New lawyers are now starting life having been sworn in to jurisdictions across the land. If these new lawyers had it like I did, they went to the swearing-in ceremony, had a nice lunch with family, and returned to their full-time occupations of being a gainfully unemployed Xbox-video-game-playing lawyer.
You’d be amazed how many jobs you can apply for between lives on Modern Warfare.
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QI’m a 3L at a lower tier law school, not a Cooley or NYLS, but not a whole lot different. I’ve racked up $90,000 in student loans, am doing well in school but got absolutely no on-campus interviews, either last year or this year. It’s not that I didn’t try. But the big firms, the ones that actually have money to spend on salaries, bypassed my school. And there’s not much out there anywhere else, even locally.
I came to school thinking I had a pretty good chance of a job after three years, especially when the placement office had impressive stats on how many grads actually got jobs. Now it seems those numbers were baked. Should I sue my law school for fraud?
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QI have a C average at a second tier school. While I have good work experience, I’m worried about finding a job out there when I graduate. I’ve interned each year during law school and I’m currently a clerk for the in-house counsel of a large (Fortune 500) corporation. I have decent experience in a specialized field (information privacy law), have received scholarships and additional training in my field, and have a good personality with plenty of optimism. Any chance a law firm will overlook my relatively low grades in favor of experience and solid recommendations from my supervisors?
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I’m sick and fucking tired of all these wannabe BigLaw douchebags pretending to work at legit, top-tier firms when they don’t. If you don’t satisfy these eight criteria, you don’t work in BigLaw. You just work at a law firm that’s big. There’s a difference. Learn it, you poseurs.
Now that summer is officially over and the whites go back into the closet for another nine months, we at Bitter Lawyer have to put the old workboots back on and get back to the grind. Unfortunately, some of you are still unemployed and probably sitting around in your tighty whiteys past Labor Day. Here’s a list of fields that are hot and jobs that are in demand. Jobs even a lawyer could do… maybe.
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QI went to law school because I was told it would “open doors.” I soon learned that there was only one door (being a lawyer) and that it seemed this door slid shut. I graduated, took the bar, but walked out of it, realizing I’d rather do most anything in life than be a lawyer.
My chief complaints with the law are as follows:
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Working comedian and Lawyerist contributor Alex Barnett on how to cope with being fired from a law firm:
If you’ve been fired you know what it feels like. You feel like a crime was committed. You feel like your boss just mugged you and stole your dignity and your confidence. Oh, and while he or she was at it, they stole your income, your benefits, and your standing amongst your colleagues. And, then for good measure, he or she took a sledgehammer and went to work on your resume.
He should know, having been fired and/or laid off from four different law firms. Read more on Lawyerist.
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Here are your headlines from the Bitter Newsroom, where we are prepared for the school year.
Maybe a JD/MBA Isn’t a Bad Idea. As more and more companies build provisions barring first and second year associates from working on their projects, law firms are responding by creating business education programs to teach junior lawyers financial and accounting concepts and the finer points of business school, like creating power-point presentations and computer spreadsheets. No word on whether or not they’ll be taught how to make boatloads of money without needing to work at BigLaw.
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QDuring the course of the last 3 weeks or so of bar prep, I had a few interviews. I got an offer (for a lot less money than I thought they’d offer) a few days before the bar, and the hiring partner tried to strong-arm me into accepting over the phone, even threatening to rescind the offer if I didn’t accept it by “the middle of next week” i.e. the Tuesday and Wednesday of the bar. I was able to talk him off the ledge and convince him to give me a few more days to think about it. My second interview was four days before the bar, and again I was told that if I didn’t want to come on that day, then I wouldn’t be considered for the job. This is a small (30 attorneys) firm.
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