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GamingHyena posted:In recent months I've been cultivating a relationship with the legal department of a local government agency, and today I found out there's likely going to be an opening soon. Even though I haven't sent in a resume I'm apparently one of their top candidates. Dare I dream of a day that isn't divided into tenth of an hour increments? The worst idea ever. There are literally too many reasons why it is a bad idea for me to set forth the whole list. Start here - what happens when someone is mean to her? What do you do? Do you stick up for her at risk of your own job? Do you let her take the heat? How do you answer for that when you get home?
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Jul 14, 2010 01:48
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More importantly: what happens when you need her to do something before she goes home but you don't need to stay behind or other such fun situations where your secretary hates you?
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Jul 14, 2010 01:51
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nm posted:This isn't that impressive i'm not bragging or anything duder I'm just telling him
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Jul 14, 2010 02:07
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don't hire your girlfriend you noob
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Jul 14, 2010 03:29
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you'll break up and then what the gently caress will you do
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Jul 14, 2010 03:29
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Phil Moscowitz posted:you'll break up and then what the gently caress will you do not her anymore, I'd bet
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Jul 14, 2010 04:01
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Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school.
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Jul 14, 2010 15:42
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. US News rankings.
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Jul 14, 2010 15:48
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. It's completely holistic. Are you black? See, holistic.
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Jul 14, 2010 15:51
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. If you go to law school no one will ever care about the crap that makes you an interesting and well-rounded person again.
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Jul 14, 2010 16:05
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. J Miracle posted:If you go to law school no one will ever care about the crap that makes you an interesting and well-rounded person again. J Miracle hit this on the head. No one wants a lawyer who is interesting and well-rounded outside of a courtroom because interesting and well-rounded people are not going to be happy living at the complete beck and call of other people so those other people can live more interesting, well-rounded, and financially rewarding lives.
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Jul 14, 2010 16:22
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The Arsteia posted:i'm not bragging or anything duder I'm just telling him Good work! Now - you must find Randbrick...
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Jul 14, 2010 16:41
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. What makes you think that colleges actually look at applicants holistically? -e- also, I know it's not a widespread trend, but American takes military service into account with significant weight. I'm far from the only vet that got in with a sub 3.0 GPA and only average (160's) LSATs. I can think of at least 3 or 4 off the top of my head.
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Jul 14, 2010 17:06
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semicolonsrock posted:Why do law school admissions just look at GPA and LSAT instead of looking at applicants holistically like colleges do? There doesn't seem to be any particularly good reason for this particular disparity between undergrad and law school. reproduction of hierarchy bitchezzz 
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Jul 14, 2010 17:54
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Law firms I've interviewed few actually were interested in my non-law school stuff. They DID prefer, quite clearly, people who had a lot of law related co-curriculars (competitions e.g. client interviews, mooting being the main route for commercial law firms since they didn't really care about volunteer work, or so I've been told), but still asked me about my fight sport activiites, my activities with the Petroleum Club at my university, and the like. Though the last may be a little misleading since my state is possibly the biggest natural resources location on the entire planet.
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Jul 14, 2010 17:55
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So everything interesting you've done in your life becomes icebreaker fodder for an interview, I guess.
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Jul 14, 2010 18:00
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I would like to thank this thread for singlehandedly keeping me from applying to law school with a gpa of 3.03. I can only imagine the pain, heartache, and money that this thread has saved me.
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Jul 14, 2010 18:08
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The gist I got from the OP and some other sources is that the shrinking legal market is not only an effect of the recession but a long-term trend which can be expected to continue. Why? What are the factors which are reducing the need for professional highly-educated lawyers? Arbitration and mediation? Cheap legal clinics? Increased ability for people to find (good) legal information themselves? The US justice system moving away from involved and expensive jury trials? Other stuff?
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Jul 14, 2010 18:32
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Halloween Jack posted:The gist I got from the OP and some other sources is that the shrinking legal market is not only an effect of the recession but a long-term trend which can be expected to continue. Why? What are the factors which are reducing the need for professional highly-educated lawyers? Arbitration and mediation? Cheap legal clinics? Increased ability for people to find (good) legal information themselves? The US justice system moving away from involved and expensive jury trials? Other stuff? In a post-economic downturn world clients are less willing to pay exorbitant amounts for billable hours, so gone are the days when a legion of lawyers would be in a basement billing $1000/hour for document review. They send that poo poo off to India now.
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Jul 14, 2010 18:47
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Halloween Jack posted:The gist I got from the OP and some other sources is that the shrinking legal market is not only an effect of the recession but a long-term trend which can be expected to continue. Why? What are the factors which are reducing the need for professional highly-educated lawyers? Arbitration and mediation? Cheap legal clinics? Increased ability for people to find (good) legal information themselves? The US justice system moving away from involved and expensive jury trials? Other stuff? The growth of new Law Schools has no real barrier to entry. Thus demand is slightly trailing the rest of the economy while the labor pool is rapidly expanding. Meanwhile law schools are using funny math to trick prospective students to attend and tuition rates keep raising. No Jobs, Lots of unemployed lawyers, high debt, dying alone.
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Jul 14, 2010 18:47
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Halloween Jack posted:The gist I got from the OP and some other sources is that the shrinking legal market is not only an effect of the recession but a long-term trend which can be expected to continue. Why? What are the factors which are reducing the need for professional highly-educated lawyers? Arbitration and mediation? Cheap legal clinics? Increased ability for people to find (good) legal information themselves? The US justice system moving away from involved and expensive jury trials? Other stuff? Lawyers have kind of contaminated the ADR (arbitration and mediation) processes, so that's more like gravy for lawyers on top of the basic vehicle of litigation. That's actually a big topic of discussion in the ADR field right now because lawyers are slowly making dispute resolution avenues meant to be unlike court into settings that often move like a court. A big part of what is shrinking the need for attorneys is the increasing ability of firms to outsource work and the firms' growing realization that clients could not give a rat's rear end about who actually does various kinds of low level work as long as the final result is good. In the past, firms needed to hire a good number of young lawyers to do work that was fairly brain dead, but still required legal training (like document review or super basic research). Physical size and technological limitations prevented firms from retaining research products for that long or getting others outside of the office to do it, so it made more sense to have it all in-house and hire new attorneys to flesh out the work force. Now, though, computers have provided ways of farming out that work so the firms can either store it for longer, get information from outside vendors (although this isn't that prominent yet), or otherwise farm out work and pass the savings on to the client. That cuts back on the demand for new associates and the availability of "real" legal jobs. Also, companies have been using the recession and the scarcity of legal work to force cost-cutting measures on firms that they've wanted to impose for a really long time. That includes having greater oversight over what gets billed, being able to visit offices and conduct audits (at least for insurers), and forcing lawyers to submit budget proposals and compete for gigs like normal contractors. Economically inefficient relationships where one company would always go to one firm for work are dying out. The presence of more and more prepaid forms which allow individuals to do their own low-level legal work has also played its part, but people have been forming their own corporations and doing their own simple wills for years now. I guess the internet has made that option more well-known, but I don't know how much of a factor that has actually had.
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Jul 14, 2010 18:49
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Halloween Jack posted:The gist I got from the OP and some other sources is that the shrinking legal market is not only an effect of the recession but a long-term trend which can be expected to continue. Why? What are the factors which are reducing the need for professional highly-educated lawyers? Arbitration and mediation? Cheap legal clinics? Increased ability for people to find (good) legal information themselves? The US justice system moving away from involved and expensive jury trials? Other stuff? It think that the above-mentioned factors are all valid, but I think there is a systemic change going on that affects all businesses, even lawyers. The change is this - information is suddenly cheap and easy to find. In years past, there were people who made their whole careers out of being the keepers of arcane information. They added no value, other than to know where certain information was. For an example, my high-school educated neighbor spent 20 years in a company as a "packaging buyer." From what I can surmise, his job entailed being paid $60,000 per year to sit at a desk and wait for his company to run low on packaging, at which point he would contact the three companies in China who made this kind of packaging, and order it from whomever made it the cheapest. The other 38 hours per week he did crossword puzzles. For the first 10 years of his career in this field, it made sense for the company to pay him $60,000 to line up their packaging, because who knew what guy at Guanging Packaging Inc. spoke enough English to process their order? Over the last few years, however, modern communications has made it possible to compress the whole world. Now a company can just get put a bid out on alibaba.com and get Pacific Rim companies tripping over themselves to make packaging. So my neighbor's information monopoly got torpedoed. And so did he, when the recession hit. The same pattern is playing out in law. Lawyers are the ultimate information brokers. The law used to be a gigantic mystery, and the common people would pay dearly for a guide. Now, scads of information is at one's fingertips, all of the time. It gets harder to see the value of a lawyer, and many lawyer information monopolies have blown up. So the practice of law changes and contracts, and the young ones and the old ones get hit the worst.
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Jul 14, 2010 19:09
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Another thing to think about, although this is more of a 2-5 year forecast (at most) than anything else, is that legal work for the big and medium sized firms in the US is fuelled by having steady transactional clients who would inevitably get into trouble and need your firm's litigation group or subgroups to step in. This is a self-feeding model that depends on having large amounts of not-so-routine contractual work. Since the US has not had a terribly great manufacturing sector for... decades, this meant that law firms were feeding off of new financial activity like IPOs or other securitization and credit work. With the consolidation of many of the large investment banks and the tight limits on credit, all this activity has either stopped or slowed down incredibly, which left firms with a lot of excess capacity that they had to get rid of to maintain partner profit expectations. As you can see from reading the business section of a newspaper at any given day right now, this financial activity has not picked up and shows no signs of really picking up anytime soon. Some people think that these times may never come back although I think that's a bit overblown. Keep in mind that Mookie, as a well-versed big firm guy, might be able to come in and point out why this is all crap, but this is the sense I've been getting from looking at how everything in NYC is going down. Solomon Grundy posted:The same pattern is playing out in law. Lawyers are the ultimate information brokers. The law used to be a gigantic mystery, and the common people would pay dearly for a guide. Now, scads of information is at one's fingertips, all of the time. It gets harder to see the value of a lawyer, and many lawyer information monopolies have blown up. Well, at the same time, laws affecting how large segments of the economy work are getting more and more complex, so it's still not something that just anybody can go in and figure out for themselves without taking some real risks. That doesn't mean that law will generate enough jobs to hire all the people languishing in law schools right now, mind you. Eric Cantonese fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Jul 14, 2010 |
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Jul 14, 2010 19:13
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evilweasel posted:US News rankings. But why would the T14, for example, care, if they're so firmly entrenched at the top? Does USN & WR really weight GPA that heavily? It just doesn't seem like they're getting the people who will make the best lawyers.
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Jul 14, 2010 19:36
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Solomon Grundy posted:It think that the above-mentioned factors are all valid, but I think there is a systemic change going on that affects all businesses, even lawyers. The change is this - information is suddenly cheap and easy to find.
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Jul 14, 2010 19:39
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semicolonsrock posted:But why would the T14, for example, care, if they're so firmly entrenched at the top? Does USN & WR really weight GPA that heavily? Yes. GPA counts for 10%, and the LSAT counts for 12.5%. This is why the LSAT is weighted slightly higher in admissions decissions. See http://www.leiterrankings.com/usnews/guide.shtml for a complete breakdown.
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Jul 14, 2010 19:41
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semicolonsrock posted:But why would the T14, for example, care, if they're so firmly entrenched at the top? Because if you're Columbia being better than NYU is important: one school is the best in New York, and one is not. Same with Northwestern and UChicago: the T14 may be the T14, but they don't always keep their perticular rank in it.
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Jul 14, 2010 19:58
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third place fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Jul 14, 2010 19:59
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third place fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Sep 2, 2010 |
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Jul 14, 2010 20:00
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poo poo
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Jul 14, 2010 20:02
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The legal economy is strong and rubust... for some. Many lawyers and law students just do not understand how to be successful. There are many rich and lead rewarding lives and some that even make good money while working few hours. It is all about playing the system and having the knowledge and ability to be successful. Most people do not have these abilities.
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Jul 14, 2010 20:12
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Drunken Scourge posted:btw is there some sort of funny or ironic name for schools that make the top 20 but not T14? TTT
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Jul 14, 2010 20:21
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semicolonsrock posted:But why would the T14, for example, care, if they're so firmly entrenched at the top? Does USN & WR really weight GPA that heavily? It seems like there's a certain value to a lawyer who can just keep his/her head down and gun like no other. Also, fantastic numbers and a 'Prestigious' resume/application are not mutually exclusive things at all, except for maybe something like business school, where the actual experience you've built up is more important.
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Jul 14, 2010 20:25
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poofactory posted:The legal economy is strong and rubust... for some. Many lawyers and law students just do not understand how to be successful. There are many rich and lead rewarding lives and some that even make good money while working few hours. It is all about playing the system and having the knowledge and ability to be successful. Most people do not have these abilities. Please elaborate.
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Jul 14, 2010 20:25
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Petey posted:Good work! Now - you must find Randbrick... In One Month I Will Meet Randbrick
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Jul 14, 2010 20:30
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Drunken Scourge posted:btw is there some sort of funny or ironic name for schools that make the top 20 but not T14? FTT
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Jul 14, 2010 20:33
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there is only one tier, "Top 1". all other schools are TTTs. hth
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Jul 14, 2010 20:42
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Drunken Scourge posted:btw is there some sort of funny or ironic name for schools that make the top 20 but not T14?
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Jul 14, 2010 21:35
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Solomon Grundy posted:It think that the above-mentioned factors are all valid, but I think there is a systemic change going on that affects all businesses, even lawyers. The change is this - information is suddenly cheap and easy to find. We have discussed this before here and I don't want to revisit the entirety of the discussion except to say that you are correct about information and, to some degree, systemic change. Technology has also had an impact on the market. Because of advances in technology, firms staff deals more leanly and are able to distribute work among offices more easily. Before you needed six people to go to the printer and physically look at an OM. Now you need one associate who sends a PDF to the printer and reviews it when you get it back. Before if your group was too busy you had to hire more people. Now you can send some work to be done by associates in the Palo Alto office and it's almost as good as if the associates were working in your office. Before you gave changes to your assistant and they made the changes. Now you type them up and run the blackline yourself. Technological changes and increased comfort with technology are making work more efficient and, consequently, depressing associate demand. I don't think it's a huge effect, but it's definitely there. Neurosis posted:Law firms I've interviewed few actually were interested in my non-law school stuff. They DID prefer, quite clearly, people who had a lot of law related co-curriculars (competitions e.g. client interviews, mooting being the main route for commercial law firms since they didn't really care about volunteer work, or so I've been told), but still asked me about my fight sport activiites, my activities with the Petroleum Club at my university, and the like. Though the last may be a little misleading since my state is possibly the biggest natural resources location on the entire planet. Yes, but consider that the minimum requirements to get those interviews were numbers based. Also, your state is the arctic? J Miracle posted:If you go to law school no one will ever care about the crap that makes you an interesting and well-rounded person again. HAHA, JUST KIDDING LAW FIRMS REALLY CARE A LOT ABOUT YOU AND YOU ARE IMPORTANT AND SPECIAL. It is better to work with a nice interesting person than someone who is a jerk but you're kidding yourself if you think that the ability to hunker down and bill isn't what really matters at the end of the day (you still have to be civil but nobody cares if you are president of your local botany club). Business posted:It seems like there's a certain value to a lawyer who can just keep his/her head down and gun like no other. Also, fantastic numbers and a 'Prestigious' resume/application are not mutually exclusive things at all, except for maybe something like business school, where the actual experience you've built up is more important. Not sure why b-school is different. There is definitely value to keeping your head down and grinding out work. Lots and lots of value. TyChan posted:Another thing to think about, although this is more of a 2-5 year forecast (at most) than anything else, is that legal work for the big and medium sized firms in the US is fueled by having steady transactional clients who would inevitably get into trouble and need your firm's litigation group or subgroups to step in. This is a self-feeding model that depends on having large amounts of not-so-routine contractual work. Since the US has not had a terribly great manufacturing sector for... decades, this meant that law firms were feeding off of new financial activity like IPOs or other securitization and credit work. Things are definitely picking up in the legal market. Whether or not that extends to the rest of the economy is a different question entirely. I think it's uncommon for firms to represent clients in litigation where the firm also represented the firm in the transaction that leads to the litigation. semicolonsrock posted:But why would the T14, for example, care, if they're so firmly entrenched at the top? Does USN & WR really weight GPA that heavily? You need to sit down and take a few minutes to seriously think about the market for lawyers and the market for law schools and how those two things are different. Why should a school care who makes the best lawyers? If the current model doesn't provide schools with students who make the best lawyers then why are schools embracing the current model?
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Jul 14, 2010 21:59
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Death to all law professorsquote:I also disagree with Wurtzel’s view that government needs to adopt various policies to reduce the number of lawyers (which of course is the main real function of bar exams): Best reply yet: quote:High salaries of lawyers? Are you kidding? The giant law firms that pay the high salaries (actually partnership profits, for the most part, not salaries) don’t offer “very basic legal services” and the lawyers who offer “very basic legal services” don’t make high salaries. Also a good reply: quote:Law school was a complete waste of time and money, and it did very little to prepare me for the actual practice of law. I learned more about the practice of law in the two months that I spent studying for the bar exam than I did in three years of law school. So I propose this: replace law school with an apprenticeship/residency program and make the bar exam tougher w/ an open research and writing component to weed out more potentially-incompetent lawyers. WhiskeyJuvenile fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jul 14, 2010 |
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Jul 14, 2010 22:00
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