Oh alright, but you have to give up your incest over homosexual relationship ideas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mAFiPVs3tM

I was going to rebut some of your "responses" to my points, but this comment makes me think you probably don't think there is any merit to the arguments of people who don't agree with "your" proposal, so I guess we will just have to agree to disagree (and, on my end, be grateful this scheme has about a .1% chance of ever being implemented).

To play devil's advocate, if you know you want to be a PD/DA, I really do think it changes the picture for 0Ls, because they should probably take scholarships.

I think DF's complaint is more against the view of LRAP as a safety net. People are making the opposite decision you advocate based on this idea that some school's LRAP is "so good" or that a school is "so committed to public interest."

Yeah. I could see going to NYU over CLS or Berkeley over Penn or something but people probably shouldn't turn down big scholarships if they're really committed to this.

If there's any possibility of you not using loan forgiveness, then yes. Scholarships can be meaningless though if you go through the full 10 years of repayment.


Ex: $220,000 tuition/cost of living to GULC
Scholarship: $60,000 (so total cost is actually $160,000)
First job: $60,000/yr. not married/no kids = $545/month*12= $6540/yr. *10 years =$65,400 total cost.

So, even though in this case a lot of scholarship money was given, GULC would have had to give basically $155,000 in scholarship to get the same financial benefit. Plus, GULC pays for your loans (not sure up to what income or for how long). So, if the scholly is big enough and it's debatable as to whether the student would truly do PI, then yes. Take the big scholly, but if they end up doing PI, then that scholarship probably won't be big enough to compare with their loan forgiveness plan. The safe plan if there's any doubt or if you don't know what awaits you for options is probably to take the scholarship.

Scholarships are the safer route, because you can't just assume you're going to have a PI job. CW is that good PI jobs are even harder to find than biglaw jobs, right? So, how can you just go in assuming you're going to snag one to qualify for LRAP and then keep at it for 10 years? It's a big commitment.

Definitely agree. Just pointing out the financial situation could end up in one's favor without factoring in scholarships. Scholarships are definitely the safer option though.

If they know, sure, it changes a lot. But, when giving advice we should have a rebuttable presumption that they are a 22 year old who is full of shit.

Haha yes. There's no thumbs up emoticon so I am just going to give you this lightbulb instead:

No, no "seems." It's 100% true. We have not hired a single applicant that had 0 PI experience to date, and I've been involved in several hiring cycles over the years. We didn't even have to look at people with PI experience that was completely unrelated to what we do. If you apply for a PI job that you have no related work experience for, rest assured there are 5 people with the prerequisite work experience that have also applied to the same position. It's won't work.

This is awesome info. How far out of the area are you willing to go with hiring? Say if someone was hiring for a position helping immigrants in general with visas and an applicant had worked only with asylees instead. Too dissimilar or close enough? Not my specific experience, but just as an example. Also, do you have a general cut off for experience (number of months/years?)

In my experience we don't. I work in Manhattan, so we don't have any reason to look beyond the law schools in this area (though contrary to popular belief on these forums, while school name is important, e.g. you going to NYLS and ranking in the bottom 50% is going to catch my eye as a "meh" candidate, we don't automatically go with the NYU/CLS kids either).

Your example is fitting since one of the things we do is file U-Visas, so I can say what my thought process would be because I've had this happen before. I'd want to know a few things: how many years of experience doing asylum work? How many cases? Did they work with asylees from only one or two regions of the world or many? Was this part of a FT job or just an internship? Does this person speak other languages? Does this person articulate a direct link between their prior experience and what we specifically do? Long story short, I wouldn't discount that resume right away, but you can see how already there would be some questions that I'd want answered. It's difficult to say what a "cut off" would be in terms of experience, but I can say that if one candidate had the work experience as part of a FT job either before/after law school (tends to be at least a few years, mine will be 5+ years prior to law school) and the other got their experience through an internship/externship (less than a year in 99% of cases), I'd probably lean toward the former initially unless there was something spectacular that the latter did. Ideally I would get the answers to my initial questions from the resume, and if they look positive, I'd probably give that person a first-round interview and see how they fare from there.

EDIT: Oh, this kind of work is definitely not for everyone. Crazy things happen, but I personally enjoy the fact that my job is never boring (even if my clients sometimes makes me want to throw my computer out the window...marathon and half marathon running is a fantastic stress relief). My mother was a detective while I was growing up, so I'm used to the crazier side of life. Some people aren't, and they wash out of this kind of work after one or two years.

SD2589 you should make a thread about PI hiring. Maybe all the idealistic 0Ls and 1Ls will read it and start to comprehend just how competitive PI hiring is.

I second this. It would also be useful for 2Ls and 3Ls who have decided they are actually going to pursue public interest work. It's hard to get informed, non-sugar coated information about hiring.

As a 0L can he really be much help?

Oh. No. I figured [s]he was a practicing attorney. Forget it. What the hell is [her] supposed experience?

Edit: Profile also says female.

It would be very helpful if someone created a thread dedicated to the realities of public interest law, good and bad. I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who want to use their law degrees for noble causes but aren't sure of just how to do that, or what avenues there are other than biglaw to pay back debt (if any).

As a general matter I agree with the idea, though like everything else on the internet it's expressed in overly douchey tone.

You can want to do public interest work and still go through OCI. It's not like people can't have multiple acceptable goals. And law students tend to be low risk taking people so they are naturally attracted to something like OCI. I don't consider that selling out. Every role in society is important. It's important to play those roles ethically. And it's important to help others along the way. There's no reason why you can't serve others as a big law associate. At the very least you could donate money. You could do pro-bono. Hell, you could just be a nice and caring person.

You don't have to major in "being a good person studies" and work in "public interest" to be a good person...

As far as PI work. As others have said. It's more important to be good at litigation, have a tremendous amount of patience, and have the ability to switch from callous to compassionate quickly... otherwise it doesn't matter how good of a person you are, you just won't be a good PI lawyer. And that's just because most PI work requires those sorts of skills.

Well, as someone who came in from the business field to do PI and will be doing PI after I graduate I have to say we're not all lying.

I'm not calling them sellouts. I'm saying that we shouldn't give advice based on naive plans that won't turn out for 3/4 people we give it to.

This is totally credited. As much as I hate to be another one of the people that caved on their 0L commitment to PI, after discussing the best path to a good government agency or USAO with 3 different career service people, they all indicated that the path of least resistance is through a stint in big law. The problem also is that most NGOs, state governments, and federal government agencies have instituted hiring freezes or their budgets have been slashed.

I'll still apply to PI gigs, but I'm not holding my breath on finding a good job that way.

The hardest part about PI, IMO, isnt that clients can be ungrateful, but that there are so many that you can't help/have to turn away.

well, no you're not calling the 0L's sell out, you're just saying a lot of them will sell out

nuance like that is lost on a simple fellow like me

Good info thanks I ask because there are quite a few areas I could broadly claim PI experience in, but I could also specialize as well, so I'd like to hear about how far a person can stretch. Granted, I'm sure some of this depends on region/applicant pool. If you're hiring in a big city environment like Manhattan where there is a lot of applicant diversity in abilities/experience you have of course more room to be picky. I know there are some places that would just be happy that I speak a foreign language (unfortunately that's not enough for places I'd generally like to work ).