Are law schools pulling a “Plato’s Cave?”

 

Having majored in worthless undergrad disciplines like English Lit, Poli-Sci, Philosophy and other future Starbucks barista subjects, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave will no doubt ring familiar to many Big Debt readers. For those unfamiliar with the parable, a brief summary is presented below. From www.wisegeek.com: 

In the beginning of the Allegory of the Cave, Plato represents man’s condition as being “chained in a cave” with only a fire behind him. He perceives the world by watching the shadows on the wall. He sits in darkness with the false light of the fire and does not realize that this existence is wrong or lacking. It merely is his existence — he knows no other nor offers any complaint. 

Plato next imagines in the Allegory of the Cave what would occur if the chained man were suddenly released from his bondage and let out into the world. Plato describes how some people would immediately be frightened and want to return to the cave and the familiar dark existence. Others would look at the sun and finally see the world as it truly is.  

They would know their previous existence was farce, a shadow of truth, and they would come to understand that their lives had been one of deception. A few would embrace the sun, and the true life and have a far better understanding of “truth.” They would also want to return to the cave to free the others in bondage, and would be puzzled by people still in the cave who would not believe the now “enlightened” truth bearer. Many would refuse to acknowledge any truth beyond their current existence in the cave. 

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In imitation of Plato’s prisoners, American teenagers are today gorged on a gluttonous buffet of just such “flickering shadows.” Like portly customers at a Bob’s Big Boy, one slathers on successive degrees like ranch dressing, a compulsory fattening-up for the inevitable student loan slaughter. Sadly, this education binge thickens Access Group’s girth while the bled-out victims reserve a spot in the austere future’s food-stamp lines. 

From kindergarten’s opening minutes forward, it’s beyond axiomatic that “college is a must” and “education is the answer.” One’s own VIP ticket, a backstage pass to a concert called success. Early indeed it begins. Before Junior is through soiling his diapers, he’s likely endured a flickering barrage of phonics-building DVDs, cognitive-theory coaches, and other fashionable accessories of the preschool-pimp parasites to whom his parents earnestly fell victim. It’s beyond endemic. 

 For most Big Debt readers, the last stop on education’s railroad was the Juris Doctor station (which, of course, preceded the eventual train wreck). For others, the LLM (Lawschools Looting Money) credential proved too tempting a dessert, a snifter of port to soothe the post-JD bellyache. But unlike Pepto-Bismol, these “chasers” only exacerbate one’s heartburn, like a shot of Drano after a keg of Liquid Plummer. Talk about a hangover! You’ll awaken to an empty wallet and a bloody rectum if you head out on the  LLM bender. 

But enough booze analogies. Let’s step off the ole’ club car and have a look around, shall we? “In the beginning,” as the Bible so states- or is it “back to the future?”…. 

The choreography of the typical TTT law school’s “admitted students day” is the law school circus tent’s first sideshow. Sweet Jesus, remember that? We at Big Debt headquarters sure do, just like it was yesterday. Nostalgia? We think not. 

As we know, the JD carnival’s opening act is invariably the “successful alumni” spiel. These masters of illusion make David Copperfield seem a mere piker. Like Plato’s parable, the lemmings march lock-step into an auditorium’s dimmed cave and intently watch these “shadows” grab the podium and commence their smoke n’ mirrors act. Without fail, these shadow grad shills are valedictorian and/or Top 1% types, the hand-picked winners of the TTT lottery. Maybe the ABA brochures should adopt a new sweepstakes-esque catchphrase, such as “all it takes is Access Group and a dream” or “hey, you never know?” Why not? As Big Debt readers know, one’s chances of success in today’s glutted legal industry is as likely as a winning Powerball ticket. But on with the show! 

The culinary warm-up to the “shadow grad” speech is invariably a sumptuous breakfast spread, complete with omelet station, crisp rashers of bacon, and Starbucks coffee served in monogrammed  Law School mugs that one retains as a souvenir upon the festivity’s conclusion. The tuxedo-clad servers add an air of bourgeoisie elegance, a subtle prelude to the three-martini lunches and country club socials soon to come once that JD sheepskin is framed on the wall. As the bacon sizzles and the coffee flows, many gunners-to-be start comparing LSAT scores and boast of pre-law seminars and top-secret-study aids they’ve already committed to memory: 

Gunner #1: “So, I suppose you’ve read Palsgraf already, right? I found the holding an interesting take on the mores of early 20^th Century post-Edwardian legal positivism myself, and can’t wait to discuss same in class.” 

Non-Gunner: “I dunno dude, all I’m ‘holdin’ is these porkroll egg n’ cheese sandwiches! By the way, check out this Lamborghini brochure I just picked up. Once I get my Jay-Dee I’m goin’ with a phat Countach! Rollin’ models and bottles, boss!” 

It’s obvious that even the busboy wants to punch both these obnoxious tools in the face. But before long, it’s off to the plush auditorium. The show’s already on the road! 

Without fail, some perky alumnette will first discuss her amazing experience at __________ Law School. The words “justice,” “pro-bono,” and “give something back” will occur as frequently as “motherfuckas” in a rap song. The shadow grad will then segue into a few “soft” negatives, like the time Professor X gave her an A- on a third-year Art Law exam. The spotlight will then pan to Professor X, seated stage left, who will blush and giggle dutifully on cue. 

Soon the bullshit begins proper. Often it’s a thrilling dissertation on some pro-bono matter where Mrs. Alumnette Esq. single-handedly rescued some innocent killer from “the chair,” rushing breathlessly into the execution chamber mere seconds before the voltage began flowing. Or perhaps an Erin Brokovich type-fable, where corporate greed’s poisoning of the water supply was exposed via passionate volleys of motion practice. Rarely are the 2:15 am Xmas eve re-reviews of “Global Bi-Lateral Broker-Dealer Sub Agreement Addendums” mentioned, nor the thrill of Excel spreadsheet billing codes discussed. Most conspicuously absent are the also-ran grads, who receive no invite to discuss their $17 an hour doc review gigs, insurance defense sweatshops, or Sallie Mae wage garnishments. No sir, kemo sabe. No gate crashers allowed at this party. 

Following the obligatory alumni spiels, the huckster dean will offer some closing remarks along the lines of “remember when you buy that first Ferrari to swing by old ______ Law School and drop off a donation check” and other pipedream-laced platitudes. Often he’ll toss in a few token warnings about “honor codes” and other ethics gibberish, along with what a privilege it’ll be to spend the next 3 years with a crew of fellow Type-A a-holes. Often the “sacrifice” of one’s law professors is noted, and how they’ve “forsaken millions in private practice to share their knowledge with you.” The lifetime tenure, 175 K salary, and five-hour, seven-month-a-year workweeks usually go unmentioned. 

Oh, how our memory fades. We’d almost forgotten the obligatory To Kill a Mockingbird  speech, a reliable staple in the TTT dean’s dumpster of clichés. Our old buddy, Mr. Atticus Finch himself. A trusty multi-tasker, this fictional tale blends hope with guilt, a surefire “can’t-miss” combo. A top-notch salesmen like the Valvoline Dean can cue the Kleenex rations upon conclusion of this tear-jerking chestnut. His oleaginous delivery, neatly wrapped in Brown v. Board of Ed’s swaddling clothes, has yet to spare a dry eye in the lemming’s cave. You’ll sign the loan paperwork as proudly as the Declaration of Independence upon the finale of this slickster’s uber-smooth sales pitch. A fool and his money are soon parted, as the old saw goes. 

On the subject of cost, let’s further break down the tuition digits for a laughing-stock “school” like Seton Hall. You’re looking at $44,000 a year; $22,000 a semester. There are roughly 14 weeks in a semester with about 15 hours of class a week. Do the math. You’re paying roughly $104 an hour, or $1.73 a minute at sticker price. A long-distance call to your uncle in Madagascar is probably cheaper. 

And just what exactly are you paying for, pray tell? Take this limousine liberal assclown, “Professor” Mark Denbeuax of the Seton Hall Unemployment Center. He’s the sort of academic D-list “pinch hitter” the cable news blabbers recruit for filler material when the midgets from Little People, Big World or other celebrities cancel out just before airtime. Let’s hear Mark’s fascinating thoughts on Gitmo: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqXacCsGtKM 

We won’t squander bandwidth responding to the absurd ramblings of this overpaid TTT dingleberry and that burly Rachel Maddow fellow (especially given reports that the recent Xmas Day airline bomber was reportedly networking in Yemen with released Gitmo detainees). Ah, Denbeuax. Must we suffer such fools gladly? Or, as the “Terrance Mann” character told Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams while throwing him out of his apartment: 

“Oh my God! You’re from the Sixties, aren’t you? Out! Get out right now, there’s no place for you here in the future! Peace! Love ! Dope! Back to the Sixties with you! 

It transcends hilarity that a contracts “professor” from a TTT like Seton Hall has convinced himself that he’s an authority on Gitmo and international terrorism. Please Mark, for the sake of Western humanity stick to UCC-2-207 and quantum meruit and the other hackneyed chestnuts in your shopworn One-L repertoire. Your grasp of reality is so tenuous it makes the late Michael Jackson seem downright grounded by comparison. We at Big Debt do thank you for the laughs, though. Television hasn’t treated us to a spectacle this side-splitting since Barney Fife compared the Mayberry County Jail to Alcatraz on the old Andy Griffith Show. And gee-whiz, Mark, it sure must be nice to pull down a guaranteed six-digit salary and clock a grueling 8-hour work week, no? Wonder how many One-L classes got cancelled while you were down in Gitmo springing bloodthirsty Al-Qaeda warriors from lockdown? We’re sure you wrote those kids a personal check for the $104 per hour of class time that was cancelled, right? 

Wow. That’s too harsh, even for us here at Big Debt. Or is it? After all, professor, I doubt the children really missed much. As we witnessed in the YouTube clip, his plodding rhetorical charms reminds one of Corky the Retard delivering a book report on Where’s Waldo? 

As we know from detective shows like NYPD Blue, when the fuzz want to know a suspect’s reputation, they start by asking his neighbors. Let’s knock on Cozen O’Connors door, a huge 550+ attorney Biglaw slop-shop located directly across the street from Seton Hall’s battle-scarred Newark campus: 

http://www.cozen.com/careers_lawstudents.asp?d=1&m=2 

Hilarious! Seton Hall is conspicuously absent from the OCI schedule despite being located directly across the street from the school! What does it tell you about Seton Hall’s reputation that a major international firm won’t spare ten minutes to send someone across the street to scrounge resumes, much less participate in OCI? Did you know that only 4 of Cozen’s 550 associates are Seton Hall grads, and the firm hasn’t hired anyone new from Seton Hall in nearly a decade? We’ll bet a fat deck of food stamps you didn’t. Seton Hall’s professors shouldn’t be hanging out at Gitmo and trolling the cable news rounds, they should be groveling on bended knee begging the partners at these firms to show up and hire some students (or at least interview them!) A dash of fellatio probably wouldn’t hurt. 

Here at Big Debt, we really have to laugh at the commentators who rant about recent graduate’s “sense of entitlement.” Imagine! Who do these ungrateful law students think they are, investing $132,000 raw tuition and three years study at some TTT and then expecting employment opportunities upon graduation? It apparently never occurs to the law schools that their overpriced, impractical, and all-around useless curriculum fails to impart any marketable skills which legal employers (or any employers, for that matter) are willing to pay for. 

As Warren Buffet once said, “when the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked.” Here’s a newsflash, ABA: most law grads have been swimming sans trunks for over a decade. Only the poisonous tide of dead-end doc review kept the waters high enough to cover their pathetic, shivering nudity. Now these jobs have been sucked offshore like a riptide by the crumbling economy and the ABA’s sell-out outsourcing opinion. The newbies are exposed, streaking across the shoreline barenaked and penniless. There’s “nowhere to run to, JD’s, nowhere to hide.” 

Given the above, the real sense of entitlement comes not from recent grads, but the law schools themselves. Why do  TTT punchlines like Seton Hall, Car-Bozo, or New York Law School feel entitled to charge the same tuition as Yale and Harvard? Why do law professors (who sorely lack the rigorous academic, peer-reviewed publication & research grounding) as profs in other fields feel entitled to guaranteed 6 figure tenured paychecks for recycling the same ancient 18^th century cases year in and year out? Why do the ABA schools feel entitled to publish blatantly fraudulent salary and employment data and furnish said self-serving falsehoods to a national magazine for publication? 

Make no mistake- there’s no “free market” at work here. In fact, it’s the furthest thing from it. The law school cartel is directly subsidized by Ma & Pa Taxpayer via the colossally inept Stafford Loan program. As such, a law school’s sole purpose is the separation of young, futureless suckers from wheelbarrow loads of Uncle Sam’s student loan booty. Once cash-tapped, the kids are then dumped-bereft of practical skills, training, or a shred of marketable experience- into a declining job market glutted beyond all comprehension. These so-called “students” are really just irritating middlemen in the Ponzi scheme, needed only to sign the  paperwork and keep the cash cow gushing milk. Outside of the top 5%, there’s little more the so-called “career centers” can do but wave the also-rans off to craigslist, or have them badger other loser alumni for volunteer cut n’ paste gigs in insurance defense or other moribund, minimum-wage practice areas. 

And enough already with the “bootstraps” compassionate-conservative shtick and the “positive thinking” pipedreamers. We especially enjoy the scolders who admonish us at Big Debt that there are no “free rides” in law. 

“Free rides?” Surely thou jest! There’s a fleet of pimped-out party buses stuffed with drunken professors and worthless, do-nothing administrators taking a veritable booze cruise on Uncle Sam’s Stafford-loan dime. It’s long past time we slash the tires and dump some sand in their gas tank. But how? 

A frequent criticism of Big Debt is that we propose no solutions. Here’s one for starters: 

There’s no reason whatsoever why America’s community colleges couldn’t staff a competent law program with experienced, local “in the trenches” practicing attorneys who’d each work a night or two a week for $2500 a semester. A bachelor’s degree need not be a prerequisite (in most of  Europe law is an undergrad degree, and their approach to drug possession, non-violent crime, and other issues is clearly far superior to the  “throw away the key” mandatory minimum model drafted by our mouth-breathing Juris Doctor-legislators.) 

Imagine the myriad benefits of this pedagogic model. The kids would learn local law and procedure, hear stories about the “real world” and business side of the law, and maybe even tag along and watch their professor try a case or take a deposition. Perhaps the programs could even serve as local Legal Aid societies, with students cutting their chops on real cases right away under well-seasoned, local supervision. Wouldn’t this make more sense than memorizing Rule Against Perpetuities puzzles and the other pointless, pseudo-intellectual drivel that passes for an ABA law school education? After all, apprenticeship is how Lincoln, Darrow and Webster all became barristers. How shameful is it that recent grads are experts on arson vs. houseburning and other Shakespearean-era trivia but unable to fill out a HUD-1 form, preliminary conference order, or even litigate a simple small claims case? If we operated medical schools in this way, we’d still treat staph infections with bloodletting and polio with mustard plasters. 

State bars should immediately implement this common-sense approach and permit non- ABA educated lawyers to practice in all 50 states. Let a real “free market” stripped of the ABA’s iron grip fill the so-called gaps. With their recent #08-451 outsourcing opinion, the ABA have disrobed themselves of even a fig leaf’s wisp of professional legitimacy. After all, the American Biglaw Association fully endorses the doctrine that outsourced 3^rd world serfs are fully capable of practicing American law so long as it pads their already-repulsive profit margins. Given that, one must suppose that the ABA’s prescribed “education” standards no longer serve a purpose either. In this age of Google Books and Lexis-Nexis, it makes no sense to mandate dust-choked libraries stuffed with arcane treatises and expensive case reporters. 

The notion that more lawyers=lower prices is true (just check out craigslist), but sadly most of these solo newbies are worthless as laypeople when it comes to even “simple” cases. We recently witnessed a new “solo” grad make an absolute spectacle of herself during a routine DWI case, and the judge even warned her (while imposing sanctions) “not to come before this court again until you learn how to practice.” His anger was misplaced. The sanctions should be Fed-Exed right to her law school’s doorstep. The “on the job training” that new solos go thru comes, of course, at a client’s expense. But all is not lost. Should a walk-in require help with a Rule in Shelley’s Case issue or find Grandma is a “fertile octogenarian,” the recent grad will Bluebook things right into shape. 

Hell, what do you expect with a “leader” like ABA President Carolyn Lamm, who made a name for herself scoring beaucoup lobbyist cash on behalf of deplorable third-world regimes? Maybe this corporate whore even picked up pointers from her Uzbekistani  human-rights abuser pals about how White & Case might maximize output from the serfs currently laboring in her own firm’s doc review gulags? Work will set you free! 

Lord knows we’ve been there. Squeezing our shrinking doc-review nickels until the buffalo shits while Carolyn and her Biglaw buddies yuk it up at DuPont Circle brie parties sure ain’t much fun, is it? It’s sad that ATL’s brilliant, swashbuckling muckrakers even lowered themselves to bickering with this witless shell of a human being and her dwindling joke of an organization. Carolyn’s rhetorical skills are decidedly bush-league and painfully amateurish. This morally bankrupt Biglaw clown has clearly waded out far beyond her depth. Thin-skinned as a jellyfish and barbed with a topically toxic “defense,” our own Carolyn Lamm. She’s all bark and no bite. 

Pity her. Like most Biglaw partners and ABA stooges, this “Lamm” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We all know the type. She’s a coddled, insecure, money-grubbing sociopath with the morals of a cesspool rodent. Amid the blogosphere’s cyclone of talented writers, her company-gal rhetoric has imploded like a tarpaper shack. It’s a meltdown we at Big Debt find downright comical. Don’t take our word for it or think we’re exaggerating. Even the august editors at high-brow Harper’s magazine saw through her self-serving charade and had some VERY strong words (for a mainstream publication) regarding her bought-and-paid-for Biglaw clichés: 

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/hbc-90006147 

This scoundrel couldn’t “lead” us here at Big Debt across the street. Her appointment as our industry’s de-facto face is nothing short of a professional embarrassment. As Groucho Marx once quipped:  “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.” Truer words were never spoken with regard to the ABA. Naming her as your “president” tells us ordinary lawyers everything we needed to know about the ABA’s nefarious internal machinery (as if we didn’t already). 

But thanks all the same, ABA. I’ll still relish sending my annual donation envelope back empty so you get nicked for 44 cents meter-mail return postage, and encourage all Big Debt readers to do likewise. And if you want to grow your membership rolls, Carolyn, I suggest you solicit Aditya and Rajiv over in Bangalore, although it might take them a while to scrounge their annual dues on the 40-cent an day salary they’re paid to code Biglaw’s outsourced bales of billable, mind-numbing slop. But hey, they’re “lawyers” just like us ABA-school grads, right? 

  

Competing on a playing field this unlevel is akin to a baseball game where one side get 15 outs an inning and the other three. Like Gaylord Perry, the ABA has a crotch full of Vaseline and a wad of sandpaper up their sleeve. Their pitches are downright filthy, and the umpire has been bribed. 

Kids, seriously, if you are currently enrolled at Seton Hall, Brooklyn, ‘Bozo, NYLS or any other also-ran private school, take a good, hard look at first semester grades. Realize that you can bail out now and save yourself a lifetime of crushing, impoverished misery. You’re on board the Titanic and the iceberg has been hit, but lifeboats remain. Board them now. Don’t go down with the ship and hope you’ll find some flotsam or jetsam to grab hold of in the drying cesspool of the legal job market. There is no “market” to speak of, just hordes of heavily indebted losers cold-sending resumes into craigslist’s barren ghetto. Your leverage via a vis salary is pathetic, like trying to budge a boulder with a chopstick. Jobs paying south of 40 (and even 30) K a year are getting bombarded with hundreds of resumes in the infamous “white-out” phenomenon described in our Shingle Hanger post last month. 

Don’t buy into the “versatility” shtick either. A JD isn’t a Swiss Army knife or some all-purpose resume improvement tool. You’re an attorney, not MacGyver. In this painful economy, HR departments are looking for relevant, specialized work experience and cookie-cutter resumes, not castoff paper-churners who can “synthesize appellate caselaw,” whatever that means. You don’t use a hammer to drive a screw, and employers seldom hire a JD for anything but the practice of law (unless you count the JD burger flippers and busboys, LOL). 

We here are Big Debt have ventured out of the cave, seen the world as it is, and now make our rounds showing others the light. Most, like Plato’s prisoners, reject our view. They enjoy the cave’s warm comfort, its flickering shadows and familiar chains.   Puppetry versus reality. As Einstein quipped: 

“The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results.”  

Today’s kids have- we posit- no excuse. They’ve heard the blogosphere’s bad news and thus proceed at their peril. Most make the law-school decision mindlessly as moths flying into a porchlight (and encountering a similar result). Yet onward the lemmings flutter, munching popcorn in Plato’s cave as the charade proceeds. At pre-law websites like Top Law Schools, the children find their prospects forever bullish, naïve as toddlers awaiting Santa’s chimney-slide. They’re in for an empty stocking and a face-full of soot. Better burn that lump of coal Santa leaves you for heat, since that’s the only “gift” you’re getting from today’s legal industry, kids. 

For God’s sake, things are so bad that hordes of recent grads are commuting 2 hours each way to work for free, right here in NJ: 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121274655 

Seven years of higher education to “compete” for a chance to work hard for nothing! The “volunteers of America,” as Jefferson Airplane sang. Stories like that rarely make the  admissions brochures, eh? Thank your lucky stars for Big Debt. As the late Paul Harvey used to opine: “and now you know the rest of the story. Good day! 

  

The kids in Bristol, 

Are sharper than a pistol 

When they do the Bristol Stomp 

L4L

LA Times says: No More Room on the Bench!

Wow, wow, and just WOW!  Perhaps the hardest-hitting mainstream Op-Ed yet on the dismal state of the legal “job market.” The writer sounds like a Big Debt fan! We argued in our inaugural post here at Big Debt about stripping the ABA of all accredation authority, and have noted their visceral systemic corruption and blatant conflicts-of-interest for years. From todays Los Angeles Times:

The American Bar Assn. allows unneeded new law schools to open and refuses to regulate them. The government should consider taking steps to stop the flow of attorneys into a saturated marketplace.

By Mark Greenbaum

Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being “a good start”? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys.

Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates. There is a finite number of jobs for lawyers, and this continual flood of graduates only suppresses wages. Because the ABA has repeatedly signaled its unwillingness to adapt to this changing reality, the federal government should consider taking steps to stop the rapid flow of attorneys into a marketplace that cannot sustain them.

From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016. Taking into account retirements, deaths and that the bureau’s data is pre-recession, the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

This jobs gap is even more problematic given the rising cost of tuition. In 2008, the median tuition at state schools for nonresidents was $26,000 a year, and $34,000 for private schools — and much higher in some states, such as California. Students racked up an average loan debt in 2007-08 of $59,000 for students from public law schools and $92,000 for those from private schools, according to the ABA, and a recent Law School Survey of Student Engagement found that nearly one-third of respondents said they would owe about $120,000.

Such debt would be manageable if a world of lucrative jobs awaited the newly minted attorneys, but this is not the case. A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt. This problem is exacerbated by the existing law school system.

Despite the tough job market, new schools continue to sprout like weeds. Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine.

The ABA cites antitrust concerns in refusing to block new schools, taking a weak approach to regulation. For example, in 2008 the ABA created an accreditation task force to study the need for changes, but saddled it with a narrow charter. In the end, it proposed only cosmetic changes and rejected out of hand the possibility of giving up control over accreditation, calling the idea not viable and “draconian.”

The task force also raised the possibility that if the ABA gave up its accreditation authority, the Federalist Society, a conservative-leaning interest group, could take over that job. This is an intellectually dishonest red herring, likely injected to divert attention from the idea’s merits. The Federalist Society would have no reason to do this because the technical, expensive accrediting process does not gibe with its mission, nor would the Department of Education be likely to give it such authority.

The ABA has also refused to create and oversee an independent method of reporting graduate data. Postgraduate employment information generally provides the most useful facts for prospective students to study in deciding whether to go to law school.

In many cases, the data that schools now furnish are based on self-reported information, skewing the results because unemployed and low-paying grads are less likely to report back. Law schools do this because they want the rosiest picture possible for the influential rankings given by U.S. News & World Report. Despite its ample resources, the ABA has rebuffed calls to monitor the schools to get more accurate data, calling the existing framework an effective “honor system.”

Based on what happened with the accreditation task force, the ABA is not likely to force change; it is too intertwined with the law schools. ABA groups — such as the task force, which was chaired by a former dean — are stacked with school officials who have no incentive to change the status quo. This is why the ABA should get out of the accreditation business completely.

Unlike other professional fields such as medicine and public health, whose preeminent professional organizations do not have control over the accreditation of schools and programs, the ABA exercises unfettered power over the accreditation of law schools.

The American Dental Assn., the nation’s leading dental group, offers a model for the ABA to follow. It accredits schools but assiduously guards the profession and has allowed respected dental schools such as the ones at Emory, Georgetown and Northwestern to close for economic reasons and to prevent market saturation. Such a move by the bar association would be unprecedented. Dental schools go even further to protect the profession’s integrity by collectively boycotting the U.S. News rankings.

The U.S. Department of Education should strip the ABA of its accreditor status and give the authority to an organization that is free of conflicts of interest, such as the Assn. of American Law Schools or a new group. Although the AALS is made up of law schools, it is an independent, nonprofit, academic — not professional — group, which could be expected to maintain the viability and status of the profession, properly regulate law schools, curtail the opening of new programs and perhaps even shut down unneeded schools. The AALS has cast a very skeptical eye on for-profit schools, compared with the ABA’s weak hands-off accreditation policies.

Although these would be unprecedented moves, they are necessary. The legal profession must be saved from itself.

Link to original here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-greenbaum8-2010jan08,0,4457698.story?track=rss

New “Shingle-Hangers” get hung out to dry

From Wikipedia’s “Frauds” article:

Scammers recognize that the victim who has just been scammed is more likely to fall for scamming attempts than a random person. Often after a scam, the victim is contacted again by the scammer, representing himself as a law enforcement officer. The victim is informed that a group of criminals has been arrested and that they have recovered his money. To get the money back, the victim must pay a fee for processing or insurance purposes. Even after the victim has realized that he has been scammed, this follow up scam can be successful as the scammer represents himself as a totally different party yet knows details about the transactions. The realization that he has lost a large sum of money and the chance he might get it back often leads to the victim transferring even more money to the same scammer.

Brilliant, no? After all, each orchard of morons always has a few low-hanging fruit just ripe for the picking. The “perennial” suckers, if you will. As our former president George W. Bush so eloquently put it: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice- uh, well, uh, uh- it’s not nice to fool people again!”

Consider the typical, hapless TTT law school grad: First she invested 100 K in a worthless undergrad degree like English Lit or Poli-Sci, then compounded this initial mistake by piling on 120 K or more in non-dischargeable law school loans, bought hook, line and sinker the materially fraudulent salary stats of her law school, endured the BarBri blather-thons, walked the hot coal hazing ritual of the bar’zam, and now finds herself coping with $1500 a month loan payments and a total lack of job opportunities. It’s a familar disaster. Like the Mountain Climber game on The Price is Right, she yodeled her way up the debt mountain and has now fallen off the cliff. Yo-da-le-hee-hoo! Thanks for playing! Even document review, the perennial “parting gift” of the law school also-ran, has now been shipped off to India like those factory jobs of yore. As Springsteen sang in “My Hometown”:

They’re closing down the textile mill ‘cross the railroad track

Foreman says these jobs are going, boys

And they ain’t a comin back

That said, we recently learned here at Big Debt that a new genus of parasite has mutated within the infectious Petri-dish of the law. This nascent strain of law school “after-scammers” are breeding like salmonella in lukewarm mayonnaise.  Our friend & fellow blogger Tom the Temp dubs this new (and apparently, now viral) bug the “Solo Practice Cheerleader Crew” (see Tom’s thoughts on these pathogens here):

http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-solo-cheerleader-shysters.html

The solo practice pipedream is nothing new to us here at Big Debt, having wreaked its way through our document review projects for the better part of this decade. All us old time coders remember the so-called “solos” on project who were “just having a slow month” and ended up in the doc review gulag “for a short while.” Curiously, those “slow months” stretched into years as these folks popped up again and again on projects like those old character actors from the 1940s gangster movies. Like bad pennies, they were always back in Biglaw’s pocket sooner rather than later. It wasn’t by choice, either.

 Armed with a flimsy stack of Vista-Print business cards and a “prestigious” midtown Manhattan mail-drop address, these usual suspects were always “open for business,” such as it were. You’d sometimes hear them on the phone in the vestibules, bickering over some rinky-dink traffic ticket or small-claims case. One particular guy nicknamed “ShitFingers” liked to operate his side practice via cellphone while dropping heat in the restroom stall, giving “toilet law” a literal dimension.  His clients must have thought one of those Civil War re-enactments was going on while he discussed the retainer.

Later, you’d go to wipe and find he’d captioned draft briefs on the Charmin and hidden a stapler under the toilet tank. I often wondered why he didn’t just tape his law degree up in there alongside the stall’s graffiti. No one would’ve cared. This was, of course, in the SullCrom basement, down amid the boxes. Those were the days, young grasshoppers.

As mentioned supra, these “solos” had little more to show for their 7 year education than those pathetic Vista-Print cards. They were curious spectacles in themselves, these cards, featuring the obligatory “Esq” after the last name, coupled with the redundant “Attorney & Counsellor at Law” directly beneath in bold font. Sometimes they’d even slug it “The Law Office of Mr. Loser Solo, Esq, Attorney & Counsellor at Law, JD, LLM” and other such nonsense, as if listing every permutation of their “title” would somehow confer respect.

It didn’t. When the bowel movement was over and the business cards put away, he went back to being Temp. Coder #670934, like Superman doffing his cape and becoming Clark Kent. On payday, he drew the same $21 an hour as the rest of the losers.

But again, we think there really was something to these business cards, something quite profound. A fire within, perhaps? Like the tiny American flag that John McCain & his cellmates stitched while inside the “Hanoi Hilton”, the cards represented pride and honor and-dare we write-loyalty to a system. A system that (like McCain & his cellmates) had ruthlessly screwed and exploited them, but a system for which they harbored latent pride nonetheless. We often wondered what pleasure was drawn from seeing one’s own name followed by “Esq.” as opposed to Temp. Coder #670934, or prison inmate, or midget porn director? Of what did these coders dream? Did they stare into the alkalide glow of the monitor and see not a Global Broker Dealer Sub-Agreement but instead  a plush corner office, complete with mahogany desk, silk drapes, and Cartier fountain pens? The law school sheepskins proudly framed on the walls? Were the images real and concrete, or lacy and vague at the edges like a sitcom’s dream sequence?

We’d rather not know. Here at Big Debt, we find these “solo law practice” pipedreams rather comical, and somewhat akin to delusions. To paraphrase Nietzsche, “if you stare too deeply into the monitor, the monitor will stare into you.” So it goes. As the SullCrom partner once told a peskily querying coder “We’re not paying you guys to think. Just click, and click fast. There’s too much fucking around down here.” Right after that, some old coder farted.

But we digress. Our first snowfall in NYC was just last week, yet shitlaw firms have been reporting severe, isolated blizzards since the 4^th of July. This often culminates in the phenomenon known as a “white-out.” A white-out occurs when the quantity of incoming resumes exceeds the toner capacity of the fax machine.

Like hurricanes, scientists are studying the “life cycle” of the typical NYC whiteout. Its root causes, if you will. The “chain of events.” They tell us it all starts with a craigslist ad, calling for some no-fault/landlord tenant/personal injury/_________(insert shitlaw practice area here) associate, with 0-2 years experience. Usually the salary offered will be south of 40 K, but much “experience” is promised in lieu of monetary remuneration. Court appearances and depositions are often mentioned, as well as “motions.”

Upon pressing the “post” button and placing the ad online, the white-out phenomenon unfolds. Within seconds, the telltale ring of the fax machine sounds thru the office as the resumes start shooting in. Building slowly, like a dynamo whirring up to speed, the ring soon blares into a continuous, screeching din like a submarine’s “torpedo” alarms in those old WWII movies. Upwards of 75 resumes a minute have been reported, and often the hapless secretaries are dispatched to find milk crates, empty wastebaskets, and other vessels to absorb this incoming resume avalanche.

But there’s no taming this feral beast. As the toner bleeds dry, the print becomes fainter and fainter, until the boldfaced “Cardozo Sports Law Journal” and “Top 46%” boldfaced type dissolves from a scream to a faint whisper. By the ten-minute mark, the fax machine pages emerge blank and unblemished, the shitlaw credentials unprinted. The toner is empty. Yet onward the onslaught continues, page upon  empty page pouring into a vortex of abject nothingness. This heart of darkness is pure white.

(A nostalgic digression: Our old NYC personal injury firm was notoriously cheap, and bought those knockoff Canal Street toners that left your motions looking like a charcoal briquette had been rubbed across them. A judge once charitably compared them to cave paintings, and asked if I’d scrubbed a chimney with them).

But let’s get back on track: Below is the website link to the new “Solo Practice University”, complete with ringing customer endorsements:

http://solopracticeuniversity.com/

God, I haven’t laughed this hard since George Carlin kicked the bucket.  Is Carlton Sheets this huckster’s uncle? Don’t laugh. I can easily see these solo-practice shysters taking to late night TV to hawk this useless drivel. You know, like those investment scam “informericals”…..

Imagine Susan Carter Liebel, CEO of Solo Practice University, reclined on a beachfront patio in Miami, the jade green waters over her shoulder and the shills facing west. Perhaps a dwarf or two, fanning her with palm fronds.  Everyone sports a tan. Sunshine, smiles & sunglasses abound:

SCL: “Tell us about your experience with Solo Practice University, Shill #1”

Shill: “Susan, I can’t thank you enough for these wonderful Solo Practice Univesity materials. Two years ago I was sweating in the Paul Weiss cockroach basement coding documents for $21 an hour. That’s right Susan, a LICENSED NY ATTORNEY making $21 an hour.

“Dear God, surely you jest, Mister Shill?”

“I wish I was kidding, Susan, I really do. Sadly, that’s the going rate for doc review in NYC.”

“But at some point, that changed, didn’t it? Tell our audience here what happened?”

“Well Susan, after getting home from Paul Weiss at 2 am with my eyes weeping blood, I switched on my 13 inch TV to watch Gilligan’s Island when I caught the end of your program here.”

“You mean “Solo Practice University”?

“Yes, and it was a moment that changed my life. Like a revelation, a God coming down to Moses, it all fit suddenly together.  Everything was made clear, the solutions to all my problems and the answer to all my prayers. The “Ten Commandments” of Solo Practice U” touched my soul!

“What happened next, pray tell, Mister Shill?”

“First, my neighbor started screaming about the extension cord I’d strung across the fire escape to steal his electricity, since mine had long since been cut off for non-payment. After he settled down, I had my roommate hold the rabbit ear antenna while I took down the toll-free number for Solo Practice University! After a few minutes I thought, “Gee whiz, why have I been reviewing those Global Bi-Lateral Broker-Dealer Sub Agreements for Paul Weiss at $21 an hour, when I can do it just as well myself for $950 an hour?

“And tell us, Mister Shill, how things have worked out since that call?”

“Susan, I’m just so happy I’m almost speechless. These tears are the tears of sheer ecstasy, by God. I swear I haven’t wept like this since chopping a bushel of onions at my old Gray’s Paypaya side job. Now, thanks to Solo Practice University, I have my own solo boutique doing Sarb-Ox compliance and multi-international securities work, and my biggest decision is choosing what color Ferrari I want next.  Me and the Goldman Sachs gang, who are now clients of mine, are partying balls out with Derek Jeter & some hookers in a couple hours. And Susan, you see this watch? See it? This watch cost more than a year’s tuition at Seton Hall. That’s who I am, and these loser coders I worked with are still nothing.” 

Cue the toll-free number. So it goes, beachcombers. You can almost smell the Coronas.

Note that none of the solo-practice cheerleaders actually practice law themselves, just as Carlton Sheets never sold real estate and Ron Popeil never ate a rotisserie chicken injected with chunks of raw garlic. Instead, they peddle the idea of solo practice as a kind of elixir, a “snake oil” or tonic if you will. Like the patent medicines of the 19^th century, they’re palliative treatments for the JD pox, not cures. They make outrageous claims and far-out promises knowing full well they can’t deliver. And shit, why not? As we wrote in the intro, someone gullible enough to waste 100 K+  on a TTT law school surely won’t mind parting with another $595 to learn the “inside secrets” of Solo Practice U! The typical TTT grad blows more than that a semester on Rule Against Perpetuities study-aid puzzles and other accessories of the lawschool scam machine.

But the truth soon sets in. Like the Wizard of Oz, the curtain has long since been pulled back on the charade of solo shitlaw by consumer-friendly websites like Legalzoom. The public know full well what a worthless “product” most shitlawyers peddle, and the jig is now up. It sure don’t take 7 years of schoolin’ to cut n’ paste some janitor’s Last Will & Testament together or grovel before some lowlife traffic court judge for a point reduction. Anyone who can read can now pretty much solve their own legal problems by downloading a few boilerplate forms, doing some quick Googling, and pulling the old cut n’ paste. They surely couldn’t be any more incompetent than the typical recent law grad, unless of course their case involved a “fertile octagenarian” or other bar exam trivia. Opening a solo shitlaw office in 2010 is like opening a typewriter repair store in 1993- your product is already obsolete. And no, we don’t want to hear about your uncle/neighbor/dad’s college roommate who made millions in the 1980s on whiplash cases. That horse has long since limped off to the glue factory. Maybe Grandpa Kettle made a living shoeing horses, but that doesn’t mean my spiffy new blacksmith shop on the NJ Turnpike will become a going concern. Times have changed.

Funny too how the “solo university” hucksters have mimicked the TTT law school website template. It features all the lame, hackneyed buzzwords like “networking” and “professional connections,” the usual “success story” shills, and even a spiffy section of “faculty” bios (btw, the faculty member on the upper right corner of Solo U looks like he just swallowed a quart of bong water). Funniest of all is the “virtual law office” faculty chick- (she’s second from the right, bottom row). Does this virtual practice come with virtual clients and a virtual paycheck? To be fair, many lawyers do practice in a virtual way, but the problems is that these “lawyers” are located in Mumbai, Bangalore, and other Third World sweatshops and charge $25 a week to churn the same cut n’ paste shitpaper as Joe Schmoe Esq. down on Main Street USA. All with the American Biglaw Association (ABA’s) full blessing to boot. Let’s sing the “ABA Outsourcing Theme Song” to the old Gilligan’s Island tune:

 “No dues, no exams, no background checks, not a single CLE, like Robison Crusoe, it’s primitive as can be.”

And like Quinnipiac Law School (Susan C. Liebel’s former employer) you’ll be pleased to know that Solo Practice University’s entrance standards are “virtually” nonexistent! She has indeed learned well. Just fork over your credit card number and $595 later you’re on your way to Solo Practice nirvana. And away we go!

Doc review will look like a night on the town once you get a few “rubber check retainers” for some serial drunkard’s 4^th DWI, or sit in some kerosene-reeking trailer park signing up an SSI disability scammer with bulging spinal discs, or chew No-Doz until 4 am filling out the 84,578 pages of HUD-1 dreck and title work toilet paper for some $300 fee residential real estate closing.

We found especially amusing the personal injury practice “negotiation” video, because we here at Big Debt are old veterans of the NYC plaintiff sewer. Save your $595, because Professor Law is 4 Losers can tell you everything you need to know about personal injury work in about 12 sentences:

First off, w/out a 7 figure ad budget you aren’t going to have any decent cases, so class is dismissed. Go have a beer. Second, if you do get a fender-bender whiplash case, the “negotiation’ with Allstate or State Farm will go something like this:

Shitlaw Solo: “Hi, I represent Mister Brokedick with a bulging lumbar disc and want to settle the case.”

Allstate: “We have it marked no pay. We will force you to trial and make 12,459 motions a day to bury you in paperwork. If the client had chicken pox in 1^st grade we will make discovery motions for the HIPPA authorization for that and also seek authorizations for every other sniffle, sneeze or fart this bastard has squeezed since 1965. If the facilities don’t provide them, we’ll just make the motion over and over and over again until you give up. We have a team of lawyers we pay $5 an hour just to do this from Touro Law School. We know damn well you’re a solo and can’t afford to pay the treating doctor 5 K to testify if it gets that far. And even if you do and you win the trial, it’s only a 25 K policy, so you’ll have made nothing after expenses. By the way, go fuck yourself mister attorney. I am a high-school dropout claims adjuster and make 65 K a year with health benefits and you are a scrounging solo ambulance chaser buried up to your ass in debt!”

Really kids, where are you going to get the $210 it costs to buy an index number, the $95 to buy an RJI (request for judicial intervention), the $500 in photocopying fees to get the medical reports,/MRI films/X-rays, the $200 for deposition fees/transcripts, the $45 for each motion and (if you go to trial) the $5,000 a Board Certified Orthopedist gets for a morning of testimony? Just a handful of fender-bender cases and you’re looking at thousands of dollars in “fronting” expenses just to churn the files. Remember, this is on top of your student loans.

Oh, you’ll have the client pay expenses upfront? Good luck. Most personal injury victims are clumsy, illterate basket cases that don’t have a pot to piss in, but what they lack in $$$ they make up for in street smarts. Ask them for money and they’ll be changing lawyers inside of 30 seconds, probably to a big mill that has the juice to get them a 1-800-Lawcash loan shark advance too.

Wake up. This is the real fucking world kids, not some Erin Brokovich fairy tale. We at Big Debt write of the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. We’re dead serious when we warn you away from the solo practice pipedream. Not only does solo practice shitlaw offer lower hourly wages than mowing lawns and less job satisfaction than stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, it also features another fun thing called the “order to show cause to withdraw.” In law, when clients don’t pay, judges don’t care. You need to formally get the court’s permission to part ways with the non-paying, bellicose, and obstinate scum that constitute the “clients” of most shitlaw offices In the words of one wag, “they have big problems and empty pockets.”

Solo practice university, as we here at Big Debt well know, is little more than a modern-day recycling of the old “snipe hunt” prank. These jokers send the newbies forth in search of non-existent “clients” and wax poetic on the notions of “justice” and “making a difference” while laughing hysterically behind the poor sucker’s backs. I’d bet a week’s worth of food stamps that half these “professors” of solo shitlaw U have an uncle who was claims manager of an insurance company or some other family connection that 99% of the incoming suckers could only dream of. It takes serious money to start a law practice, and don’t let the Solo U cheerleaders convince you otherwise. They’re just salesman out to score a quick buck. 

Take this under advisement: A law practice isn’t a shoeshine stand, crack deal, or hot dog cart. You’ve gotta pay bar dues, CLE fees, malpractice insurance, court filing fees, your own health insurance, and a host of other expenses too numerous to list. Student loans are beyond crushing. It’s very easy to get in over your head, and a couple bounced retainer checks will have Access Group’s goons “accessing” your bank account. Short of dropping off $150,000 of seed money on your doorstep, there’s nothing Solo Practice U can do to help you. As the old saw goes, “wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

Like all good salesman, the solo practice cheerleader’s purpose is not to teach you the “practice of law” or “how to network” or any other Oprah-esque, self esteem junkie nonsense.  Our society’s nonstop doses of ”feel good” syrup and “you’re very special” candy canes have rotted our collective teeth out already.  Most people graduating from law school aren’t special, and aren’t going to amount to a pint of cold piss in this devilish farce of a “profession.” Forty years go, no accredited law school would’ve even accepted the majority of the mouth-breathers enrolled today, and rightly so. Fact is, the ”solo cheerleaders” only want to make a sale, and the #1 key to making a sale is overcoming objections.  Consider this snippet:

Solo U Website: “The common preconception among law students is that starting a solo practice is unwise, if not downright impossible. Conventional wisdom says you should work for someone else for a few years to learn the ropes.”

Law is 4 Losers Translation: The common perception is wrong. YOU can succeed where others failed. YOU can beat the odds, YOU can defy the convention wisdom, etc. All you need to do is fork over $595 and the secrets of Solo Practice U will have you minting so much money you’ll need a Brinks truck to escort it to the bank while you follow in your Bentley sniffing blow off the dashboard.

It’s no different than the law school scam itself. These hucksters are so slick it’s as though they were the Valvoline Dean’s own understudies. When kids (and their parents) object to paying a 2^nd tier boiler room “school” like Seton Hall $44,000 a year in tuition, the old “Valvoline Dean” Pat Hobbs just grins and points to the “average starting salary” of $125,000 listed in the brochure and extends a shiny pen.

“Dear God”, say the kids, “that’s only the “starting salary!” “Just imagine how well I’ll do 5 years out!” Hobbs flashes his soulless, oil-can grin and in three years the kids aren’t lunching at Sardi’s but instead sucking glue off their food stamps. The snack bar’s been relocated to the shithouse.

Kids, the sad truth is that a JD/law license is nothing special. Any mouth-breathing moron can drool on the LSAT, get admitted to a TTT, sleep thru the so-called “classes,” take BarBri, and get admitted. If the standards for medicine were as low as for law, the typical US life expectancy would be about age 6.  Cutting my Inspector Gadget Fan Club membership off the back of the Coco-Puffs box was more of an accomplishment than passing the NY/NJ bars. You might as well frame your driver’s license as hang a J.D. on the wall. It’s as watered-down a credential as there is and getting exponentially worse by the day. You don’t make tomato soup by squirting ketchup into a swimming pool, but that’s about as weak as this “profession’s” flavor is today, thanks to our pals at the ABA (American Biglaw Association), who just accredited 4 new law schools on Dec 5.

For a real laugh to ring in the new year, feature this: Solo Practice U now offers gift certificates for that “special” loser in your life. I’m not making this up:

We’ve had many requests from non-lawyer spouses, parents, girlfriends and boyfriends and even lawyers themselves who have wanted the option to purchase the ‘gift of education’ for the lawyer or law student in their life. Now you can do so and just in time for the holidays or even a ‘passed the bar exam’ present or simply because you want to help someone kick start their career in solo practice.  They are good for any occasion and available year-round.

Wow. Talk about a lump of coal in the old Xmas stocking. Maybe a better gift would be a tighter-fitting garage door so the carbon monoxide doesn’t escape while your resident loser-lawyer does himself in. Hell, would you rather be dispatched with the quick choke of exhaust fumes or the slow strangulation of starting a shitlaw “practice” with Sallie Mae riding shotgun? And you really have to chuckle (or wretch) at the “requests from spouses, parents and girlfriends” pouring into good old Solo Practice U. Like Al-Anon families, these folks are collateral damage in the law school bloodbath. It’s hard for laypeople to comprehend just how utterly hopeless and abysmal this industry has lately become, especially with noxious drivel like Boston Legal flooding the airwaves 24-7. Let’s be perfectly clear: For most, a law degree confers nothing but a lifetime of non-dischargble debt, sporadic and miserable employment, stress, bitter disappointment, and wages well south (after loans are deducted) than that of a truck driver, garbage man, or bricklayer. These “loser” grads aren’t just statistics, lest we forget. They’re real people-our friends from law school, from projects, from practice.

 Here’s a fact: law school salary numbers aren’t exaggerated or puffed or coiffed or stretched. They’re outright lies. I’ve been in this game 5 years and can’t name a single attorney I know making more than 60 K. Not one. This is in NY City. Almost everyone I know is either unemployed or working in some doc review boiler room for embarrassingly low wages and no health insurance.  Most are already so jaded and ground-down by this perpetual misery that they just plain want out. Who can blame them? Only a true sociopath could take any satisfaction or pride from the mind-numbing boredom, vapid make-work, elitist pricks, gutter wages, crushing stress, and complete ethical cesspool that is the “practice of law” in our time. It’s nothing more than a giant Ponzi scheme with a tiny handful of “winners” and rapidly growing hordes of very pissed-off “losers.” 

Rather than piss $595 away on a worthless Solo U pipedream, I suggest that all shitlawyers send their families the link to our blog (as well as others in our blogroll at right).  Encourage them to read the many horror stories and shattered dreams posted in the comments section and elsewhere. You are not alone. Unlike Solo Practice U, we charge no tuition and make no false promises. We’ve rubbed the law school lamp too, and no genie was released. Our only goal here is to kick the oinking snouts of the law school pigs who grow forever fatter at the federally-backed tuition loan trough. These swine squeal and bleat about pro-bono work while collecting their six-digit paychecks and jacking up tuition at 5 times the rate of inflation like the hypocritical limousine liberals that they are. We here at Big Debt would like to wish all the absolute worst on them, their families, and their health for 2010. It’s past time these shysters reap some of the misery they’ve sown.

The only surefire cure for the “disease” of a J.D. is to run fast and far from this swirling sewer of an industry before you are sucked down the toilet with the other “solo” rabbit turds. If you’re on unemployment in NJ, you qualify for free tuition at any of the community college tech schools. Our advice here at Big Debt is to roll up your sleeves and load up your toolbox. Thanks to a generation of propogandist “college for everyone” drivel, there’s an acute shortage of HVAC repair techs, plumbers, electricians, and other skilled tradesman. Don’t believe us? Call a plumber and a lawyer and see who can get there first. By the way, ask the plumber if he’s willing to install your faucets “pro bono” because you have no money. After all, running water is surely as important as your legal problems (and plumbers are VERY expensive), so just tell him he should do it for free in the public interest. Try the same thing with your auto mechanic, roofer, HVAC guy, and electrician. You’ll quickly find that only the “law” is so fixated on the merits of giving expensive professional services away to deadbeats for free. Here at Big Debt we’ve long argued against any and all pro bono work. Why? Because by so doing, one reinforces in the public’s mind that the service provided is worthless. This is especially true when rendering an “intangible” product like law, one that looks to a layperson like nothing more than a stack of very boring paperwork. (Imagine that!)

In summation, starting a “solo practice” in 2010 is like selling saltwater on a lifeboat: people are already surrounded by an infinite quantity of this worthless and unpalatable resource.  Drinking that saline-soaked Kool Aid will kill you faster than thrist.  Just open up your hometown Yellow Pages and count the 500 or so pages of desperate solo shitlawyers begging for DWI, real estate, personal injury, and other “common folk” law. When you’ve finished that assignment, we recommend a “bonus tour” of craigslist’s  legal services section, where the truly desperate bottom feeders hang out. Like catfish, these barristers subsist on a steady diet of legal excrement, the carrion every other lawyer has already turned down. Some of these “craigslisters” will even shovel your snow or clean your gutters during your free 7-hour consultation. When you’ve completed this “lawyer-counting” assignment, ask yourselves how many lawyers you (and your family) have needed in your life and divide this by the number of lawyers you’ve counted in your area. Lawyers aren’t much for arithmetic, but this is what’s known as “doing the math.” And unlike Solo Practice U, these numbers don’t lie.

Law Really is a “McJob”!

Check out this profile from the American Biglaw Association’s “Legal Rebels” website:

 http://www.legalrebels.com/profiles/the_legal_grinder

 While I applaud this man for having the guts to try this unique approach, it seems even his business isn’t going so well:

 And the country’s credit crunch and mortgage crisis cut deeply into clients’ abilities to come up with cash retainers, even if they want to. “It’s a lot of hard work, and I don’t know if you can make enough money to make it worthwhile.”

Here at Big Debt, we have a far better proposal to “make legal services affordable,” one that doesn’t involve lawyers becoming latte-slinging baristas on the side: Immediately strip the ABA of accreditation authority, make law an undergraduate degree (or even a 2 year community college program), and require a 3 year apprenticeship program with a solo, public interest, or small law firm as a licensing prerequisite. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and even dentists and physicians all serve apprenticeships (or residencies) prior to licensure. Of course, this presents quite a problem for the law school cartel, since most professors have no practical experience themselves. A self-selecting group, law profs are mostly Ivy grads who clerked for a year or two and went right back into the warm cocoon of law school “academia,” where they waste time writing boring, long-winded articles which no one ever reads or cares about. Did we mention the $150,000 a year salary and six-hour workweeks?

 Eliminating the bar exam would also be a welcome step. This farcical hazing ritual’s sole purpose is to further fatten bloated law professor salaries by providing a cushy summer gig teaching 16th Century British common law to auditoriums full of people at $4,000 a pop. Not one iota of the exam bears even the most tangential relationship to the practice of law, and the recent BarBri class action lawsuit highlights the wanton greed and shamelessness of these parasites. Rumor has it that law professors earn upwards of $30,000 a summer “teaching” the pointless drivel that they somehow neglectfully skimmed over during the 3 years of legal “education,” despite the fact that they charged $43,000 a year tuition for the pleasure. Imagine if we ran our public highs schools this way, with the teacher’s union saying: “Don’t worry parents, we aren’t really going to teach your children anything they need to know, but a monopolistic for-profit test prep company will fill all the gaps after they graduate, so no biggie!”

God, remember the MBE? We here at Big Debthad the pleasure of sitting for it in Albany at the Pepsi Arena. The fellow beside us got so nervous that he soon reduced his pencils to a small mountain of sawdust, gnawing them like a gerbil with his incisors before biting off the erasers, which he gummed, sucking them between his molars. I think he even swallowed a couple. After 45 minutes, having gnawed almost a 2 X 4’s worth of lumber between his lips and ingested a tire’s worth of rubber, the poor tweaker just bailed, giving the 98 year old proctor his half-bubbled Scan-Tron and heading for the hills. We can assure him he didn’t miss anything: even though we passed, no further success followed.

 Eliminating ABA law schools, with their antiquated curriculum, obscene administrator salaries, dust-choked libraries, and patently fraudulent salary and employment stats would be a great “first step” towards reclaiming the once-noble industry of law. After all, how can recent graduates assist those in need when they themselves are struggling under six-figure debt and an abysmal job market? No one has done more than the ABA to create this mess, and as such they should have no role whatsoever in its repair. Their infamous “outsourcing opinion” stripped whatever shreds of moral authority they still held,  and revealed that they really exist solely to increase Biglaw profits at the expense of everyone else.

As more and more grads go “upside down” on their student loans and small firms continue setting new floors for salaries, change cannot be far off. The comments we’ve received here at Big Debt ring like a song across the land.

Theres’s something in the human condition sparks our larynx into song whenever the “goin’ gets tough.” From the soaring spirituals of the Old South’s cotton fields to Woody Guthrie’s witty Depression-era ballads, verse has always salved the weary soul. We offer the  adaptation below for your enjoyment. A link is provided to the original version for those unfamiliar with the tune so that all might “join in.”

 Without further adieu, let’s start singing along with your pal Law is 4 Losers & the Big Debt Orchestra!

 Busted (adapted by Law is 4 Losers)

 My bills are all due, and there’s holes in my shoes

I was busted.

Salaries are down, they’re scraping the ground

But I’m busted

 I got a toilet JD and a low GPA

A big stack of bills that I owe Sallie Mae

Soon she’ll come haul my belongings away

I’m busted.

 I went to Dean Hobbs to ask for a job

I was busted.

I hate to beg, to grovel and moan

But I’m busted

Hobb’s said: “Son, there just ain’t a thing I can do

“We have no positions for losers like you

But have you considered a nice doc review?”

I’m busted,

Lord, oh Lord, I’m busted.

 Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnAYYh8gGQ&feature=fvw

“Swamped with volunteers”, lawyers can’t give their services away!

We here at Big Debt received the following email this morning from The Posse List, an online tipsheet that forwards upcoming doc review gig information to desperate shitlawyers trying to scrounge out a living. Or should we write, used to forward such information. Past tense is appropriate in many conversations about the law, one quickly finds. Like a relative with Stage IV cancer, the legal industry is essentially a dead man walking, with most lawyers already earning less than plumbers, garbage collectors, and truckers (and that’s assuming you can find paying work at all, which is the biggest of ifs.)

 Lately the projects have been few and far between, thanks to the ABA (American Biglaw Association) outsourcing domestic legal work to India. (The most recent project advertised was by an agency called Juristaff. This project required NY bar admission, 6-12 months electronic discovery experience, featured mandatory 60 hour weeks, and paid a whopping $23 an hour with no time and a half for overtime). Needless to say, the project was fully staffed within 45 minutes. Yet despite this gluttonous saturation NY State is considering the addition of three additional taxpayer-funded law schools!

 But back to this morning’s email:

 The Posse List New York — Pro Bono Opportunities

New York Posse List Members:

 Interested in helping underserved New Yorkers who cannot afford legal representation?

    Want to maintain and improve your skills and acquire new skills?   * Need Free CLE credit?  

 There are many reasons for contract attorneys to do pro bono and there are many pro bono opportunities in New York. Clearly there is a serious need for pro bono legal services in New York. In a recent report, the Office of NY’s Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiatives stated that the supply of publicly funded legal aid and pro bono services is “entirely inadequate” to meet the need. In addition to the obvious need, pro bono work is also a great opportunity for contract attorneys to maintain and improve their skills & acquire new skills, work directly with clients, network and get free CLE credit.  (CLE credit is available for pro bono work in NY State).

This email highlights pro bono resources, as well as opportunities that may be well-suited for contract attorneys who have time off between projects or otherwise (some pro bono work may not be appropriate because of time-commitment, requirements of particular pro bono legal service providers).

Note that patience is required for finding the right pro bono opportunity.  The need is great but some legal services organizations that put together pro bono work are understaffed in their pro bono programs and swamped with volunteers because of the state of the economy.  Persistent matters and the right opportunity will happen!  

Hilarious, ain’t it? “Swamped with volunteers!” When’s the last time you heard of a pro-bono plumber, or a pro bono auto mechanic? Both these services are more expensive per hour than the average shitlawyer, but their trade organizations don’t seem eager to replace your faucets or spark plugs for free, do they? Instead, these folks realize that when a large section of a trade decide to work for free, it grossly devalues the service and makes it that much harder for others to earn a living. Besides, most of the lawyers doing pro bono are probably poorer than those they purport to assist!

“Pro Bono” work is little more than a relic from the days when being a lawyers was an elite and lucrative profession, not a race-to-the-bottom industry full of overpriced gutter schools and Biglaw cabals who send work offshore to increase their already repulsive profit margins.

What does it tell you about the state of the legal industry that people clamoring to work for free can’t even find the “opportunity” they desire? Who would spend 100 K+ and three miserable years of their life to enter an industry “swamped” with hordes of people just dying to work for nothing?

 Here’s a novel idea: how about pro-bono law school administrators, or pro bono law professors? Surely given their obscene salaries and benefits that would make a CEO blush, these folks could do a couple years on the house and donate their earnings to scholarship funds, no?

NY Times says “Padlock the Law Schools!”

Yet another “mainstream media” article this morning echoes the messages we preach here at Big Debt: law schools enroll far too many people for the infinitesimal amount of jobs available, and blatantly lie about salary and employment outcomes.

 The Times article, titled “Lock the Law School Doors,” is available right here:

 http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/hold-for-tues-pm-another-view-lock-the-law-school-doors/#comment-313815

 This is perhaps the hardest-hitting article yet published by the mainstream press about the complete and utter fraud that is law school. I especially enjoyed this snippet:

 This fall, as thousands of second-year law students wait in vain for callback interviews and ponder instructions to cast a wider net, they might wonder why, when they signed up for all of this, no one mentioned times were changing.

 Actually, quite a few people have been “mentioning” this for years, like our friends over at Tom the Temp (linked on my blogroll at right) as well as people on the JDUnderground message board (also linked at right).

 The problem is that pre-law students are so hard-headed and stubborn they make George W. Bush seem contemplative by comparison. Most 0 L’s dismiss as a loser or slacker anyone who points out the truly abysmal state of the job market, or the cruel fact that most Non-Biglaw firms and solos pay salaries south of 50 (or in many cases, 40) thousand dollars.

 Among the worst of the kool-aid drinkers are the children over at Top Law Schools, a pre-law message board that is packed to the rafters with the proverbial Kool-Aid drinkers. You might as well walk into Mass at a Catholic church and start espousing atheism as try to tell these lemmings what a massive mistake they’re making. In fact, even mildly anti-law school posts on that board result in an immediate ban of your IP address. Most of these kids have watched one too many Boston Legal reruns and think they have a future at the Ferrari showroom with Denny Crane rather than on the food stamp line. Ah, youth. Forgive them, they know not of what they speak.

 The New York schools aren’t the only ones engaged in bald-faced lies about salary. My alma mater, the Seton Hall Document Review and Perpetual Unemployment Preparation Center, lists “average private practice” salary at a cool $125,000, and broadcasts that 40% of grads enjoyed this outcome:

 http://law.shu.edu/ProspectiveStudents/prospective_jd_students/Career-Stats.cfm

 This isn’t truth-stretching, puffery, or salesmanship. It is an outright lie. If publicly traded corporations engaged in this type of fraud, state AG’s would be all over it and law professors themselves would demand that heads start rolling.

 For institutions that purport to stress ethics and professionalism, this cynical statistical molestation is particularly troubling. After all, most students are going deep into the morass of non-dischargeable student loan debt to pay the bloated salaries and cupcake perks of these fatcat administrators and profs. Enticing people to borrow money based on lies and fraud isn’t just the height of hypocrisy, it’s a moral abomination.

 We below propose a suggestion to the ABA that could easily and completely end this chicanery: Require the graduates of all ABA schools to complete a postcard-sized document 14, 30, and 48 months following graduation, and make non-compliance grounds for disciplinary action. You may wonder why we advocate “14 months” as opposed to 12 for the initial reply? Simple. Many gutter law schools (like our alma mater, Seton Hall) like to steer graduates into Traffic Court Clerkships that, in NJ, last for 12 months post-graduation. These “temps” are counted as fully employed in “government” jobs under the currently flawed metric, which grossly inflates the overall employment picture. Sure, there’s a chance the traffic court judge might “hook you up” with a post-clerkship gig, just like there’s a chance a new Porsche might be under our Xmas tree this December. (In fact, many of these “jurists” spend their spare time hitting the bottle hard, as these recent articles show:

 http://www.newjerseydwilawyerblog.com/2009/06/dwi-convictions-haunt-two-new.html

 and

 http://www.njcriminaldefensejournal.com/2009/08/articles/new-jersey-dwi-law/bridgewater-municipal-court-judge-arrested-in-lavallette-on-drunk-driving-charges/

 Maybe they could score their ex-clerks a bartending gig, since that seems to be where most of their “contacts” are located? Talk about “networking”!

 But back to our proposal. The employment survey should query as follows:

 1.) Law School name and graduation month/year

 2.) Type of employment procured (law firm, solo practice, business etc).

 3.) Job title at current employer (associate, janitor, dishwasher, mulch-spreader, etc).

 4.) Current Salary.

5.) Is your current position temporary or “contract” in nature? (e.g, document review, assisting law professor with article research, etc?

 6.) Have all graduates mail these cards to an independent, third-party accounting firm which can produce accurate charts and other materials from the data provided (and also perform functions like random audits, etc to assure accuracy.)  

 7.) Require all law schools to reproduce the results of this survey in their admissions materials, and require that every prospective student sign-off on a notarized form that they have viewed this data.

 Of course, we know this will never happen. First off, the ABA is too busy finding new ways to outsource legal work and thus increase Biglaw profits per partner, as well as fashion more complex and Byzantine ethics rules to screw over solos and small firms while padding Biglaw’s bottom line. It would also drive most schools outside the Top 25 or so out of business within 5 years, forcing scores of washed-up “professors” back into the cruel reality of the work force which they themselves so detest. Oh, the horror!

We welcome any suggestions or modifications to the employment survey above.

The “Top 14″ Get a Taste of the Toilet!

 

Our pals at the venerable “Grey Lady” today featured an article that we here at Big Debt found especially provocative. Perhaps those august muckrakers at the Times are regular readers of our humble little blog? Here’s a link to today’s piece, titled “Downturn Dims Prospects Even at Top Law Schools”:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/business/26lawyers.html?_r=2&hpw

 Of course, our freinds at Above the Law have been following this story for months, as they point out here:

http://abovethelaw.com/2009/08/lame_nyt_article_on_legal_job_market.php

And now the WSJ Law Blog responds with a similar story:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/08/26/with-biglaw-jobs-drying-up-help-us-help-julia/

 Pass the Kleenex, U Penn! Cry us a river, Columbia! Though we take no delight in crass schadenfreude , it is worth pointing out that those outside the Top 14 schools have been experiencing the “downturn” in legal hiring since about 1985. I found this quote from a current NYU 2-L quite telling:

“You almost bank on the big firms hiring you because they’re really the only ones who can help you pay your debt,” he said, his mind already skipping forward to a situation he didn’t choose to articulate. “Quite frankly it would be an absolute disaster. I don’t know what I’d do.”

Since you’re obviously at a loss for words, allow us here at Big Debt to flesh-out your future: Welcome to reality, comrade. You’re barreling head-on into the Stalag 17 of temporary doc review hell! Welcome to $28 an hour straight time, along with cockroach infested basements and retina-burning hours of staring mindlessly into a computer screen. Did I mention the complete lack of health insurance? The lying, pimp-daddy temp agencies who skim 20% of your paycheck each week, cut rates and overtime mid-project, and do everything short of fellatio to keep the sociopathic, money-grubbing Biglaw partners happy at all costs?

Yes. This; my friend, is “what we do” for a living here at Big Debt. The absolute disaster that you try to “avoid imagining” is the stark reality that many of us 2^nd tier grads have been living in for years. Scant media attention has been paid to us, and few barrels of ink have yet been drained writing of our plight. But that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less painful.

Like you, we once harbored hopes of a decent (and; dare we write, successful) life. We took out the same loans, paid the same tuition, and studied the same casebooks. Yet for us, scolding rather than sympathy was the usual reception we encountered when experiencing your current situation: “You should’ve studied harder for the LSATs,” said the experts. “You should’ve known all second-tier schools lie about placement” cried the career-services crew. “You should’ve gone to a Top 14,” said the recruiters.

Unlike today’s elite crew, we alone bore the blame for our sorry lot in life. No “economic downturns” came to our defense, no “transformative structural changes” could be indicted for our struggles. Nope. We did it the old fashioned way. We just plain fucked up. As George Carlin once quipped, “they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Yes indeed. We believed “it” in spades. Hook, line and sinker, we swallowed the law school bait that bar admission was a fast-track to an upper-class lifestyle. Or at least, we erroneously assumed, a bulwark against desperation and abject poverty. We were wrong on both counts. Subtract four-digit monthly student loan payments from the $45 K a year most shitlaw firms pay (or the temp agency $28 an hour gigs) and you’ll soon find a crowd of well-educated food stamp recipients. This was of course of no journalistic consequence when the Seton Hall and Brooklyn Law mouth-breathers of the world experienced it, but a brand-new narrative naturally ensues when the Top 14 crowd end up angling for spots in the breadline.

Funny how things work out, isn’t it? As Bob Dylan wrote in Like a Rolling Stone:

“Now you don’t talk so loud. Now you don’t seem so proud. About having to be scrounging your next meal”

With the shine on those fancy degrees fading to rust and Biglaw collectively shitting their gold-plated diapers, you “gunners” have every right to be pissed off.  We know we would be.

And no, we’re not without sympathy. After all, you can draw considerable pride from what you’ve already accomplished. You aced the LSAT’s, no? You were one of the chosen few able to correctly seat the orange spaceman next to the red alien on alternate Tuesdays while sticking the left-handed Vulcan in the gun turret on those clever “logic games,” right? You doggedly bit down and memorized those “rule against perpetuities” puzzles where the 84 year old fertile octogenarian was artificially inseminated by a donkey and left her half-human heirs a springing executory interest in a life estate, yes?

C’mon now, we know damn well you did. Fess up! You’ve already earned that goddamned 160 K, by Gosh, and now the Biglaw boys don’t want to pay up! Like Clark Grizzwold arriving at Wally World, you’ve endured a hard-fought voyage only to hear a laughing plastic automaton tell you the trip was all for naught.

Of course, all is not lost. There’s always the trusty small firm “fallbacks” if document review isn’t your bag, as we’ve pointed out here amply in the posts below. Of course, you’ll only be earning $115,000 a year less than what the AmLaw 250 crew pays, but remember that you’re “building experience,” as the old saw goes.

I hope you can survive on 45 K a year with those hefty loans, since that’s what most shit-law “firms” pay today here in NYC. Unfortunately, Sallie Mae and your landlord might not accept the much-ballyhooed small-law “experience points” in lieu of student loan or rent payments. They both have a nasty habit of actually asking for cash.

But fear not: I’m sure you’ll love the world of personal injury practice so much that money and food will be but an afterthought. Nothing gets the old legal juices flowing like taking a deposition in the grungy basement of Diamond Court Reporting in the Bronx. Let me elaborate on a typical “premises case”: You’ll suffer for 3 hours in an unair-conditioned room the size of a broom closet while interrogating some violent crackhead about the puddle of urine he slipped on in a Gerard Avenue dive bar. You’ll show up in the kangaroo-court bullpens of Room 707 in Bronx Supreme and yell out the name of your fender-bender case until your hapless hung-over adversary locates you. Then you’ll together fill out a toilet-paper “stip,” get grouched at by a law clerk during your status conference, and hop back on the subway to your office, where you’ll spend the remainder of your “lifestyle” 11 hour workday cutting and pasting reams of boilerplate auto-accident discovery requests together. At the end of 12 months your bonus will be a Starbucks gift card and a pat on the proverbial backside.

“Way to go, champ,” said our first boss as we wandered off for the holidays. He had held our holiday party in the office, since the phones had to be manned when his 1-800-U-HURT-ME commercial ran during daytime interludes of the Jerry Springer Show. Between bites of pigs-in-a-blanket, I signed up a juicy supermarket trip n’ fall case with heavy neck injuries and a gentleman named “Respeckt” whose thumb was recently gnawed off by a crackhouse pit-bull.

Now the Top 14 crew can join us second-tiers in these festive celebrations! Goodbye SullCrom, hello slip n’ fall! As the old Toyota commercials used to shout: “Oh, what a feeling!”

Once again, we’ve digressed. But really, the Times article was pure drivel. We suppose it’s really not surprising, considering the source. Remember folks, this is the same newspaper that dispatches idiots like Thomas L. Friedman to bumble haplessly around the globe on a fat expense account like Chevy Chase in the those old Vacation movies (yes, we’re National Lampoons fans here). This journalistic “Clark Grizzwold” never saw a Bangalore call center or Mumbai doc review factory he didn’t get all ga-ga over. One wonders what those data entry drones and Dell support desk staffers thought of a curiously American spectacle like Mr. Freidman, with his 1970s porn star mustache and unctuous, shopworn platitudes.  One can easily imagine the awkward exchanges between Mssr. Friedman and an LPO doc reviewer:

 “Greetings, I’m Thomas L. Friedman from the New York Times newspaper. What’s your name?

 “Patel Ganesh Mogambo.”

 “And what are these documents you’re looking at here, Patel?”

 “They are Global Bi-Lateral Broker-Dealer Sub-Agreements generated under your U.S.A. Corporate Paper-Churning Act of 1996, Subchapter VII(b)ii.”

 “Wow, sounds amazing. How did these documents make it all the way to India?”

 “Some wise American law firm called the DLA Piper sent them to my employer so that we could review them to see if the world “shall” appears on page 4354, paragraph 7(g)ii of all 127,390 duplicates”

 “Sounds fascinating, Patel. And congratulations on joining the spiffy new ‘global economy.’ What were you doing just a few years ago?”

 “I lived on a goat farm outside Delhi, and at night attended the Ravi Sankesh Bajar College of Laws and Animal Husbandry. I am told that your country has an equivalent institution, something called the ‘Seton Hall Law School’, correct?”

 “That’s right. And if I may ask, how much do you earn a week here at this legal process outsourcer, Patel?”

 “I am paid thirty rupees, which in your American treasure is about 48 cents.”

 “Amazing. Here is an autographed copy of my new book ‘The World is Flat’. In it, I write about how wonderful it is that extremely wealthy Americans can shamelessly exploit members of the Third World like yourself and realize even more disgusting profits than ever dreamt possible, while simultaneously driving down wages and benefits for licensed American professionals.”

 “Thank you so much Mister Freidman. I will treasure it always as a memento of our most pleasant exchange. By the way, when you get back to your USA can you tell David Hasslehoff hello for all of us? I grew up watching Knight Rider on BBC re-runs and hope to one day code enough documents to buy my village a talking Trans-Am like KITT.”

 “Actually, that car wasn’t a “green vehicle,” Patel. In fact, KITT was what us enlightened NY Times reporters call a “gas-guzzler.” It was recently traded in under our country’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program and replaced with a Honda Prius who sadly can’t talk, but does get 65 miles to one gallon of gasoline! Do you know many ‘liters’ of fuel savings that is, per chance?”

 “Go fuck yourself, Mister Freidman. You a bad, bad man. I have already exceeded my 90 second daily rest break and will be fired by the DLA Piper law firm if I don’t get 500 more batches completed by 4 o’clock in today’s PM.”

 So it goes in Manhattan, it goes in Banglaore. You can change the country, but not the conditions. Beneath Cesar’s deep big sky, we all try to scratch our way ahead. The question is thus: Does the fault lie in our firms, or in ourselves?

Law is 4 Losers, 2009

Become a “certified” click-monkey for just $199

Our friends at Peak, the infamous staffing agency famous for setting new floors on contract attorney pay and canceling projects 15 minutes before they begin, have now taken a page straight from the law-school scam playbook.  These shameless pimps are now offering certification in Concordance document review software for only $199!

http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/385055/df7446b57d/1732500959/8b826f6e35/

I’ve often argued that non-Top 14 schools should focus their entire curriculum on document review training, since that’s where 95% of their graduates will eventually end up. Instead of taking torts, contracts and civ pro the first year, dumps like Brooklyn, Car-Bozo, and NYLS should have classes on Summation, Concordance, Introspect and other coding software. There could even be document review “clinics” where the finer points of coding are taught, like which Chinese take-out restaurant has the best lunch special,  how to adjust your monitor’s contrast to avoid retina fatigue, etc.  They could even bus in patients from a local mental institution to simulate one’s future co-workers out on the clicking circuit. Even clad in a straightjacket, it probably wouldn’t be hard to figure some type of “mouth-coding” device akin to the gadget that lets Stephen Hawking communicate, and thus allow even violently spastic nutcases to code away happily. Some might even make the cut for a Second-Level review!

And honestly, only a rookie coder would fall for this “training” scam anyway. Veterans know that whatever the software platform, you answer the agency by saying “Sure I used that on the X project, I know it like the back of my hand. ” Most of these systems aren’t exactly rocket science: usually there is a button for “responsive” and a button for “not responsive” and that’s about it.  Like law school, this is merely another shameless farce to separate fools from their money.

I’m still waiting for Ron Popeil of infomercial fame to unveil a new televised law school on late-night TV. Surely the ABA wouldn’t deny accreditation to man whose knife set can saw through a Buick’s muffler and still be sharp enough for neurosurgery! He already possesses many of the attributes of a great lower-tier law school dean: hucksterism, puffery, truth-stretching, and of course the most important element of all: a never-ending audience of mouth-breathing shills who believe his every word.

Job of the Day!

Here’s the type of sub-poverty level gutter job that grads of NYC also-rans like Brooklyn, Car-Bozo, Hofstra, NYSL and the other diploma mills can look forward to!

Entry Level Attorney (Midtown East)

---

Date: 2009-08-23, 9:12PM EDT
Reply to: job-gxagw-1338741955@craigslist.org ^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

---

 

Manhattan Personal Injury firm seeks entry-level attorney. MUST be admitted to NY bar. Foreign language skills a plus.
Salary- there is no salary the first 3 months. After 3 months, the salary will then be $25k. You will get great experience and learn how to take a case from inception through trial. You will get to handle your own caseload. Expect trial experience within 9 months of start date.

• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

This is the reality on the ground, kids.  I bet the job poster has burned thru 20 fax machine cartridges already as the hordes of desperately indebted losers look for any foothold possible in this dying gutter of an industry. Four years of college, three years of professional school, and the bar exam all to earn less than a teenage fry cook at McDonald’s!

As I wrote in an earlier post, look for shitlaw “firms” and solos to test new floors for entry-level salary. How low can it go? Maybe soon the firms will charge the associate for working there!

UPDATE: Another new shit-firm has posted a craigslist ad:

http://newyork.craigslist.org/lgi/lgl/1339967848.html

 For those too lazy to” do the math”, this works out to a whopping $16.25 an hour if you assume a 40 hour week (but I’ll bet you’ll be there more than 40 hours).

This is not a joke. These jobs aren’t some aberrations or outliers in the legal world.  Instead,  they are the harsh reality for any second-tier grad outside the Top 5% and law review.  Wise up, lemmings.  Your future is staring you right in the face.

Shitlaw Primer, Part II: The “Experience” Scam

 Ah, it’s that time of year again. Autumn. The days growing short; leaves soon withering off the trees. The once lush canopies will crunch dead underfoot, raked to the curbside with their chlorophyll gone. Soon a sucker-truck will grind them into mulch. So fades the hopes of this fall’s second-tier lemmings.

 At the typical career services office, the hang-dog faces will nervously assemble like a funeral dirge as Biglaw firm after firm pulls out of OCI. Like an ugly teenager, these schools threw a party and no one came. Time to put away the punch bowls and pack up the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey set. This party is over.

The 2 L’s of  2009 are a bit like those Civil War wives, scanning the casualty lists daily to see if hubby got gut-shot at Gettysburg or lost an arm at Bull Run. “My God, even McCarter & English cancelled?,” cry the gunners. “Don’t the partners there drive salt-rotted Hyundai’s and mow people’s lawns for extra cash on weekends?,” and  ”What do you mean Proskauer pulled out? I was all set to tell them about my new article for the Brooklyn Sports Law Journal!”

It’s over, kids.  Christmas ain’t here yet, but Santa already left you a lump of coal.

 The proud “gunners” who spent 75 hours a week in the library at Brooklyn, Car-Bozo and the other also-rans will openly sob into their spiffy new second-year casebooks as the true depth of the mistake they’ve made cruelly sets in. The children’s bone cancer ward at Sloan-Kettering will be a mardi gras compared to the scene that’s soon coming to a second-tier school near you! Biglaw has already filmed the trailer for this horror movie: firm upon firm has already shit-canned OCI at even the elite schools, and summer-associate offer rates are hovering around the 50% mark at many of the big mills per Above the Law and other websites. And rather than ballgames and booze cruises, the few “summers” left in Biglaw are staying past midnight churning the shitpaper to score brownie points. My, how times have changed.

Biglaw never really wanted to “dip into” these shitty Non-Top 14 schools in the first place, and when they did they held their nose and cringed, like a husband fishing his wife’s wedding band out of a septic tank. They looked for the few “diamonds” to pluck from what was otherwise a festering puddle of excrement.  This “tier-two trolling” was necessitated by the insane credit bubble and alphabet soup of shitpaper that had to be pushed during Bush’s ”boom” times:  CDO’s and CDS’s and other worthless securities and phony “investments” engineered by Biglaw’s criminal pals on Wall St. 

Now those days are forever gone. The large firms have a veritable Tiffany’s of jewel-encrusted job seekers from which to pick, and are unlikely to ever again stick their toes in the Tier 2 mud puddles for “talent.”  Why pan for gold when stacks of bullion surround you?

 But fear not, gunners. “There are always small firms and solos who need new lawyers,” says career services. “And by golly, once you get some practice “experience” you’ll be making Biglaw bucks in a few years anyway!”

 This ‘experience’ farce is a staple of the career-services comedy routine. Like Kramer’s prat-falls on Seinfeld, it never fails to raise a laugh around here. Fact is, most rinky-dink firms are struggling to get by themselves and have no need for a newbie shit-lawyer to get all “Learned Hand” applying res ipsa loquitor to some supermarket trip n’ slip case worth $1500 bucks. Just flip open your local Yellow Pages and count the teeming hordes of shit-lawyers begging for DWI, trip n’ fall, simple wills, and other low-end garbage. Hell, go check craigslist’s “Legal Services” section right now and see for yourself how many newbie grads and struggling solos are currently under-bidding each to do the cheapest speeding ticket or DWI defense! It’s like an auction: “I’ll do a DWI for $500, going once, going twice….”Wait, do I hear $450? Going once, going twice: SOLD to the shitlawyer in the beige JC Penney suit for $450!

 Don’t believe me? Here’s a new website that specializes in just what I described:

http://www.legalmatch.com/   

A real-life example: My father recently had a minor fender-bender while merging on to the NJ Turnpike in heavy traffic. He was going about 3 miles an hour, and sustained no injuries and little damage other than a nickel-sized spot of chipped paint. However,  as he was driving a company-owned car, he summoned the police for an accident report so that his company would have a written record for their files.

 Within the week, he received 37 (thirty-seven) direct-mail solicitations from personal injury and traffic court lawyers encouraging him to sue. Some enclosed lavish brochures, calendars, and even refrigerator magnets so we’d remember them if Grandma ever takes a header at the Stop n’ Shop incontinence products aisle! It wasn’t so much funny as just downright sad. You see, NJ Ethics Rules allow ambulance-chasing shit-lawyers to buy mailing lists of every police report filed in each county for the purpose of drumming up frivolous lawsuits. Naturally the NJ Bar is trying to put a stop to this, since any way that non-Biglaw lawyers scrounge out a living is per se suspicious. Read all about it here:

 http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202432615948&rss=newswire 

 The tidbit below from the above article is especially amusing, and indicative of the cut-throat competition among the gutter “firms” to get tort cases. For those too lazy to read the entire linked article, a notorious NJ shitlaw firm hired squads of homeless guys to stick flyers under people’s windshield wipers that advertised the firm. One of these “pamphleteers” stuck an ad on the car of a recent rape victim, touting the firm’s expertise on “rape and assault torts.” The rape victim naturally went apeshit and turned the ad over to the clowns at the NJ Bar Association. The juicy details:

 [P]ompelio’s law partner, David Gray, says K.D.[the rape victim] called him about the flyer, “upset and crying,” thinking Zemel’s firm must have investigated her and feeling her privacy had been violated. Gray says he felt obligated to report what he saw as an egregious ethics infraction.

The matter, Committee on Attorney Advertising v. Zemel, CAA Docket No. 14-2007, was heard Monday by Hackensack, N.J., solo Cynthia Cappell, the chairwoman; Sheryl Mintz Goski of Herold Lawin Warren, N.J.; and Elizabeth Fuerst, the public member.

Zemel, in his answer filed July 10, denied that he deliberately targeted the rape victim or that he even knew about her case, where she lived or whether she had a motor vehicle.

 This is what you soon-to-be 2 L’s  who get stiffed by OCI have to look forward to! Sticking leaflets under people’s windshield wipers like some ghetto department store promoter! Imagine Attitcus Finch rounding up Scout and Jem and saying “C’mon kids, looks like rain’s a coming. Time to get our leaflets under the windshield wipers so Daddy can buy groceries this week! Now Jem, you hit the parking lot over by the Radley place…..”

 Hilarious, ain’t it? It’s not enough that every daytime TV ad features an ambulance chaser begging for your case, or that the Yellow Pages have degnerated into a de-facto Martindale directory of bottom-feeding shit-lawyers. Nope. The good old American Biglaw Association is busy accrediting new schools as we write, and the state of New York is considering using taxpayer dollars to open not one, not two, but THREE new law schools! Read about it here: http://www.law.com/jsp/law/careercenter/lawArticleCareerCenter.jsp?id=1202421782269

 Talk about selling umbrellas on a sunny day! New York sure is facing an acute lawyer shortage, with only one out of every 120 citizens admitted to the bar. Why not just go for broke and pass a “Motor-Lawyer”  law akin to the “Motor Voter Act,” where everyone who applies for a NY State driver’s license is automatically added to the roll of attorneys?  Or just auction off a set number of law licenses each year like they do with the taxicab medallions and such? It’s obvious from the bar exam that standards for admission are essentially non-existant anyway. Remember that Life Goes On episode from the early 1990s where Corky stole the driver’s ed car, drove to New York,  enrolled in NYLS and passed the bar before returning home to his more lucrative career of gluing pine cones on to Xmas wreathes?  Shit, every time New York tries to raise the passing score by a tenth of a point the gutter schools start screaming “racism” and lobbying for “extra time” for their special needs grads to sharpen their Crayolas and wipe the drool from their chins.  Pathetic.

 Better yet, the few small “firms” that actually hire new grads do so only to exploit them at slave wages and send them running around kangaroo court stipping out the cut n’ pasted toilet paper that passes for pleadings in most state and municipal courts. The typical small NYC firm running a craigslist as for an associate pays well south of 50 K, and specializes in landlord-tenant, personal injury, or low-end insurance defense. Some of these firms are infamous for their screwball antics, as the recent New York Law Journal article below states:

“No-fault firm replaces associates with chimps!”

BROOKLYN, NY: Noted no-fault boutique Stage, Dent & Puller this week announced plans to replace all no-fault insurance associates with circus chimps.

            “This recession has been tough on our balance sheets,” said Biff Stage, senior partner at the Court Street firm. “It’s not just Biglaw shops across the river who’ve been suffering. Auto insurers seem to have lost the appetite to settle fraudulent cases in this environment, so we’ve tried to become more cost conscious.” The chimps are part of Stage’s cost-cutting strategy. Stage said that thus far the chimps seem happy, although some have complained about the lack of air conditioning and the case management software from 1983. “Our case management system is like an Atari,” laughs Stage, “and these chimps grew up on Wii, so there’s naturally a learning curve.”

            A court officer who was interviewed for this article (and asked to remain anonymous) had nothing but praise for the new primates-at-law. “Compared to most no-fault attorneys, the little guys are remarkably well-behaved. They never bicker with each other during calendar call like their human counterparts, and many also have less body odor.” Judges have likewise praised the new-found orderliness and decorum embodied by the ape-attorneys. “They’re strong advocates, and an asset to the Bar of this state,” said the Hon. Crash Jackson, who presides over the no-fault part of King’s Civil Court on Livingston Street.

             However, not everyone is “going bananas” about Stage’s monkey business.

             Lauren Haman is president and chairperson of L.A.C.E. (Lawyers Against Chimp Exploitation). “These creatures can think and reason at a high level, solve complex logic puzzles, and possess excellent oral and written communication ability,” says Haman. “We here at L.A.C.E. feel that no-fault auto practice is an insult to the talents and gifts of these unique primates;” some of whom, she added “graduated from first-tier law schools with distinction.” She also questioned the ability of the chimps to afford their natural diet of fresh fruit and wholesome legumes on the $42,000 a year salary that Stage was know to pay his (former) human associates.

            But for now, it seems Stage will get to keep his courtroom monkey-crew as long as he likes. In fact, several AmLaw 250 firms are now exploring the idea of replacing their document-review attorneys with chimps as well. Is Stage afraid of his chimps “jumping ship” if more lucrative work opens up in Manhattan?

            “Not a bit,” says Stage. “The entry-level market is so bad right now that even if all my chimps walked, I’ve have a new crew in here by sundown.” “Besides,” Stage added, “even a chimp would get bored doing doc review.”

      So it goes in Brooklyn!

Another career-services scam is the “midlaw” firms, those supposedly slimmed-down “fighting” versions of Biglaw, the “welterweights” if you will. Unlike the large firms, they may focus on only one small subsection of law, like page 14256 of the Omnibus Corporate Paper Churning Act, Title VIII(9)(b)ii of 1988 instead of the entire bill. Salaries in the 85 to 125 K range are rumored, but seldom seen by new grads.

          In fact, midlaw firms are a bit like Bigfoot sightings or UFO landings: much is read about them, but few can claim to have actually encountered one. Fact is, these so-called “boutique” firms do not hire also-ran newbie grads and “gunners” from second-rate schools, but instead recruit Biglaw refugees who seek saner hours for slightly less pay. Often a significant book of portable business is also required, as are Ivy-league credentials and five or more years in a niche practice area. Trying to land one of these jobs fresh out of school is like running the wrong way down an escalator: people will laugh and heckle you like you’re some kind of moron. Among experienced lawyers it’s well know that one moves downfrom Biglaw into these gigs, not “up” through the trenches of shitlaw. Many midlaw/botique ads even expressly state “no insurance defense attorneys need apply,” a subtle hint that your belt-notches of proud fender bender verdicts are not welcome or needed.  They’d simply prefer not to hire you! Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity!

           By the way, I’d like to thank all the visitors and commentators who’ve visited the site since its inception last week. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and several people have already notified me of their imminent withdrawal from law school. Good for them.  I’ve advised countless law students who miss the OCI cutoff to simply “cut their losses” and not throw good money after bad as we did.  As Kenny Rogers sang in “The Gambler”: You gotta know when to walk away, know when to run.   As us “in the trenches” lawyers well know, the occasional hyperbole and such we employ here at Big Debt serves only to stress the truth of the larger point: Law school would be the world’s biggest scam if not for the “practice” of law itself! Until next time,

 Law is 4 Losers