can I get a role call for active students? is it just Arab and me?

3L can't come AND go soon enough. I really hope I shored up a job with the General Assembly, although I left without an offer at the end of June but more of a "we wish we had an opening to give."

8/12/2012 9:55:41 PM

about to start 2L, but i'm part time.

8/13/2012 9:14:34 AM

Quote :

""we wish we had an opening to give.""

Welcome to the legal field job market. You seem to be building a great resume though. Good luck!

8/13/2012 9:44:38 AM

Feels weird not being in school anymore...

8/13/2012 9:41:36 PM

hopefully it should feel like money is entering your pocket not leaving it

8/13/2012 9:44:13 PM

Ha! I wish lol -- been spending $$$ trying to get this small practice incubator off the ground, I'll be going into debt for at least another couple months

If y'all get bored and want to check it out, we've got some info on Facebook until I get the main website up and running: https://www.facebook.com/NorthCarolinaSPICE

[Edited on August 13, 2012 at 9:49 PM. Reason : ---]

8/13/2012 9:48:36 PM

I'm getting my LL.M. this year... Then maybe I'm done.

8/14/2012 3:35:28 AM

I'm starting my 3L year in a couple of weeks.

8/15/2012 11:24:15 PM

Make sure you're applying for jobs from now!

8/16/2012 7:35:42 AM

Anybody pass the bar today?

8/27/2012 6:00:57 PM

::raises hand::

Crazy to think when I started on TWW I was a college dropout... and now I'm a lawyer

8/28/2012 6:27:01 PM

Congrats TGD!

8/28/2012 7:01:21 PM

^^ Nice. Congrats!

It's crazy that it takes South Carolina 3 months to grade the bar exam. Those mofos are just lazy.

8/29/2012 8:16:48 AM

They probably don't go at it hardcore like NC does. I believe the NC graders rent out a beach house for a week and do all the grading at the same time. Seems to work well, and I know I appreciated the quick response.

8/29/2012 9:37:07 AM

Quote :

"I believe the NC graders rent out a beach house for a week and do all the grading at the same time."

That sounds like it could be trouble as well. I don't know if I could grade that well with the distractions that come along with a beach house.

I think SC has to be one of the slowest...I think I remember us getting our results after NY and CA...which makes no sense. But whatever. Made it even sweeter when I passed.

8/29/2012 10:21:57 AM

I doubt anyone takes longer than Maryland. Maryland doesn't publish the results until Nov 2, and those are the "unofficial" results

8/29/2012 8:51:48 PM

WTF. How can you have an unofficial bar result? Do they double check them all or something?

8/29/2012 9:06:07 PM

wow we just got our school rate back, 75%...that's fucking awful. way to blow our first rankings (not that I put much weight into them)

8/30/2012 5:26:10 PM

Whats the NC passage rate?

I think our first ones were in the 70s...but then the SC pass rate was around 80...so it didn't look bad. I haven't kept up the past few years to see if it's improved.

8/30/2012 5:29:43 PM

the state average was 79%

8/30/2012 6:03:07 PM

Thats not bad then. Don't think you can expect to beat the state average in the first couple years.

8/30/2012 6:42:04 PM

we used to be above the average

8/30/2012 7:13:54 PM

Ah...gotcha. You're fully accredited now though, correct? Even so, a couple percentage points below average isn't that big of a deal.

8/31/2012 7:08:50 AM

Look on the bright side, you could be joining my alma mater at 60% and dead last in the state for the 2nd year in a row

8/31/2012 11:35:07 PM

^Jesus...which one is that? Is it accredited? I'm assuming it's one of the recently formed ones. I have no idea what's going on with the new NC law schools. Easy in SC when you only have to keep up with two.

9/1/2012 12:12:41 PM

I think he's talking about N.C. Central.

9/1/2012 12:18:33 PM

Yep, NCCU Law. Sitting at mid-80%s when I came in as a 1L. Now dead last in the state 2 years in a row, and -19% below the state average

9/1/2012 7:02:41 PM

Upside is that (1) I'm licensed and (2) only paid $24K total for the privilege. I feel bad for folks paying $42K+ annually...

9/1/2012 7:03:43 PM

What do you think is the cause of that? The new law schools? Have the incoming classes been lower on the academic totem pole? New schools taking your professors?

I find that big drop pretty interesting.

9/2/2012 9:36:14 AM

Naw oddly enough our "academic profile" for each entering class has climbed as the economy got worse -- the school got more selective and let the leftovers go to Charlotte Law (who has now beat us twice )

It's a side effect of a whole mess of factors, each one taking its chunk out of the total:

==> Out-of-state recruitment. For the past few years the school has been intentionally recruiting folks from other states, to give us a more "national" perspective on law practice. The problem is that many of our high-GPA folks went to other states this year instead of staying in NC (of the 145 who graduated this May, only ~105 stayed in NC). Their expected pass rate will likely bump us up past Charlotte Law for the NC schools, but the ABA only looks at the two largest jurisdictions per school so NC and GA are it for us.

==> Sealed scores. We had a handful of folks have results sealed for various reasons (one guy in our Top 10 had a music CD in his laptop when he got there, a girl had hers sealed b/c an essay answer was half-typed and half-written due to the power outage, etc) and they tended to come from our higher academic performers. But sealed results are excluded from the per-school totals, and they don't re-run the numbers after results are unsealed in November/December.

==> Panic. I think we're the only law school that issues laptops to our students, since many of our ppl tend to be poorer than elsewhere. The downside is that after 3 years the batteries don't hold a charge worth a damn. When the power went out a second time and laptops started dropping like flies, it was overwhelmingly NCCU Law students affected. NCBLE tried to address that issue with their dual-score algorithm -- one score as though nothing happened, a second score that dropped the afternoon essay answers and doubled the morning's -- but damn near everyone felt the afternoon questions were the easier of the two sets so they wouldn't really get the benefit that solution was intended to provide.

==> Attitudes. For better or worse, most of my classmates didn't like each other People tended to study in small groups or alone, and would avoid the law school at all costs to work at home. Because of that we had the worst attendance rates for both BarBri's and Kaplan's bar prep programs, which of course is going to impact bar passage.

==> Failure avoidance. One of the unintended consequences of improving the "academic profile" has been bringing in a bunch of kids who had great college GPAs and weren't ready for NCCU's strict-C curve. I know a lot of folks who avoided or dropped our harder courses just to preserve their GPAs, which also meant avoiding the more-rigorous papers and the extra writing experience in general. (This became one of the few times I was proud of graduating from NC State with a 2.1 in my major, a C-curve didn't both me at all )

==> Defeatism. There's always a few outliers who do everything they're supposed to do and still fail for some reason, including a few of my closest friends. I think part of what hit them was a negative attitude in the week leading up to the exam, constantly going "I'm not ready. I'm going to fail. OMG I'm going to fail." all the f*cking time. Agitated the sh*t out of me And isn't exactly the most useful attitude for passing.

End result: 100 unsealed results in the stats table, of which only 60 passed.

There's probably more at play that I'm missing, but I suspect those 6 factors would explain 98% of the people who failed. I just hope it's a wake-up call to our law school administration to come up with something to fix it, because the N.C. General Assembly has been itching to shut us down to save money for a couple years now...

[Edited on September 3, 2012 at 3:29 PM. Reason : ---]

9/3/2012 3:23:28 PM

The top two seem legit, but the rest can be said for most other law schools. And only one of those top two pertain to this year.

Either way...

Quote :

"Upside is that (1) I'm licensed and (2) only paid $24K total for the privilege."

9/4/2012 6:46:43 AM

if i woke up tomorrow and only owed 24k, i'd die.


enjoy it, good sir.

9/4/2012 10:16:21 AM

oh I owe a shitload more than that, it's just from 6 years (including summers) at NC State

9/4/2012 4:33:17 PM

Anyone in here do Real Estate law? Closings and such?

9/7/2012 9:56:07 AM

Quote :

"can I get a role call for active students? is it just Arab and me? 3L can't come AND go soon enough. I really hope I shored up a job with the General Assembly, although I left without an offer at the end of June but more of a "we wish we had an opening to give.""

New 1LE @ Central. I don't come by TWW much these days, but I just remembered this thread and decided to check in.

From that, I came across TGD's blog. I appreciate the insight.

9/7/2012 11:33:12 AM

My pleasure! Make sure you grab the 1L/2L/3L/bar outline ZIP files I put on there, should be enough material to give you a big head start on law school

@jbrick83: Never done it before, but I just got sworn in today and can learn quickly

9/7/2012 7:29:10 PM

look out for a thread in the Lounge this weekend for my capstone project, I hope to get some great feedback going

it's on designing tools for crowdsourcing legislation from scratch on the web - there's a lot more to it than that but I'd like to keep discussion limited to that thread or a similar one I'll be starting on reddit

9/7/2012 7:38:46 PM

Quote :

"Anyone in here do Real Estate law? Closings and such?"

Thats pretty much all I do.

9/8/2012 7:55:16 AM

posted a thread in the Soapbox because even though they're crazy half the time, they're crazy people who spend an inordinate amount of time responding

message_topic.aspx?topic=630739

9/8/2012 9:15:02 PM

have y'all seen how many attorney's (well, at least bar-sitters) charlotte school of law are churning out the next few years?

jesus christ.

their reputation isn't exactly stellar as it is (no offense to anyone who went there), but becoming a damn diploma mill can't help. they're, reportedly, going to be churning out almost as many kids per year as the rest of the state's law schools churn out combined.

glad i've got a job, but damn if it's still not going to affect salary prospects.

9/12/2012 8:41:10 PM

How many people do they have in each class??

Keep those fuckers out of SC!

9/13/2012 6:46:25 AM

Can't remember the exact numbers, and don't have time to research right now, but they're building an addition to the current location on Wilkinson Blvd. to house all the newcomers and I believe the class this year brought in around 350-400 kids. Whatever the number is I just remember hearing it and thinking it was insane.

9/13/2012 1:11:43 PM

Jesus. With $40k a year in tuition...those mother fuckers are raking it in.

9/13/2012 2:15:35 PM

jesus. that's more than it costs to go to AU here in DC, and it's one of the most expensive around this area.

9/13/2012 2:58:11 PM

I read the other day that it's like 80K a year to go to law school at Stanford and Berkeley. You gotta think that they're letting them take out close to $120k a year to cover tuition and expenses.

That blows my fucking mind. But at the same time...if you graduate from Stanford law, you're probably making an easy six figures out the gate...provided you pass the Bar of course.

9/13/2012 3:03:55 PM

i think San Fran biglaw salaries are on the same scale as DC, which is to say, the NY scale ($160k first year), so yeah, if you get out of either of those schools into a good biglaw job, i think you'll be able to afford it, and then it really just kind of goes exponentially upward from there.

9/13/2012 3:36:46 PM

^ you make 6 figures in the DA's office in Cali almost right out of the gate, so that makes up for some of it.

Charlotte School of Law is going to flood the shit out of SC and the metro areas of NC, i would bet. i would bet this is also going to lead to the RFP's that have currently rolled out in Wake County to begin rolling out all over the state to cut the newbies out of just hanging out their own shingle and doing the court appointed list.

probably a good idea in many ways, like cutting lesser qualified noobs out of the market, but a bad idea for those who make a living off the lists. i could be very wrong, though. we'll see how it plays out.

9/13/2012 4:46:08 PM

RFPs are already being instituted throughout the state, just being done in phases. Same thing in Mecklenburg.

NC still has one of the lowest attorney to citizen ratios in the country though, even with the two new schools.

9/13/2012 7:25:55 PM

^
Even so, we also rank ~#12 of 50 for lawyer oversupply

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/the-lawyer-surplus-state-by-state/ [referring to http://www.economicmodeling.com/2011/06/22/new-lawyers-glutting-the-market-in-all-but-3-states/ ]

Charlotte School of Law's 1L class this year is ~550 students -- bigger than all of NCCU Law with a smidge of UNCCH Law thrown in

9/14/2012 10:40:41 PM

Fuck me....these are my last set of Family Law cases. I'll still do a divorce for a friend...but fuck this shit.

Any other attorneys in here dabble in Family Law? If not...don't ever get into it. If so, how the fuck do you do it??

10/12/2012 11:32:22 AM