The fighter still remains...

Being unemployed has put me on the most bizarre sleep schedule.  With no real incentive to wake up at a normal hour, I end up sleeping until 11 AM, but staying up until 3 or 4 AM.  I would not quite call it insomnia, because I don't exactly have trouble falling or staying asleep.  I'm just on a really strange rhythm.  Hopefully that will change if and when I find a real job, but truthfully I have always been a bit of a night owl.  Anyone else on a vampiric sleep schedule?

Anyway, this has been a big week for those of us working to expose the law school/higher education scam.  First, we have the arrival of a new blogger, a professor sharing his or her insights on the scope of the scam from the inside, and at a first tier school no less.  Then, there was the announcement about the lawsuits against NYLS and Cooley.  (Check out some coverage of that here.)  I won't belabor these stories, as the other scam-bloggers have done an excellent job of covering the details.  (See the links on my blog roll.)  Suffice to say, I believe that momentum is on our side and, more importantly, I strongly believe that the truth is on our side.

Big news:  I have a legitimate job interview scheduled for Monday morning.  We will see how that goes.  I am slightly more optimistic about this position than about the prior ones, as this company actually sought me out rather than the reverse.  They found my information in a resume bank I signed up for shortly after I graduated.  Wish me luck!  Going on these interviews and getting rejected can be draining.  But for those of you who just finished the bar exam and are now going to be beginning the process of interviewing/getting rejected, there is a silver lining.  After the first ten or so rejections they stop stinging as much, mostly because they cease to be a surprise!  This is surprisingly liberating, and allows me to go about the process of applying for jobs with companies or organizations I know I will likely either not hear back from or not be selected for with an odd detachment.  (Although I will admit, there is something vaguely irritating about those form auto-replies that state that due to a high volume of applications they will only contact those people they wish to interview!)

On that note, I will leave you with my "unable-to-sleep" song of choice, which I find strangely appropriate in spirit if not in actual lyrical content.  :) I hope you are getting more sleep than I am tonight!

Another day, another misleading study from industry apologists

With everything that has been going on in my life over the past few weeks, I missed this trash when it came out a couple of weeks ago.

If you have been keeping up with the blogs recently, you have seen that we have been inundated with articles and studies pointing out that salaries are falling for new attorneys, and that the legal industry is losing jobs.  You might be surprised to find anyone ballsy enough to pretend that there is good news for recent law graduates.

Enter NaTTTional Juri$t.  This sickening publication should be familiar to all current law students or recent grads.  At my school, there were bins of it all over the place for people to read between classes.  Sandwiched between advertisements for foreign study programs and LLM programs ($$$) you will find the occasional article.  Since I graduated I have not had the misfortune of encountering one of these, but someone passed along this article from the website.  Here's the intro, and it is quite a hook:

"Recent law school graduates on average have more disposable income than they did ten years ago, this despite higher student loan debt and a worsened job market, according to an exclusive study by National Jurist magazine."

Really??  Despite higher student loan debt and a worsened job market, I should have more disposable income than law grads ten years ago???  THERE  IS HOPE!  Tell me more, tell me more... like, can I buy a car?

Not so fast:

"But that is not true for graduates who get jobs at the smallest law firms, or for those underemployed or unemployed. Students entering private practice with a law firm between two and ten attorneys saw an 8 percent decline in standard of living from 1998 — largely because salaries dropped from the Class of 2008 to 2009. But, if the students take advantage of the income-based loan repayment plan that took effect in 2009, their standard of living actually increases by 26 percent." 

So basically their point is this:  if you land a job at a big firm, your standard of living will be significantly higher than similarly placed law graduates ten years ago.  True or not, this issue is moot for the vast majority of recent graduates.  Their second point is that if you work in public interest or government, your standard of living will be a modest 6% better than similarly situated graduates a decade ago.  I am almost willing to believe that. Many schools now have loan repayment options for recent graduates in public service (if you can qualify for them), so it is a possibility.

But the misleading conclusion that the study draws is that recent law graduates in general have more disposable income.  When so many recent law graduates are either unemployed or flipping burgers, how can that possibly be the case?

I do not doubt that the new loan repayment options have helped some people.  But what about the unemployed?  Don't they count?  You can't publish a study that almost completely ignores an entire, substantial demographic and expect to draw anything meaningful from it.  As the NY Times pointed out, the unemployed have become invisible.

School's Out Forever

Hi everyone,

I know it has been a really, really, inexcusably long time since I have blogged. And I am sure that I have lost most of my links or readers. But I want to check in with a little update in case anyone still looks because the scam-busting movement is just as important to me as ever, if only from the sidelines.

Graduation came and went with little fanfare on my part. I told my family not to bother making the trek because I don't feel there is really anything to celebrate about graduating with a ton of debt, no job and a group of friends in the exact same situation. None of my close friends from law school have jobs yet, and only a few of my acquaintances do. I will say that if I feel good about anything, it's the fact that I will never be in a classroom again and no one will ever get another tuition dollar from me. That said, graduation also marked my official transition from depressed law student to completely unemployed law graduate. Yes, I am unemployed for the first time in my life since I was fourteen, which is pretty demoralizing even if it has only been a few weeks.

A few things going on in my personal life convinced me to put off taking the bar until February. I have been looking for non-legal jobs and if I find one I like I might not take the bar at all. Or even if I find one I don't like. Who knows? At this point what I really need is a paycheck; I don't want to mooch off of my fiance forever.

I literally have nothing but time right now, so maybe I will take this opportunity to post more often. So many of the really important scambloggers have done a great job advocating for various types of reform, and I think they will be better advocates for such things than I will. They are more eloquent and, frankly, more creative. But perhaps I can turn this into a job-search journal. I have been applying for non-legal jobs for three weeks now. In that time I have had two interviews. (Two and a half if you count a phone interview that lasted about a minute.) Perhaps I will post more about those later, but the real take-away from all three is what I (along with many others) have been saying all along. A law degree is NOT an asset in any field but law. The law degree scares people away. A position that you are fully qualified for and could perform well in will be out of reach because the employer will be scared that you will leave for a "$100,000 law job."

Plenty of people go to law school not knowing what the practice of law entails, and therefore not knowing that they might not like it. That is bad enough, but what really pains me is to hear about people who plan on getting a law degree *knowing* that they have no desire to practice, thinking that they can "do anything" with a law degree. The employers I spoke with beg to differ.

I will be checking in with some job market updates as I get them. Once again, I am sorry for the months with no updates, but I can tell from reading the scam blogs that the movement has not suffered! The truth has a way of getting out eventually, and it feels good to know that I have played even a tiny part.