Grab bag: A few parting thoughts on law jobs, graduation, alcohol trouble, and sweet victory

I've got multiple ideas competing in my head for a blog post today, but instead of picking one I'm going to write about all of them.


1. Finality: in less than a month, I'll be picking up my J.D. as I walk across a stage in a gown and cap that cost me $90 to rent. For one day. Not too happy about the rental, but attending law school at the University of Louisville is still hands down the best career decision I've ever made. As I check off my final obligations in the coming weeks -- one exam, a few more classes, a couple of papers -- feel free to email me at acdavi07@louisville.edu if you are applying to law school and want candid advice about where to go and how to get there. Later this summer, I'll be writing about the bar exam, and then life as a first-year associate at this law firm.


2. Disappointment: this week I filled out the NALP survey for graduating law students, which provides salary information and employment statistics to aspiring law students, some of whom have turned around and sued their former law schools. The survey was a disappointment, partly because I found out it doesn't collect compensation details beyond base salary. That makes for a vastly incomplete picture, especially for those of us (outside traditional BigLaw) who are relying on more complex pay structures that take into account contingent fees, profit sharing and other types of bonuses. At the same time, I'm happy to be able to report having a job at all. Many, many, many students in my graduating class are still searching for an offer. My sources tell me all but a handful of last year's U of L grads found jobs within nine months. Here's hoping that's true for the Class of 2012 as well.


3. Scandal: spreading gossip is not one of my goals for this blog, but I feel obligated to mention the second U of L law grad in recent months who has made headlines in the legal world. In a bad way. Both students allegedly did dumb things in public involving alcohol, which you can read about here. I'm sharing the information not because I am in a position to judge others, but because it's a good reminder of the perils that lawyers (and law students) face when it comes to substance abuse.

Brandeisliga 2012

4. Victory: congratulations to the law school's soccer team, Brandeisliga, which won the university's intramural futbol championship earlier this week. I'm still a bit sore from playing three games in as many days, but it was a great experience. Soccer bonus: 50 greatest goals of all time via YouTube.

High GPA = passing score on bar exam (maybe)

Just walked out of an hour-long primer on the Kentucky bar exam, which most 3L students will take in July at this local hotel. Among the tidbits offered to aspiring exam takers were these stats on the correlation between law school grade-point average and success on the Big Bad Bar:

• For students with at least a 3.0 GPA at U of L Law (usually the top one-third of the class), 100 percent passed the exam last July on their first attempt. The same students in previous years have passed the exam at a roughly 98 percent clip. 
• Students with a 2.6 GPA or lower had a 74 percent pass rate on the same exam. 
• Overall, the school had a roughly 90 percent pass rate last year, compared to an 86 percent statewide pass rate. The 90 percent rate was down a bit from the previous year, but in line with the last five years overall. 

There are, of course, exceptions to the above rules. Bonnie Kittinger, general counsel and director of the Kentucky Office of Bar Admissions, told us it is not uncommon for otherwise high-achieving students to study lightly for the test and then assume they can hang loose for the rest of the summer. Some still pass. Others do not. We also discussed dozens of other details, including the grading process, filing deadlines, even the definition of a law school application. Perhaps the best advice came from Eric Ison, one of the state's seven bar examiners, who asked us to take the bar seriously, but also to remember to breathe. "Don't be consumed by the bar," he said. I will try to keep this in mind over the next seven months. I imagine it will be easier said than done.

Exclusive Interview with Jim Chen, Dynamic Dean of the University of Louisville School of Law

Jim Chen, the dean of our law school, also happens to be one of Louisville’s most engaging and dynamic figures. A former Fulbright scholar, he speaks multiple languages, is a prodigious blogger, served as a clerk for Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court, and worked alongside Barack Obama on the Harvard Law Review. He also cuts some pretty smooth moves on a dance floor, is known to frequent some of the city’s hippest consignment stores for his formal attire, and only needs thirty seconds to turn a conversation about law school into a chat about tsunamis in southeast Asia. We recently sat down in his office, on opposite sides of a desk crammed with stacks of paper, coffee mugs, books, a stapler shaped like an alligator, and a sign that says “… And this would be good for students because…?”). Here is a shortened transcript of our conversation. The focus of our talk was law reviews, so the below questions are a little heavy on scholarship. Any typos or non-sequiturs should be attributed solely to me.

Dean Chen

3L at U of L: You wrote recently in the Louisville Bar Briefs publication about the rising cost of legal education. Are too many people going to law school?

Dean Chen: I don’t think too many people are going to law school. I want to make sure that they are going for the right reasons. If you are thinking about making a ton of money, you shouldn’t go to law school. If you have nothing better or more compelling to do you shouldn’t go to law school. You should not undertake law school unless you have a plan to manage your debt.

3L: Why go to U of L?

Chen: We offer very good preparation for the practice of law. We are the dominant creator of professional connections, and the premier door opener in this market and I our broader region. We do this at an extremely cost effective basis.

3L: How important is it for Louisville to remain in the top 100 law schools in US News & World Report?

Chen: You don’t build a school in order to achieve a particular ranking. You build a school in order to achieve a particular mission. If the rankings -- which are imperfect and in some cases downright perverse -- happen to approve by giving you a certain number, that’s well and good. We are aware that people take these things into account. It’s not as if we consciously ignore the rankings. But if you think that giving more opportunities for experience-based learning and specific grounding in skills is good, then you pursue that, whether or not those efforts are reflected in the rankings.

3L: You’re nearing your fifth anniversary as dean. How have you put your stamp on the law school?

Chen: Focusing on the law school’s mission, on the 1,000 days of the student experience, and on the subsequent 2,000 weeks of lifetime work that our typical graduate does beyond law school. We have 1,000 days in which to put our mark on our students, to give them the best instruction, the best experiences that we can provide, and then to engage them over the course of their careers. So, I think of things like the clinic, I think of things like dramatically increasing philanthropy and outside engagement as my accomplishments as dean.

3L: What’s a typical day like for you?

Chen: I don’t think there is such a thing. There are a wide range of different tasks: a lot of decisions involving money, how to spend it, where to get it; a lot of agenda setting and policy making; a lot of correspondence, and a lot of email; I go to a lot of meetings at the university level; I go to a lot of events and represent the law school. I work one-on-one with quite a number of people from faculty to students. It bleeds into evenings and weekends.

3L: What do you remember from your time working for Clarence Thomas?

Chen: He’s been on the bench for 20 years, and I showed up during his second year. It’s pretty intense, working at the Supreme Court. There were certain patterns and rhythms. On a fairly regular basis you had to make sure that petitions for certiorari were reviewed and presented to the justices. There was conferring one on one with the Justice on specific cases that had been argued and assigned to him. I remember he was kind and very generous with his time. There were quite a few things that we did there that proved, by virtue of having the benefit of further thought… that not everything should be done in the heat of the moment. If you can avoid doing things in the heat of the moment, that is perhaps the luxury of an appellate court, and perhaps the luxury of an academic institution, unlike the private practice of law. In an academic setting, like the Supreme Court, the players last a lot longer. It’s a lifelong commitment and engagement, and as a result you have a lot of things that are decided not instantly, but certainly by people who expect to be there a long time. That forces a particular rhythm in life.

3L: Do faculty spend too much time on scholarship as opposed to teaching?

Chen: I don’t think that’s true. Obviously, everyone has a different individual allocation of time. It will vary based on where you are in your career, where you are in the rhythm of the year, whether you are teaching a subject that requires personal preparation on your part because you haven’t taught it before, or a subject you’ve taught for decades at a time. And this is the whole point of giving faculty time to write scholarship as part of your job. There is an expectation that you write and publish scholarship as a condition of getting tenure. I do think it’s entirely appropriate – in fact it’s a professional obligation – to connect your scholarly work with your teaching. The whole point of doing scholarship is making sure that you have something to profess. Isn’t that the root of the word professor? That you aren’t just saying something, you are stating it, you are professing it.

3L: You were on the Harvard Law Review when Barack Obama was its president. What was it like working for Obama?

Chen: (laughs, noting that he may be one of the only people in the legal profession who was worked for both Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama.) Obama was older than us, and he had a lot of social intelligence that the rest of us were still working to develop. Thinking back on my time in law review, law review gave me the opportunity to read very broadly in law, and on the academic side of law. If you are conscientiously reviewing articles for publication and conscientiously editing them at the level of substantive cite checking, technical compliance, etc., you can’t help but encounter a very broad range of serious legal scholarship, and you learn by immersion this strange language that passes for the patois of full-time teachers of law.

3L: How much energy are professors here expected to put into the prestige of the law reviews that they publish in?

Chen: When you speak to a junior faculty member whose professional credentialing is still on the line, their perspective will be different because they still have yet to pass through the tenure portion of their careers. For me, this was fifteen years in the past, so it’s different from my perspective. I am quite aware that those things don’t matter terribly much to someone like me who is not trying to get tenure.  Someone who is looking for tenure, obviously their perspective is different. I think quite often we use the reputed prestige of a law review as a surrogate for what we believe to be editorial quality. Those are generalizations, and I think they are crass. In my own experience, I’ve gotten good editing from every layer without regard to the prestige of the school, and without regard to whether the journal is the flagship or a specialty.

Latest law school video pitches Lawlapalooza

Haven't heard of Lawlapalooza? It's the local legal community's annual battle of the bands, and a fundraiser for the Judge Ellen B. Ewing Foundation. I wrote about it last year at this link. Some students and faculty this year created a YouTube video promoting the Oct. 27 event, which made me feel good because at times I've felt a strange compulsion to create my own cheesy law school videos (or see my complete list of law school videos). It's good to have company.

On this Date: Looking Back at 1L and 2L

A year ago, I was writing about my second-year classes, and posting an interview with Kimberly Ballard, the law school's director of academic success. Two years ago, still a very green 1L, I was writing about my first brush with mid-term exams, and a successful but somewhat unlikely campaign to buy a golf hat from my Torts professor for $1,040. Today, as I sit in the law review offices writing this post, I am increasingly finding it hard to keep my focus on law school, and away from the bar exam and job prospects (latest guilty pleasure: looking at Facebook profiles of recent graduates to see who is working and where). In addition to classes, I am also working on an interview with Jim Chen, the dean of our law school for the last five years. I sat down with him for nearly two hours last week to discuss education, law reviews, and what it is like to be one of the only individuals in the world who have worked for both Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama. Did you know that he also used to live in Iceland?

Law school videos: hip hop, indy rock & comic relief

Anyone who reads this law school blog knows I am enthralled by amateur law school videos. Hey, it's a weak spot. The latest to cross my desktop is a hip-hop ode to graduating law students. So it hits home. And the production quality is surprisingly solid.



To see other law school videos, check out this one from GWU, or this from UC Berkeley. I also have my own humble offerings, including an in-class reggae interpretation of tax law, and a tour of Louisville with my Con Law book set to an indy rock soundtrack. Come to think of it, the lure of law school videos makes a lot of sense. Law school is already part theater, and the pressure and seriousness of the experience requires a little comic relief if you want to refrain from going crazy. Let the credits roll.

Hidden Attic at U of L Law Revealed

A view of the law school library's mysterious attic

As I plow through my third year of law school here at U of L, there are plenty of days when I just want to be finished. Today is not one of them. I had two very good classes today, in which I learned some pretty useful things from excellent professors. For example, I've always thought that it is best to sign one's complete name in legible cursive on the back of checks. Not true. You can use a stamp, a squiggly mark, a circle, even a smiley face as long as that is your customary method of signing. You can even have someone else sign for you (agency law). I also recently learned that I enjoy no Fourth Amendment protections if a police officer comes to my house dressed as a gas meter reader and convinces me to allow him inside. These are good things to know.
But nothing can top the visit I made this afternoon to the law library's dusty attic. I knew we had a basement, and even a sub-basement, in our library. But if you ask the reference librarian at the front desk to see the attic, she'll gladly wave you in to a separate little elevator behind the desk, which will take you to a tiled-floor room filled with thousands of books that look older than dirt. Some of them even are older than dirt. In the attic, you can peruse thick tomes about aviation law from the 1960s, or Supreme Court decisions from World War I. You can even find cracked and faded compendiums of Kentucky statutes from the 1860s and earlier (intent of the drafters, anyone?).  I realize that things of this nature may not be interesting to everyone. But if you agree with me that hidden attics are great and mysterious places, good for you. I also understand Professor Metzmeier has recently written a column about the same attic in the LBA's Bar Briefs publication. Check it out.

Lawyers, lawyers everywhere: local attorneys profiled in new edition of Louisville Magazine

The latest edition of Louisville Magazine takes an in-depth look at  the city's legal market, and therefore is a must-read for the area's current and prospective law students. There's a fun piece about Darryl Isaacs, a U of L grad who is best known as the "Heavy Hitter" on television (and on billboards, at right). On the more serious side, there's a lengthy article about what it's like to be one of the 62 attorneys who work in the local public defender's office. The upside: incredible experience in a very well respected organization handling high-profile cases. The downside: not as much money as you might make in private practice. The article is a good reminder that money isn't everything when it comes to being happy as a lawyer. Some of the brightest students from U of L Law have joined the public defender's office in recent years. It's also a good place to stay for a few years before launching your own private firm. You can check out the entire magazine, page by page, by clicking on this link.

What do U of L law students look like?

One of the best things about attending law school at U of L is the myriad backgrounds of the students who surround me. Just as impressive are the directions in which many of us are heading. Don't take my word for it. A new section of the law school's Web site profiles a handful of current and recent students. You can click on this link to check them out in detail. Above, photo of Alicia Gomez '10.

Cautionary tales: big Louisville law firm facing lawsuit from former client for alleged negligence

A story on the front page of today's C-J offers a fascinating look at one of the most dreaded experiences a lawyer can face: a lawsuit from his own client. Frost Brown Todd, one of Louisville's largest and most prestigious law firms, is being asked to fork over $93 million to a former client who alleges the firm bungled his case. The details are complicated, but they go straight to the heart of two core law school classes: Contracts, and Professional Responsibility. I won't repeat all of the gory details. To read the story, click here. The link will expire in a few weeks, so check it out now. Note: one of the only things that a Louisville lawyer dreads more than a malpractice suit is a phone call from Jason Riley or Andrew Wolfson, the reporters who did the article. Both are veteran legal writers for the city's largest newspaper, and they've spent much of their careers feasting on the misdeeds of local attorneys.

Brandeis, final exams, and animal crackers

I tossed a quarter this morning on the memorial (at right) for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who is buried just outside the front doors of the law school. For years, law students at U of L have placed coins on Brandeis' grave site during exams. If you are feeling really unprepared, or believe in lots of luck, you might place a box of animal crackers on the stone (Brandeis loved animal crackers). Anyway, we have now finished three of our finals, and there are two more to go -- Property this morning, and Civil Procedure on Friday. It's a grueling marathon, but the end is in sight. And when we finish, there will only be one day to go before the Kentucky Derby. Sort of ironic. The fastest two minutes in sports will arrive just after what has to be the longest year of our lives.

Kenneth Starr extols free speech in U of L lecture

Freedom of speech and religion was the central theme in a lecture at the law school yesterday by Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel from the Bill Clinton era. About 100 students, faculty members, and local attorneys attended the inaugural William Marshall Bullitt Lecture in the school's Allen Courtroom. A story about the lecture also made the front of the Metro section in today's Courier-Journal. Starr is perhaps best known for his hard-nosed probe of the Monica Lewinsky affair, but he also is a former Solicitor General and U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the District of Columbia. And he made several comments yesterday that showed me he can't be easily painted into a single political corner. For example, he defended lawyers representing accused Al-Quada terrorists, and said a few nice things about President Obama. He also stressed the importance of civility in politics, and talked about the importance of freedom of speech for all groups, including corporations. Image, above right, from Pepperdine Law.