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DavidGoldinSecondPaper 5 - 18 May 2010 - Main.PaulSmith
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| | | The World is Changing | |
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< | Everything is different now. We've discussed a multitude of issues in this class, but for better or worse, the one that has resonated most strongly with me is that the big law firm model of selling hours is no longer viable and that employment structure of a part of the legal field has changed dramatically. Even if we want to, we can no longer count on pawning our licenses for $160,000 per year. Coming into this semester, my plan was to stick my head in the sand. Before law school, I spent two years working at a big Wall Street law firm that fired a number of people. I knew that things were changing. But this wasn't going to deter me. I was going to go to EIP and snag that one last position at X & Y LLP, where I would serendipitously not be furloughed or laid off and would end up making partner and getting paid $3 million a year. And I would do this all without hurting anyone. Now, I realize that if I want to achieve what I came to law school for, as I discussed in my introduction 3 months ago, I need to give up this fantasy. | >
> | Everything is different now. We've discussed a multitude of issues in this class, but for better or worse, the one that has resonated most strongly with me is that the big law firm model of selling hours is no longer viable and that employment structure of a part of the legal field has changed dramatically. Even if we want to, we can no longer count on pawning our licenses for $160,000 per year. Coming into this semester, my plan was to stick my head in the sand. Before law school, I spent two years working at a big Wall Street law firm that fired a number of people. I knew that things were changing. But this wasn't going to deter me. I was going to go to EIP and snag that one last position at X & Y LLP, where I would serendipitously not be furloughed or laid off and would end up making partner and getting paid $3 million a year. And I would do this all without hurting anyone. Now, I realize that if I want to achieve what I came to law school for, as I discussed in my introduction 3 months ago, I need to give up this fantasy. | | | It is easy for me to pity myself and to bemoan the plight of us lawyers-to-be in the Columbia Law School Class of 2012. But it is important to take a step back and realize that the world isn't just changing for us - it's changing for non-lawyers as well. One of the main industries of coastal Maine was canning. The industry "employed thousands of workers at more than 50 canneries". Now, the last one is about to go out of business. As the sardine canning factories that used to dot the coast of Maine disappear, so do the $18 an hour jobs that came with them. People who have worked at the factories for over 40 years are losing their jobs. Unemployment will soon get even higher, and this already impoverished part of Maine will become even poorer. | |
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> | | | | I have trouble seeing how this is relevant. You seem to be using a very specific example, described in detail, to establish that it’s easier to make a good plan now than it is to change a bad plan later. I’m not sure this point is really necessary, and if it is, I’m pretty sure it could be captured in a sentence rather than a paragraph.
A New Path | | | So, how am I going to go about this? As Eben has pointed out, it isn't something that I can learn in Torts, or by having my resume reviewed by a career counselor in Jerome Green Annex, or even by attending a touchy feely workshop from 12:10 to 1:10 about the changing legal market. My plan is a simple one: first, to pick something that interests me, and then to figure out a way that I can do work in the field that will allow me to be the type of lawyer that I want to be. Perhaps this is a naïve approach. Perhaps I will fail. Perhaps I won't be able to find meaningful legal work in the areas that interest me most. But I have two more years of law school to test the waters, and as I stated earlier, I now have an idea of what not to do, and an idea of what I'd like to learn. | |
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< | %BLUE& You just slammed the specific opportunities that law school offers, and then turned around and said law school would broadly give you the meaningful opportunity to “test the waters." Elaborate more on what opportunities you’re going to be able to take advantage of now that you wouldn’t have before, or cut one of the two contradicting statements -- otherwise the whole paragraph comes across as disingenuous. | >
> | You just slammed the specific opportunities that law school offers, and then turned around and said law school would broadly give you the meaningful opportunity to “test the waters." Elaborate more on what opportunities you’re going to be able to take advantage of now that you wouldn’t have before, or cut one of the two contradicting statements -- otherwise the whole paragraph comes across as disingenuous. | | | The Immediate Future |
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