UPDATE: The link to the course materials is gone, but it's website holding location is here, at the bottom of the page.
Hello folks, I wanted to get this post in early in case anyone happened to be near the GWULS this Friday, October 6! NALP is having its first-ever "Summit on emerging Careers", with a specific focus on "JD Advantage" jobs! Let's take a look:
The JD Advantage job market has more than doubled in the period since 2005. This event will focus on understanding a number of specific employment opportunities that have developed quickly in the period following the recession, including jobs for law school graduates in compliance, legal process outsourcing, and data privacy and security, among others.
The Summit will provide education about how to advise students and graduates who are examining these new career opportunities and will feature innovative career services professionals and deans who have capitalized on these opportunities for their graduates, as well as recruiters and others from some of these new law grad employer organizations. The entire conference will feature experts on 21st century legal careers.
Sounds great! I'm sure lots of job-searching law grads would like to get in on the ground floor with all this new information! I mean, why hold it all close to the vest, let's get that info out there! Open the doors!
Hmmm, wait...the conference is for law school administrators and staff. Hmmm...it costs $475 to attend. Hmmm..."NALP Members only." Hmmm... the speakers appear to be mostly law school professors and deans. There are executives from CapitalOne, Facebook, Senior Counsel from FirstNet, a couple of law firms, Spotify, USDOJ, Assistant General Counsel from JP Morgan Chase, SunTrust Bank, and Kroger, however. So, go! Here are nine entities who are looking to hire thousands of JDs for compliance, legal process outsourcing, and data security! Maybe the uninvited should barge in anyway with some Boomer-moxie and distribute resumes, because hey, they must be hiring! Why else would they show up and wax poetic on this "emerging" subject? This "new" information should be trumpeted from the rooftops! Salvation for the beleaguered is at hand!
Snark aside, here is the fundamental problem. The market for JD Advantage jobs has more than doubled, not because market demand has increased, but because graduates and down-sized practitioners are desperate for work. Here, let's look at NALP's own data:
-more below the fold-
Back in 2001, only 6% were employed in the JD Advantage category. To be generous, call it 11%, once you throw in the "other professional positions" category. That's because 3 out of 4 graduates wanted to be (and were employed as), well, you know, lawyers. Fifteen years later, that 6% has more than doubled to 15% (or 20%, depending on how you count).
A full two-thirds of graduates are still seeking/desiring/doing "actual lawyer" jobs. Either that, or they are so desperate to move into JD Advantage but can't, because the market won't receive them. Well, until 2017, according to NALP...
If this data showed something like 45% JD Advantage, 45% Bar Passage required, and 10% "other" (which has been relatively constant the last fifteen years), then that would be interesting. That would support the idea that the market for JDs is opening up, and JDs were flowing into other industries.
As it stands, the "growth" in JD Advantage as been slow and anemic, not explosive. Perhaps the future will change abruptly in all kinds of paradigm-shifting, disruptive ways. With law schools desperate to stay alive and pumping out twice as many graduates as the market needs, however, this remains to be seen, as compliance, legal outsourcing, and data security CLEARLY DID NOT EXIST* prior to the Great Recession. This conference is not about outcomes, but how to bring more into the fold.
*haha
I work at a state regulatory agency. The last three times we posted a job, the majority of the applicants were JDs. Ten years ago, we never had a JD apply. The job pays in the low 60's to start. Our most recent hire just finished law school and has over 125K in loans.
ReplyDeleteMaybe someone can ask NALP why there are no MD-Advantage or DDS-Advantage conferences?
ReplyDeleteIn med school I heard a professor lament that a small fraction of grads skip residency and go to silicon valley to join health care related start-ups. The prof was upset because there is a shortage of primary care physicians, and these grads are taking medical school slots that could have gone to applicants that wanted to actually practice medicine. That is the only kind of alternative career path I have heard of that could be called an "MD advantage." But these were not unemployed MDs. These were grads who didn't want to go through the grind of residency and were seeking out riches in silicon valley.
DeleteThe professor's gripes helped me to realize we are hearing a lot of double speak from the law school scam artists. (BTW, unlike law school where professors have a few years of practice experience and never practice again because reasons, this professor was a practicing physician and lecturer. Strange how MDs can balance teaching and working when that is too burdensome for law profs.) On the one hand, law schools claim we have a critical shortage of attorneys. They say, courthouses are filled with pro se litigants in divorce proceedings, landlord tenant disputes, contract disputes. Even rural areas have a shortage of lawyers! So we need to churn out more law grads. If all of that is true, then the pig deans and law profs should be upset every time a law grad works in human resources, corporate compliance, or at the local Meijer. But the law profs and scam deans are not upset at all. They tell unemployed grads that the JD is versatile and that they should pursue one of these supposed alternative careers. They want to use the “JD advantage” category to bolster their employment stats. Essentially, they will do and say anything to get lemmings to enroll.
Nothing but promotion of the law-school scam. The real purpose of this event is to train law-skule touts to bolster their disgraceful employment figures by directing more graduates to pursue "JD-advantage" jobs that don't really call for a lawyer's skills.
ReplyDeleteThe reference to "legal process outsourcing" as a promising "JD-advantage" career is ridiculous. Any job described as outsourcing will assuredly be unattractive, at least for someone who has just blown a quarter-million or so on a "professional" degree.
And what exactly does a person do "in compliance", or in "data privacy and security"? Shuffle papers? Check boxes on a form?
I still hate the law school cartel and I graduated almost 10 years ago. I occasionally look up people who graduated around the time I did.
ReplyDeleteFor every dipsh!t sociopath who makes partner, there is someone who couldn't find a job and had to go to a "JD preferred" job or had to go back to their old career.
There are a couple of people who I looked up recently. They were both chemical engineers, making decent bank before going to law school. The lady went to a Toilet, like me, and then went back to work at her old company doing "compliance." I looked her up again and she's back to an engineering job. So what use was the stupid law degree?
The dude worked for an oil company before going to a Toilet, graduating, and then doing sub-JD work patent searching. Eventually he joined a small patent outfit which I think was struggling even then. He gave up after a few years and is back in refining working as an engineer. Do you think he feels law school was worth it?
Kids, it ain't worth it. These people all lost 3 years of $100K salaries and paid $100K to go to law school, all to make less upon graduation than they would have if they had stayed with engineering. These people will be much less financially secure in their retirements, and may have to work until their 70s.
Law school is a straight-out scam for 90% of people.
I've done the same thing for 20 years - twice as long as you.
DeleteYou'll find ever-more and more people from your class and beyond "disappearing" from law practice - if they even were ever able to break into it to begin with.
Like everything else, law is an "up-or-out" profession.
The people you mentioned were already on the fringes to begin with. Small firms fail and dissolve all the time. Patent was decimated and is still contracting. So, people at small firms can find themselves jobless fairly quickly.
This is why every a-hole and their brother is begging for a gov't job. But, of course, that won't work either.
There is no lawyer shortage in any state and it's commonly 3:1 for every job.
Put a fork in law as a career. It's done.
The people I followed who aren't struggling in law all came from money and had connections. So, when you say law is a scam for 90% of people, I fully agree.
The people that win in law had the Game won before they ever played it. That's what the other 90% don't understand.
Both of those people were lucky to get back into engineering. Lemmings who expect to fall back on a prior career after three years of law school and a period of failure to establish a legal career should think again.
DeleteThe disappearance problem from law is huge. In my practice area, more and more former big law or big in house attorneys are cropping up in small firms. In the past, there were few of these shops. People went to mid sized law firms or got in house jobs. Today, the big law firms are putting out so many people and putting them into jobs that are not stable long term, if any jobs at all, that you do not have good long-term placement outcomes for those who started with jobs. People I know from toilets who got jobs in big law cannot work in their 50s or beyond. Same with people from T6 law schools. Big law has no responsibility for taking on too many associates and putting out many more lawyers than the job market can absorb long term, so it does just that.
DeleteYes, the second lemming was very lucky. I do not know how he got a job back at the refinery after over 10 years out of engineering. I had interviews for oil and gas jobs after graduating law school and failing to get a lawyer job, but did not get hired, partly because they thought I would leave as soon as I got a lawyer job. They actually told me that.
DeleteOil and gas jobs pay better than most lawyer jobs. You should see the amount of bottom feeding lawyers around my area. I bet most of them are lucky if they pull in over $50K/year. yet nothing we do dissuades the lemmings.
****For every dipsh!t sociopath who makes partner, there is someone who couldn't find a job and had to go to a "JD preferred" job or had to go back to their old career. ***
ReplyDeleteI'm curious 6:04, do you really believe all successful lawyers are dipshit sociopaths? Do you think that successful lawyers are any different than any other successful people in society, espeically successful professionals like physicians, dentists, accountants, etc? How about the huge scam by Arthur Anderson helping Enron defraud its investors. Do you think those accountants are more "noble" and decent than lawyers?
Guessing that 6:04 was using some sarcasm as comic relief...
DeleteOf course not. There are a fair number of dipsh!t lawyers though. And yes, I do think certain professions like lawyering tend to attract dipsh!t sociopaths. Take surgeons and CEOS. There are numerous studies that show these professions tend to be more highly populated with sociopaths than others.
DeleteIt also depends on what you call successful. If you're talking about who makes the most money, then I feel my point stands. If you're talking about a person who finds their career personally rewarding (i.e., they love what they do regardless of the money), then my point doesn't stand.
CEOs tend to get their jobs for reasons other than ability, such as pedigree or connections. That could explain the large number of sociopaths in the executive suites.
DeleteSurgeons, though at least extensively trained and capable, tend to come from privileged backgrounds. That could explain a thing or two.
Lawyers too used to come from the aristocracy, and many still do, particularly those that attended élite schools. Nowadays, however, the ranks of lawyers are filling with dipshits who never should have pursued the legal profession.
10:40 AM, how many shady architect jokes do you know?
DeleteWhat is incredible is the false advertising calling jobs that do not require a JD and almost always do not prefer a JD JD Preferred or Advantage. These are jobs that may require a BA and maybe a CPA sometimes. Human resources, compliance and paralegal work are not JD preferred.
ReplyDeleteLaw schools that cannot fill up their seats because there are not enough jobs for their graduates are perfecting the fraud of telling people that most jobs are JO preferred. Well, they are not JD preferred. The JD degree is almost certainly a waste for anyone who wants to be a lawyer and cannot get a job as a lawyer.
There is a small number of people getting JD/MBAs at top schools who may not work as lawyers by choice. A few people go back into an area that is quasi-legal after law school even though they could get a job as a lawyer.
However, for most lawyers, a JD preferred/ advantage job represents failure and a job which is not going to pay for the cost of law school right away and likely ever.
For many positions passed off as "JD advantage" by law-school scamsters, the JD is actually a decided liability.
DeleteI've applied for plenty of those types of jobs and gotten e-mails back "No JDs please". Even silence would be better than that affirmative rejection. Usually they change the ad after too.
DeleteThere was a time when the Federal Government did prefer JDs for a lot of positions. But Federal jobs have always been notoriously difficult to obtain, and they closed that option off shortly after the Great Recession.
The most successful law graduate applicants just scrub their resumes free of law school.
Oh and for many of these positions, they do practice age discrimination, they are looking for recent college graduates. Only 50+ year olds are actually legally protected, but very few people go to college at that age so it's not as much of an issue. Law grads however are typically going to be several years older than college grads, and while you might not want to think that is much, it takes most out of the running as well.
I have a bunch of cousins and friends that are in JD type jobs like Compliance and Contract Specialist.
ReplyDeleteNone of them went to law school. I only know of one guy with that type of job that did---and he only did it well after he'd already been working that job, and to move up to a higher level, and his company paid for law school, which he did in the evenings.
I don't actually know of any attorney or JD that then got those jobs. There are a few I'm sure, but not in any of the departments for these people I know. They all get paid well too, much more than a solo attorney or contract attorney would, with much better conditions, job security and benefits.
Right on about needing experience for compliance jobs and about them hiring BAs, not JDs.
DeleteHave a very attractive cousin in compliance - a BA who graduated with high honors from high school and college.
Just try getting a JD preferred job after being up or outed from your big law job and then the follow on law job. The compliance jobs want compliance people. Whatever you did in law, if they are not looking for a counsel and compliance officer, they are unlikely to hire you. They want people with exactly the experience the job requires, and there are plenty of those people. Fifteen years ago I interviewed for a compliance job at a major bank. Paid $150,000 back then. I had years of big law experience in the area they were looking for. Guess who they hired? A compliance person who did that in their prior job. As to counsel and compliance officer jobs, they are like finding a needle in the haystack with hundreds of seekers for each needle, so don't count on it.
No one I know who is an attorney has a contract review or compliance job either. There just are not that many of those jobs. They need BAs to fill those jobs, not attorneys who are going to demand raises to pay for an unnecessary JD degree they so stupidly signed up for.
Funny you should mention this. I tried for years to get a compliance job, but had no success whatsoever.
DeleteI think these "JD Preferred" jobs have gotten very competitive, thus they're not tenable for most law school graduates.
Every type of job that is marginally related to law is severely oversubscribed because hordes of desperate unemployed and underemployed lawyers are applying to these jobs.
DeleteAt the other end, every non-law organization where a lawyer who actually has a private practice job could go to get clients is terribly oversubscribed as well.
The extreme lawyer glut has produced career unemployed and severely underemployed lawyers, many, many from elite schools. The degrees from these elite law schools are worthless for most older women and minorities who actually need to find a job.
Most lawyers in urban areas with high costs of living would be much better off as a 20+ year public school teacher than as a 20+ year lawyer with an elite law degree because of the extreme supply/demand imbalance in the legal job market where the market simply disappears for older lawyers. They cannot stay in their jobs and they cannot get new jobs because of the way the legal job market is structured.
It is crazy. One would think by going to an Ivy League undergraduate and a top 8 or top 14 law school that it would be possible to work on full-time, permanent basis in law or a marginally profitable related job. That is simply not the case for more experienced lawyers. Lawyers can spend 400 hours a year on a job search with top credentials and not not get anything because they have too much experience. The market is for lawyers with only a few years of experience with very few jobs for more experienced lawyers.
There is no job that is not explicitly legal in nature, where a JD will be chosen over an MBA....
ReplyDelete... and, I sent an email to the career services person at my old law school - I contacted them for some advice even though I graduated 8 years ago - and got an automated so-and-so "will be out of the office" reply message. This conference was this last friday, I bet that's where she went.
A bit off-topic, strictly speaking, but interesting nonetheless.
ReplyDeleteBy a MetNews Staff Writer
The bleak job prospects for new attorneys was reflected in an opinion Friday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal which holds that a new admittee’s status as a lawyer did not substantially increase his earning capacity so as to render his wife entitled, in a dissolution action, to reimbursement for community contributions to his legal education.
At issue was whether Family Code §2641(b)(1) applied. It provides:
“The community shall be reimbursed for community contributions to education or training of a party that substantially enhances the earning capacity of the party.”
San Diego Superior Court Judge Gerald C. Jessop said that to order reimbursement, “[t]here must be evidence that the education substantially or demonstratively enhances earnings,” and observed:
“That evidence is missing. It’s speculative at best. Consequently, the Court is denying that request.”
The ruling came in the action for the dissolution of the marriage of William D. Powell, admitted to practice on Feb. 28, 2014, and Cara Powell. The community financed William Powell’s education at an unaccredited law school while he was working full time as a home theater installer.
‘Ticket to Prosperity’
Div. One of the appeals court affirmed in an opinion by Justice Cynthia Aaron, who quoted a 2008 Court of Appeal opinion as saying:
“A law degree is not a ticket to prosperity.”
She wrote:
“In this case, as William aptly points out, Cara argued that William’s legal education substantially enhanced his earning capacity because he became capable of practicing law as an attorney and that the only reason that William had gone to law school was to increase his earning capacity, but presented little or no evidence to demonstrate that his legal education in fact substantially enhanced his earning capacity. For example, Cara presented no expert witnesses to testify regarding the income that William was reasonably capable of earning based on his personal attributes and the employment market….”
‘Highly Speculative’
Aaron continued:
“On this record, it is highly speculative whether William’s legal education substantially enhanced his earning capacity. William possessed marketable skills as a full-time electrician installing home theaters, and he had been steadily employed in that capacity for at least seven years. There was no evidence in the record that he had a reasonable prospect of being hired or earning more as a full-time attorney. In fact, the evidence showed that William had received no offers of full time employment as an attorney. His income increased somewhat after he graduated law school because of tutoring jobs and occasional legal work. However, William also incurred many expenses in connection with trying to build a legal practice….We discern no abuse of discretion by the court, which cited the correct legal standard and relevant case law, in its finding that there was insufficient evidence that William’s legal education substantially increased his earning capacity.”
The case is Marriage of Powell, D071322.
The real problem is the lack of JD preferred jobs for lawyers. There are only about 620,000 lawyer jobs taking out solos and 1.3 million lawyers. Another 150,000 solo jobs that mostly pay like a BA or less, but are shared among at least twice as many lawyers. If good JD preferred jobs that paid decently were readily available, these statistics would not be so horrible.
ReplyDeleteJD preferred jobs are not plentiful unless you call jobs like probation officer, title insurance sales, mortgage loan officer, and every other job that has an extremely marginal relation to law and does not warrant an expensive JD a JD preferred job. Those jobs are only available to those who are relatively newly graduated from law school, to the extent a JD can get that type of job. Many JDs who have those jobs may have done them before law school - experience is key to getting any job.
It is a pretty depressing scene. More and more lawyers losing jobs. Big contingent of women in their 50s formerly at big law losing jobs like deer in headlights. They cannot get anything. No JD preferred, no jobs at all. Maybe they can work in retail if they really need the money. Their experience just does not match the market. This happens to men too, but they are older when it happens and they find it easier to get short term jobs in law than the women.
The up or out and class year hiring has now started to put a huge contingent of lawyers out of work by the time they reach their early to mid fifties, with no opportunity to work after that. The goal of the profession here is to give opportunities to younger lawyers at the expense of more experienced lawyers. An experienced lawyer cannot even touch JD preferred because they don't have the proper experience.
Many colleagues formerly in big law are completely unemployed in this booming economy and have spent more than a year unsuccessfully looking for work. They will take law or any job related to their experience, but no one is hiring JDs over the age of 50.
Law today is a very poor career. The ABA needs to wake up to the fact that it is putting lawyers, hundreds of thousands of lawyers, out of work with its fake "antitrust" policy. Antitrust laws never mandated accrediting bodies to keep opening hundreds of schools to train hundreds of thousands of Americans for certain unemployment and underemployment in their field of study.
Big law lawyers are unemployed because they learned nothing on their job that translates into knowing anything about practicing law. I've said this before and will again. Millions of lawyers work in small businesses throughout the land doing stuff like criminal defense, wills, trusts, personal injury litigation, etc. That is the basis of most legal jobs and careers out there. If you come out of Big Law, what the heck do you know? What is required to be included in a Mutual Fund Offering? It always comes down to whether you have useful skills. Big lawyers don't. Don't judge us by them.
DeleteNot true. My colleagues and I have a specialty. Problem is that the legal jobs in that specialty are stagnant at best and probably declining. There are lots of non-law jobs that a lawyer with out expertise could do given the opportunity. Problem is that lawyers generally are stuck with law jobs.
DeleteIn our area, the number of jobs declines as one gets more experienced. If there are not related non-law jobs for us, we will end up unemployed years before retirement.
I've read in much of the world doctors and lawyers have to wait tables or drive cabs, because there is just no demand for them.
DeleteThe medical profession is still fine in the US for now, but law is quite obviously in the same spot it is around the world.
The law schools failed to restrict entry into the field, and since that is the case, while it won't help anyone who is already a lawyer, the best thing to do is probably to at least just turn law into an undergrad major like in most countries. And maybe require some sort of apprenticeship and training to become a full attorney, similar to a CPA and a few other professions.
Obviously law schools do not want this, but at some point the DOE really has to step in, especially when the ABA has claimed some flimsy, false Constitutional "access to legal education" nonsense to justify not doing its job. What better way to give more people access to legal education than to just teach it in undergrad?
I have scrubbed law school from my resume.
ReplyDeleteI have an interview on Friday.
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!!!
DeleteIt went pretty well. I didn't get an offer but I did get an appointment for a urinalysis test. I'm not sure how much the companies pay for those... would companies pay for drug tests of people they already decided not to hire?
DeleteHIRED!
DeleteCongrats!
DeleteDON'T LOOK BACK.
Scrub every bit of law school from both your resume and your life. Do what you can re: any debt you have. Do the best you can.
You did the absolute right thing, no question. By this I mean: You got out of law as soon as you could.
Like me, you blew 3 years of life and so on but that can't be helped now. Spilt milk and all that..
All the best!
The whole notion that the amount of JD-advantage jobs has doubled since 2005 strikes me as a horse/cart problem.
ReplyDeleteIt's more likely to me that the reason more people are counted in those jobs is simply the result of fewer newgrads being able to obtain actual law jobs.
So they turn to other jobs and if there's a smidgen of "the law" aspect about it, their loving alma mater shoves it into the "JD preferred" bucket, using whatever amount of spit and axle grease may be required to force that square peg into the round hole.
I know many JDs in legal compliance, trade compliance, and personal data security roles within large corporations.
ReplyDeleteI also know many JDs in corporate procurement or other business-related roles.
Not one of the above obtained their position as a newgrad. They migrated into those jobs after successfully working as lawyers first.
Yeah, I know it's anecdote and all that, but too often I hear "compliance" touted as a JD-Preferred job without the touter giving due consideration to just how many of those are available without real working legal experience as a prerequisite.
The people you know in these jobs likely got legal jobs in the business first and then switched to non-legal jobs within the same business. The problem with that is that you need the legal job first with the same employer to get something else.
DeleteWith the problem of there not being enough legal jobs long term for those leaving big law, mid law or respected boutiques or for lawyers whose in house jobs have simply ended, lawyers are going to have a tough time transitioning to something else unless they effectively hit the in house job jackpot.
A lot of us are dealing with fewer and fewer open law jobs as we get more experienced and no employment opportunities anywhere. That is after years of big law and big in house. Other employment is not happening for many experienced lawyers who need work.
The JD preferred market is there but it is very, very limited. Only a very small share of experienced lawyers who actually practiced law first will be able to access that market. It is not the answer to the severe longitudinal oversupply of lawyers who start with good jobs after law school and cannot find anything when their job simply disappears after time, which happens to probably most lawyers before they reach retirement.
Sometimes experienced lawyers have counsel positions at law firms where they are actually only marginally working, only very part-time or intermittently. Those lawyers typically cannot get real jobs. It looks like they are working from the internet. In fact they are earning what an entry level BA earns at best. Sometime their work is from home with no office available. No escape from that without the non-legal jobs being available to lawyers in sufficient numbers. The non-legal jobs are not happening for most lawyers because their work experience is not a match for the non-legal job and the non-legal market has its own applicants with great experience who beat out the former big law lawyers for that non-legal job almost every time.
The law school I went to posted some article about compliance jobs as being an option for law school graduates. Of course, they failed to mention how difficult it was to get one of said jobs.
DeleteAlso, the term "compliance" is pretty broad, and it can include all sorts of positions.
Unless you're as @4:04 says, the only "compliance" jobs you'll be able to get pay between $35K to $50K--and you'll likely need some sort of other certification or experience. Maybe you can eventually move into a better paying position, but that will take both time and luck.
Also, as noted, you'll be competing with many non-lawyers for these positions, and some of them have more specific experience that is valued by the employer.
In New York City, a 20 year public school teacher in the Tier IV pension plan earns over $200,000 a year in total compensation. That figures in the cost of pension, free medical for the family while working and free retiree medical for the worker and spouse for life. The $200,000 does not include an exemption from NY State and City taxation that the pension has under the NY State Constitution when that pension is paid.
ReplyDeleteLawyers of course don't get these benefits since they are not collectively bargained.
Compare this to a 20+ year graduate of Columbia or NYU Law. A lot of these graduates are struggling in jobs with low incomes and no employee benefits. Earning $75,000 a year with no employee benefits would be a typical outcome for these lawyers. A few are partners, a few more at big in house, but many are earning in that five figure range with no employee benefits and less than $50,000 after taking out the cost of family medical benefits.
It is night and day better to be a teacher in New York City than a lawyer. Even for Columbia and NYU grads, the teachers earn double what most Columbia and NYU lawyers earn 20+years out.
And that's not even getting into the stress of legal practice, and the lack of camaraderie.
DeleteMost lawyers tend to be obnoxious and not pleasant to be around. But the vast majority do not start out that way. It's simply a symptom or result of a very difficult career, financially and simply in terms of day to day conditions.
It's a lot easier to be a nice, good person when other people are nice and good too, and money/resources are no real issue.
you guys see this? pure comedy.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lowellsun.com/ci_31394323/book-review
Grisham's three characters -- Mark, Todd and Zola -- have eagerly entered the Foggy Bottom Law School with hopes of high-paying careers after graduation, dreams encouraged by the school's marketing material and loan officers.
Alas, by their third year they have learned the hard truth: The law is an elitist profession, and it is practically impossible for the students to get any job upon graduation, let alone the mythical six-figure positions that go to graduates from top-tier law schools. Instead, students from little known, albeit expensive schools, find themselves saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt, no prospects and little chance of ever repaying their loans.
Oh, wow. Will someone review that novel for this site?
DeleteThe review that 1:37 cites says that those three lemmings of Foggy Bottom (hilarious) dropped out and posed as lawyers down at the courthouse in order to wring money out of various scams of their own. Sounds like the tactic "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Except that their approach was illegal, whereas the law-school scamsters' enjoys full support not only from the law but also from the state, the ABA, the LSAC, and hackademia.
The anti-scam movement is winning. Odious born-with-a-silver-spoon-up-my-ass scribblers such as Lisa McElroy have felt the need to allude to the movement in their shiterature (http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.ca/2015/10/who-wants-to-be-lousy-fiction-writer.html), and now a popular writer has based an entire novel on the plight of three unemployable students of an InfiLaw-style toilet. This movement has been in the mainstream for years.