"The After the JD project will track the professional lives of more than 5,000 lawyers during their first ten years after law school. Whilemost of the project will unfold in coming years, the data presented here provide a first snapshot of the stratified random national sample, based on questionnaires administered two to three years into the new lawyers' careers. The findings presented here will be elaborated and augmented through face-to-face interviews with a sub-sample of roughly 10% of the survey respondents. Building on this first wave, the future work of AJD will employ follow-up questionnaires and personal interviews six and ten years into the respondents' careers. When completed, it will be the first national study of the factors -- personal and professional -- that account for the wide spectrum of legal careers and experiences"--Introduction
Written by Harvard-trained ex-law firm partner Liz Brown, Life After Law: Finding Work You Love with the J.D. You Have provides specific, realistic, and honest advice on alternative careers for lawyers. Unlike generic career guides, Life After Law shows lawyers how to reframe their legal experience to their competitive advantage, no matter how long they have been in or out of practice, to find work they truly love. Brown herself moved from a high-powered partnership into an alternative career and draws from this experience, as well as that of dozens of former practicing attorneys, in the book. She acknowledges that changing careers is hard much harder than it was for most lawyers to get their first legal job after law school but it can ultimately be more fulfilling for many than a life in law. Life After Law offers an alternative framework and valuable analytic tools for potential careers to help launch lawyers into new fields and make them attractive hires for non-legal employers.
There's an old saying about law school: The first year, they scare you to death; the second year, they work you to death; the third year, they bore you to death. Helping to alleviate this famed fright, sweat, and boredom, The JD Jungle Law School Survival Guide expertly shows current and prospective students how to navigate all three years of law-school torture. Comprehensive, practical, and witty, it includes advice from students in the trenches, successful graduates, sage professors, and working professionals, including:How to identify and get accepted at the law school of your choicePlaces to look for and get financial aidEffective note-taking, study, and exam-day strategiesTips for managing law-school stressHow to pass the bar exam the first timeHow to land a law internship-and then the job of your dreamsFounded by parent company Jungle Interactive Media in 2000, JD Jungle is one of the hottest new magazines on the market. With a circulation of 80,000 subscribers, it can be found on newsstands everywhere. Visit www.JdJungle.com.
Around the world, access to justice enjoys an energetic and passionate resurgence as an object both of scholarly inquiry and political contest, as both a social movement and a value commitment motivating study and action. This work evidences a deeper engagement with social theory than past generations of scholarship.
An urgent plea for much needed reforms to legal education The period from 2008 to 2018 was a lost decade for American law schools. Employment results were terrible. Applications and enrollment cratered. Revenue dropped precipitously and several law schools closed. Almost all law schools shrank in terms of students, faculty, and staff. A handful of schools even closed. Despite these dismal results, law school tuition outran inflation and student indebtedness exploded, creating a truly toxic brew of higher costs for worse results. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent role of hero-lawyers in the “resistance” has made law school relevant again and applications have increased. However, despite the strong early returns, we still have no idea whether law schools are out of the woods or not. If the Trump Bump is temporary or does not result in steady enrollment increases, more schools will close. But if it does last, we face another danger. We tend to hope that crises bring about a process of creative destruction, where a downturn causes some businesses to fail and other businesses to adapt. And some of the reforms needed at law schools are obvious: tuition fees need to come down, teaching practices need to change, there should be greater regulations on law schools that fail to deliver on employment and bar passage. Ironically, the opposite has happened for law schools: they suffered a harrowing, near-death experience and the survivors look like they’re going to exhale gratefully and then go back to doing exactly what led them into the crisis in the first place. The urgency of this book is to convince law school stakeholders (faculty, students, applicants, graduates, and regulators) not to just return to business as usual if the Trump Bump proves to be permanent. We have come too far, through too much, to just shrug our shoulders and move on.
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
You Don't Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism highlights how race and gender create barriers to recruitment, professional development, and advancement to partnership for black women in elite corporate law firms. Utilizing narratives of black female lawyers, this book offers a blend of accessible theory to benefit any reader willing to learn about the underlying challenges that lead to their high attrition rates. Drawing from narratives of black female lawyers, their experiences center around gendered racism and are embedded within institutional practices at the hands of predominantly white men. In particular, the book covers topics such as appearance, white narratives of affirmative action, differences and similarities with white women and black men, exclusion from social and professional networking opportunities and lack of mentors, sponsors and substantive training. This book highlights the often-hidden mechanisms elite law firms utilize to perpetuate and maintain a dominant white male system. Weaving the narratives with a critical race analysis and accessible writing, the reader is exposed to this exclusive elite environment, demonstrating the rawness and reality of black women’s experiences in white spaces. Finally, we get to hear the voices of black female lawyers as they tell their stories and perspectives on working in a highly competitive, racialized and gendered environment, and the impact it has on their advancement and beyond.
While emphasizing that lawyers fulfill a vital but often misunderstood public function in society, The American Legal Profession: The Myths and Realities of Practicing Law dispels some of the common misconceptions about the legal profession to show that the reality of being a lawyer is much different from what many students believe it to be. Many students know little about what law school is like or how it differs from undergraduate study, and this book corrects common myths about graduating law school and life after passing the bar. This brief primer is a nuts-and-bolts analysis of what it is really like to go into the legal profession, from start to finish, giving students considering a career in law a realistic overview of their potential legal careers.