Skip to content

Category Archives: Legal Profession

You Be the Ethics Board


Illinois lawyer Loren Friedman changed the Bs and Cs on his law-school transcript to As and Bs and landed a summer associate job at Sidley Austin, the large corporate Chicago law firm.  Years later, when Friedman was working as an associate in a firm in New York, Sidley Austin discovered the lie.  Friedman admitted his [...]

Law School Cost/Benefit


The WSJ Law Blog recently ran a post that’s worth linking to just for its title:  “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers.” Its substance–or the substance to which it links*–is less cheery, being an academic paper that addresses whether “a law degree is a good investment.”  The paper examines the investment [...]

What Was He Thinking?


Having recently dissed Yahoo!’s event planners, fairness requires mention of a story I read in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, which picked it up from the Legal Profession Blog.  This past spring Illinois solo attorney Samir Chowhan advertised for secretarial help for himself and another solo on Craigslist–in the Adult Gigs section:
Duties will include general [...]

Law Career Blues


I’m not trying to discourage prospective law students.  Honestly.  I just want to reduce the number of former students who return to shout in my face “practicing law sucks!” or “the only job I could get is doing document-review piecework as a $23/hour contract attorney!”

Placement Office Scrambles at Law School Where 65% of Grads Had [...]

I Never Metadata I Didn’t Like*^^


Metadata is “data about data” or “information about other information.”  Web pages contain metadata–click on “view page source” or the equivalent command in your browser to see all of the behind-the-scenes code that goes into this seemingly plain, boringly-white page.  The typewritten papers and memos of my college and law school careers contained no metadata [...]

Life in a Corporate Law Firm . . .


I discovered Bitter Lawyer Blog and its “Living the Dream” webisodes from Legal Blog Watch.  I’ve watched a few and they are hilarious, although I don’t know how well the humor translates to non-lawyers, or lawyers who’ve not worked in big firms.  As someone who spent hours as a young associate proofreading financing documents around [...]

Being Real


Some law students know why they are there.  I corresponded this week with a former student, now a 2L, who has known she wanted to be a lawyer since she was five.  (I don’t know how one makes that decision at the age of five but I believe her when she tells me that’s how [...]