Something completely different.

After finishing law school and sitting for the bar, most people assume that they're going to become lawyers, and feel obligated to restrict their job search to the legal market. Recognizing the reality of the market here, however, an express piece of my strategy for getting work for the coming year has been watching out for opportunities that didn't have anything to do with being a lawyer at all. Just because I now hold a J.D. and (presumptively) a license to practice law in the Bay State doesn't mean that I'm not still (somewhat) trained and experienced as an editor, a PC technician, and (just barely) a dinner-jazz-worthy trio pianist. So I've also been sending out resumes throughout the last few months to particularly interesting jobs in other fields that I might be qualified for, just to see what I might be able to get.

One of those feelers came back in a very surprising way today when I got an email asking me to call in to schedule an interview for an editorial position at a major Boston-based international weekly publication. A publication that you, dear reader, have almost certainly heard of, even if--like myself--you've only read about its articles rather than bothered to read them at the source. A publication that has nothing to do with the law whatsoever. (Although a quick Wiki search reveals that the one and only Oliver Wendall Holmes was published in it in the '20s. For some reason.)

I tell you all of this only because it got me thinking a lot today in a direction that I believe is representative of an increasingly common dilemma for American law school graduates. Here's the short version:

Many people enter law school with no intention of ever practicing the law at all. I used to think I was one of those people; I still may be. This is not at all an irresponsible attitude, given the realities of our country right now: law degrees have always been a basic foundation for political careers, and (for whatever reason) are now also being seen more and more as little more than advanced business degrees. Although this country is desperate for qualified teachers, nurses, and research scientists, Americans are abandoning these professions and rushing to law school in record numbers. For the moment, it seems that demand has not kept up with the unending supply. There are too many of us. Which is why I see nothing wrong in falling back on other strengths for the moment.

I love the law, at least in an academic sense. But I also love the writing and editing process. I like to make bad writing good, and good writing better. It's one of the many areas of my life where I have more than a touch of OCD--only one reason I find the whole thing so immensely satisfying--and it's mostly paid off so far. So why not just do something I (think) I love? Why whine for paragraphs at a time about rather than just being excited for the opportunity to interview for an entry-level job at an important, prestigious, name-brand international publication?

The answer has something to do with what economists call the "sunk-cost" phenomenon. It's the sort of guilt that comes with having spent three years earning a degree in one subject only to turn around and take a job doing something else. If I were to take something like this, I think it would be with the assumption that I'd be looking for legal work next year... but that would still be giving up a year of legal experience.

Any thoughts?

Glengarry Glenn Boston

"These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. To you, these are gold; you do not get these. Because to give them to you would be throwing them away."

That would be Alec Baldwin talking down to Jack Lemmon (mastering the role of Shelley "The Machine" Levine later lovingly immortalized as "Gil" in The Simpsons) and his shabby crew of swampland salesmen in the outstanding mid-90s film adaptation of Mamet's Glengarry Glenn Ross. It's also the subtext I seem to get every time I call into my favorite (as yet useless) legal temp agency.

OK, not entirely fair. I know I'm not at the bar yet, and that I don't have the proper paralegal experience, and that there are just too many people in my situation right now. But still. There has to be something out there for a guy who can type 85 WPM and looks sharp in pinstripes. End of whine. Something more useful tomorrow, maybe.

Less than zero.

Don't you hate those stupid little magazine sidebar features in which the editors try to gloss current trends by reducing them down to lists of cleverly annotated numbers? Totally. Me too.

8: Number of law schools in the Commonwealth.
6: Number of law schools in greater Boston area.
87 to 1: Last estimated ratio of "people" to "lawyers" (each of which are, as we all know, discrete and mutually exclusive categories) in the Commonwealth.
2: Number of Boston legal temp agencies registered with in past two months.
0: Number of placements granted from legal temp agencies, despite diligent contact.
45: Approx. number of resumes and cover letters mailed, e-mailed or faxed in direct response to job postings resembling things that I might be qualified for.
1-3: Number of years of experience required for almost every legal job posting ever.
2: Actual, live, non-phone-based interviews granted from responding to job postings.
150: Approx. number of law firms called in past 1.5 monts to casually enquire about short-term legal employment, or, y'know, if you have it, maybe some real work.
130: Approx. number of carefully-timbred-and-toned-but-not-too-scripted messages left on HR voicemail systems, mostly for my own entertainment.
40: Approx. number of callbacks so far from these messages; some friendly, none helpful.
18: Approx. number of resumes sent in response to callbacks claiming that they would like to have them to "keep on file."
100: Approx. number of HR directors named "Barbara."
1: Approx. number of receptionists who openly laughed at me for even considering calling her firm for short-term legal employment.
1: Approx. number of HR directors named "Barbara" who laughed at me for same.
1: number of dreams had in past month in which I'd passed the bar.
4: number of dreams had in past month in which I'd failed the bar.
75: Approx. statistical chance, in percentage form, that I have, in fact, passed the "Passachusetts" bar the first time.
3.5: Approx. number of weeks until I know either way.
0: Approx. number of Boston legal employers who seem to want to interview, let alone hire, someone from an out-of-state law school who has not yet passed the bar.

Meeting people is easy.

Prof. Daniel Solove used to teach at my law school. Now he plays with toys.

I've found that the process of organizing my life into static, unalterable sentences open for public comment has left me with a simple conclusion: I make much more sense on paper. Some people make sense as soon as you meet them; I am not one of those people.

This is not to say that I'm too complex or antisocial or halitosized to be capable of making a good first impression. It's just that I haven't learned how yet. I like to think that I'm implanting some kind of a good-first-impression germ with each person I meet that will develop into an incurable case of full-blown, retroactive good-first-impression-itis about three days later, but we all like to hope for the best, don't we? Yes, we do.

Here's a story--mostly true and only tangentially related to the subject of this blawg--that should be read in a soothing, wryly self-aware voice on NPR by an overeducated masochist:

I was at this wedding a few years ago where the town drunk (no, really: the town drunk) wouldn't leave me alone until I played the blues for him. No, I told him, I don't play the blues at weddings. Isn't there anything else I could play for you? There wasn't. By now enough people had been drinking for enough time that I could probably get away with it, so I resigned myself to the inevitable and waved him over to the piano.

His improvised lyrics were awful. But he was good. Really good. Hunger, pain, lust, loss; everything you would suspect was hiding deep in the soul of a drunken, wrecked, gin-blossomed failure. So remember, kids: nobody sings the blues like the town drunk.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

For someone.

Not my department

Can't tell you how happy i am to be living in a state that has both a Department of Industrial Accidents and a Department of Mental Retardation.

rock, rock. rock'n'roll law school.

I've just realized that this is the first October in 21 years in which I'm not in school.

And then for some reason I was thinking about that guy, back in law school. If you went to law school, you had one of these guys too. He was the one who went around letting people know that they probably shouldn't bother signing up for the upcoming moot court competition because, well, you know, he and his partner were both Best Oralist in their respective appellate advocacy classes. And there's really no way you'd have a chance. (He really talked like this. About everything.)

Ours was completely destroyed in the first round because he'd attempted to script exactly everything he would possibly need to say. (Well, that and he was a raging sociopath with a terrible courtroom manner.) How did yours do?

Required listening for public interest attorneys

Okay, back to work...

If you don't already know, This American Life is the best public radio program ever. I can say this both as a public radio junkie and as someone who has now listened to nearly every single TAL broadcast...

I wanted to point you toward two compelling stories about innocent defendants: one is a compelling portrait of a who devoted his life to getting his innocent friend's conviction overturned, and the other a series of case studies on how police and prosecutors can abuse their power. (Links go directly to RealAudio feeds.)

A friendly rebuttal.

Something about this blog seems to bring out the anonymous cranks. I can't really let it all go unanswered, so a couple of quick replies:

Extracurricular activities are for high school and college, not graduate school.

Well, maybe. But those of us who didn't make law review have to find some other way to distinguish ourselves while in law school; something that says we're a little different. (This doesn't include getting through a couple of rounds in moot court or the various professional organizations you're supposed to join. I did all that. I'm talking about something unique.) I came to law school from a very creative background, and wanted to keep some of that going while my brain was in the process of being reformatted by The Law. I happen to think that it reflects well on my work ethic and problem-solving abilities that I was able to organize and direct a full-length theater production (including a full set, lighting, props, costumes, and sound) during my best academic semester. Of course it was a frivolous waste of time. But I work best under pressure, and the fact that I could really succeed in both endeavours at the same time should say something to somebody. You're welcome to disagree.

Yet, I am gainfully employed while you are not simply because I chose to exercise foresight.

That's pretty much impossible to prove, although you're welcome to try. "Foresight" (whatever that is, really) is only one of many factors that can get people employed in Boston. But for now: okay, you've got a point. I certainly could have planned things out a little better: I went to a law school located in a region (namely Newark, New Jersey) that I had virtually no interest in settling down in. Moving to Boston was kind of a last minute thing, and my school has virtually no connections here. My past legal experience was in Maryland, Newark, and London, and my past professional experience was in Tacoma, WA. The take-home message here: Unless you went to a top-ten school, the legal profession does not kindly reward itinerants.

Anyone who believed their degree results in automatic employment probably should not even practice law.

Couldn't agree more. That was actually supposed to be the thesis of this ongoing cautionary tale, and I'll be developing it more in the next few days.

The icing on the cake on the table at my wake.

Administrative note: any comments deleted from here out (unless they're just patently offensive) have been removed because they are spam. Nobody likes spam.

I should also add that I was informed yesterday that the Probate and Family Court does not consider me to be worth an interview.

Considering that I had to briefly visit another universe in which Matt Cameron was someone who left law school very excited about the prospect of spending every working day working with probate and family law cases just to write my cover letter (with occasional breaks to ask myself just why I was bothering with this [answer: "you need a clerkship... you need a clerkship...you need a clerkship"]) I shouldn't be too surprised or disappointed. I'm told that some people really want this position. A lot. And they're welcome to it.

Still, disappointment. It's like being turned down by your fourth choice in homecoming dates. You wouldn't have wanted to go with her anyway, but at least you would have gone.

To my friends in Hostile, Mass.

A quick, scattershot reply to my anonymous detractors:

1) As to my experience: it's good, at least in a public service-y kind of way. First summer was at a public defender's office, second working for a respected professor at my law school doing research on the implications of using experts to rebut eyewitness testimony. Last fall I studied in London and worked with a local immigration attorney on asylum cases. I'm also professionally trained as an editor, which should be a minor advantage given the general writing quality in the field just now.

2) As to picking up clients now instead of looking for work while I'm waiting for my bar results: that's called "practicing law without a license," and it's a felony. (Did your law school not have a professional responsibility class, or were you too busy going to all those interviews?) Not the best way to start one's legal career.

3) Although I don't like to think of myself as such, I'm more or less average. I didn't really understand the point of slaving away on law review or pretending to enjoy moot court, so I helped to found (and later ran) the school's first theater group and worked on the newspaper instead. Part of the point of this blawg is to provide an object lesson to show what happens to us non-top-ten-percenters from bottom-of-the-top-100-schools after law school. Although I'm generally optimistic about the future, it is not--as you might be gathering--always pretty.

Anyway, sorry to delete your earlier posts, but I thought they were all from the same miscreant. Further analysis has proven me wrong and now I can't figure out how to restore them. It's all free speech from here on out, though. So.

Temps and Tempability

It occurs to me that the purpose and content of this blawg could be taken as an extended whine into the void. Do I sound like I'm whining? I hope not. It's only that I just went through three years of intensive graduate study and spent the better part of a summer sitting for an $815 licensing exam and now I'm ready to work (full-time, with appropriate compensation) in the legal field. At which point--and only then--this blawg will end.

This desire doesn't come from some sense of entitlement or special privilege. Unlike many of my peers just now, I'm not holding out for six figures (or anything close!) or my own office or even something that I will enjoy every day. I'm just looking for a good, honest, PAID (see "interview with the soul vampires," infra for an example of an opportunity that is literally UNPAID) position that will get me as much experience as quickly as possible. I used to have higher standards (read: ideals) about public service and actually helping people and all that, but your heart can stop bleeding pretty quickly after graduation once you start hearing about how the market's taking to new lawyers.

Which is where the temping comes in:

I've signed up with two different legal temp agencies in the Boston area, neither of which have been much help yet. This is, to answer a previous poster's question, why I haven't started looking to wait tables or taken work at a bookstore yet (although I have left an application at all the major bookstores in the area). I'd rather hold out for temporary legal employment, as these postings can get me some experience (however insignificant, it's still going to be more valuable than shelving books at Borders) and I've heard that this is actually one very good and acceptable way to get yourself hired permanantly.

One job I wouldn't want to be "groomed" for...

Some things are worse than being unemployed.

Adventures in renvoi

I have a unique problem that most recent law school grads don't face: I don't (yet) know anyone in the area I'm searching in. Connections are everything anywhere, but that seems especially true in this town...

C. got a lead on understaffing in the Boston City Law Department (to whom I had already sent a resume), so I tried calling them again today. When I asked if there was anyone I could speak to regarding employment possibilities in the department, I was forwarded to (where else?) HR. HR asked if I was responding to a specific job posting; I was not. So back to the Law Department.

"You just called here, sir." When I told her that HR had sent me back to her, she gave me a number to try. That number, of course, was Barbara (see "Nominal Fun," infra) at HR again. (Law dorks will recognize this is as a textbook example of the old double renvoi mess.) Just as she was about to send me back to the Law Department, I asked her if there was anyone outside of this little binary loop I could speak to about this.

"Well, not unless you know somebody who knows somebody," she said.

interview with the soul vampires

If you think (as I tend to do) of interviews as blind dates, this would be the one where both people sit down, look at each other, smile politely, and immediately start to eye the nearest exits.

It should have been so good, too. He *loved* my anti-BigLaw cover letter (obviously not the one I usually send out, but he had requested a custom letter in the ad, stating that generic ones would be tossed and blacklisted) and I liked what I'd read about his business model (no billable hours, work/life balance, everybody gets an MBA while working there, a pro bono wing that works with struggling artists and musicians, etc). But some things just make more sense on paper.

I won't name names, but this firm is a sham, a train wreck, a disaster in the making. It's run by this (very) young salesman who just passed the bar this February (after graduating from a certain fourth-tier school in the Boston area), has no legal experience to speak of (although he was CFO of some startup or other before law school), doesn't expect to turn anything approaching a significant profit until about this time next year (meaning, of course, that no one gets paid, at all, until then), and has no one on his team so far who has any significant experience whatsoever in the fields that he intends to practice in--although, to be fair, they all seem to have very strong business backgrounds. Where most new firms would shore up their resources and be sure that they had the right people able to cover the right areas before actively thinking about marketing themselves, he's doing it totally backwards: namely, building up a fancy corporate structure, doing expensive market research, and planning a business model for the past nine months BEFORE taking on any attorneys, let along clients. Actually being able to perform the work in question seems to be entirely incidental to selling what he calls their "package of products" (y'know, what most people would call "legal services"). i finally had to ask him: "Don't you think it might be a problem that no one here has any legal experience at all, and that you're mostly talking about hiring people straight out of school?"

"Well," the Salesman said, "it's a team environment. We can learn from each other." That was about enough for me. I was already unimpressed enough with the office, with his breezy sales talk and illusory business model, and (most importantly) the prospect of not being paid more than a couple hundred dollars a month for the next year, but being told that the blind can, in fact, be expected to successfully lead the blind was really all I needed to hear. I'm not asking for a workplace that comports with Scripture, but I would at least prefer that we try to heed some of Jesus's most generally applicable teachings. The blatantly indifferent stupidity of this approach was so overwhelming, so totally blinding, that I couldn't even think straight for a few minutes when faced with its full implications for a new law firm in one of the nastier legal markets in the country. You can't start up a new firm without at least a couple of experienced attorneys behind it. You just can't.

I'd already been warned that these guys didn't have it together, that the Salesman was selling a lemon, but that was after I'd already gotten the interview. At that point, I thought it might be a chance to practice my interview skills... but I didn't even have the heart to do *that* once I saw the office. I mostly wanted out of there. But the feeling was mutual after he asked me if I'd taken a Meyers-Briggs test recently.

I have, of course, and we're total opposites on every count. He's up in the freakishly extroverted corner of things, and I'm pretty much on the other side of the diagram. Again, the long, mutual stare of a blind date gone horribly wrong. "You know," he said, "we're really looking for people who can aggressively network, who can get out to every possible function and get the word out about this firm."

"Look," I said, with a quick glance at the exit before I stared him down. "You send me out alone to one of those functions, and I will singlehandedly destroy your firm's chances of survival."

There was a long pause with a lot of eye contact. He kept waiting for me to smile, and then finally broke the tension with some nervous laughter. I didn't really see anything to laugh about.

You know how these dates usually end: awkward smiles, a bad hug, eyes everywhere but the other person, maybe a chaste kiss on the cheek if one or the other of you are feeling particularly gracious. My only consolation was that my pesky questions about the feasibility of all of this, my unmaskable cynicism about what he was trying to do, seemed to keep him more nervous than I was. And I wasn't, really. It's hard to be nervous about missing an opportunity for something you really don't want to do.

Another interview

My next interview is scheduled for next week with a startup firm. The guy claims to be organizing the "corporate law firm of the future," which, as far as I can tell from our half-hour phone conversation today, mostly involves (1) not having billable hours and (2) installing a foosball table in the lunchroom. Oh, and arranging for every attorney in the firm to get an MBA while working there (hey, why not?) because he's obsessed with having attorneys with business smarts (not a bad idea, considering how many of us are so completely devoid of them).

Unfortunately, of course, due to the startup nature of things, he won't be able to pay anyone until the end of this year even after a year of past operation... BUT (and this could be big), as befits any startup, I'd be entitled to a full share in all later profits as one of the first ones in, something that might really pay off in a few years.

I'm approaching this with a lot of skepticism, obviously (I'll want to have a good long look at that profit-sharing agreement), but joining a new law firm is MUCH safer than jumping into just about any other kind of startup business, since new law firms generally have a very low rate of failure. we're not talking about a dotcom or a restaurant here, after all--it pretty much takes a significant death or scandal of some kind to do firms in entirely. It also means that i'd effectively hit the ground running as a (sort of) partner, which is kind of unimaginably tempting. As it is, he made it clear that he's been getting hundreds and hundreds of responses to this opportunity from around the country (he was aggressively recruiting at law schools nationwide), but that my cover letter really made him want to call me as soon as he read it. Which kind of made my day.

Welcome to IHOP...

Word on all sides continues to be to wait until i'm officially licensed to practice to really get looking. But i can't help trying anyway.

As the interviewer cheerily reminded me yesterday, there are just waaaay too many law school students out there, all over the country. He actually said that for most legal employers, the idea of adding another associate is like a fat guy who just ate 59 pancakes being asked if he wants a 60th.

"Sure, maybe i kind of want another one," he reasoned the fat guy would think, "but do i really want to pay for it?"

I'm not really sure what that means, but I don't think I like it.

Just about ready to sell out...

Interviewed today at an insurance defense firm downtown. Insurance defense is much more interesting stuff than i'd ever given it credit for--mostly dealing with frauds, liars, and truth-stretchers (that would be the plaintiffs, not the lawyers)--described as being a sort of "private D.A." with a lot of independence, my own office with windows, and opportunity for a *lot* of experience packed into a short amount of time. That's the sanitized version, anyway. Who knows. I'm sure there's a reason that most people in this field don't do it for more than a couple of years.

Here's a look into the market: Today's firm received over 100 resumes in 2 days, including one from a barred attorney who has been unemplawyed for over a year. Basically, I was warned that he'd take someone with my qualifications who is already at the bar if they came through the door first, but that's not likely to happen since he did note "no experience necessary" in the ad.

And then there was the pancake story. Maybe I'll post that tomorrow.

He wants me to send a couple of writing samples and call him when I've got my bar results; he thinks the job will still be open then, and i take that to mean that I'm in consideration. But I'm still new to this whole legal interview thing: for all I know, it was a polite kiss-off.

Nominal fun

After days of research, I can now announce the top three names for HR directors in Boston law firms:

1) Barbara
2) Susan
3) Vicki

I don't want to be too deterministic about this, but what is it about the name "Barbara" that makes a young woman so much more likely to go into HR? Explanations welcomed.

...and he woke up deep in Hostile, Massachusetts.

Our story so far:

After graduating in the top 1/3 of my class from Seton Hall Law, I've moved up to Boston with my girlfriend (herein: "C."), who is now clerking in MA Superior Court. For the first time in my adult life, I am unemployed.

While my interests are in public interest law, I'm willing to work just about anywhere that will have me at this point. Since I don't have much else to do, I thought I should keep a daily record of what a typical law school graduate is facing in this country today.