quick further update

Not sure if it was the quick administration of the clot-busting medication, but my mom's deficits seem to have resolved, and she's home from the hospital -- more doctors appointments to come, the doctors aren't quite sure what caused the stroke, so she'll wear a heart monitor for the next month to see if anything abnormal is going on-- but for now she's really, really lucky.  Thanks for the e-mails/comments...

I wrote an Anonymous Lawyer post this morning, reacting to a letter to the editor in yesterday's NY Times about how it's a good thing for graduates of elite law schools that now they're forced to find opportunities besides law firms.  I'm obviously not someone who's going to argue that law firms are the right place for everyone, but, gosh, I don't see how it's a good thing for those jobs not to be there for the people who want them, especially with the amount of law school debt most people have, and especially since it's not as if it seems like there's a lack of lawyers willing to fill legal jobs outside the law firm world.  It's one thing if you could make the case that law firms are siphoning off people who we desperately need to be doing other things with their law degree-- but even when law firm hiring seemed unlimited, there was a huge amount of competition for public interest jobs and clerkships.  And it seems like throwing all the people who would otherwise be happy to go to a law firm into the pool with everyone else will just make it that much harder for people with a real passion for something other than law firm work to get those jobs.  Look, good thing for some people, who really will end up happier now that they're forced to do something else besides go to a law firm?  Sure, absolutely.  But for everyone?  I don't think so.  And for the world as a whole?  I don't know-- I think if you end up at a law firm just because you're lured by the money and don't want to have to look for something you'd rather be doing, you kind of deserve your fate.

I've just spoiled the Anon Lawyer post, but it's not like that really matters.

Perhaps interestingly enough, deciding this is my take on the NY Times letter means I have to totally rethink a piece I was starting to play around with for the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, offering advice to incoming law students.  The angle I sort of wanted to take was that now that there aren't any law firm jobs out there anyway, law school can stop being about resumes and law review and good grades and can actually be fun.  Like business school.  But now I sort of feel like that angle opens me up to exactly the same kind of reaction I have about the NY Times letter-- so I'll think on that for a little longer and see where it gets me.

Comments

[Sean S]

Really glad your mom is recovering so well. So strange that a person can have complete control over his/her language ability, then have a stroke, then have much less control over it, but then if the stroke resolves itself, the ability comes back. Really shows how fragile we are.

[PG]

Good to hear your mother is doing so much better.

"Perhaps interestingly enough, deciding this is my take on the NY Times letter means I have to totally rethink a piece I was starting to play around with for the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, offering advice to incoming law students."

I think you can still take your angle without being quite as ... paternalistic? patronizing? ... as the NYT letter was. Personally, I tried to extract quite a bit of fun from law school, aside from my perversity in taking two more tax classes after making a C in the first one. Going to a good law school allowed for both fun and BigFirm job so long as you didn't mind not being at the firms that gave the highest bonuses (or in my case, any bonus to speak of). That may no longer be true, but I'm not sure how many people are actually starting law school intending to work in BigLaw anyway (I surely didn't mean to). For people who begin school with that plan, I hope they get exactly what they want. But it would be nice for the law schools, knowing that they can't promise those jobs to everyone anymore, to help students think more creatively about what they should do with a JD. I think this economic climate should be changing the law schools, and then they change what they're doing for the students.

I certainly hope that it makes the public interest counselors a little more open minded about who might go into public interest and other non-BigLaw work. The head PI person at my law school was apparently a Tartar to those whom she felt could ever possibly want to work in a job involving profit. (I.e. a resume that indicated work experience in anything other than 100% non-profit type work made you unworthy.) The other PI people, who dealt more with pro bono, were much nicer and understanding of the concept that profitable law firms provide much of the funding and some of the manpower for public interest work.