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Recently passed the Bar and no jobs in Austin.  I went to court this week for a volunteering thing I have and it's an object lesson in "Hell, I could do that." So I've been thinking about hanging out the shingle. I know a few attorneys in my class who took this route and most seem to be doing pretty well (although, if you're not it's not like you're likely to advertise).Anybody here take this route and if so, what is it like and what do you have to watch out for? Been trying to write up a Business Plan, per what the SBA site says. At least that's where I'm at now, so this is kind of in the early stages; however it seems more viable than waiting for someone to glance at my resume.
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Dec 1, 2010 21:03
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Kumo posted:Anybody here take this route and if so, what is it like and what do you have to watch out for? Overhead (lexis, malpractice insurance) Lack of experience I would highly recommend doing some volunteer work to get the ropes of criminal law before trying it.
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Dec 1, 2010 22:06
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sigmachiev posted:Another serious post re: topics! Excellent discussion on video game law with an IP Law Professor and the General Counsels of Electronic Arts, Take-Two, and Activision-Blizzard: http://www.ipcolloquium.com/Programs/16.html
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Dec 1, 2010 23:44
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You can always do ghost writing for pro se litigants who can't handle all the work for themselves, but can't afford a full service attorney, either.
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Dec 2, 2010 01:04
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IrritationX posted:You can always do ghost writing for pro se litigants who can't handle all the work for themselves, but can't afford a full service attorney, either. That would actually be fantastically entertaining. All those rambling yet meaningless motions calling the opposing counsel and the judge dirty names. My god.
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Dec 2, 2010 01:16
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IrritationX posted:You can always do ghost writing for pro se litigants who can't handle all the work for themselves, but can't afford a full service attorney, either.
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Dec 2, 2010 01:26
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BigHead posted:That would actually be fantastically entertaining. All those rambling yet meaningless motions calling the opposing counsel and the judge dirty names. My god. If by "fantastically entertaining" you mean "worse than being an anal bead tester" I guess, yeah. The best clients are ones who don't want lawyers but have one forced upon them by the court
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Dec 2, 2010 01:41
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IrritationX posted:You can always do ghost writing for pro se litigants who can't handle all the work for themselves, but can't afford a full service attorney, either. If you're considering taking this seriously, it is a terrible, terrible idea.
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Dec 2, 2010 01:45
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Omerta fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Aug 17, 2011 |
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Dec 2, 2010 02:47
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Omerta posted:If I do worse than median I am going to autoban/kill myself. This poo poo is not hard. Or are you saying that's the easy part? Also, if someone's going to ghost write for pro se litigants, just man up and become an unemployed author (use your legal experience as material!  ) -- it's at least socially acceptable to be a writer without work than being a lawyer without a paycheck, you'll be making the same amount, and generally folks don't hold nearly as much contempt for lazy authors than those greedy, bloodsucking lawyers. It's a complete win!
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Dec 2, 2010 15:01
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Omerta posted:If I do worse than median I am going to autoban/kill myself. This poo poo is not hard. _________________________/ every one of your classmates (except the gunners who have scared themselves into spending every waking moment studying)
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Dec 2, 2010 15:39
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At the subway station today, there was a cop with a dog standing at the top of the escalators. As people came on or off the escalators, the cop would let the dog wander up and sniff at them. To me, this seemed like a straight-up search using the dog as a tool. Remind me goons, what did the SCOTUS say about police dogs and 4th Amendment searches? I seem to recall that dog sniffing does not rise to the level of a 4th Amendment search but I don't really keep up with criminal law at all.
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Dec 2, 2010 15:53
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I'm kinda curious. Was the cop stopping people and making them get sniffed? Or was the dog just being allowed to roam and sniff people at will but was not being directed to each and every individual person that came through? Oh and what subway system/station?
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Dec 2, 2010 15:54
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SWATJester posted:No because you implicitly authorized them to build such a face when you invited them to participate in a game that arguably is specifically designed for making giant lava vomiting faces. See, but in Second Life (which nobody actually cares about except for scholars) you would've been paying money for that spot of land, so your neighbor's giant lava vomiting face would be reducing the value of your investment! (please credit me if you end up writing this paper, I can be on law review vicariously)
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Dec 2, 2010 15:56
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SWATJester posted:I'm kinda curious. Was the cop stopping people and making them get sniffed? Or was the dog just being allowed to roam and sniff people at will but was not being directed to each and every individual person that came through? The latter - the dog was basically just wandering, but the cop was keeping him near the tops of the Union Station outdoor escalators. And the dog was going right up to people and its nose was touching them, but a person could avoid the dog by waiting until it was preoccupied and walking by - although presumably the dog would still sniff out any explosives / drugs. (I assume it was an explosive-sniffing dog.)
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Dec 2, 2010 15:56
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echopapa posted:See, but in Second Life (which nobody actually cares about except for scholars) you would've been paying money for that spot of land, so your neighbor's giant lava vomiting face would be reducing the value of your investment! Heh I'm done with scholarship for a while; I just finished writing a technical chapter in an upcoming ABA book on international virtual worlds law a couple months ago.
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Dec 2, 2010 15:58
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entris posted:The latter - the dog was basically just wandering, but the cop was keeping him near the tops of the Union Station outdoor escalators. And the dog was going right up to people and its nose was touching them, but a person could avoid the dog by waiting until it was preoccupied and walking by - although presumably the dog would still sniff out any explosives / drugs. IIRC perfectly acceptable.
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Dec 2, 2010 15:59
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Is there a long post somewhere in this thread about why getting a JD is a bad idea for people who are actually interested in policy? I get that you don't really apply much of what you learn in law school to policy work but when I look at staff lists for think-tanks it seems like everyone is a JD or an Economics PhD.
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Dec 2, 2010 16:02
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upekkha posted:Is there a long post somewhere in this thread about why getting a JD is a bad idea for people who are actually interested in policy? An econ PhD is a very good idea. A law degree is a very bad idea.
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Dec 2, 2010 16:07
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upekkha posted:when I look at staff lists for think-tanks it seems like everyone is a JD or an Economics PhD. That is not a useful piece of data for deciding whether to go to law school. That tells you nothing about the current job market for JDs. Here is a hint: if you look at a job, and there are people with JDs who have that job, and people without JDs who have that job, then the JD is clearly not a good idea if you want that job. You want to be like the non-JD people who have the job - they spent less on their education and now hold the same job as someone with a JD.
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Dec 2, 2010 16:39
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entris posted:That is not a useful piece of data for deciding whether to go to law school. That tells you nothing about the current job market for JDs. Here is a hint: if you look at a job, and there are people with JDs who have that job, and people without JDs who have that job, then the JD is clearly not a good idea if you want that job. You want to be like the non-JD people who have the job - they spent less on their education and now hold the same job as someone with a JD. That makes perfect sense I just wonder about whether there is a "rite of passage" issue going on. For example I have heard from tech people before that there is a soft-requirement for PhDs in the management track for some corporations just as a tradition and prestige issue even though a bachelors or masters in engineering + MBA is sufficient qualification in the scope of tech management.
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Dec 2, 2010 17:06
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Jesus loving christ, they just granted summary judgment on something they really shouldn't have, gently caress judges and gently caress getting hometowned.
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Dec 2, 2010 18:14
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CaptainScraps posted:Jesus loving christ, they just granted summary judgment on something they really shouldn't have, gently caress judges and gently caress getting hometowned. This is why you can't get invested in cases. I got hometowned IN my hometown with an out of county plaintiff. So maybe that isn't so much 'hometowning' as 'aggressive schizophrenia'
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Dec 2, 2010 19:05
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JudicialRestraints posted:This is why you can't get invested in cases. I got hometowned IN my hometown with an out of county plaintiff. Yeah, I know, it's just a fresh wound based off a bad decision.
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Dec 2, 2010 19:15
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entris posted:The latter - the dog was basically just wandering, but the cop was keeping him near the tops of the Union Station outdoor escalators. And the dog was going right up to people and its nose was touching them, but a person could avoid the dog by waiting until it was preoccupied and walking by - although presumably the dog would still sniff out any explosives / drugs. See United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983) and Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005). Dog sniffing doesn't constitute a "search" as long as it doesn't require an undue amount of time/inconvenience from the searchee, and it's somewhat unique in that it only exposes whether or not you have drugs/explosives, not any other information in which you'd have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It's official conduct that doesn't invade a reasonable expectation of privacy. If the dog alerts, prepare to get your rear end searched. NJ Deac fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Dec 2, 2010 |
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Dec 2, 2010 20:04
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I forget, did the majority opinions address the obvious incentive for cops to just train dogs that indicate all the time (or at least massively err on that side)?
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Dec 2, 2010 20:27
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Ainsley McTree posted:If by "fantastically entertaining" you mean "worse than being an anal bead tester" I guess, yeah. The best clients are ones who don't want lawyers but have one forced upon them by the court I think it would be great to spend my bar-mandated free lawyering writing "Your honor logic dictates that the opposing counsel is a dick, and my parking ticket is godzilla."
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Dec 2, 2010 21:08
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Elotana posted:I forget, did the majority opinions address the obvious incentive for cops to just train dogs that indicate all the time (or at least massively err on that side)? Seriously, drug-sniffing dogs are such a loving scam. They decided to take them to a school faculty parking lot in Houston (also, gently caress HPD, sociopathic provincial jackasses) so they were wandering around with drug-sniffing dogs. The dogs gave six false alarms before they finally find two xanax pills under the seat in a car. Despite the fact that it was a car used by several other people, they went ahead and suspended the teacher because of "zero-tolerance save the children!" BS. Didn't seem to help that she was the current "Teacher-of-the-Year" and loved by pretty much everybody. gently caress drug-sniffing dogs and gently caress this sociopathic, schizophrenic, sense- and compassion-void country.
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Dec 2, 2010 22:08
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Daico posted:Seriously, drug-sniffing dogs are such a loving scam. Dude take a Xanax pill or two.
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Dec 2, 2010 22:30
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Applying for summer jobs hooray hooray. Anyone done a judicial internship/externship? Deal or no deal? Our career center is really pushing applying to them, and it sounds nice but so is anything they ever talk about. Is it anything like clerking, either in terms of the work or the prestige?
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Dec 2, 2010 22:47
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Elotana posted:I forget, did the majority opinions address the obvious incentive for cops to just train dogs that indicate all the time (or at least massively err on that side)? Why would cops have an incentive for that?? They'd waste a ton of their time investigating false positives. I could see racist police departments taking a false-positive-prone dog into an area with brown people or Spanish-speaking people, but in general I don't think there's much of an incentive to have a lot of error-prone dogs.
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Dec 2, 2010 22:53
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Direwolf posted:Applying for summer jobs hooray hooray. Anyone done a judicial internship/externship? Deal or no deal? Our career center is really pushing applying to them, and it sounds nice but so is anything they ever talk about. Is it anything like clerking, either in terms of the work or the prestige? It depends on the level, but I would say generally yeah, especially in this market. Unless you're offered something paying (You haven't), then I'd take it. Mine was at the District level, which in Idaho is upper trial court. It did more for my understand of being a lawyer than all of law school.
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Dec 2, 2010 23:11
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Day Five of sobriety. Last day of classes, then a week before the first final. Kill me now.
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Dec 2, 2010 23:14
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Direwolf posted:Applying for summer jobs hooray hooray. Anyone done a judicial internship/externship? Deal or no deal? Our career center is really pushing applying to them, and it sounds nice but so is anything they ever talk about. Is it anything like clerking, either in terms of the work or the prestige? It's usually exactly like clerking, except you don't get paid, you usually don't get as good of references out of it, and employers never really seem impressed about it other than 'at least you didn't sit on your rear end'. OTOH, I did get one callback strictly because of an internship with a judge, as I happened to write the opinion on a case my interviewer had partly handled.
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Dec 3, 2010 00:15
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if you want to clerk after graduation judicial inter/extern is a good move though
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Dec 3, 2010 00:19
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Abugadu posted:It's usually exactly like clerking, except you don't get paid, you usually don't get as good of references out of it, and employers never really seem impressed about it other than 'at least you didn't sit on your rear end'. OTOH, I did get one callback strictly because of an internship with a judge, as I happened to write the opinion on a case my interviewer had partly handled. When you say employers aren't that impressed by it, do you mean overall or in comparison to specific jobs? So, a firm would be impressed by a summer firm position but not this, or are most summer jobs not particularly impressive on employers? I'm interested mostly on the practical side of things, as it seems like I'd learn a lot, but if it's gonna harm my career chances (rather than like a neutral effect) then I'm gonna be a bit more hesitant.
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Dec 3, 2010 00:22
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I wish I had interned or externed or whatever for a judge. As it is, I have literally no idea what happens in a court case, or what sort of paperwork gets filed, or how to actually be a lawyer. Whether an externship is a good thing to have on a resume: for biglaw, not really. Since biglaw firms don't care if you know how to be a lawyer or not, they aren't really impressed by externing or working part-time for a solo while in school or any of that stuff. It's true that clerking after graduation is generally considered a positive, but once again, biglaw perceives your clerkship strictly through the lens of how rarefied and prestigious it is, so a trial court clerkship where you deal with everyday lawyer work is not a big help. If you want to do something other than biglaw (read: the vast majority of lawyers), then externing can help because it gives you practical experience and tells a small firm that you'll be ready for actual court-related work sooner.
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Dec 3, 2010 00:36
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Direwolf posted:When you say employers aren't that impressed by it, do you mean overall or in comparison to specific jobs? So, a firm would be impressed by a summer firm position but not this, or are most summer jobs not particularly impressive on employers? I'm interested mostly on the practical side of things, as it seems like I'd learn a lot, but if it's gonna harm my career chances (rather than like a neutral effect) then I'm gonna be a bit more hesitant.
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Dec 3, 2010 01:37
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Direwolf posted:When you say employers aren't that impressed by it, do you mean overall or in comparison to specific jobs? So, a firm would be impressed by a summer firm position but not this, or are most summer jobs not particularly impressive on employers? I'm interested mostly on the practical side of things, as it seems like I'd learn a lot, but if it's gonna harm my career chances (rather than like a neutral effect) then I'm gonna be a bit more hesitant. Firm jobs are preferable to externing for judges because a) firms pay you and extern jobs generally don't and b) firms are much more likely to hire their summer associates. If it is too late to get a firm job for next summer then externing is completely fine. As Ersatz said it will provide you with a lot of valuable skills and whatnot. Externing can be particularly useful if you want to clerk after law school, especially if you actually make friends with the judge you extern for and want to clerk for their district.
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Dec 3, 2010 01:47
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SWATJester posted:I'm kinda curious. Was the cop stopping people and making them get sniffed? Or was the dog just being allowed to roam and sniff people at will but was not being directed to each and every individual person that came through? Sometimes in Boston the cops will have a bag-searching table in front of the subway and they'll randomly stop people and ask to search their bags. I've never been asked, and I've never stuck around long enough to watch someone who has, but I'm wondering what they do if you say "no thanks" and keep walking, like they were a beggar who asked you for change? Presumably nothing because outside of consent there's no way the 4th amendment lets them search your bag, right? I may be a lovely lawyer but I'm pretty confident on that one. Every time I see them I kind of secretly hope they ask me so I can "no thank you" to the thundrous applause of the proletariat while a cute hippie girl tenderly takes me by the hand and leads me to a stall in the men's room but it never happens
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Dec 3, 2010 02:02
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