For those of you, like me, who weren't around TLS in the summer of 2011 (the all too brief 3 months that areyouinsane posted on here.......), before I share a spectacularly funny post of his, this is the background......JCougar wrote:Best idea ever. I wonder what happened to that guy. He was a very entertaining writer. You could fill a novel with all his material.eweller wrote:i suggest we get "areyouinsane" to debate dean alexander.
It's early summer 2011; Paul Campos was two months away from his first incendiary posting on his insidethelawschoolscam blog; for those with eyes to see, the return on the investment of 3 years at law school was marginal at best and insane at worst, yet TLS was still full of misty-eyed 0L's full of hope and moderators who in the main served as boosters for this jurisprudential dream.......
Into this heady mix of increasing doubt about the future and evangelical prestige fervor that is TLS at it's smug worst, entered areyouinsane. Ignoring the moderators constant threats of banishment, for 3 months, he regaled everyone with outrageously funny stories from the basement of shitlaw. JDUnderground on steroids. An example, one of many........
"I poasted this in the Rutgers-Newark thread earlier to tell these kids about "midlaw" firm McCarter & English in Newark NJ. Those kids didn't care for it but maybe you guys will like it:
We used to scroll thru the McCarter associate bios while I was temping there, and most of these mouth breathers are from laughable garbage schools like Seton Hall/NYLS, and got hired because their Daddies work there or their Daddies are federal judges, CEOs, or other "grease" and nepotism. Or they're bottom of the classers from "real" law schools like NYU who got dinged by the NYC biglaw firms and had to ride the PATH out to NJ with their tail between their legs and take a gig at this ghetto-assed dump.
Their offices are also very outdated and borderline embarrassing for a "big" firm. They don't even have their own cafeteria. It's a 1970s era building and the associates share offices. There's one really fat partner who I used to ride the elevator with a lot- he always had a huge hoagie from Subway and mowed it right in the elevator, like something out of a comedy movie or whatever. The lawyers there also dress poorly and are mostly total slobs.
Here's a funny story: I was temping on the big Seroquel case there back in 2008. McCarter was apparently in major trouble before that case came in and the firm was in danger of splitting up. So they poached a partner from a "real" firm and she had a relative at Astra-Zeneca who gave McCarter the doc review portion of the litigation (all the "real" work like motions, objections, etc was done in NYC by I think White & Case- you couldn't trust the mouth-breathers at McCarter with anything important LOL). This broad apparently got a big cut of the action from bringing in that case- she was made instant partner and got a limo to work, etc. I saw her once and she was kinda hot in a cougar sort of way.
So McCarter (after landing the doc review) rented off-site space at the US Customs Building across from SH Law and fired up the project. 90% of the coders were SH or Rutgers grads- it was like a "New Joisey" class reunion! I got called on a Sunday and was hired over the phone - they said "just show up there 8 am Monday." Back then all you needed was bar admission and a pulse to get these gigs (pulse optional).
So anyway, after a couple months we got to a portion of the doc review where the European docs showed up: stuff was in Swedish, Danish, German, etc. So McCarter hired outside non-lawyer translators to read us the docs so we could decide if they were responsive or not. These translators were some real characters: there was a semi-blind old Japanese woman we called "Yoko Ono" and this incredibly good looking Danish underwear model named Lucas. I was assigned to work with Lucas and all the chicks were ga-ga jealous and asking me "what's he like" and "I'd bone him right here on this desk" and stuff like that.
Lucas, however, "played for the other team." He was always talking about his "partner" and their pad in Chelsea and stuff like that. He also told me that in Denmark an employer would be imprisoned for the kind of shit working conditions McCarter gave us. We literally worked in a converted janitor's closet- there was a "slop sink" in the corner and shelves full of trash bags, floor cleaner, etc. They made a desk for us by putting a 4X8 sheet of plywood on top of 2 sawhorses. We sat in metal folding chairs. You see, we had to be "sequestered" somewhere somewhat private since they had to read this shit to us out loud so we could code it.
I learned quite a bit of Danish from Lucas too. If I was gay I'd def. want a partner like him. He told me he turned gay b/c he got tired of sleeping with hot chicks after awhile because it came so easy for him. Seriously, this guy could walk into a bar and chicks would ditch Derek Jeter to hang w/ this dood. Kind of like when the Fonz walked into Arnold's.
So anyway, the translators were treated like VIPs compared to us shitlaw temps, since they spoke rare and "exotic" languages and were not very easily replaced. They also got paid a LOT more than us: they were getting 55-75 an hour, and none of them were even lawyers or JDs, just translators. They got car rides home (and the blind lady Yoko Ono even got led into the room by an associate each day b/c she could only see "sideways," apparently). My buddy Holbs had to work with her and she was always having him tilt the screen and rub her neck & stuff like that. She was from Kyoto originally and spoke like 10 other languages besides Japanese. She hardly got any work done because as I said she was pretty much blind, and also she wrote everyone's names in Japanese with those fancy paintbrush-type pens and made little cards & oragami for people to take home. She was a very nice woman.
McCarter even brought them in these awesome box lunches each day from a gourmet caterer in Jersey City. These swanky lunchboxes had proscuttio and mozz. sandwiches, bottles of Perrier water, a fresh apple & orange, and those elite potato chips that are all purple and shit.
It was funny watching them all go to the conference room and pick up their grub everyday while we worked right alongside them and got jack shit- we usually ate at the crummy overpriced McDonald's inside Newark Penn Station. Lucas was always like "if you guys are really lawyers, why don't you get a box lunch like us?" I told him that we were just temps and went to shitty schools so they had no need to treat us like anything other than garbage. He found America very interesting and said he was gonna tell everyone in Denmark about how weird life here is. He took pictures of the janitor closet we worked in with his Iphone and sent them to friends back home, and none of them belived he was really working in such squalor. Sometimes if he wasn't too hungry he'd share his box lunch with me, or at least give me the apple or the chips, etc."
