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WaveLength posted:Is the state of the law profession as dismal in Canada as it appears to be in the States? Not quite as dismal, since we don't have the same mass of law schools flooding the market. But I'm a graduating 3L (from uOttawa, feel free to add me to the list!), and I and an appalling number of my classmates haven't found placements yet. On the other hand, you won't pay nearly as much in tuition if you're a citizen, so it might still be a worthwhile gamble. Just realise that it's a gamble. If I'd known then what I do now, I probably wouldn't have gone. Sibtiger posted:But she wants hard statistics demonstrating it, like the ones that were linked a couple pages ago about percentage of people getting offers and only 3% of firms hiring 3Ls. But I honestly have been looking around and I cannot find anything- I don't know if my Google-fu is just too weak or stats like that are just not obsessively collected like they are in the US, but the Canadian Bar Association doesn't have anything, and I don't know any other organizations that would. Are you two Americans or Canadians? The advice I gave above isn't quite as applicable to international students because they'll pay a fair bit more for tuition at most Canadian schools. I can't find any good stats on hiring for Canadian law graduates either, but you might try looking at the various provincial bar associations and seeing what they might have? Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 01:15 on May 7, 2010 |
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May 7, 2010 00:47
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I graduated today and am legitimately worried this will be the highest point of my life. Talked to a classmate of mine who narrowly beat me for a paid internship-possibly-leading-to-job with a government agency. He's considering leaving it to try for private practice. I wanted to shake him and tell him he was crazy...but I said "cool, good luck, let me know what you decide, I might be interested." Who knows, maybe I'll luck out!
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Jun 6, 2010 04:19
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:Oh my god, everyone I asked agreed to write letters for me for my articling applications. Maybe everything will be alright in the end Make sure they actually write them for you, unlike the reference of mine who dropped out of contact for a month and a half just when letters were coming due. 
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Jun 16, 2010 23:41
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I Am Not Clever posted:Would you like to elaborate? Any school for which a 164 is "well above average" is not worth going to. (supra pp. 1-47.)
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Jun 17, 2010 03:33
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Will2Powa posted:One thing I want to know is what do you forsee in the future for the law job market or how long the current lack of jobs will last? If I would go to law school, it would be at LEAST three years away. Do you think there will possibly be at least somewhat better job prospects in six years time? Problem with projecting that far out is that nobody really knows what's going to happen to the industry - the economic slowdown hit around the same time as a serious sea change for the legal industry in the States (as one of the articles in the OP describes, and lipstick thespian above does a lot better at than me). There's no guarantee and no way of guaranteeing that any of these lost jobs are coming back. Still, if you have three years between now and a potential law school, and you make it into a good enough school, and you actually want to be a lawyer (which is the ONLY reason to go to law school even in the best of times), then sure, job prospects will probably be better in six years time after all of us unemployed grads have starved to death. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jun 20, 2010 |
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Jun 20, 2010 19:29
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Adar posted:Your first question has already been answered so I'll take a crack at the second. This is generally true for lawyers transferring skills between jurisdictions period - your best bet if you want to practice overseas is to go to law school overseas, and even then it's a longshot. The closest thing to an exception to this would be an American lawyer transferring to another common-law country like Canada/UK/the Commonwealth, where there's enough overlap at the foundations of the system that the transitional work you'd have to do to qualify for the overseas bar might not be too onerous, but even here I wouldn't count on it at all.
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Jun 20, 2010 20:56
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Not to mention that filing suits involves a good deal of court fees that aren't subject to the supply-and-demand pressures of the legal industry, so there's a limit to how cheap any of this gets.
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Jun 20, 2010 22:41
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I suppose the goonfleet.com lynch mob can look like a court if you squint real hard.
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Jun 23, 2010 04:32
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Dallan Invictus posted:I graduated today and am legitimately worried this will be the highest point of my life. Guess who lucked out.  Short-term gig (3-5 months), so I guess I'll keep trying to find a way to article next year either with DOJ or some IP/techlaw firm in Ottawa/Vancouver/Toronto, or get some other permanent position. But it's a foot in the government door, it uses my law degree despite not being counsel-track, and it sure as gently caress beats unemployment. I start Monday. Now, to keep my bills at bay for three more weeks... Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jun 30, 2010 |
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Jun 30, 2010 22:25
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:Congrats! Was this through FSWEP? The position I lost out on last fall was through FSWEP, but the counsel that interviewed me liked me enough that they decided to bring me on now anyway without going through FSWEP or PSR. I blew my chance at DOJ Ottawa because my second reference decided to take way too goddamn long to write their letter, but I might be able to get in through a secondment from some other federal position, or apply to one of the regional offices and get in that way. It'd be a bloody dream job, I agree. God, I wish articling apps didn't need to be so ridiculously far ahead of start time. Blehhh.
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Jul 1, 2010 17:11
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:I was cleaning my room today and found all of the brochures and correspondence and offers from various TTTs (including forum favourites Valpo and Cooley I had to fix the email address on my LSAC account the other week (back when I was panicking over my job search and considering doing LSAT tutoring), and now I'm getting all the TTT emails I was getting back then. (no more Columbia packets, though - oh what might have been.) Do they seriously send out the same emails to the same accounts so often?
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Jul 9, 2010 02:11
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). I seriously considered going to them before I found the thread.
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nm posted:The bar is easy. If you struggle at all, you're going to fail. More or less this. My cohort of grads generally wrote the bar a month or two ago (Ontario, for what a Canadian example is worth), nearly everyone was terrified going in and coming out, but when I was done there was only one person I knew that I genuinely thought might fail. (I passed, they failed. )You'll all be fine. Good luck!
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Jul 27, 2010 16:27
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Petey posted:Loved this: It's deliciously ironic that your citation points to a blog post that's no longer there (so thanks for quoting it.)
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Sep 2, 2010 20:00
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Petey posted:joe miller is literally remedial minus the dick pics and foreclosure scheme Still two weeks until the election, I wouldn't be so sure about that "without".
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Oct 20, 2010 15:21
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:It's endemic to the industry though. I did some work recently and calculated that my hourly wage was 2% of the rate the lawyer was billing the client. It was so absurd that I just laughed it off but goddamn there's some serious flaws in the system as far as using students/young associates is concerned. Crooked game, only game in town, etc, etc, etc.
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Oct 23, 2010 21:59
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Soothing Vapors posted:hahaha I knew what #4 was before I looked it up, I am a hopelessly broken trainwreck of a human being In fairness, that's a memorably bizarre style of cause. Anyone know why it's not, say, U.S. v. Vazquez?
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Nov 8, 2010 21:05
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Low Ping Gentleman posted:(generally useful and accurate info) I will add to this that most of those Canadian tuition figures are for citizens/permanent residents - count on paying a fair bit more if you're not one, barring some fairly specific exemptions.) (for example, the school I graduated from, uOttawa, charges C$13k/year for citizens/permanent residents, and C$30k/year for international students. Toronto charges about $23k and $33k respectively. Osgoode is an apparent exception to this, charging everybody $16k.)
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Dec 7, 2010 05:45
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Copyright and patent have the same general problem of overbroad enforcement, with the same general result of stifled innovation, just in disjoint fields such that the one you consider more important is largely a function of your particular interests - and half of that clusterfuck of a D&D thread doesn't know the difference between the subfields of IP anyway, it's depressing to read.
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Jan 18, 2011 22:58
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Hammer of Loki posted:By the end of it all I was so throughly disillusioned with the system I decided not to take the bar and instead spent the summer learning Arabic. I've come around a little bit and I have decided to take the bar next year, but I have no plans on ever becoming a lawyer.  You've come so far and still learned NOTHING. Go, cut the last chain and flee!
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Jan 28, 2011 07:24
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I doubt we have any Quebecois in this thread, so the reasoning behind the provincial prosecutors deciding to go on strike will remain a mystery, but I figured you guys would get a kick out of it one way or another:CBC posted:Quebec's legal system is expected to come to a near halt Tuesday as about 1,500 government lawyers, including 450 Crown prosecutors, are on strike a day after last-minute talks failed. Professional solidarity and all, but I don't feel like they've thought their plan all the way through (even though Quebec is likely the most worker-friendly province in the country).
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Feb 8, 2011 15:50
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I'm more familiar with Canadian copyright, so this is more from a quick statute dive than any detailed research of case law, but:entris posted:Ok intellectual property peoples, here is a hypo: I'd argue that concerts count as collective works, so the individual performers would own the copyright to their contributions (as in, their sets), and the copyright to the concert as a whole would rest in the organisation - the organisation would only have the right to distribute the individual performances as part of reproductions of the entire concert. (see 17 USC 201(c)) So yes, they would be able to put video of the concert on their website. In practice, quote:What if there is a contract between the organization and the performers, does that control the property rights? This tends to happen, and those contracts will control since copyrights are fully alienable. quote:What happens if the organization wants to put on a free, open-to-the-public presentation of some news or sporting event - say, throwing up the Super Bowl on a big screen in a park. Does the organization have to get permission from the NFL, or the local cable provider, to do that? It would be the NFL's permission you would need, I believe, but I'm less sure about this. edit: new page Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Feb 17, 2011 |
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Feb 17, 2011 21:37
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G.bola posted:i hear that a lot around this thread. but what if one was committed, and anything short of law school was considered a personal failure. Imagine how much more of a failure you'll feel like with five figures of extra debt, an average law school GPA, and no job. I know I've had this discussion with you, but you didn't listen to me. Granted, with Canadian law school tuition this isn't usually a life-ruining situation, but it's still best avoided. Look, I know you're actually serious, (though possibly drunk at the time). If you can raise your score significantly, then go (with an average GPA, you'll want a hell of a raise, though.) If you can convince someone else (ideally unrelated to you) to pay for it, then go - all you lose then is time (likely spent living in some of Canada's least enticing cities if you can't raise that score). Otherwise, seriously, don't. Reassess your goals, accept that it's not going to work the way you planned, and move on. Life's too short to beat your head against a wall.
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Mar 4, 2011 15:58
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HiddenReplaced posted:My Canadian classmates tell me grad school debt from Canada sucks and he won't be able to IBR anything because it won't be US Fed loans. Canadian student loan debt is (5-7 years after graduation, if the court judges you've been acting in good faith) diuschargeable in bankruptcy, and depending on your province there are repayment assistance plans (in addition to the federal one), but I haven't done the math on whether any of them are as generous as IBR. edit: also, yeah, I'm being a little harsh on the "least enticing cities" part. I cut a few places off my application list because I knew I wouldn't want to live there, but everyone's got different tastes, eh? Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Mar 4, 2011 |
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Mar 4, 2011 16:24
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fruitpoops posted:I've been following this thread for a while now, but it seems kind of US-centric. Not as bad (mostly because we get out with less debt), still bad. With your admissions you're about as well off as it's possible to get unless you do badly in law school (which is always more of a possibility than people assume it is). Apparently BC's legal job situation is particularly terrible (or maybe that's just Vancouver's, I'm not familiar with the details), though, so I'd suggest UT or Osgoode instead unless you really plan to practice in BC. Dare I ask what sort of lawyer you want to be?
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Mar 11, 2011 16:43
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MEET ME BY DUCKS posted:So I know there's a few posters in here that know about intellectual property law, and I know Petey has mentioned Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic. Is it even worth looking into the Berkman Center Cyberlaw Clinic given that I don't have an engineering/hard science undergrad background? Are there decent "soft" intellectual property jobs out there, or am I going to be completely hamstrung by an inability to sit for the patent bar? I haven't really had a huge interest in intellectual property until looking into Harvard's Cyberlaw Clinic, but it's definitely not something I would want to pursue if it's poor employment without being able to sit for the patent bar. Personal anecdote (though this is a Canadian one so perhaps grains of salt are in order): I worked for CIPPIC (hardly a Berkman equivalent, but the best cyberlaw clinic in the country) for a year-plus, and IP firms won't even look at me because "I don't have enough of a technical background" for lacking an engineering/science background (I minored in CS and did IT work in college, but that's really nothing) - most such firms will do patents in addition to soft IP, and appear to want people who can do patents. I'd have done it anyway because I'm a panda and it was great work, and I could just be terrible too (  Abugadu), but if you don't love the field it might be best avoided.
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Mar 16, 2011 13:48
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fruitpoops posted:Jesus! I thought the Canadian law market was doing ok... Oh, no, it's doing poorly, just not as apocalyptically poorly as the American market, and without quite as much debt for students to deal with.
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Apr 2, 2011 00:36
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My sister paid that much (plus utilities) for a studio in Queens when she was going to school in NYC, but that was some time ago and I remain convinced the landlady was giving her a deal because she liked her. I agree with Greg, don't count on getting that without a roommate.
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Apr 3, 2011 16:12
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qwertyman posted:I always hear about Learned Hand Job or Unestoppelable. Surely that should just be Unestoppable? (please god kill me now)
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Apr 7, 2011 18:16
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baronvonwalz posted:Point of curiosity, it seems that the biggest reason posted in this thread for the reason not to be a lawyer is "Some people don't have jobs after graduation," More accurately, "some people don't have jobs after graduation but still have to pay six figures worth of money that in the best case, could have gone somewhere more useful to them and, in the worst case, they don't have at all," but hey, don't let that stop you! I've found that if a) you're going free or really cheap, and b) you're going to a school that's good enough to actually get one of the limited jobs available, the thread generally defaults to "you probably don't want to be a lawyer, look at us, we're broken shells of people and it's the profession that did this to us, but hey, if you do, knock yourself out." edit: (alternatively if you're a Canadian going to school in Canada, but that mostly falls under a) and also because there are only two of us still posting here (who are, I think, both unemployed).) Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Apr 21, 2011 |
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Apr 21, 2011 19:32
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There aren't as many of us Canucks that post here (only three at my last count), so probably not as representative, but we're all unemployed at last check (as in not finding articles) and it's rather ugly out there. I'd probably still say the same thing you're quoting (in fact, I was probably the one who said it last time, and it's mainly "not as bad" because we don't typically go into nearly as much debt as American students and we don't have quite the glut of law schools they do so employment prospects are a little better.) What's the program you're looking at at UT? What's your undergrad in? Have you taken the LSAT?
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May 11, 2011 18:19
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:Even if a quarter of us are unemployed/without articles, that still means a majority of students have found work (even if only for a year). Going isn't a terrible decision, but it may not be a good one. Yeah, I think that if I were a bit less specialised in practice area (or less tied to major cities by my disability) I could probably have found something even with my by-no-means-stellar transcript (hell, my friend with similar grades who ended up failing the ON bar twice found articles), so I'm not doing the "don't go never go" shtick either, but it's not easy for Canadian law grads right now even if you're going to UT/Osgoode.
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May 11, 2011 20:11
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Jenkl posted:I'll be honest, reading this thread and what the google spits out doesn't really make me want to pursue this further, but I feel like I'd be failing I didn't at least do some research on the topic. Keeping your options open is all well and good, but ask yourself "what would you want to do with a JD?". I get the feeling you're kind of a "law and policy" or legal academic type (or maybe I'm just projecting) but part of your research needs to be "what jobs do I want to do that need this degree, and do they actually exist"?
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May 11, 2011 21:04
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:In the national security job context, is a law degree seen in a favorable light like an MA would be? Not that I have an actual answer for you, but I'm sure that if you can come up with suffiiciently flexible arguments regarding section 8 of the Charter you'll fit right in.  (seriously, good luck, god knows I'm desperately looking for ways to pivot my law degree into the work I actually wanted to do pre-law school as well).
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May 27, 2011 04:27
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 I'm somehow interviewing for my dream articling position next week and I don't even care that it probably won't start for another loving year and I'll somehow have to stay alive until then. Someone needs to slap me and tell me this will all end in tears.
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May 31, 2011 21:17
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Dallan Invictus posted:
It...didn't end in tears?  I'll be articling at the CRTC next year. (non-Canucks: our telecom/TV/radio regulator, like the American FCC - why yes I am a cyberlaw panda!)Screw the rising 3Ls that I just beat out, you'll find another job. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jun 21, 2011 |
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Jun 21, 2011 13:38
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 chat:Penguins Like Pies posted:Horray Canadian articling goon! Mostly research/advisory opinion stuff and drafting various legal instruments, I suspect, though I know I'll be involved in the occasional actual regulatory hearing and whatever administrative litigation we get stuck in. Or maybe someone will Charter-challenge us again! CmdrSmirnoff posted:Congrats! Do they do any hireback? They only hire one articling student a year, and there actually seems a decent chance at hireback if there are positions open - which given the party in power is not necessarily a sure thing! One of my old classmates is articling there this year, I haven't heard if she's staying on yet (I know she wants to) but I think she put in a good word for me alongside the rest of my references. CmdrSmirnoff posted:I found out today that one of my friends is articling for $350/week. That comes out to less than minimum wage assuming a 40 hour work week.  At this rate I'm going to have to revise my forecast of the Canadian legal market closer to "don't go no jobs die alone".Any luck for you two?
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Jun 22, 2011 07:01
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Congrats on your offer, PLP, that's a load off your back I'm sure. Crim defense? I forgot what your summer firm does. Good luck on your interview, Smirnoff, even though the pay looks lovely. :/ Penguins Like Pies posted:Yay! Charter challenges! For how crappy I did in constitution, I surprisingly think Charter challenges are fun. I'm waiting for the ONCA's judgment on whether prostitution laws violate s. 7. Constitutional Law was the first law school exam I ever took, and boy did it show on the transcript. I think everybody is watching that case, though, even though we all know it'll end up at the SCC. But I love Charter challenges too: s. 1 means they're basically All Policy Arguments All The Time and I'm the kind of law student who really should have taken an MPP instead.quote:In an interview with a crim defence firm, I got asked about my constitution mark. I responded with my usual "studied for a closed book exam the way one would study for an open book example" and then ended it with "But it's not like we learned about s. 7-14 of the Charter anyways". Heh, I got asked about my bad marks too - it helped that two of the three worst ones were in Contracts and Corporations, I guess, so I was able to tell the truth "Because I don't really care about those areas of law" - and was able to counterbalance it with a bunch of glowing marks and references saying "but he does really care about THESE areas of law and this is what he can do when he cares". quote:but long story short, it's the year of practical experience you get after law school while you take your bar courses. You become a fancy "student-at-law". I've compared it to a residency for med school (except it's after we get our degree) to non-law people. This is a Good Answer and I use that analogy all the time myself.
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Jun 22, 2011 15:23
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They chose my friend (who had better marks) over me.
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^^That needs to be set to the Sunscreen Song.
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Jun 23, 2011 06:36
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CmdrSmirnoff posted:I got an articling job in crim defence. I'm basically Maury Levy. Still better than zero (and you don't have to pay tuition anymore) - so congratulations!
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Jul 6, 2011 03:48
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Alaemon posted:(For the record, I would rather retake the LSAT. The two people I was with disagreed - I think the difference is I did Kaplan LSAT review and they didn't.) I didn't study for the LSAT at all, let alone take a review course, and I'd still rather take the LSAT again than the bar, what the hell are your colleagues thinking?
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Jul 27, 2011 00:46
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