bitter rant

Public (Dis)Interest

by Katie Apple on December 1, 2008 in Columns

I’ll be honest. I’m in it for the money. I wasn’t one of those 1Ls who said they came to law school to help people. I became a lawyer because it seemed like the best way to land my DreamJob without first having to work in the mailroom. Also, I like money. I like nice things and the law seemed like the best way to get nice things for myself (I don’t do math or science).

I did get an unpaid clerkship at DreamCompany and yes, I get that there are tradeoffs and that I’m paying my dues—more than willing to do so—but I’ve lived a student’s lifestyle for far too long. I’m ready for some money.

Unfortunately, it’s hard out there for a recent law school graduate, and with Big Firms in the middle of a hiring freeze, it’s no time to be choosey.

Of course, it’s not like there are no jobs for lawyers. In fact, there’s always one employer who’s hiring—the government.

So three days ago, I decided to suck it up. With an enthusiasm that my student loan company would admire, I applied for a government job.

In my application there was a section asking for a personal statement regarding my interest in criminal law. Hmm.

Well, I love “Law & Order” (I heart Jack McCoy). Okay, I didn’t put that down.

Knowing someone on the inside, I also managed to get my hands on a hiring manual, which stressed the importance of finding applicants with a strong interest in public service.

Ugh. The public? I have come to realize that, on the whole, I don’t like the public very much. I didn’t go to law school to change the world, fight the power, or help people. That’s why all of my internships were spent working on the management-side of labor law.

But my government lawyer friend indulged me with a mock interview.

It didn’t go well.

He laughed at me and said, “Get thee to a soup kitchen this weekend!”

Yeah, didn’t happen.

So what to do when you need to sell yourself as a humanitarian and you couldn’t care less about humanity? In plain English—lie. But “lie” is such a dirty word. I massaged some of my prior experience and talked about wanting to transition from the private to the public sector and really give back.

Amazingly, I wasn’t struck by lighting.

That seems to have gotten the ball rolling with the government. But hopefully it won’t come to that. I’m hoping the Big Firm hiring freeze thaws before I have to make a commitment to the people.

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Giving Thanks for Billing on Thanksgiving

by Bitter and Abused on November 26, 2008 in Columns

I just got back from a meeting regarding a response (due Monday) to a motion for summary judgment in a trade secrets case. Junior partner who was left in charge of dealing with responding to the 865 statements of undisputed material fact (and who had been aggressively insisting since last Monday that it was “under control”) revealed that although he had disputed nearly every one of the statements, he “hadn’t really had time to completely finish” filling in the supporting cites from a record containing hundreds and hundreds of pages.

For the un-anointed, all you really need to understand is that there is a lot of fucking work left to do. Not only is Thanksgiving shot, but so is close to every minute of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, including those traditionally spent sleeping.

Of course I desperately wanted to fire off a searing indictment of this abuse, until it dawned on me: This is precisely why they pay me five times the median household income for single women. So perhaps my mood (and productivity) would be better served by reflecting on why this abuse should be greeted with holiday gratitude:

It’s concrete proof I haven’t been laid off
Won’t have to pretend I’m working just to save face in front of my law school friends who work at more prestigious Big Firms than mine
Perfect opportunity to act out my fantasy of pulling that senior associate of indeterminate relationship status into a make-out session in Docketing
Can finally stare for as long as I want at the creepy family photos in the offices of the senior partners I work for
The borderline psychotic wife who is convinced I am having an affair with her junior partner husband is (presumably) with him today, which means an all-day reprieve from those unsettling hang-up prank calls
Won’t have to take the long route to the bathroom to avoid the secretary that terrifies me
It’s a weekday (holiday or no holiday), and I might be able to cut out before 10:00 PM
No need to come up with excuses to get that Mormon paralegal who thinks we’re BFFs out of my office
Will not be subjected to the open-mouthed ogling usually caused by my office’s placement on the path to the men’s room—none of the male partners will be here
The saved calories means slightly less guilt over not having gone to the gym since five weeks before the bar exam
Won’t have to deal with the newly minted family holiday tradition of having my Uncle Joe announce derisively “Here comes the bigshot rich lawyer” every time I enter a room

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Two Bar Exams, One Dream Clerkship, No Job

by Katie Apple on November 24, 2008 in Columns

The thrill is gone.

Last Friday, I found out that I passed the New York bar. How I was able to find that out after five-plus hours of fruitlessly trying to load a page on their website, which crashed approximately 14 minutes after results became available, is another story.

I immediately had that “whoosh” feeling, like 15 tons had just been lifted from my shoulders. I had that same feeling almost exactly one year prior, when I found out that I passed the California bar.

A year ago, I went out, got drunk and took a cute guy home. It was great.

But one year later, the results of the New York exam inspired little in the way of drunken revelry and casual sex.

Why the second bar exam?

I had moved to New York for what was supposed to be a six-month clerkship at DreamJob (yes, you’ve heard of the company. No, I’m not going to name them). After a few months at DreamJob, I fell in love with New York, which prompted me to begin my search for local BigLaw jobs that would help me eventually return to DreamJob as an in-house counsel. In other words, DreamJob doesn’t hire lawyers straight out of law school. They’ll give you a “clerkship” with a meager stipend that won’t even cover the cost of renting an apartment in New York.

But the lawyers at DreamJob did help setup a few BigLaw interviews for me that went something like this:

Partner: “Oh, you’re not licensed in New York. But you’d be willing to take the Bar again, right?”

Me: “Well, I can waive into DC and in five years I can waive into New York…”

Partner: “Not so much.”

Me: “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

So I had to regroup, suck it up and sign up for the New York bar.

Let me just tell you 3L’s out there who bitch about studying for the bar: You have nothing else to do but go to class, write some outlines and work out. (I was never in better shape than when I was studying for the California bar. And I’m talking about California-hottie shape, mind you.) Working and paying rent in New York City while studying for the bar was a totally different experience. I worked for most of the summer, found a new apartment, moved and managed to do my first multiple choice questions the weekend of July 4. This was not the plan for success I had followed the year before, and I was nervous. I had an epic breakdown after the test was over. I was so exhausted.

But there was no rest after the July exam It was time to find a job.

Luckily, DreamJob extended my clerkship (with its meager stipend) while I was looking for a job. I thought, yeah, I’ll be out of there in a month. That was back in August. Four months later, I’m still working as a clerk and going on interviews.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that DreamJob’s kicking me to the curb by December 31, and I’m looking at a widespread BigLaw hiring freeze.

So, despite a regular stream of “promising” interviews, this is my life right now:

Ignorant Slut Co-Worker: “Congrats on passing another bar.”

Me: “Thanks.”

Ignorant Slut Co-Worker: “Now if you could only find a job.”

Me: “I hate you.”

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Pro Bono Sucks

by Bitter Staff on August 18, 2008 in Columns

I’m sorry, but I can’t take it anymore. This is the fifth time in three weeks I’ve received (and—yes, fine, I’ll admit it, deleted without opening) the “Urgent Pro Bono Staffing: Please read!” email from Mr. Of Counsel, who is tasked with harassing everyone in the firm about taking on pro bono work. Call me heartless, call me a horrible person, an obnoxious, selfish little snot, but I’ll go ahead and say it: I hate pro bono.

I just can’t understand why BigLaw associates are constantly guilt-tripped into not only having to care about this nonprofit, Skid Row crap, but also having to spend time working on it, for no credit. No other professionals are strong-armed into doing random work for people who can’t pay out of some outdated sense of noblesse oblige, so why are lawyers? Because we get paid pretty well? Please. Know any i-bankers who’ve clocked a few hundred pro bono hours selling bonds for asylum refugees recently? What about your friendly neighborhood hedge fund manager, cosmetic surgeon, or real-estate developer?
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Precious Nuggets of Wisdom

by Bitter Newsroom on August 3, 2008 in News

Just when you thought it was safe to wallow safely in your time-honored right to be miserable at work, some over-earnest hick lawyer goes and screws it up again.

This time, the thanks is owed to the recent clueless ramblings of Stephen Ellis, a partner at Tucker, Ellis & West, a Cleveland law firm with less people working in its entire office than certain Big Firms have working in their mailrooms. In an article adapted from a commencement speech he recently gave at an Ohio law school, Mr. Ellis offers his local-yokel take on the “secret to happiness and success in a lawyer’s life” with “seven simple suggestions.”

The highlights of these simple, yet deeply insightful, suggestions:

“Be enthusiastic about your clients’ matters”;

“Don’t be obnoxious. Do a good job on the law, facts, and strategy, but don’t make it personal”;

“Get ‘outside’ yourself and participate in community events”;

“Believe in your brain”; and, our own personal favorite,

“Be nice.”

While we heartily appreciate Mr. Ellis’s efforts to keep us happy and successful, we can’t help but point out that when you’re a lawyer at a nice little Midwestern firm that no one outside of Ohio has ever heard of, you need to realize that your advice may not have the same sway to a junior associate at, say, Skadden or Cravath. Sorry, but your idea of success and happiness may be a few acres off from theirs.

But thanks for the tips, though. We’ll be sure to keep them in mind when we’re on our fourth all-nighter in a row on an $8 billion merger for a client that we’ve never even met.

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Shut Up and Drink

by Bitter Newsroom on July 27, 2008 in News

True or false: Being a summer associate at a Big Firm is sort of like being an aspiring actress who comes to Hollywood and suddenly finds herself forced into a life of gonzo porn and crystal meth by a big-time agent who threatened to ruin her life if she didn’t do what he said.

If a recent spate of alarmist reports floating around the legal blogosphere is any indication, the answer appears to be “true.”

Leading the pack of the whining reactionaries is Lauren Stiller Rikleen’s recent report in the National Law Journal, which offers a self-proclaimed “sobering look at a long-standing culture” of summer associate programs.

The report details certain atrocities that summer associates in Big Firms nationwide have endured in the recent past. One student recounted, for example, the horror that “Everything is free. The atmosphere is higher class than anything we are used to, and the pressure to attend every event, including the after-parties, is significant.” Even worse, Ms. Rikleen reports that “summers who refrain from participating…are tagged as ‘not being fun.’”

Offering a solution to end all this unnecessary suffering, Ms. Rikleen suggests that Big Firms simply “cease funding the after-event partying,” explaining that “firms that foster career-building skills over drinking skills are sure to have an advantage” in recruiting future associates.

While one can be certain that Ms. Rikleen has no doubt brought her expertise in sensitivity training and peer counseling courses to her conclusions, the question still remains whether she’s ever worked in a Big Firm—or any job that involves interacting with other people. Because we hate to break it to you, lady, but a key “career building skill” is learning how to navigate awkward social situations at work without having a breakdown over it.

Here’s the thing that summers need to realize: You know that clique of actual associates who go to all the summer associate events? The ones who get loaded and spend the next day IM’ing all the summers about it? The ones who’ll tag you as “not being fun” if you don’t do the same? Big Firms have a name for them: losers. There’s a reason they have so much time on their hands to go hang out with a bunch of law students. No one cares what they think, and neither should you.

(And if you’re not buying it, go find the associates working on the biggest deals and most high-profile cases at your firm and ask them how many summer associate events they’ve attended so far this year. When the number tops zero, let us know.)

So, summers everywhere, just calm down. You’re getting paid like a grown-up, so buck up, act like one and realize that sometimes—even when you don’t feel like it!—you may have to show your face at a lame firm-sponsored party. And sometimes, yes, there will be drunk douchebags there who may make you feel awkward. So hang out for a bit, then bail. Have a drink. Or don’t. No one really cares. Not anyone that matters, anyway.

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Photo by mrlerone

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Billable Hour Douchebags Strike Again

by Bitter Staff on July 21, 2008 in Columns

How long will the legal community have to suffer through the collective whining of delusional, over-entitled douchebags? Seems the good kids over at Stanford Law School’s Building a Better Legal Profession, the self-proclaimed “national grassroots movement” that demands Big Firms cut billable hour requirements to improve associates’ lifestyles are at it again.

This time, at least, the Stanford kids weren’t directly responsible for the whining, but somewhat more terrifyingly, their very existence was cited to support a cause they hold near and dear: flex time in the workplace—the topic of a roundtable discussion recently held in the New York offices of Davis Polk & Wardwell.
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