[manilaguy]

(05-25-2010 12:38 AM)Jim Kirk Wrote:  

Few notes - you hit a lot of stuff in your post. Some considering law school might get a few gems from this - I am going to ramble - but hear me out -

I just passed my 10 year mark as a practicing lawyer in New York City. I have admission to 5 federal districts, as well as NY State, Connecticut and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals - I went to a good Law School - (not top tier) in New York City. I graduated with a b- average but my LSAT score was high enough I got a good scholarship. I graduated through to passing the bar and paying the application fees with debt of about $95,000, I promptly married a girl from a wealthy family and went to work for a small but pretty active firm in New York City. Pay was abysmal - I worked there five years and moved to a very active mid-size firm and took a huge step up in pay and benefits although still not great by what the media tells people lawyers make - I am now going to move on again - probably to something completely different and not law related. My wife and I may open some type of 'green' business but who knows.

A word on the legal job market - for new hires and for BigLaw - it is the worst its ever been and New York City has the largest legal community in the country. The top three graduates (class rank 1, 2 and 3) this June of a mid-level Law School in NYC do not have jobs lined up after they take the bar. The BigLaw firms have not been hiring in general 'across the board' and just about any mid-level firm has laid 15% of its staff off in the past year. I was in Boston on a mediation last Fall and there its 10 times worse as from right from the mouth of retired MA State Judge who was on the bench for 30 years. Old backup plans like going to work for the New York City Law Department or the District Attorneys office do not work anymore because they are getting thousands of applicants and there is a general hiring freeze in all City agencies. An employment ad in the New York Law Journal will get 500 resumes. There are more reasons for this than the economy - the Courts in NY are throwing out a lot more cases - and automobile litigation is way off due to a Court of Appeals, but the mills keep churning out lawyers.

To the Original Poster - you will be lucky to have any decent job when you get out - no matter where you work -

If salary was not a consideration - the job you should go for would be something along these principles -

Andrew Carnegie had remarked something to the effect that you should throw yourself into you job without regard to pay (at first) because you need to learn the job from the trenches - so to speak. My first job had me in Court 3 to 4 times a week when I had no idea what I was doing. 3 years of law school teaches you NOTHING about lawyering. The skills you learn lawyering - dealing with clients from all parts of society from drug dealers to millionaire real estate developers - learning succint arguments and argumentative writing - trench style - is a valuable skill which does translate to other jobs and makes you a good lawyer and employee in any capacity. You learned none of that in law school. A Federal Judge once snickered at a greenhorn Biglaw guy for prefacing his argument with "May it Please the Court" - I made a motion in Fed Ct to dismiss a case once and the District Judge on the record told me 'he would look at my bullshit later' The formal memos and arguments you do in moot court are not used at all - they want plain speaking.

Anyway - BigLaw will not let you do any real lawyering for a very long time. They may let you field a call or write some material now and again - but they generally will not let you appear for something as mundane as a preliminary discovery conference for 7 to 10 years. Put another way - no student who went to work for BigLaw knows much about lawyering and they are not learning when they are young during their first 7 years which is the only time you can really learn something new and the most important time for a lawyer - once you get up about 34 or 35 years in age - you don't want to learn anymore - you are busy with wife and kids, etc. It gets MUCH harder to learn in this field after 35. (I am 36).

Therefore, take any job that throws you in the mix on many many different subject areas. The District attorneys office is great for this but its hampered by virtue of the fact that its all criminal law - you want to do everything - take a job that puts you in Court - after 6 months sponsors you for admission to federal court - after 9 months lets you take depsitions - after 2 years lets you take depositions on heavy cases - after 4 years lets you mediate and arbitrate cases - etc. Just keep growing your skills for those 7 to 10 years without regard to pay . . .

Now to the topic of your leaving the country to flee your debt -

Depending on the State for which you sit for a Bar - your name, social security number and entire academic and work history back before High School becomes a pseudo-public record. All your residences, names, place of Birth, etc. go into a file forever. New Jersey for instance requires you submit fingerprint cards which they may, or may not, keep. They will find you.

Depending on how agressive the note holder is on your loans - you will eliminate your ability to ever take out a loan, get a gov't job, work in law enforcement (you will be considered a security risk), pass background checks, ever. It will always be there in your file. Risking the foregoing in the first 7 to 10 years of your professional life, i.e. your first 'job', is very foolish. Consolidate your loans, ask for forbearence, try public interest employmet debt foregiveness - live at home for a few years - at least get the skills and experience you can from those early years. You are too young along to throw 3 (really 4) years of work away. Do lawyerly things - dont work as a congressional paige, BS like that - get that in. Even if you only do 3 years - that is a lot better than 0.

International lawyering - again law schools talk up a good game but it is very difficult to get licensed in any other country - Japan (I know one white guy that did it - but he had a Japanese wife) requires a certain amount of law school (one year I think) and an attorney sponsor. He was fluent in Japanese but never got more than a part-time job after admission - Japanese lawyers (their numbers are strictly controlled) do not hire Westerners. I know another guy that got licensed in France but he spoke better French than English - he passed the French equivalent of the bar exam which was given over 3 days entirely in French - (There are licensing exceptions for lawyers in the employ of foreign corporations - this might give you a limited exemption from these requirements i.e. work for Dow Chemical in Japan - but these jobs are very very difficult to find and usually offered to people with some real connection to the country)


If you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to snag a BigLaw job - if you want any type of lifestyle for the remainder of your life (and I mean this) take the job for the SOLE REASON that you will use it to pay off your debt and you will leave when that is accomplished. You want to hang with beta herbs, omega perverts, 4 foot 8 JAP's, for the rest of your life - join NYC BIgLaw . The older female partners are either 500 pounds weight and as mean - the younger ones are all dykes which only promote dykes. Most peopke in BigLaw for 10+ years in New York City HAVE SERIOUS MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PROBLEMS which they unleash on the world. AND I MEAN SERIOUS! The lawyer who likes to be put in diapers and spanked is the normal one in the bunch). Here is a sobering thought for you - check around the blogs and figure out where the associates from Skadden et. al. or Sullivan et. al. drink on Thursday evenings - 3 or 4 hours of you seeing that and its all the proof of what I just said you will ever need.

At any club in Manhattan, or high-end cocktail lounge, or rooftop bar, etc. with a nice scene - I have never met another lawyer (unless they all lied). I have always been the only one - and I got news for you - being a lawyer confers ABSOLUTELY NO STATUS. Your parents will be proud of you and it is an accomplishment but (to borrow the G's terminology) Nightlife Princess is going to bat an eyelash when you tell her your a lawyer. You would get more play if you told her you wrote a book on serial homocide.

If you had to incur 200k to get a law degree - you should not have gone to law school. I got my job when the market was not that bad - but since 2006 its been a bloodletting -

To some of the others considering law school -
Your Juris Doctor degree without 5 years work experience is pretty much worthless. All the college and law school salesman pushing law school by saying things akin to 'you can do anything with a law degree - you can work anywhere across all types of industries' is 96% bullshit. It will give you certain graduate credits towards a higher salary in a gov. job - or in law enforecement - but do not think Dell, or Hewlett Packard, or Dow Chemical are going to hire you in a non-lawyer capacity because you put 'JD' on your resume. I know people who have tried this route and more ofter you will have to explain away your law degree as people will view you with suspicion for not working as a lawyer. People still think o the 'LA Law' picture and think you are living the life of a G being a litigator.

With respect to foreign passports - if you are of European extraction and not to long in this country generation wise - Ireland, Germany and Italy have passport programs for persons who can claim 'citizenship by descent' - It took awhile but I got my Euro passports - which I then got for my wife and are not getting for the kids. These programs are not well organized or publicized - Ireland's program is the best and can be done without visiting the country - Italy is the worst as their beurocratic mess makes you go to offices in Italy 2 times at least and takes 2 years.

Just an FYI - the best thing about a Euro Union passport is that it entitles you to work anywhere in the European Union. For instance, you could as of last year - land in France and file 2 forms with the gov't and goto work. After 6 months you can go on their health care systems, etc. A Euro passport is worth its weight in gold for these reasons alone. I had read on expatica.com that the street value of an Irish passport was one million Euro - it does not surprise me.

If I had it to do all over again - I WOULD NOT have gone to Law School although I do appreciate the mental discipline it instilled and the level of organization and critical reading ability it gave me - but it was not worth 95k. I would probably have gone into anything dealing in cash in a field catering to yuppies/immigrants. Import of wood from Africa - childrens clothes from France or Spain, etc.

Wealth comes from profit and capital gains - not from salaries. Ask me how I know.

Holy Crap! Good thing I didn't go to law school.

My boss made me interview a lawyer chick today just for kicks. She was a young 20's, fresh from law school, pretty face 9 out of 10. I really felt sorry for her imagining her there with a 100k+ student loan from a non-top tier school. She has a law degree for heaven's sake applying to be a clerk! lol. I even felt more pity imagining that lots of guys would probably find her undatable bc.. well.. she's a lawyer. And who wants a lawyer gf/wife? Anyways, this chick was over qualified. The fucked thing was, if she didn't bring up her law degree and if she said she only had a BS, I would have tossed her resume to the round 2 bin on account of her pretty face.