"The fact that I went to Goodwin Procter doesn't mean I'm not passionate about doing this type of work"

..but it's a pretty good hint. From Law.com:

Are Public Interest Lawyers Getting Crowded Out by Deferred Associates? - One recent law grad looking for public interest work notes, 'We don't come with a $70,000-plus salary with benefits intact. Psychologically, it's hard to deal with that reality.'

Sending incoming associates into temporary public-interest jobs - with a healthy stipend to cover their costs of living - is intended to be a fiscally smart and compassionate way for law firms to handle an overabundance of young attorneys...

But some recent law school graduates who have spent years preparing for public-interest careers worry that law firms are hurting their job prospects by flooding the already competitive public-interest job market...

A love letter from Martindale-Hubbell®

"You know what a love letter is?":
We recently notified you of an annual $50 administrative fee associated with the maintenance and upkeep of your Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Ratings indicator displayed throughout the Martindale-Hubbell® Legal Network. If this fee is not paid by 11/9/07, your rating will no longer be displayed in our online and print resources. While this may not eliminate your rating, it will exclude it from being seen by over 1 million visitors that reference Martindale-Hubbell when evaluating and selecting a legal resource. You can submit a credit card payment for your 2007 administration fee via www.mhur.com/prradmin or by calling us at 1-800-892-6998. If you have already paid this fee, please disregard this notice.

(This one goes out to my little friend at LexisNexis®, who's been visiting the blog every weekday since I got Martindale-Hubbell®'s previous letter.)

Pay for your Martindale-Hubbell® rating or we'll shoot this dog

I got an urgent (unsolicited) letter today, urging me not to miss the boat on a major legal concern's new business model™ - yesterday's price = free; today's price = $50.00:

Martindale-Hubbell® Peer Review Ratings™ - 2nd Notice

We recently notified you of an annual $50 administration fee associated with the maintenance and upkeep of your Martindale-Hubbell® Peer Review Ratings listing displayed throughout the Martindale-Hubbell® Legal Network.

While we assume this nominal fee remains unpaid through an oversight, you should know that if it not paid by 11/01/07, your rating will no longer be displayed in our online and print resources. This would not eliminate your coveted rating; however it would exclude your rating from being seen by over 1 million that reference Martindale-Hubbell® when evaluating and selecting a legal resource...

Let this sad post stand like Ozymandias' statute to show the world that I once attained a coveted BV(T)® rating, and that for a few shining years my glory was known to every and all. Now that most coveted distinction, for which I labored and lobbied so hard, will flit through cyberspace unseen and alone. I weep. Lord knows what a blow it will be to all the teenagers in my county who seek public defender services by first turning to Martindale-Hubbell®.

I'm so grateful I'm not alone.

Update: one reason why Martindale-Hubbell® needs my $50.00: to pay for flying the Martindale Hubbell-Lexis Nexis Legal Advisory Board to Madrid and treating them like royalty.

Karma gets pretend prosecutor

Huzzah for shaming sanctions! Via Public Defender Stuff:

Judge Reprimands Temp Prosecutor for Personal Blog

When a temporary San Francisco prosecutor wrote on his personal blog about a misdemeanor case he was handling last December, he probably didn't think the judge would read it.

But Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow heard about it. And he didn't like what he read... (T)he judge... came down hard on ex-prosecutor Jay Kuo, calling his conduct "juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional." Karnow also stated his intention to send his written ruling to the State Bar...

"... He sought only to celebrate himself, tout his prowess and to preen his own feathers, as it were, unconscious of other effect..." Kuo's actions were probably reckless, Karnow wrote, because the attorney should have known that his posts might, like private e-mails, eventually be "uncontrollably distributed."

Update: Here is a good overview of Jay Kuo's undoing, with more excerpts from Kuo's LiveJournal posts, from The Internet Patrol - "Blog Postings Cost Lawyer His Job When Read by Judge".

P.D. $$$!

From today's online ABA Journal:

BIG MONEY IN INDIGENT LAW? - Newspaper Shows Some Lawyers Make Six Figures, But They Point to Their Heavy Caseloads

Now the BigLaw kids will be flooding into our line of work!

(Remember, you read it here second (or third).)

CA: you can take the boy out of BigLaw

A "litigation boutique" lawyer gets to play DA in The City, or, how some prosecutors talk about us when they think no one's listening:

The jury was waiting outside to be seated. I knew all their names. I had my peremptories ready. My witnesses were prepped. My opening statement was polished. I had just won a tentative ruling on a major evidentiary issue admitting the defendant's prior felony conviction for armed robbery. I was going to skewer him on the stand.

And...

The Public Defender pulled the "I'm pregnant, and I can't proceed." IN THE MIDDLE OF JURY SELECTION. Her doctor said that this was supposed to be her last trial--there was no medical emergency preventing her from going forward. She's just chicken. Chic-KEN!

This BigLaw boy isn't fit to shine Jeff Adachi's shoes, yet he's quite full of himself. Scroll around his site, and then click through to his firm bio, which states that he has served on the boards of directors of the ACLU of Northern California and the Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom. Yeah, he's a real prince. Or maybe another one-syllable word that starts with "pr-".

(I haven't got the hang of LiveJournal netiquette, I suppose. If I (or anyone) can find an offensive and public post through Google, Technorati, or IceRocket, is it supposed to be off-limits because it's on LiveJournal?)

Update 12/17/05: In a blow for shame-based sanctions, the temporary prosecutor has taken down all his offensive public posts and is switching his journal to members-only, but not before he picked up a raft of new readers in the San Francisco p.d.'s office. I suspect that instant karma's gonna get you, Mr. Kuo.

Weird science

Infinity Ranch points to a Slate article by a law school dean who argues, "Prosecutors are from Neptune, defense attorneys are from Pluto."

Infinity agrees. I don't. To me, prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys, particularly us public servant p.d.'s, live on the same planet: Planet Courtroom. Even if we occupy different sides of the courtroom, we still have this planet in common. It's a world seldom orbited or even viewed by BigLaw or academy types from Earth.

The dean makes some good points about professionalism and professional duties. However, he also suggests that the differences between prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers are genetic. Easy on the genetics metaphors, Profe; you never know where they might lead.

Cultural exchange

A partner in a large San Francisco firm has been "loaned" to the San Francisco Public Defender's office, and is blogging the experience:

...I see this same client rummaging through the trash. My split-second decision was to walk straight past her without making eye contact in case Ms. Hyde was out. I'm almost past her when she calls out "are you my lawyer?" I thought about lying, but decided I had to stop and say yes. Thankfully she seemed to be on her meds that day. Instead of threatening me, she told me that she had completed 8 of her 25 hours of counseling...

Mutual opportunities for learning and growth here.

News from criminal court: life is hard

A slice-of life article with a fairly odd tone in The Oregonian takes pity on a BigLaw attorney turned prosecutor who has fallen down the rabbit hole:

Since he'd resigned from Stoel, he had sensed private-practice attorneys treating him differently. The unspoken assumption was that the smartest lawyers end up in private firms, not making $49,500 at the Multnomah County district attorney's office.

In his old life, he ate at the best restaurants, took European vacations and served on civic boards. As a rookie assistant DA assigned to Misdemeanor Row, Stanford made $80,000 less a year, worked out of a cramped office, handled the most minor of crimes and grabbed lunch from street vendors.

The complexities of the criminal justice system still confused him. He was discovering a world tinted by shades of gray rather than the black and white he'd expected...

As Jeremy Irons said, "You have no idea..."

There you go

A young California lawyer who made the switch:

"I've switched over to criminal law. Civil law was boring and time consuming.... As a public defender, I'm the boss. I'm getting much more experience. It's much more dramatic and exciting. I love it."

(an old post, but I just found this blog. See also "Happy at the public defender's office".)

You'll never make it in BigLaw!

It pleases me immensely to hear a 21-year-old say this:

"I think i definitely want to be a public defender for a couple of years at least."

Right on. Join us. But beware what the well-tailored lawyers say:

Law students also need to realize that there is a vast difference between a starting job at the public defender’s office or district attorney’s office, as compared to starting at his firm of choice. It takes a thick skin and a strong constitution to work with hardened, penniless criminals day in and day out at the public defender’s office....

Well, thanks for the kiss, I suppose, in a "well, X has a nice personality" sort of way (we get this kind of compliment from our professional betters in the Bar all the time). Now here comes the kiss-off:

Some law students are under the impression that they will gain valuable trial experience as a public defender or a deputy district attorney enabling them to later land a good job with a law firm.... a young attorney who has worked for the government has learned nothing about dealing with individual clients, quoting fees, keeping clients advised, and grasping the many complex issues that are presented by business clients on a day-to-day basis. And while it may also be true that government attorneys learn to think on their feet... this is not good training for handling complex business cases where preparation is the number one priority. Just as important, a government attorney has had no experience billing 40+ hours per week or even keeping track of their time. Thus, working for the government right out of law school often disqualifies young attorneys from ever landing a job at a prestigious law firm.

I weep. All these years of haggling and litigating over people's freedom have left me unequipped to deal with the issues that really matter, like whether Corporation A will pay Corporation B's attorney fees.

Young 'uns, if you truly harbor dreams of grinding away in the law library generating income for your firm's partners, and maybe in two years or so getting to roll a partner's briefcase to court to watch said partner do a trial, then for G d's sake turn back now, and don't follow me!

(This could be a good time to introduce newer A&C readers to the beloved Public Defender Dude essay, "Criminal Law is so much better than Civil Law".)

(I do know at least one former p.d. who's now a success in a big law firm, but that one's name is anathema - we shall not speak it.)

Correction: this post implied that the author of the quoted career advice and his firm hail from BigLaw. By BigLaw standards (and perhaps others), both are in fact rather small. A&C regrets the error.

Dislocation

Yeoman links to two thought-provoking subjects.

The most recent is a link to this essay from Stay of Execution titled "Legal Lies," which Yeoman calls "The single best commentary on the nature of legal education ever written".

Ethical Esquire's David Giacalone responds to "Legal Lies" with a fairly thorough-going rebuttal, as well as more links and suggestions for further reflection.

I approach this back-and-forth from the perspective of someone who knew going in that the sort of law I wanted to do in the future wasn't going to pay worth a damn, and made my choices as to law school and financial aid accordingly. On the other hand, there's a colleague for whom I have great esteem, with a great heart and a working-class background, half-Appalachian, half-Polish-American, who couldn't have become a lawyer without incurring a ton of student debt, and yet went for Legal Services, not for the big bucks. He would like the other post from Yeoman, part of a series on social class in the New York Times, which links to a good story about Della Justice, a lawyer who came up from poverty in East Kentucky, and now works to straddle both worlds. The article from the New York Times requires registration; the article from Kentucky.com does not:

While most of her work week is devoted to commercial law, Justice spends Mondays in family court, representing families with the kind of problems hers had. She bristles whenever she runs into any hint of class bias, or the presumption that poor people in homes heated by kerosene or without enough bedrooms cannot be good parents.

Which leads me to one last link to this reflection prompted by that public defender rant from Craigslist: How do you rescue these kids...

Give me your tired, your rich, your huddled BigLaw associates yearning to breathe free

Huzzah! There is a way out of the salt mines for unfulfilled young lawyers.

Alaskablawg lifts his lamp beside the golden door.

(Shout-out to long-time listener, first-time caller "Dennis Kucinich" for recommending the NLADA job opportunities site for all your legal aid and public defender job hunting needs.)

(And a bonus link to Si Kahn's "The Lady of the Harbor.")

Lawyer Guy, we hardly knew ye

On Tuesday a funny and acerbic blawg was taken off-line by its author. I wanted to save a bit of his brain and bite on my site, so here, by permission of the blawgger, one of the final dispatches from Lawyer Guy:

I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise.

"God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

So apparently law firms are struggling with the influx of Gen Y folks that don't want to be associate-monkeys. Allow me to retort.

Why the fuck would they?

Admittedly, there is a very stark generational gap right now in the legal field. You have the old battleaxes, who spin yarns about working 20 hours a day "back in the day," and then you have the younger generation, who always have one eye on the door. Both don't appreciate either's work ethic. Obviously, I can't speak for the older generation, but I can offer my two cents for us younger folk. And the Firm, like any other, is good in some places, bad in others - so this is really more a rip on the state of big-firm law and the culture you find everywhere....

1) It's not a profession, jackass - it's a business. Older attorneys will wax poetic about how the law used to be a profession, a guild, blahblahblah. What they ignore is that, in the 50s, 60s, & 70s, sure - I'll agree it probably was. But with the shift to the corporate philosophy in the 80s, and the massive firm mergers in the 90s, the law became a business. That's it - it's a job. Older attorneys end up talking about living and breathing the law & striving to improve the profession, but simultaneously demand, at all costs, under penalty of termination, that associates bill at least a couple thousand billable hours (and more) every year. The free time to read legal journals and go to things like Inns of Court vanishes when you're struggling just to keep at par with other associates so you can keep your job. We have the factory mentality because your generation made it into factory work.

2) People? What are they? With the increased size of firms, and the jacked-up fees required to meet the overhead, associates don't see other human beings. We rarely see other associates except in 10 minute increments, we never see clients (because the "press the flesh" is the domain of the rainmakers only), and we certainly never see the courtroom (clients don't pay firm rates to send an associate in front of a judge). So, associates wind up getting most personal with their computers and their phone - do you think I'd rather go out for a drink with a client, or an associate, or whatever, instead of blogging? Hell yah. You dehumanize the job, you make the associates detached - that's just how it is.

3) Bitch work - no thanks! We're breeding a whole generation of associates that will be absolutely incompetent in a courtroom. Where associates in firms started out with jumping right into court with small subro actions, now you have no hope of trying a case (even as a second chair) until you make some sort of senior associate status (or have some flukey case fall in your lap). Nobody - and I mean nobody - went to law school fantasizing about sitting alone in a cold office under flickering flourescent lights ad nauseum pushing paper. That's a fucking accounting/insurance adjusting job (sorry, accountants and insurance adjustors). Dammit, we want to be in a courtroom, blowing some silly witness up on cross-examination!!

4) Um...look at you. We're not retarded. We can see what's happened to partners - dismal family lives, no extracurricular activites (no, golf and Rotary club don't count - that's "networking"), etc. Our generation, on the other hand - we want to have the family lives that we probably didn't have growing up; we want to do other, non-job things that have meaning, be it getting involved in church more than Christmas/Easter services, or spending an afternoon at the food bank; we want to get out and blow off steam, because we've all seen the old lawyers that have had 3 heartattacks by the time they're 50; and most importantly, we want to be well-rounded - we don't want to be lame fuckers on the golf course every Saturday talking about comfortable shoes. Fuck that. We're all acutely aware that big-firm, civil litigation does not make us a better person in life.

5) Life Principle Number One. Nobody dies wishing they'd worked more.

It's a little funny this article came out today, because Replacement Associate gave me the full hour, closed-door "crisis of faith" confession today. She's simply burned out - she billed well over 200 hours last month (which had only 19 official billing days), was out of town at a meaningless, last-second depo over the long weekend when her dog died, and is watching one of her best attorney friends tear her hair out about whether she'll lose her job for taking more than a month of maternity leave (hard to make up that lost month of billables!)....she's looking around, taking an inventory, and realizing that she doesn't want to wake up at 45 and wonder, "What the fuck happened with my life?" (doing that really quickly, of course, so she only loses .1 on her billings for thinking of something other than the law).

And, honestly, I had nothing to argue with her. Every point she had (pretty much all of the above) is perfectly valid.

So, while I'm sluffing out tomorrow on those pre-meeting-meetings and huge stacks of document discovery so I can hang out with friends, watch movies, drink, and generally fuck off -

Well, I'm not going to feel bad for "the law" in the slightest.

"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

Skål, Lawyer Guy. Takk for minnene.

Not in it for the money

From CrimLaw's hustings, a good Q&A session with a Virginia p. d. who specializes in death penalty work:

Public defender finds reward in being clients' advocate.

On the other side of the aisle, a deputy prosecutor in St. Louis who's "a poster child for loan forgiveness."

Remember, law students, a bad day in criminal court beats a good day as a first-year BigLaw associate every time.

Inspiration from PD Dude: "Why Criminal Law is So Much Better than Civil Law"

This marks the first week of work at capital city's P.D. office for my colleague Kim Possible. I recruited her out of the Legal Aid Clinic of our fine state law school, where she'd been going around the dorms explaining the Fourth Amendment. A couple of months ago, she left my shop and accepted an offer at a capital city Big Law firm, Hell Verily. To her credit, she realized where her heart truly was, and bailed in less than a month. Good for her, and good for all the accused.

In her honor, and to prevent any other young PD's from making a similar mistake, here's a link to a classic from "Public Defender Dude" (before it turned into a politics blog): "Why Criminal Law is so much better than Civil Law."