Pam Karlan Kills at SLS Graduation

I've already complained about my own law school graduation speaker. I only got more bitter when I read the text of Professor Pamela Karlan's remarks to Stanford Law School's Class of 2009. She's funny; she quotes Dante; she inspires. She also addresses her membership on The Short List:

Would I like to be on the Supreme Court? You bet I would. But not enough to have trimmed my sails for half a lifetime. Sure, I’ve done lots of things I regret over the years. But the things I regret aren’t the things that keep someone from being nominated or getting confirmed. I regret being unkind to people I love and respect and admire. I regret getting frustrated by little things. I regret never taking a summer off. I regret not being able to stick to a diet. But I don’t regret taking sides on questions involving the Voting Rights Act. I don’t regret helping to defend the constitutional rights of criminal defendants. I don’t regret litigating cases on behalf of gay people. I don’t even regret being sort of snarky.

I recommend reading this on a Monday morning, a Thursday afternoon, or whenever you normally need a little pick-me-up.

Interview with a Recruiter

In the current economic climate, jobs are scarce and competition is fierce. How does this change the game when you are interviewing? I asked Kathleen Pearson, Director of Professional Recruiting with Waller Lansden Dortch & Davis, her thoughts on this subject, and here’s what she had to say.

Q: Landing the interview: what qualities are you looking for in potential job candidates? Has this changed since the economic downturn?

A: The economy and the current shift in the legal industry has definitely changed the employment landscape for potential candidates. Quite simply, there are more candidates on the market and fewer positions available.

IP/Gender Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS
American University Washington College of Law

IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections
6th Annual Symposium
April 24, 2009

Special Theme: Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual Property

Sponsored by
American University Washington College of Law’s
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
Women and the Law Program
Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In collaboration with
American University’s Center for Social Media
The Organization for Transformative Works
Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University
Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College

Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 19, 2008

The Interview Suit

The New York Times reports that classic suits are making a comeback in The Return of the Interview Suit. The unemployment rate is currently high in America, and so are suit sales: 

Companies like Men’s Wearhouse and Tahari are reporting an upswing in suit sales, particularly for those classic navy or gray pinstripe styles they classify as “interview suits.” Arthur S. Levine, known as the suit king of Seventh Avenue (who now designs a collection of women’s career clothes in a joint venture with Mr. Tahari), said he sold 1.8 million outfits this year, almost 10 percent more than he had expected.

Maximize Your Time in Law School

A friend of mine just started law school, and she asked me what I wished I’d known when I was a 1L that could have changed my law school experience for the better.

Here are the top three things I think you can do to maximize law school:

1. Invest time in making friends

Business school students know that networking is just as important a part of their business school experience as their classes. Though calling it “networking” makes you sound a little too premeditated about the whole process, the idea behind it is a good one that I don’t think law students give enough credit. Your peers in law school are going to be your future colleagues and connections. They’re going to be the people who can get you an interview for that great job 10 years down the road, the partners at the law firm who can hire your solo practice, or the general counsels at the company who hires your firm. In the short-term, they’re going to be the ones who lend you notes when you miss class, study with you, and talk you off the ledge when 1L grades come out. Put less time into solo study at the library and more time into bar reviews and other social activities. Maximize your time in an environment with other smart and interesting people by making lasting friendships and connections.

Why can't we be friends?

What is it about OCI that makes me question my chosen profession?  Is it that my normally pleasant classmates turn into back-biting sycophants?  Is it that some legal "professionals" choose to treat us as if we were nothing more than displayed pieces of meat?  Two painful OCI stories that made me cringe when I heard them:

The Cravath Model Is Failing - Nothing New to the Bottom 80.

According to Professor William Henderson, Indiana University School of Law, and a study from Bell Laboratories, top performing associate attorneys can "evaluate problems from the viewpoint of customers and manager," take initiative, rely on more experienced coworkers, and build consensus.  The study then goes on to further that these skills do not necessarily correspond to law school class rank.  In fact, "researchers found no relationship between [attorney] performance and various social, psychological, and cognitive abilities.  http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/cravath_model_that_created_have_and_have_not_law_grads_could_implode

The ability for lower-ranking law students to become high-performing attorneys may be news to big law firms, but for those of us in the lower eighty percent, it's what we rely on every time we check our grades.  This is also what clients unwilling or unable to pay the six-figure salaries awarded to associates at big firms rely upon in all of their legal endeavors.    I have spent this summer clerking in a seven-attorney law firm in a county which bridges the gap between rural and suburban, hardly a Sidley or a Shook, Hardy, and Bacon (neither of which would have granted a student like myself - somwhere around the top third mark - an interview).  In this firm and in similar firms in the area I have observed some of the most talented attorneys practice their craft.  I have seen them succeed in cases against those big firms that may have passed on these small-town attorneys' resumes years ago and that passed on mine last fall.  Class rank is not the only marker of a lawyer's ability.  It is about time firms realized it.

First Weekend of Fun

I am going to save the work-related entry for a bit later. What I will tell you now is that I am working on a rape case of a convicted man. He was convicted of a double rape which carries with it a minimum life sentence. I did a bunch of research and reporting and it looks like we are going to appeal. The appeal process is tomorrow so I will just write about my experience with the whole case after that.

As for the fun stuff, we went on our first adventure this weekend. Ande picked out an area from the Lonely Planet called the Oribi Gorge. It is about 2 hours away, west of here. Ande rented a van, which is in itself a story, I picked out a hostel, which turned into its own story, and we did a bunch of activities at the Gorge, which were fantastic. All and all I thought it was a successful weekend.

Ande picked up the van on Friday after work. She had explained to the rental people that there were 9 of us, and apparently that is a bad number for renting cars. Now I haven’t explained kombis to you yet, so this is as good of a time as any. We take kombis to work. There are these large van-type things that can fit around 17 people. They go in one direction or the other (either to city center or out to an area like North Beach, which is where we live). There is a driver and a doorman. The doorman whistles and yells out the window trying to solicit passengers, whether they look like they want a ride or not. They have certain hand signals that say where they are going and the just constantly stick their heads and hands out the window. Last night was the first experience I had of a doorman trying to get us to come into another kombi and being scolded by the doorman of the one we were getting into- apparently these guys should not mess with each other. In the kombi you are piled atop one another, the outside likely has some ridiculous name and slogan (our particular favorite name is “Solja” and slogan, “A good name is better than riches”). They blast music, sometimes to an offensive level, usually hiphop. One even had a music video running on their DVD player, although that was the fanciest one we have seen. Some are really clean and new, some have the character of an old school bus I used to ride in 2nd grade. They are one of my favorite parts of the character of this city and a ride anywhere costs R35 which is less than $.50.

So anyway, Ande comes back with the car and it is a kombi. HUGE! It seats 15. We all have a laugh about how far away the person in the back seat is from the driver. We hear the story about how Ande scraped the top in a parking garage, and we revel in the thought of picking up passengers to pay off the rental. But we are off.

Should you supplement CA BarBri with PMBR

So, the first thing I want to point out is that this is not a paid advertisement and I don't have a relationship of any sort with Kaplan PMBR.

Congratulations to all graduates.  I think most around the country will graduate some time over the next three weeks or so (sorry, Chicago!).  If you are like I was, you may be looking to the not-so-distant future and wondering if you have the right plan to tackle studying for the bar exam.  Hopefully, this advice isn't too late, but if you haven't signed up for a course that will supplement BarBri's MBE program, I think you should, at least if you are taking the CA exam.

Did you know that the best indicator of whether somebody will pass the CA bar exam is their LSAT score?  Why, likely because 1/3 of the test is multiple choice and such a test requires a skill set that translates from one multiple choice test to the next.  Also, it is likely because the essays are so subjective that many get through them without doing all that great objectively.  California test takers have one of the top average MBE scores in the country.  I also believe in the idea that practicing can help improve your multiple choice test performance.

I think that, if you have the time and the money, you should take the 6 day PMBR to kick-start your summer of studying.  Personally, I took my last semester kind of easy.  I took the minimum number of credits required and took sort-of soft, theoretical-type classes instead of black letter law type courses.  I found the five days that I spent in PMBR before BarBri started to be a great way to kick-start my black-letter-law brain and get going on the summer.

However, the biggest reason why I think you should take the course is for the practice questions.

Number 63 and Abandoned: A Rant From the Forgotten Eighty Percent

I’m not in the top twenty of my class. I’m not even in the top twenty percent of my class. In fact, by definition, the majority of my law school class is not in the top twenty percent of my class. Yet, we keep being forgotten by our professors, our deans, and perhaps most noticeably, our career services offices.