|
Jesus, I was in the old thread for the whole Toona saga, but reading it all straight like that is like railing that pure Colombian
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2018 23:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:39 |
|
|
sullat posted:Ran into an acquaintance from law school a few weeks ago. Said he was "busy as hell, and couldn't stop to talk". Ran into him again and stopped to chat. I asked him, "hey, you still work for ICE?" and he cringed and said, "please don't say that out loud." They're probably hiring a lot, maybe even ALJs! Or not, hard to say what they're doing.  Based on observation, being ICE's counsel in immigration court seems like a really lovely job unless you're a psycho. It's a huge volume of mundane paperwork, you can't exercise discretion in any case (according to them, only supervisors can), and you're usually in the position of railroading an unsophisticated pro se person for the civil violation of trying to make his family's life better.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2018 06:08
|
|
|
Soothing Vapors posted:america bad Correct
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2018 20:05
|
|
|
ActusRhesus posted:Aaaaaand. Another time my state proves its superiority. PDs by statute must be paid the same as prosecutors of equal seniority. Also determinations on expert funding and such is done by an independent commission of judges (recuse on questions in their own district) and lawyers (no PDs or prosecutors) appointed by the legislature. Same commission makes PD hiring decisions and handles other matters affecting PDs. Is Connecticut actually a province of Canada? e: actually, I think there are a few states that have pay parity, right? I know California does. Weirdly, New York does not have a statutory requirement for this I'm pretty sure, though I think in practice the salaries tend to be similar.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2018 12:52
|
|
|
In my parents’ neighborhood in the Bay Area, there is a 755 square foot house selling for 595k. It’s the most affordable house in the neighborhood. When my parents bought their home in the late 80s they paid 100k (about 250k in today’s dollars, using a CPI calculator). Ask me about never being able to buy property 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2018 21:40
|
|
|
Don’t take other people’s lunches, you jerks. It’s true, lawyers really are soulless monsters.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2018 14:10
|
|
|
What percentage of your actual work hours is billable hours? Or what I’m actually interested in, how many actual hours do you have to work in order to reach X billables? Like I probably work about 2200 hours per year at a nonprofit where I have decent but not Government Job-tier work-life balance. My impression of big law types I know is they work way more than me.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2018 14:48
|
|
|
evilweasel posted:New York doesn't use bar numbers, your name is your "bar number" in a way that i forget the details of. So in NY at least it's pretty common to do it just to identify yourself as a lawyer in legal correspondence. New York has attorney registration numbers, which are essentially bar numbers. What we don't have are bar cards. When I was visiting Texas for work a few years ago I was lucky I already had a Secure Pass to show some jail staff as my "bar card" -- some colleagues of mine had to show their Certificates of Good Standing and argue a bit to be let in.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2018 18:41
|
|
|
Mr. Nice! posted:So hey, on a serious note, I think I might need to quit my job. I’ve only been there two and a half months, but I don’t see it changing with more experience. I’m going to work excessive hours. I’m going to have more cases than I can handle. And people’s lives are dependent on my actions. The longer I do this, the more severe the issues. I feel lost all the time, and, quite frankly, I don’t know that any amount of time is going to change that. That's really hard man, I'm sorry. The first thing I'll say is you have to take care of yourself, so you should quit if you really think that's what you need to do. Especially in light of ongoing health issues I remember you mentioning. With that said, though, I honestly think that sometimes you just have a rough patch with this work and can come through it and eventually feel better later -- especially when you first start and everything seems overwhelming. It might be worth it to try to take some space on a weekend, say, and ask yourself exactly what it is that is causing your feeling of burnout and fear. Yes, legal work is high stakes -- if you are a human being at all, you feel bad about the outcomes your clients may face and it feels like it is all riding on you. But with experience you can get really good and begin to feel like you are at least doing the best that any person can reasonably do for them, given the situation, and the truth is outcomes are often outside of our control. I also read Trauma Stewardship not too long ago and found that book helpful for thinking about self-care in the profession and setting yourself up for success if you do keep doing defense work. Good luck bud 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2019 00:27
|
|
|
Yuns posted:I think it takes certain personality types to thrive in or enjoy or even tolerate big law. This line plus the Patrick Bateman av quote is I know some big law guys who don't seem to hate it, but honestly the misery of former classmates of mine working in big law is the only thing that sustains me when I think about how big a paycheck I missed out on. I also won asylum for an HIV+ dude today after he spent 5 months in immigration detention so I guess there's that too.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2019 01:01
|
|
|
terrorist ambulance posted:meanwhile, a large fat failson in a grease stained hamburglar outfit is literally carrying bags with large comical dollar sons out from the whitehouse. those charged with "oversight" are either investigating benghazi and emails for the dozenth time, or waiting for a republican cop's "report" to decide whether they should point out the fat man's obvious and repeated crimes It is one of my sincerest beliefs about this whole situation that if the US still exists in 30 years, conservatives will look back on Trump with the same fuzzy positivity as Reagan and will have learned no lessons. People here have memories like goldfish and 100% wouldn't give a poo poo about how corrupt and evil Trump is if he wasn't also an embarrassment. There are already opinion pieces whitewashing Bush and he lowered taxes on the rich, killed hundreds of thousands of people while destablizing a whole region of the world, and legalized torture just like 15 years ago.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2019 05:56
|
|
|
I am surprised to see a lot of highly accurate class analysis ITT
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
Lol at blarzgh being deeply wrong both about human society and Vietnamese soup
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2019 01:28
|
|
|
Vox Nihili posted:But in all seriousness, if you actually score a scholarship at a T14 and you're presently working at McDonald's, then yeah, go to law school (or hop on any of a dozen less painful career tracks, because if you can get into NYU law or whatever you can definitely get into a nursing program, etc. of your choosing). I agree with the parenthetical here. The impression I get from you, new guy, is you are very young. Like just 1 year out of college, right? If you have the ability to get into a "top" law school and you are only interested in making money, I don't know why you'd choose law over something like investment banking or consulting. Isn't McKinsey's whole deal that they prefer to hire liberal arts majors? Plus, you're young enough you could do a tiny amount of post-bac quant work, and then make money in finance. I am morally and politically opposed to school-based elitism, but it's a general truth about our society that if you went to good schools and do well on tests, you are more likely to be able to get into any kind of good program or get hired into a good job. There's no particular reason to choose law if that's the position you're in. Or hell, get a generic "social media manager" job or whatever at a big company, make a tolerable amount of money for a while, and eventually become senior associate deputy VP for SEO or whatever the hell people do in generic corporate jobs now. The job market writ large in the US is much, much better than it was 10 years ago -- but law has never fully recovered from the great recession. You might be able to walk into a 50-70k per year bullshit job in marketing, sales, whatever -- meanwhile, lawyers are making that amount of money (or less) after 3 years of lost earning potential and usually, significant debt. Law is for (1) sociopaths, (2) people who regrettably went to "low ranked" schools and are now trapped by circumstance, or (3) for dumb do-gooders like me, joat mon, nm, and whoever else who has foolishly yolked themselves to a life of hitting their heads against a wall when we could've made more money doing something else.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2019 17:52
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:What if... There’s no right to an appointed lawyer so it’d just be like traffic court in Texas
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2019 04:23
|
|
|
Javid posted:Everyone involved with this story is a moron Wasn’t there a thread where someone was describing a bunch of paranoid poo poo and it turned out they had poisoning from a carbon monoxide leak or bed bugs or something?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2019 01:42
|
|
|
Unamuno posted:Didn't even realize you get a "100" on law-related tests other than the MBE, but maybe that's because I am a T10 snob. From some googling, seems like one of the requirements of getting licensed through apprenticeship in California is a first year exam. Maybe it’s truncated or scored differently than the bar. E: I know it’s a whim or publicity stunt or whatever but I’m oddly rooting for her. What’s the real daylight between a dude like Michael Cohen, and Kim Kardashian West. I feel confident the legal profession in America could not possibly be more debased than it already is. The Dagda fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 10, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2019 23:31
|
|
|
nm posted:Even if it isn't that, excess anxiety and stress without adequate rest is going to gently caress your health up long term. Similar problem with lack of self-care for Jeff Adachi, the recently deceased PD of SF. Proximate cause of death was cocaine, but the coroner's report showed he also had significant untreated cholesterol and artery issues and he should've been on medication for that for years. This guy famously only slept 4 hours a night and refused to take care of himself, it's awful and no surprise he died at 59, cocaine or no.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2019 16:46
|
|
|
LOL, this ‘myths and facts’ document from the Executive Office of Immigration Review (the immigration courts) is bonkers. Imagine a criminal court issuing a document stating like, “Do you know most accused are guilty? Also we are definitely neutral arbiters and are definitely not violating due process.” Also, I am pretty skeptical of these statistics given what is going on in the document overall. The thing about how there aren’t significant disparities in asylum grant rates across courts is an actual, straight up misrepresentation; Syracuse University independently tracks the data through FOIA. I also think the percentages on representation are wrong but I don’t know that one off-hand. When CBP or ICE does something lawless I kind of expect it, but the erosion of the adjudicative body itself is a new, grim reality.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2019 04:16
|
|
|
nm posted:What do you expect when the prosecutors literally run the court? Yeah, for sure. It still feels bad though
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2019 00:04
|
|
|
Alder posted:Law school a good idea in 2019? I don't know any lawyers and I wasn't sure where to ask. I had a bunch of bad joke answers lined up, but I'll spare you -- no. If you live in the US it's almost certainly not a good idea to go to law school, because it's either a bad bargain, or you are good enough at school and test-taking that you could get into a better grad program and onto a better career track.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2019 01:39
|
|
|
I am a US immigration lawyer for a nonprofit that exclusively does deportation defense and humanitarian work, AMA. The situation is worse than you think it is.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 18:57
|
|
|
Hoshi posted:How much worse? It probably depends on how closely you follow the news on this kind of thing — some people are surprised that, eg, asylum seekers and other immigration detainees die pretty regularly in US custody, trans asylum seekers are held in solitary confinement as a policy, there’s no right to a bond hearing in many cases (ie the government can and does hold for months without a hearing of any kind to determine whether you’d be a flight risk on release, even for people who have lived peacefully in the US for years), and even for “regular” people with US citizen kids who pay taxes there’s often no legal relief of any kind. However, that’s all par for the course really. I would say what’s new and doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention is the way that impunity and caprice on every level of the executive branch is blocking even the legal opportunities we used to have. Like ICE counsel refusing to produce charging documents in court so you don’t know what people are charged with, USCIS (the immigration agency) refusing to acknowledge settled state law that may affect your case, the attorney general unilaterally overturning favorable past case law, criminal prosecution for helping migrants, etc. It’s a bunch of “minor” capriciousness that adds up to a lot. Even if we ultimately win on a lawsuit against this stuff it takes years to resolve, and there’s no guarantee of a win anyway given all the Federalist Society types on the federal bench. E: for example I can’t even begin to explain how psycho it feels to have to brief the issue of whether or not the New York Family Court, established by the courts of the state of New York, under the Family Court Act, which handles all juvenile, etc, matters and has for decades, is a family court with the authority to make dependency decisions for juveniles. It’s like sovereign citizen poo poo but the attorneys making the galaxy brain arguments work for the Department of Justice. The Dagda fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jun 14, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 19:38
|
|
|
terrorist ambulance posted:I genuinely get a feeling of nauseousness reading stuff like this. A bit of both probably. It’s clear that the worst faction of the Republican Party is at the helm in a way they weren’t before, which is the proximate cause of the sudden changes. With that said, it wouldn’t be possible but for the preexisting dysfunctional nature of our institutions. Over the years Congress has delegated sweeping powers to the executive in the area of immigration, and the courts have upheld it. There’s one bad Scalia line from years ago that is something like “the due process owed to an alien is that which is given by Congress.” The courts’ ability to review the executive’s actions in immigration are highly restricted, by statute. So it is a legal regime that is predisposed to abuse in my opinion, as there’s few of the formal rights and judicial independence that criminal defendants receive. Like with a lot of other things in the US, we got by for many years with a semblance of small-l liberal normalcy because normal people in the system more-or-less respected the ideas of procedural fairness, individual rights, and so on. Now that there are a bunch of far right guys in power playing hardball, they have the institutional leeway to accomplish their goals because there are few legal defenses against them.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 21:03
|
|
|
Ur Getting Fatter posted:Can you not appeal this poo poo to some higher instance? No. To be less flippant, the type of application he is talking about (Special Immigrant Juvenile Status for children who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent) cannot be appealed to a judge; there are administrative appeals but a delay is not a circumstance that warrants an administrative appeal. For some types of immigration relief you could file a writ of mandamus in court forcing the government to make a decision, but this is not one of those situations. The child does not have a right to have his application adjudicated. The Dagda fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jun 14, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2019 21:29
|
|
|
spb posted:Just want to say thanks to the OP for posting the Toona story. It convinced me not to pursue law school. This comment made me go back and read the whole thing again and goddamn, it's so good. Toona my dude, I'm genuinely sorry about those rough turns, but at least your suffering has made some internet nerds laugh. The Dagda fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jun 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2019 04:44
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:The main one discussed at the conference was client intake. In the nonprofit legal world a lot of grunt time is spent listening to the legally ignorant complain and figuring out if there is any remedy for their complaints. A lot of that could potentially be automated with sufficiently sophisticated tools. I think screening tools are good and can be helpful, but they are deeply limited. Over the years I’ve worked a lot in systems that have tried to mimic this through a kind of labor arbitrage, where big law pro bonos, non-attorney navigators, and even limited computer tools are used to triage cases before referring to actual non-profit lawyers. It’s better than nothing, but not by much. Typically if someone has a muddy fact pattern at all, I will have to do a whole second screening with them. A good volunteer or non-attorney intake person will err on the side of over-inclusivity, which is good, but means I get a lot of people who I could have identified at the outset as lacking relief. It’s not useless — some people have absolutely no claim and it’s easy to tell. But I would be able to identify that person in 20 minutes or less. And the non-profit is paying me, an attorney from a top law school with five years of experience, $25 per hour, so it’s only gonna cost them like $8 to have me weed that guy out anyway. Less for a good non-attorney staff person.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2019 04:45
|
|
|
Petey posted:let me rephrase: should I go to law school if I get into harvard or yale with some need-based aid (see below) and my goals are to work in academia and/or running a nonprofit but a PhD in history/anthro/etc is possibly an even worse idea, somehow drat, welcome back Petey. Some of my peers have gone into legal academia, mostly clinical teaching. None so far have gotten a permanent position, all but one had to relocate to a much smaller/less desirable city. They're all on fellowships or contracts that last one or two years, then get renewed (or don't). From history PhDs I know, the humanities job market is even worse. We are talking about people who graduated from history doctoral programs at places like Berkeley, teaching in non-tenure positions at small colleges in the middle of nowhere. My understanding is that the academic job market (both law and humanities) is incredibly oversupplied. I don't see why you'd want a JD to run a nonprofit; really, you would want area expertise and to be a go-getter, that's it. What field would the nonprofit operate in? Overall, I'm happy with the choice to get a JD rather than a history PhD (which I was also considering 10 years ago!) but that's because I more or less enjoy being a lawyer. I can't imagine enduring three years of loving law school otherwise; it's not an intellectually stimulating environment. Just do what you really want to do, which is get the PhD.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2019 08:07
|
|
|
Has the thread already discussed this batshit story about a lady committing identity theft so she can...appear as a criminal defense attorney?quote:The mail fraud charge was for submitting a change-of-address form in another lawyer’s name to the state bar, then having that lawyer’s bar card was forwarded to Devlin’s address.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2021 05:15
|
|
|
Kalman posted:It was the ins and outs that got him in trouble - the ups and downs followed naturally. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2022 04:31
|
|
|
Nm or other California guys, what is jury selection / voir dire like here? The last time I was called for jury duty was years ago when I lived in New York, and I was struck, I assume for being a lawyer. I normally wouldn’t actively try to dodge jury duty but I just had a baby. But I feel like a judge will think it’s a lame excuse that I want to be at home with my three month old son. Both his mom and I are on parental leave so it’s not really like he wouldn’t have another caretaker. I was originally called for a time right around his due date and got an extension of a few months. Is it likely I’ll get struck here too? I work for a nonprofit doing immigration defense and have co counseled cases with some PD’s offices if that is helpful info.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2022 19:22
|
|
|
Thanks for folks’ input on the jury issue. Mindblowingly, I not only had to appear, they picked me to serve on this misdemeanor domestic battery case, despite the fact that the vast majority of my legal experience has been working with victims of domestic violence. Anyway, we acquitted.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2023 01:10
|
|
|
dpkg chopra posted:If you could choose to do every trial without a jury, would you? I guess it depends on whether you think they're more fair on average than your typical judge, and I have absolutely no idea where I'd land on that right now. Immigration court, where I practice, is a bench trial and the judges are former ICE prosecutors and also are literally part of the DOJ -- but would a panel of everyday citizens be more sympathetic and fair-minded? Same question for any other judge in a different kind of court, since they are often former criminal prosecutors. But on the other hand I just had to serve on a criminal jury and we voted to acquit, and I feel like no judge would've let the defendant walk.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2023 23:45
|
|
|
A PM for me too, thx.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2023 17:22
|
|
|
Tokelau All Star posted:I'm gonna do oral argument in front of the Ninth Circuit this summer, I'm hype. Good luck. I did this remote during the pandemic and since I was at home and didn’t get to go to the nice big courthouse it felt incredibly low rent and anti-climactic. Might as well have been immigration court or traffic court.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2023 03:54
|
|
|
Nonprofits have to “incorporate” in their own state I think, not in Delaware. I’ve never had to file the papers but am close enough to know you have to report to your local dept of state. Good luck Nichael. I’m feeling pretty burned out lately and sometimes wish I had taken the money instead of the clean hands, but I try to remind myself that it is good to enjoy and feel good about what you do for work.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2023 18:01
|
|
|
I am a big nerd and would have loved intellectually serious coursework on legal philosophy, sociology of law, legal history. Law school in the US is not that, obviously. I also loved the clinics where I was essentially an intern and got to do hands on casework—I only learned how to be a lawyer from those clinics and from internships outside of school. The doctrinal classes taught in lecture format using the Socratic method are the absolute least useful part of the whole thing. Should be scrapped entirely for yes, basically barbri, if they’re going to keep that stuff at all. They should either go all the way and make it like a PhD program, just for kicks, or make it a like a trade school and journeyman apprenticeship program. As it is, it’s the worst of all worlds.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2023 03:19
|
|
|
People in the law thread, of all places, won't be scandalized by the idea that higher education is often just about filtering. Even I consider the school people attended or their class rank or similar signals (dean's list, whatever) when hiring, and I find that kind of thing to be generally distasteful. But that's an argument against bloated law school curriculums, not in favor. Just make people take a bunch of tests if we're just going to be hazing them and then using their academic achievement as a proxy for lawyering ability.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2023 20:55
|
|
|
Shageletic posted:Cousin in another state is asking for a good immigration lawyer other than searching google. How did we decide this before? Checking in with the local bar? I forget. Better to use the AILA referral service in this case than the regular bar one: https://www.ailalawyer.com
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2023 23:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 10:39 |
|
|
I think only a couple of guys here work in big law but figured I'd ask this embarrassing question on this obscure corner of the internet: what are the prospects for someone to lateral into a big firm from public interest, with 10 years of experience as an attorney in nonprofits only? I went to a T5 law school but chose touchy feely law. My current job title is "legal director," I run a small nonprofit legal program. I know a couple of people personally who have made this transition with similar credentials and I'll talk to them, but I get the sense they had really strong personal connections or something at the firms they went to. I do not have that. Some of my concerns are: - I have zero subject matter knowledge in any area of litigation relevant to a large corporate client, though I have litigated at both the district court and circuit court level in addition to admin hearings (immigration court) and some minor state court stuff. I don't even know whether those skills are transferable. The only discovery I have ever done in my life was during FOIA litigation. - As a 10th year associate I assume I'd be too expensive to the firm - is that right? They'd rather have a partner who can bring business or a cheaper associate. - I don't know how to fake being interested and literally don't know what you guys say in interviews; I just need money. Is this even remotely something I should spend time looking into? My situation is between the pressure of my elderly parents and young kid, it is probably untenable for me to keep working the nonprofit life.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2024 04:25
|
|