More Signs of the Times

PILF (short for Public Interest Law Foundation) helps fund the stipend guaranteed to students who spend their summers pursuing public interest work. That money has to come from somewhere, and one of the sources is through an annual donation-supported auction. Students can donate items or services (tutoring sessions, babysitting hours, etc) and the money raised from the auction is then donated to PILF.

This year's auction apparently isn't shaping up to be as robust as in years past, as evidenced by this e-mail we got in our Columbia inboxes today:

"Subject: Financial Forecast: PILF STUDENT DONATIONS DOWN BY HALF

As we all know, these are tough economic times. For an organization like PILF, which
relies on fundraising to support summer funding and community grants, that means it
will be even harder to continue these activities. So we need your help! Tomorrow
(Monday, 2/23) is the LAST DAY TO DONATE items for the auction. Stop by our table
in JGH and fill out a form, or email the attached one to jk2868@columbia.edu. Everyone has something to offer, and every donation is appreciated.

Firm donations are down - don't let student participation go the same way!"

Law School and the Economy, Revisited

So I think some anxiety—over the economy, the future—is there.

It’s subtle, to be sure, and nobody talks about it much, but it’s definitely lurking somewhere in the background. It’s lurking in the whispered rumors of a few unlucky 2Ls who don’t have yet have jobs for the summer, a predicament unheard of in better times. It’s lurking in a 1L job search that might be more prolonged, or pained, than what last year’s class went though. It’s lurking in the spectacle of firms holding recruiting “receptions” promising only good conversation, rather than full-blown luncheons promising good food, too.

So there’s some anxiety, but it doesn’t feel particularly real yet. As 1L’s, we’re still somewhat shielded. We’re not on the front lines of the economic quagmire, as many recently graduated law students, or 3Ls and even 2Ls, are. We have debt to pay, but so do many of those people—and they’ve lost their jobs. We don’t yet have jobs to lose, and we can still enjoy the luxury of pretending our student loans don’t exist (at least until six months after graduation.) We still have a shot, and to some extent, that’s comforting.

Along with that, the 1L job search is starting to fall into place for most people that I know, and it seems like quite a few of my classmates have recently found positions they’re comfortable with. A handful have offers from large firms. A good amount of government-types got their wishes—U.S. Attorney’s Offices, various Department of Justice divisions, district attorneys. And of course, many are heading the nonprofit route—saving the world, domestically or abroad.

I fall into that last category. I haven’t been flooded with offers, to be sure, but I have a couple of options with domestic non-profits to mull over. I’m grateful for that, even if I won’t be making an extraordinary amount of money (or any, actually, besides what I’ll get from Columbia’s Guaranteed Summer Funding Program.) So sure, the 1L job search is stressful. But it’s a different kind of stress—it’s stressful because it’s so unguided, so uncertain, so wide open. There aren’t hundreds of employers lined up, laid out in a neat schedule, all waiting to speak to you. Everything’s up to you—to find them, to tell them you’re interested, to hope they’re interested back (a good percentage of the public interest jobs I applied to never bothered to reply.) But just about everyone finds something, eventually, and what you do 1L summer really doesn’t have to have much bearing on the rest of your life.

With 2L OCI, much of the uncertainty of the search goes away. The employers come to you. You know who you can speak to—heck, you can even choose who you want to speak to, since it’s run on a bid system. 2L OCI is stressful for an entirely different reason: it’s it. Barring a judicial clerkship, or certain specialized government and public interest jobs, your 2L summer determines your career. If your plan is to work in a firm, your summer firm is likely where you’re going to end up after graduation, because firms extend full-time offers to just about every member of their summer class...at least, that’s how the script used to read. Now, nobody knows. It seems like summer associate positions don’t mean what they used to, and for those who want to work in a firm, there are precious few fall-back options if things don’t work out.

Anyway, here’s my proposal: firms should just cut starting salaries. I don’t know what it seems like such a taboo thing to do, but it is. Firms have already broken every other taboo—not offering their entire summer class, laying people off, even withholding bonuses and annual raises—but they haven’t yet lowered their starting salaries. Every major firm in every major market stubbornly pays the same starting rate: $160,000. It’s illogical, because as much as they try to project otherwise, law firms aren’t uniform. Some do better than others. The corner McDonald’s isn’t going to pay their fry-cooks as much as the gourmet restaurant next door pays their chefs—why should law firms? The truth is, there are some firms that can afford to pay $160K to a first-year associate. There are many more that can't, and they’re hurting.

Also, I don’t know about you, but $160,000 seems like a disgustingly large amount of money to me. You might not live like a king on that salary if you’re in New York, but there are many, many people that get by just fine on much less. It’s certainly more than I ever imagined myself making in my mid-twenties. And when it comes down to it, I'd rather have a job making less than be laid off and not make anything.

But like I said, that’s all still an undercurrent. Those worries are lurking in the background. For the most part, it’s business as usual. Firms are still trying to woo 1L’s, even if the receptions weren’t as lavish as they once were. There’s still free food to go around. But there are signs. I applied for a job about a month ago, and got an e-mail back the other day. It wasn’t a rejection. Rather, the e-mail said that the internship I had applied for had been canceled, due to “changing business needs.”

Something tells me they won't be the only firm with “changing business needs” in the coming months.

Procrastination.

Here are how the deadlines for our moot court competition look:

Week 1: Statement of the Case (basically, a summary of the facts and the major arguments for each side)
Week 2: Outline of brief
Week 3: Rough draft 1 of brief
Week 4: Rough draft 2 of brief
Week 6: Final draft of brief

At the outset, our moot court editor advised us to front-load the work: "the more you do now, the less work it will be later, so make sure to do a good job on your outline."

Of course, having a general tendency to procrastinate, I always punt on the earlier assignments, vaguely promising myself that I will make up for my shoddy work later. So I basically blew off my statement of the case...and then my outline...and now the rough draft that was due this past Monday. I always handed something in, of course, but to say that I put in an honest effort would be a stretch.

The problem is this: I never really get around to making up for my initial, shoddy work. This doesn't go over too well in a long-term endeavor like moot court, where each week's assignment builds off of the previous week's. My thinking process goes something like this:

Week 1: Statement of the case? Whatever, I have to write the outline next week anyway. Let me just BS something for now and I'll straighten things out later.
Week 2: Outline, huh? Well, my statement of the case is supposed to help me write this thing, but I guess I didn't do that great of a job last week. But look--it's just the rough draft that's due next week! And this is just an outline. And the class is pass/fail! Who cares!
Week 3: Uh oh, time to write the rough draft. Okay, so I'm supposed to write it based off of my outline. Hmm, my outline looks like it was written by an 8th grader. Well that's no good. But crap, this draft is due tomorrow! I guess I'll have to make do. It's just the first rough draft, after all--I still have 2 more chances to get it right!
Week 4: (hasn't happened yet, but I assume something similar to Weeks 1, 2, and 3)
Week 6: See week 4.

So that's the problem. It's like trying to build a house: I'm too lazy to lay a solid foundation, and instead of shoring it up later, I just continue to stack bricks haphazardly on top of an already-shaky foundation. However, the optimist in me always seems to have faith that one of these weeks, I will magically find the time to go back and make everything right. Well, maybe next week...right?

Anyway, some happy news: I have a job for the summer!

Phone Interviews

So as I alluded to in a earlier post, I'm (painstakingly) going through the summer job search right now. Pretty much the only thing I've determined so far is that phone interviews have to be one of the most awkward forms of human interaction ever invented. First of all, I'm a guy. And as a guy, the majority of my phone conversations go something like this:

Me: hey
Friend: hey
Me: Where you at?
Friend: the law school, in the lobby.
Me: Oh ok, see you soon.
Friend: Yup. Bye.

I'm pretty sure if someone were to transcribe my phone calls, at least 95% would go something like the above. The other 5% would be calls to my mom.

And anyhow, I like face-to-face interviews. I like to make liberal use of hand gestures. I like seeing someone's face. If they nod and smile vigorously while I'm talking, I'll know to continue. If they sit there with an icy glare (not uncommon in legal interviews, I've learned) then I should either try to wrap things up or pursue a different angle.

Unfortunately, this all goes out the window in a phone interview. It's just me talking into my phone for minutes at a time, with no feedback whatsoever. Without any guidance, I'm liable to talk myself into huge holes, because I don't know when to stop talking. Is my answer too short? Too long? Who knows? It's not like I can stop in the middle of my answer and say "How am I doing on this one?" By the end of most of my answers, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, or how I even got to talking about what I did. I feel like a crazy person who's been rambling to himself for far too long.

With that, I have to go prepare for the phone interview I have later today. Wish me luck.

Moot Court, Part I

(A commentator in the previous post asked about moot court. I'll probably write an entry about my own personal experience sometime later, but here's a more general post)

For the uninitiated, or for those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the legal system, it’s a bit hard to describe exactly what moot court entails. It’s kind of like mock trial, I guess, except there’s no trial..or jury…or witnesses. It’s kind of like giving a speech, too, except you’re liable to be interrupted 20 seconds in, by a judge asking you to answer a completely off-the-wall question. Closer to the truth could be to call it a conversation, or maybe a debate, between yourself and the judges, although that only describes a fraction of the actual work that goes into moot court.

I’ll spare most of the more mundane details, but moot court basically seeks to emulate what happens at the appellate level. There’s already been a trial, ostensibly, and your job as a fake lawyer is to first write a brief (basically, a paper setting forth the main points of your argument) on this fake case, and then to argue your position as either the appellant or appellee in front of a panel of fake judges. In some cases, when the moot court is consequential or prestigious, the judges are real.

At Columbia, participation in moot court is mandatory for every first-year student, but not everyone participates in the same one. There are a whole host of specialty moot courts, which focus on a particular theme in their fake cases: the Native American Moot Court, the International Arbitration Moot Court, the Environmental Law Moot Court, etc. These usually get going in the fall, and one has to apply and go through a selection process to become a part of one of them. This process typically involves sending in an application and then going through a rather intimidating face-to-face audition process with existing members of the team. Some groups are more competitive to get into than others. It’s kind of like being recruited for the basketball team: you try out, hope for the best, and wait to find out whether the team has picked you.

For those who weren't picked (e.g. me), we must participate in the Foundation Moot Court program. These are identical to the specialty moot court programs, except they start up in the Spring rather than the Fall, and the topic of the case can be anything, because they're written by second-years who supposedly did well in the Foundation program last year.

This all sounds a bit more consequential than it really is. The requirement is pass/fail, which provides precious little incentive to put in more than a token amount of work since we have 4 real classes to balance on top of moot court. However, it's useful in the sense that it combines many of the skills that one should have learned over the past semester: how to research cases, how to cite them, and how to write a coherent argument, among other things. Of course, now that it's time to actually put all those skills to use, I feel woefully unprepared. But more on that later.

Law School and TiVo

During my senior year of college, TiVo was a godsend. For that one glorious year, the one thing I was never short on was time. After managing to get into law school, I subsequently developed a full-on case of senioritis, which should have provided plenty of time for pursuing anything I wanted: lifelong dreams, childhood hobbies that had since fallen by the wayside, all the great books I had never read. Instead, I chose to take this time and spend it watching TV--the more mindless, the better.

Aiding me in this endeavor was TiVo. Although I had the time to catch most of my favorite shows during their original airings, TiVo filled in the blanks quite nicely. I could watch The Daily Show for three nights a week, but when it was Thursday and time to go out, I would set that night's episode to record. It was magnificent.

When I got to law school, I thought my trusty DVR would prove its worth more than it ever had before. For one, the law school schedule is much more hectic and unpredictable than anything I experienced in college. There’s always such-and-such student group meeting, or some speaker stopping by, or some free dinner somewhere, or just a heap of reading due the next day. I knew I wouldn’t have time to sit down and watch TV whenever I wanted.

Thus, I turned again to TiVo. In college, I had practiced restraint. In law school, I went overboard. When you’re chronically short on time and you have a magic box that puts the entire world of television at your beck and call, it’s hard to resist the temptation. Every morning, I would look through the day’s programming schedule, and then set TiVo to record anything remotely interesting. Oh, there’s an Office marathon on TBS? I’ll record every episode! Oh, today’s Sunday? I'll record every NFL game on TV! (and then Sportscenter afterward, so I can catch all the highlights and analysis.)

Of course, it never quite worked out that way. Mere weeks into law school, my TiVo became a huge backlog of all sorts of programming that I never really sat down to watch. But dammit, it felt good to have the ability to watch all those shows, should the mood ever strike (hint: it never did.) I guess I'm just lucky my roommate doesn't watch TV. It would be a disaster.

After researching this phenomenon further, it appears I’m not alone. This condition actually has a name: TiVo guilt. Go figure. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go record that episode of Lost that's airing tomorrow night.

Some Different Perspectives

One of the inspirations for my starting this blog was a blog I've been following for several months now. It's written jointly by two fellow 1L's, one at Harvard and one at Yale, and it is excellent.

http://similarlysituated.blogspot.com

The Law School Relationship Post

I flew solo into law school, but many of my classmates didn't. I guess we (or most of us) are at that age where it's just not common to go any lengthy period of time without, at the very least, casually dating.

Consequently, much of the fun of the first few months of law school centered around speculating over who among the still-single crowd would pair up. Maybe it's still early, but after being here for a semester and change, the truth is that law school has produced precious few actual couples. In fact, there are only two or three items that I know of. And none of them, as far as I know, are reflected on the individuals' respective Facebook pages (a crucial barometer of any relationship, of course.)

What law school has done far more proficiently, it seems, is split people apart. Of those who came into law school in some sort of long-term relationship, the results are all over the place. A healthy portion are managing fine, and I admire them enormously. To balance the sizable law school workload, on top of a social life, on top of everything else being a law student entails, on top of a relationship, is no small feat.

But for every success story, there seems to be several failures. Just about everyone in my immediate circle of friends who had come into law school in a relationship are now either single, "taking a break," or hanging on by a thread. It's a bit disheartening to watch.

As for myself, I haven't met anyone here yet, and I don't see it happening in the near future. Maybe it's better that way. Dating within law school seems, at best, to be an endeavor fraught with potential pitfalls. The instant any inkling of a romance begins to leak out, you will become the talk of the town. You will endure endless scrutiny from your peers, whispers in the hallways and covert stares, whether it be from well-wishers who secretly want to believe that a law school relationship can blossom, or from those cynics who observe with a morbid curiosity and take silent bets on how long your relationship can last before the stresses and realities of law school tear you two apart.

Of course, meeting someone itself is a challenge. Unless you're both huge law-dorks, law school provides precious little material with which one can kindle a romance. For one, the unkempt hair, unshaved beards, sweatpants, and haggard faces that most students begin sporting when times get rough probably isn't the fastest way to a guy or gal's heart. And I don't imagine an afternoon spent poring over the Glannon Guide to Civil Procedure, discussing res judicata and hammering out the intricacies of class action regulations, is how everyone imagines they'll meet their future husband or wife. At least, it's not how I imagined it, although I may have had a sinking feeling that it was just what I had signed up for as I sent in my seat deposit to Columbia.

But hey, I've heard that quite a few people end up meeting their future spouse in law school. So maybe there is something about the environment that acts as some sort of strange aphodesiac. Or, more probably, everyone is just so desperate by the end of it all that they latch onto the first person they can. Who knows? I still have a couple years to find out.

Perspective

Perspective. Much of the time, I feel like law school was designed to rob you of it. You have the same classes, with the same people, in the same claustrophobic building, day after day. You do the same work, read the same cases, and buy the same study supplements. You then apply to the same jobs with the same group of mega-firms, but not before Career Services guides you into formatting your resume so that it looks the same as every other resume from Columbia.

So when it seems like everybody around you in moving at warp speed in the same direction, it's hard to stop and look around. You just don't have the time, or you convince yourself as much. You just run along with them. You hope that they're leading you in the right direction, and that they can't all possibly be wrong that this is where the prize is, that this is the direction in which the finish line lies. But is this really the way it has to be?

Sometimes, it helps for me to talk to non-law-school friends, because they remind me why I went to law school in the first place. They give me perspective. When I tell them I'm unhappy with my grades, they remind me that grades aren't everything and hey, there are worse fates than being somewhere in the middle of the class at a great law school in a great city. When I talk about how much so-and-so firm pays and lament that so few firms are hiring 1Ls this year, they aren't impressed, and they don't pity me. Instead, they ask me about why I went to law school in the first place, and remind me that it wasn't to do well, but to do good.

Needless to say, these conversations are refreshing. They help me stay sane. That's not to imply that I've completely rejected the law school dogma. I may very well end up giving my life over to a firm, at least for a while. But that will be my own fault. As common a fate as it is, I understand now that it's not an inevitability, because there are other lives than my own. There are other paths than the one I'm on. They're out there, and they're every bit as exciting and rewarding and worthwhile, and maybe someday I'll walk a different path.

So no, law school means an awful lot, but it's not everything. As much as 1L year can make one think otherwise.

On Writing

When I young, I apparently had thin, hard to find veins (or ridiculously incompetent doctors). Whenever I went for a blood test, the doctor would spend a tortuously long time poking around my arm with his needle looking for a vein. Nope, blood's not coming out here, better stick this somewhere else. I remember once sitting there for almost half an hour before the doctor finally hit paydirt. I felt a strange mixture of relief, gratification, anger, and fear as the syringe which had so stubbornly refused to fill up turned red nearly instantaneously.

That's how I've always about my writing. Sometimes, it's like I've hit a vein, and the words come flowing out effortlessly. But most of the time, I feel like no matter where and and how hard I try, I can't get anything on the page.

I've had to change this attitude in law school. It would be generous to describe law school exams as unforgiving--they are three or four hour affairs in which one must digest a dense fact pattern, somehow extract the "issues," and then weave these issues together with the relevant law and substantive theories of the course in a semi-cogent manner. Needless to say, there is no time for poking around. You have to just write, pride be damned. I think that's the hardest thing mentally about exams--a fear that it won't come out well, coupled with the knowledge that you can't wait for the needle to find the vein. You just have to go for it, or you'll run out of time. It's hard. I'm still learning.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner at 10:08 PM

So I'm sitting here at 10:08, ready to eat my first and only meal of the day. Let's just say that law school does strange, and often not good, things to one's schedule and health.

Jobs and the economy

Speaking of things not worth writing home about, my job search. I don't have a job yet. It's always fun trying to figure out who has a job already and who hasn't, but I think there remains a not-insignificant chunk of my classmates who are still sorting things out. I have a few interviews lined up with various public interest agencies. The positions are unpaid, but luckily Columbia guarantees summer funding of $4200 for the summer for those taking such unpaid public interest positions. Of course, $4200 is less than a week and a half of salary in BigLaw (a world with which I am still blissfully unfamiliar) but I figure it'll be enough to get by. I've never been too taken by the lure of money, anyway, so it's no big deal.

However, the economy does seem to be a big deal. I'm not an economist, but I guess it doesn't take a genius to figure out that not all is well. Our intrepid (and just-turned-forty) dean, David Schizer, has spent the past few weeks reassuring us through a series of bland, uninspiring e-mails that the school is fine, we'll be fine, don't worry, we'll have jobs and graduate and be stuck doing miserable work in a huge law firm just like everyone else before us, and the economy can't do anything about it.

However, one visit to abovethelaw.com tells a different story: firms (seemingly) everywhere are freezing salaries, laying people off, and cutting bonuses like the 1930's just rolled into town. The truth, I feel, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Nobody really knows how the market will be in August, when we actually do interviews for our "real" jobs, so there's nothing we can do except sit back in our chairs and watch.

Exams; grades

Grades are a hot topic on everyone's mind these days. Just about everyone has gotten their full set of grades by now. There's rampant speculation going on, naturally, on the order of whispered questions in the hallways like "what do you think X got in Y?" as X walks by unaware. The speculation is fun, but when you actually find out, it's even juicier. No way! He got an A in torts? He's never struck me as particularly bright...or Wow, a Hamilton Scholar got a B-? Just goes to show you...

etc.

Of course, you can't do this but with your closest of friends, because grades otherwise are taboo. That is, unless you're one of the lucky few with multiple A's, in which case grades are not a taboo topic in any situation, around anyone, lest you miss a chance to drop a not-so-subtle "Yea, I did pretty well..." just so everyone knows.

I didn't really have a set strategy going into law school exams, and I think that hurt me. Someone once told me that grades on law school exams correlate roughly to how much you write--the more you write, the better your grade will be. This also appears to be the general consensus on law school discussion boards. As a result, I basically carpet-bombed my exams with words, words, words. Fuck answering the question, man, I'll just toss some more words in there. Erie problem? There's no Erie problem, I'll just throw some more words at it.

I imagine the result was a huge, incomprehensible jumble of typo-ridden sentences and questionable legal analysis. Consequently, my grades were nothing to write home about. Somebody should have reminded me that correlation does not indicate causation.

First Post, Some background

I've never had a blog. I think for a long time, I was under the impression that I never had anything worthwhile to say. If I had to blog, I thought, it had to be witty or profound, or it wouldn't be worth anything at all.

Like many law students, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. This kind of it has to be perfect thinking has pervaded far too many areas of my life, although writing the most profoundly. (Maybe the opposite sex, too: I won't go for her unless I'm absolutely sure...) For example, I used to aspire to being a novelist. Creative writing was a passion of mine, and I churned out some decent work. But with every successive thing I wrote, I adopted the mentality that this next piece had, just had, to be better than the last one. Of course, nobody is that good a writer that every successive thing they write is better than the last thing they wrote. Or if such people were out there, I wasn't one of them. This mindset paralyzed me, and soon, I wrote nothing.

Looking back on it, this kind of thinking has really done me no good at all. It's simply prevented me from doing a whole lot of things that I might have looked back on as worthwhile. So here's an attempt at blogging. It may not always be witty, it may not always be profound, but hopefully it'll be an accurate and honest account of a not-so-normal time in my life--the first year of law school.

If I were writing a typical law school blog, I'd have some catch-up to do, seeing as how it's already February. I've essentially missed the period where I can recount to my blog about how terrifying my professors are, how I'm developing scoliosis from lugging around 10 lb. casebooks everywhere, how certain students are cool and others are gunners. And sad to say, those thoughts are no longer fresh in my mind. Therefore, I think it better to simply start in media res, and sprinkle in some background from time to time as necessary.