Associate's Mind

Two articles stood out to me from mainstream press outlets this past week*. One from the Atlantic, and one from the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic’s piece, The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think (citing LST’s 2012 report) delves into the abysmal employment landscape for new lawyers: The barren job [...]

  I was recently corresponding with a friend and the topic of extra-curricular projects came up. I rattled off a list of 6 or 7 things I’m doing outside of work.1 Bar committees, speaking engagements, article writing, writing a book, etc. All of them, taken with the day-in, day-out grind of being a lawyer, can [...]

  Although you’ve probably heard from both of them before, law professor Brian Tamanaha, and Dean Mitchell of Western Reserve Law School were on WHYY’s Radiotimes yesterday discussing the topic “Rethinking Law Schools.” You can give it a listen here:   Here’s the TL;DR: Tamanaha Risk in writing book? Back lash from colleagues, but some were supportive. Negative [...]

  “Popular culture has made a career in law look easy and lucrative. But this is complete fiction.” Thus begins the Alabama State Bar’s (ASB) informational booklet, “Thinking of Going to Law School?” But wait, it gets better! Before you go any further, you need to make a realistic assessment by honestly answering three questions [...]

  The 21st century hasn’t exactly been rainbows and ponies for the legal industry. As has been pointed out frequently here and nearly everywhere else, lawyers are facing unprecedented pressures on the profession. This has led to new lawyers adapting and performing in ways that were not anticipated while in law school. In a paper entitled Practicing Theory: [...]

  To say that people want rewards without responsibility or effort is a trite observation. But often times it seems as though the problem is growing increasingly worse. For example: Get fit in five days!!!! How To Get Fit With 3 Minutes Of Exercise A Week SIX Second Abs Five days to fitness, to three [...]

Scott Greenfield has a post up this morning entitled The Law Professors’ New Clothes, addressing the continuing running in circles of the legal professoriate – offering vague solutions that dont actually address the problems new lawyers are facing today. If I recall correctly, the problems facing law schools involve excessive expense, declining enrollment, declining standards, producing many times more lawyers [...]

  There is a parking deck right next to our office building. The monthly fee is $80. Cheap, in comparison to most cities. Affordable. Four blocks away from our office building are the bridges going over the railroad tracks that bisect Birmingham. The bidges are lined with parking spaces whose parking meters have all been removed. So parking is [...]

  N.I.N.J.A - No Income, No Job, or Assets Often used in context with loans, it also applies to so-called social media “experts.” There has been a ridiculous rise fo people claiming to be some sort of expert or professional or guru in social media in the past few years. How many? Try this on for size: So [...]

  Just saw this over at TaxProf: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects there will be 74,000 new lawyer jobs this decade, while American law schools will produce more than 400,000 graduates. “It’s not clear to me there’s an oversupply problem at all.” So says Lawrence Mitchell, Law School Dean at Case Western, and [...]