Greatly Exaggerated

Mikey demands updates, though the withered husk of his own atrophied blog was long ago carried off by bitter winds. So be it.

Class is the same as it ever was. Evidence is too early in the morning (8:45). Con Law is interesting and well-taught, but the professor pauses for rhetorical effect an order of magnitude more often than is called for. Quality would be greatly improved by recording the lectures and watching them at double speed, or at least time-and-a-half. All the rest of my classes are somehow tied to work at the clinical office.

Clinical work is, from an objective standpoint, more than a little insane. Explicitly modeled on the "Watch one, do one, teach one," model of clinical instruction in medical residency, it essentially flings us headfirst into court to (mal)practice on indigent clients. I can't decide what's more horrifying, that they entrust people's futures to entirely green students with no real world experience and only minutes to prepare, or that this still tends to generate wildly better outcomes from the system than poor folks could secure on their own. Sometimes the law seems intentionally designed to stomp underfoot people foolish or irresponsible enough to find themselves at its mercy. Especially terrible are the clerks at the Massachusetts court. They love us because they sympathize somewhat with our causes, and more importantly because we suck up to them shamelessly, but they are the most repugnant petty bureaucrats I have ever encountered. "You have to be nice to us," they gleefully cackled on our first-day courthouse tour, "or we might lose some important paper. We can make your life real hard." I should know better than to be surprised, but it's still breathtaking to see firsthand how clerks doing the most menial clerical work for a government agency become tinpot dictators when you give them de facto power to (quite literally) ruin people's lives. So we smile and laugh and rub their dirty little egos and accept it as a part of doing business.

From a student's perspective, clinical practice isn't all that it's cracked up to be. You get a lousy exchange rate - one credit unit for every five hours. That's like pro-rating it as though a full 12-unit academic schedule was a 60-hour week, which is flat out crazy. And of course the commute to the center where we work is over an hour each way by subway. When you get there, the work is immediate, gritty, and mundane. A plurality of my working time is spent playing phone tag with unreliable clients. We do get to do some exciting things, but the opportunity costs are enormous. It's almost as bad as Law Review would be.

So my private-sector leanings have been confirmed. Corporations may be ruthless and amoral, but they're quasi-rational and at least you know where to find them. Speaking of which, we're into the second week of OCI, which is like speed dating for legal careers. After day 1 (four interviews) I was over the whole process. No more terror, and no more joy. The worst kind of interview is when they just ask you if you have any questions for them, answer them tersely, and wait for you to come up with more. Even if you're prepared to carry the conversation for twenty minutes (never mind 4-6 such conversations in a day, with class interspersed), it's not even a reliable way to get information about a firm. How am I going to be able to tell if they're telling the truth? Some of these people have been taking and defending depositions longer than I have been alive. I actually went meta and explained this dynamic to one interviewer, which in retrospect may have been a bit of a strategic blunder.