are really important, especially for someone in your situation (already into a career, have kids, etc.).

The free degree helps a lot. Do I understand correctly that you'd also be able to do it part-time while working? I went nearly debt-free and I think that made a huge difference in my ability to make a good job decision coming out of school. The people I know who had huge loans were desperate to work for large firms just so they could make enough to pay them off quickly. The "lucky" few who got those jobs were often miserable, and the ones who didn't were financially miserable.

The second consideration IMO is that law school is more like a professional program with some academic trappings/pretense rather than a true academic program. Your first-year courseload will likely be entirely standard/predetermined. From there you will have more choice, and there are some research opportunities and philosophically oriented courses, but most courses revolve around a specific area of law with aim toward understanding the foundation of that area for practice purposes. And yet at the same time, law school isn't as much of a professional program as, say, nursing school, in that it doesn't really teach you how to practice law.

The third consideration, and a corollary to that imo, is, don't get a law degree if you don't want to use a law degree for professional purposes. I found some of law school interesting, but not enough to be a pursuit for its own sake. You go to law school to become a lawyer (or, in your case, maybe a higher-paid and more specialized librarian?), not to explore.

All that said, I didn't hate law school. I found it manageable, sometimes interesting, and only really stressful around finals. Sure, there are assholes, but it wasn't as bad as the stereotypes I had read about. I think a lot of people who say "Oh everyone is so competitive and it's so nasty" are people who are actually competitive themselves and won't admit it. I had friends, we helped each other study, there was none of that Paper Chase-type backstabbing or fighting over outlines or whatever. The kinds of people I met there were a little more straight-laced than my college friends on average but it was ok. Remember also that you will be one of the oldest people in your program, and many of them will be in their early 20s. That dynamic worked well for me -- it was easy to focus on getting my work done, going to class, and going home.

I also went full-time and wasn't working and didn't have kids yet, so I think it's unquestionable that if you go while working and parenting it will be more stressful than my experience.

Copyright law was one of the more interesting courses I took.

I could say a lot more, email or gchat?

hey man alive thank you! this is all super helpful. email is fine! and by the way i owe you an email- i rarely check my ilx email address (it's a one-off account, weeks sometimes months go by, i am trying to be better about it) and didn't realize i missed one from you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMS59sxwxs

Numbered points one and two and weak reasons to go -- the more concrete they get, the stronger they become as positives.

Numbered point three is not in the plus column, and, as a predictor of happiness, statistically speaking, actually more of a negative.

What comes after "all that said" is a killer no-more-calls-we-have-a-winner reason not to go.

I know lots of people for whom these four points are true who went to law school anyway, and a few of them did well in school. I don't know any happy people like that.