Big Law Associates Deferred, but Getting Air Time.

Worth listening to.  

Compare and contrast that with this article, entitled "Law Firms Express ‘Growing Enthusiasm’ for Contract Lawyers."  In this article, it states:

This year, 10 percent of the firms plan to cut associates, 38 percent plan to reduce or discontinue hiring first-year associates, and 54 percent plan to shrink their summer programs.

At the same time, law firms are instead expressing a “growing enthusiasm” for a staffing alternative—contract lawyers, according to an Altman Weil press release. Last year, 39 percent of the law firms used contract lawyers. This year, 53 percent will or might do so, while 52 percent expect that contract lawyers will become a permanent part of their staffing plans.

Yes.  The connection is clear as June 21st is long.  Law Firms are capsizing and/or imploding.  The lawyers of today will be contract attorneys, working for 70 hours a week and no benefits.  I laugh when I hear young lemmings talk about the economy improving and how jobs will be available once that happens. It won't happen.  Law firms are on a permanent trek to finding a cheaper way to provide legal services and contract attorneys are the glaringly obvious solution.  And the contract attorneys of yesteryear, TTT and TT graduates, will be pushed out in favor of T14 contract attorneys.  If anyone from the ABA is reading this blog, I implore you to do something about this.  Our industry is sinking fast.  Does someone in the basement of BigLaw need to go postal on a firm to get the ABA to stop accrediting law schools?   They should be taking accreditation away from TTT sewer schools.  With every unemployed graduate put out in the market, the value of our work decreases to pennies on the dollar.  The ABA has the power to stop this madness.  UGH. I can't handle this type of news anymore.

Happy Tuesday.

Horror News Open Thread

Another day, another sign that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Let's start with the news that 300k teachers could be laid off this summer. Unlike overpaid law professors who fuck (literally) their students and contribute little to the well being of our society, teachers who work in primary, middle, and high schools are underpaid, overworked, yet are essential to an educated safe, and productive community. Schools in my area have already proposed 4-day school weeks and extended vacation. I expect the crime rate to skyrocket. When teenagers have nowhere to go because all of the schools and recreational facilities have been shut down, the only thing left to do is alcohol, drugs, sex, and loitering.

I've been putting off the BP Oil gusher spill because it's just too depressing beyond what we've all read and seen on the news and in photos. I recommend Naked Capitalism and Corrente for updated news and analysis of the cover-up story. Not only have wildlife and jobs been destroyed, but now there are reports that fishermen have become ill from BP's toxic chemicals while trying to clean up the spill.

More and more stories about sick fishermen are beginning to surface after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fishermen are working out in the Gulf -- many of them all day, every day -- to clean up the spill. They said they blame their ailments on the chemicals that BP is using.

One fisherman said he felt like he was going to die over the weekend.

"I've been coughing up stuff," Gary Burris said. "Your lungs fill up."Burris, a longtime fisherman who has worked across the Gulf Coast, said he woke up Sunday night feeling drugged and disoriented."

It was like sniffing gasoline or something, and my ears are still popping," Burris said. "I'm coughing up stuff. I feel real weak, tingling feelings.

"Marine toxicologist Riki Ott said the chemicals used by BP can wreak havoc on a person's body and even lead to death."

The volatile, organic carbons, they act like a narcotic on the brain," Ott said. "At high concentrations, what we learned in Exxon Valdez from carcasses of harbor seals and sea otters, it actually fried the brain, (and there were) brain lesions."

Despite the environmental disaster in the Gulf, Shell continues to go forth with plans to drill on the Alaskan coast as early as July 1st.

Do you have additional doomsday news to report? This is an open thread. Legal and non-legal news welcomed.

I Need A Freakin' Job

This is amusing.

"I need a freakin' job." That's the message President Obama saw as he arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., this afternoon for an event talking up the administration's success in creating new jobs. He also pitched Congress on approving a $30 billion credit for small-business growth.

Yet critics say Obama has been focusing his recovery efforts too narrowly and hasn't done enough to help people find work. After all, the latest job figures show 9.9 percent of the country still out of work. That inspired a group of unemployed Buffalo residents — who also have a website called INAFJ.org — to appeal to the president in the form of a billboard along the route his motorcade took into town.

Unfortunately for those who need a freakin' job immediately, neither of the major political parties think job creation is the number one issue for midterm elections. Why do we vote for these people again?

Yet jobs aren't a huge priority for either party heading into the midterm campaigns, as Politics Daily's Jill Lawrence notes. That might be because other issues have taken precedence. A new Gallup poll finds that for the first time in two months, the issue of "jobs" has fallen to No. 2 on the list of issues Americans are most concerned about. The new No. 1 issue: The economy in general. White House officials defend their efforts on jobs, saying the president has been focused as much on creating new jobs as on "saving" current positions.

Meanwhile, in the real world outside of lalaland DC where everyone gets paid by the health insurance industry and Sallie Mae, millions of people are suffering and the higher education scam continues. The New York Times interviewed a woman who took out a $17,000 student loan for an eight-month course to become a medical assistant after losing her adminsitrative assistant job two years ago. The program sounds like another for-profit college scam to me.

Ms. Norton, for her part, may be reluctant to acknowledge that many of her traditional administrative assistant skills are obsolete, but she has tried to retrain — or as she puts it, adapt her existing skills — to a new career in the expanding health care industry.

Even that has proved difficult.

She attended an eight-month course last year, on a $17,000 student loan, to obtain certification as a medical assistant. She was trained to do front-office work, like billing, as well as back-office work, like giving injections and drawing blood.


The school that trained her, though, neglected to inform her that local employers require at least a year’s worth of experience — generally done through volunteering at a clinic — before hiring someone for a paid job in the field.

She says she cannot afford to spend a year volunteering, especially with her student loan coming due soon. She has one prospect for part-time administrative work in Los Angeles — where she once had her own administrative support and secretarial services business, SilverKeys — but she does not have the money to relocate.

“If I had $3,000 in my pocket right now, I would pack up my S.U.V., grab my dog and go straight back,” she says. “That’s my only answer.”

With so few local job prospects and most of her possessions of value already liquidated she has considered selling her blood to help pay for the move. But she says she cannot find a market for that, either; blood collection agencies, she said, told her they do not buy her blood type.

“Sometimes I think I’d be better off in jail,” she says, only half joking. “I’d have three meals a day and structure in my life. I’d be able to go to school. I’d have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here trying to be a contributing member of society.”

My suggestion to flee the country might sound drastic to some of you, but when educated professionals who have done everything right are selling their blood to pay the bills or would rather commit suicide or be thrown in jail, that is when you have to consider other options. Oh, and as I mentioned last week, this won't be ending any time soon.

Millions of workers who have already been unemployed for months, if not years, will most likely remain that way even as the overall job market continues to improve, economists say. The occupations they worked in, and the skills they currently possess, are never coming back in style. And the demand for new types of skills moves a lot more quickly than workers — especially older and less mobile workers — are able to retrain and gain those skills.


There is no easy policy solution for helping the people left behind. The usual unemployment measures — like jobless benefits and food stamps — can serve as temporary palliatives, but they cannot make workers’ skills relevant again.


Ms. Norton has sent out hundreds of résumés without luck. Twice, the openings she interviewed for were eliminated by employers who decided, upon further reflection, that redistributing administrative tasks among existing employees made more sense than replacing the outgoing secretary.


One employer decided this shortly after Ms. Norton had already started showing up for work.

One Word Answers...

[University of] San Diego May Be Classy, But Does It Need a Public Law School?

One Word Answer:  Princeton.