Going To Law School

Re: job market for Brooklyn Law School grads. Not too great at the moment, but Hurting and Burt will be in better shape in 3 years when the economy isn't in the shitter.

Looking back at Law School Confidential, 90% of his advice was wrong -- although I did the color-coded briefing through all of law school and that was actually kind of helpful.

Didn't get your email Hurting... Try this one: w@rsh@w.@@ron at g✧@i✧.c✧✧ -- @ = a

lolol

I accepted at BLS today.

Didn't re-e-mail you yet Aaron. Will do so soon.

You chose BLS over Cardozo and/or American, is that right, Hurting? What prompted your decision? (if I may ask; feel free to tell me to f--k off)

My worry with Card0zo is the whole job thing ... I only got 20k/year. I'd like to do something in the government (family's in Big Law and it truly sounds like my idea of hell).

I chose BLS because they gave me a full ride and Cardozo couldn't match it.

Stanton, try to talk them into upping your offer next year if you do well.

Brooklyn gave you a free ride after you accepted at Cardoza? Da-yum.

i no rite

I think I get it though -- they must set aside some scholarship money and deliberately wait until their rival schools (Cardozo being the most obvious one) have likely doled out their financial aid. They probably knew that a student like me was either looking at Fordham with no money (actually I was waitlisted) or a Cardozo-level school with money

They made me a can't-refuse offer at a time when Cardozo couldn't match.

Fordham's getting ridiculous with their standards lately. Everyone I talked to who applied was either rejected outright or waitlisted. Might as well just aim for Columbia or something.

I sent you a g-mail, aaron, did you get it?

The single worst time of a law student's life is waiting for the bar exam results. I have 5.5 hours more to wait.

Jeez, waiting for your test results is even stressing ME out. I remember that special flavor of torture very well.

I really hope you pass, for both our sakes.

You ain't kidding, girl.

This shit is not joke. I mean, I'm already resolved to take the thing again in July if don't pass - I really like what I do, and I think I could be pretty to very good at it some day.

But I gots to be licensed.

5.33 hours remain...

Is it normal to feel like you may be making a terrible terrible mistake, say, every other day as you approach OneL?

Yes. I mean, what you're feeling is within a range of normal reactions. It could be fear of the unknown, knee-jerk buyer's remorse, or a real fear that you'll have to confront. You won't be able to tell until you actually go through a semester or two (I'd say two) and perhaps a summer internship. If, at that point, you feel the same way, maybe you should reconsider your career choice.

So I've quit porn . . . .

-- Hurting 2

Or maybe your just reacting to this.

haha

man, I knew that post was going to haunt me

Maybe now I can realize my dream and be a "Dude Who Is A Bit Zingy But Never Get Credit For Being So."

Yes Hurting 2, I am currently very nervous out about this decision. I'm having trouble sleeping. I haven't filled out my loan forms yet.

Of course the whole, "you'll never find a job as a lawyer! you'll be a temp slave for life! ahahah!" thing hasn't helped.

Yeah, well you I'm not surprised. No offense. I just mean that you're kind of doing this ultimately for the same slightly murky reasons I'm doing it, so not surprised you feel the same doubts. I only just did my FAFSA yesterday (btw it only takes like 20 minutes so just get it over with).

You've been reading JDUnderground too, haven't you.

Where are you getting this? Is the economy for first-year attorneys that bad?

I've always thought about becoming a lawyer, but what still floats around in my brain is, "yo dude, what about that screenplay maaaan? move to LA and make movies!" and I'm like "brain, I haven't had a good idea in years" and then my brain's like "you're just being lazy" and I'm like, "dude, brain, relax"

haha, mine is "I really should have gone and gotten that composition degree. I could go to a commercial program and do jingles and soundtrack music for bread"

or

"I really should have just dropped out of bourgeois lifestyle and moved into a warehouse in Philadelphia like my friends did and made experimental noise all day"

A friend graduating a top 10 school has been telling me some scare stories, but he's always been a pretty negative guy without much of a long view on anything. I think he's also just freaking out for personal life reasons.

(about the job market I mean)

I suppose it's all regional. In Miami, I've seen cutbacks recently that shocked me (e.g., Holland & Knight laying off administrative staff; Becker & Poliakoff attorneys taking a supposedly temporary 12% pay cut to compensate for poor firm collections). But for all that, my impression is still that the first year job market isn't that bad.

My relative who's a partner for one of those humungo firms in Miami said a lot of the people at his firm had been laid off, and as a partner he had his $$$ cut, etc. etc.

I haven't heard about massive cutbacks, but obv., the bad economy is having an impact on firms, especially in places like Miami, where the real estate meltdown is at its worst. Still, you won't graduate for another three years, which is a lifetime in terms of the economic cycle.

I think Im' going to "bite the bullet" and put down my second seat deposit. My life is currently a bleak, empty void of a blank slate, so why the hell not.

Hey Hurting 2, still bugging out about the law school thing?

On and off. I just read two cases for the mock class I'm going to on Thursday and they were fun trademark stuff, which got me sort of excited again.

My wife is trying to make me swear off jdunderground.com but it's hard to resist

"BLS IS A PISS SOAKED TTT QUADRUPLE TIER TOILET AND THEIR DEGREES ARE TOILET PAPER AND YOULL ONLY USE YOUR DEGREE WHEN YOURE ON THE TOILET". Cardozo doesn't get much better press.

I'm hoping jdunderground is an unrepresentative minority; I've brought up popular concerns on that forum with family and friends in law (representing schools from Rutgers-Newark all the way to U Penn) and they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

Sitting in on classes, law is really interesting. It's like learning the programming that runs our civil society. My issue is: 1) do I still want to do the poor writer trying to his thang that has been unsuccessful so far and 2) the debt man, I'm going to near 6 figures of debt thanks to COL.

From what I've heard about doc review, it's not much worse than my job now, so if that's the worst case scenario I'm no worse off than I am now except three years older. I even have a friend who likes his low-level insurance law job.

Yeah, I'm not sure what people expect out of the world. It seems like 90% of work out there sucks; as a writer for M4TSUSHIBA ELECTRIC INDUSTRIAL CONCERN a subsidiary of M4TSUSHIBA ENERGY CORPORATION CONCERN I basically just regurgitated orders from Haruki-san and took shit from Bill in telecom. The pay sucked, it was dead end, etc. My co-worker was through the ringer in the editorial world in NYC ... an editorial assistant for most of the big Manhattan publishers. The job we shared she considered a gift from god after that experience.

So uhhh... yeah. If you do the same shit for 4x more money, whatever. Dreams are stupid, too, if you have to move back to your parents if you get laid off.

As in, I'm on the verge of hanging myself living at home with my parents. All it took was getting laid off in a shitty job market, and wallah, I'm 8 years old again. So if law school helps me never, ever to come back here ever again, good.

In every law school preview/admitted student day ever:

-Career services people making it sound like they will find you a job

-virtually meaningless list of sexy-sounding places where graduates work in some capacity or other

-"We have lots of different organizations!"

-"We have lots of different kinds of classes!"

-"One time, a 1L student did this really wacky thing in a class!" (uproarious laughter)

Also, "the students here are all so nice to each other; they help each other out unlike [higher ranked or rival school] where they break laptops and steal library books".

At least at the American University students day the 3Ls were like, "guys, we're not going to kid you, a lot of you are going to start out making $40,000/year."

i feel bad cause i think i introduced you guys to jdunderground haaaaaa

nah, actually I'm kind of glad I read it. I'm using it to manage my expectations but not taking it too seriously.

Yeah, I had no idea about any of that in regards to law school. I thought you'd graduate and be all like $_$

A little over two weeks before I start.

What ever happened to BLAM and his Fantastic Bar Exam?

i have 1 more year left. i'm going to get a government job lol! i am excited about lawyering sometimes.

I'm a little excited for school to start; I've been sitting on my ass like a bum for the past few months and going crazy with boredom. I'm also starting to see into the horrifying darkness of my soul, so a distraction would be nice.