Quote: (02-12-2013 10:19 PM)Hades Wrote:
Never understood why women wanted to be lawyers. The first thing I think of when I hear "she's a lawyer" is "whichever poor bastard puts a ring on that is doomed for life".
Because it's a career that offers significant pay and significant glamour (unless TV shows like
Ally McBeal, LA Law, The Practice and
The Good Wife have been lying to us! No, Hollywood would never lie to us!)
Also, look at the shift in her punctuation after the first few messages; from perfect grammar to text message grammar, back to perfect grammar, and back again. Either she's twisted her panties into a tizzy and forgot how to type, or this is two different people.
I'm not a lawyer. I don't have a legal background, and I only have a mild passing interest in the Law, but I hope this chick realizes that it's not going to be a whirlwind adventure of Cosmotinians and Handbags in the Big Apple as soon as she graduates, because to become a top lawyer in the top market, I'd imagine it requires...
1) A great GPA in Undergrad.
2) A high enough score on her LSATS that allows her to be accepted into one of the maybe two law programs in Canada that Canadians need to get into to have even a chance of making it in NYC; McGill and U of T...or maybe she's actually smart enough to get into an Ivy League program?
3) As she's hardly the only Canadian who wants to work in the law profession in NYC, she needs to stand out with extra-curriculars (watching TV and fucking are sadly not relevant extra-curricular activities); debate, the school's legal tribunal, the school newspaper, semesters abroad, the school's law journal, TA a few courses, anything she can so, she should do.
4) ...All of which needs to be done while maintaining one of the best GPAs in her program and an 'active social life'.
5) She needs to pick what type of law she wants to specialize in if she wants to be a 'high paid lawyer!'. Law isn't just one discipline; it's myriad and varied, and some lawyers make seven figures a year, while some are in the low sixes. I think a corporate lawyer makes more than an immigration lawyer, for instance.
5) Afterwards, she needs a good internship, competitive as fuck.
6) Pass the Bar, varies by region.
7) To get that big salary you need to get into the big firm...again, not competitive at all to do so.
8) If she even manages to do this (the odds are severely stacked against her at this point, but maybe she can?), she probably imagines a whirlwind life of high pay, short hours and martini lunches with Mr. Big as soon as she creates her email on the firm's servers. Yeah, her salary will probably be pretty good if she made it this far, but the hours? Before she becomes The Good Wife, she can expect about 5-10 years of crazy horrific work hours (70+ hours a week), before
maybe making partner, then the money rolls in and when she's 36 and single and lonely, she can finally relax a little.
9) And of course, why would an American firm hire a Canadian, when they can just as easily find a more or equally qualified American and not have to deal with the bureaucratic bullshit that comes with hiring foreign employees?
10) Can someone dig up how many top-ten law firms in New York have female partners? I'm sure it's less than 10%, but also I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn that it was 0%.
I don't comprehend the lawyer fascination with young people and especially young women; the compensation is good, but not relative to the workload, 95% of them don't really do anything of value but clutter up the pipeline with worthless paperwork and delays and no one admires the profession. I'm choosing to blame David E. Kelley.
Also her time frame is way off. Looking at her picture, this girl is probably about 21. She wants to be an established lawyer in NYC in ten years? Good luck with that, it'll take at least 15.
Would bang, but she's just slightly above the middle for Montreal. Her blonde friend in the white shirt is far better.
This information brought to you by: Some hearsay and half an hour on Google.