Friends Want Your Legal Advice, Just Not Your Bill

General, Legal Aspects, Legal Profession

Two readers wanted to know why I’ve never written about how difficult clients can be. I don’t write about clients because I’ve never had one. But I do have friends constantly asking me for legal advice, they just don’t want to pay me for it. As every law student/lawyer knows, by Thanksgiving break of your first year you’ll start getting requests for free legal advice.

You will be asked to draft wills, listen to landlord/tenant complaints, divorce issues,etc. After a few drinks with your friends, one will pull you aside and whisper something like, “So if I meet someone in the bar, and they say they’re 21, and then after I sleep with her, I find out she’s 16, it’s the bar’s fault for not checking, right?”

It really doesn’t matter if you know the answer or not, because no matter what you tell them, you’re screwed. If you give them advice that they don’t want to hear, they’ll say they saw the same sort of thing on Boston Legal and the character didn’t get arrested on TV. If you tell them you don’t know the answer, your friends will get angry. But you’re a LAWYER, they will sputter, how could you not know?

I’ve decided there is the only one right answer when giving free legal advice. From now on, I will just smile and say, “It depends.”

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No Discharge For You! Bend Over For Access!

General

How’s this for legal reasoning? A judge refused a woman’s request for discharge of her student loans in part because she had been offered a job at a bank for $80,000. HOWEVER, because she had bad credit due to her loans, the bank withdrew the job offer. Unfortunately, the court didn’t find that it was “helpful to debtor’s case.”

Anyone who has a student loan had just better get used to bending over and really enjoying it, because the courts are not about to give anyone with a law degree a fresh start. Read it and weep:

[14] In this case, Debtor is a young, single woman with no dependents. She has an undergraduate degree and a law degree. She suffers from no physical or mental impairment to her ability to earn a living commensurate with her level of education. She has held several responsible positions as a paralegal for which she has been paid significant compensation. For example, in the position that she held at the time of trial, her annual salary was $51,500.00. According to her own testimony, a bank had offered her a position at an annual salary of $80,000.00.FN8

In short, Debtor is well educated, has acquired marketable skills in the legal field, enjoys good health and is not saddled with dependent care obligations that would prevent her from pursuing future employment. These attributes preclude her from proving that, for reasons beyond her control, she suffers from a total incapacity in the future to pay her student loan debts.
FN8.The fact that the bank withdrew the offer when Debtor revealed her personal financial situation is not helpful to Debtor’s case. Her financial situation is not a circumstance beyond her control.

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Toilets Need To Be Sued, But Not For a Grade

General

You have to admire this student’s balls, because you won’t be able to admire his brains. I never thought I would agree with a judgment for a law school, but this student seems to be reaching a bit here.

A student at one of our favorite New York toilets, NYLS, sued the school when he received a C in his first year writing course. In a move that can best be described as bowl jumping, he transferred from Hofstra to NYLS. He claimed that he was disadvantaged because he was a transfer student, and asked that the law school change its grading system from letter grades to a pass / fail system, similar to Yale Law. He must have thought he was transferring to NYU, not NYLS. Well, he had the first two letters right.

The C student also claimed NYLS didn’t act in good faith and fair dealing and thus breached an implied contract with him. I’ll agree that NYLS doesn’t act in good faith often, (if ever), but this seems a little ridiculous to me. Wonder what he would have done if they had given him a D?

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Massachusetts Toilet War

General

The law school toilet war in Massachusetts is getting ugly. Three toilet competitors, New England School of Law, Western New England Law School and Suffolk, have been spending large amounts of money lobbying against the potential UMass merger with Southern New England School of Law and have been accused by state Rep. John Quinn of “joining forces to fix the market.”

Well, toilet schools are big business, and our friends in Massachusetts aren’t going to let just any toilet into the cartel without a fight. It’s all about the money, never about education. Just keep printing those worthless diplomas and cashing those tuition checks.

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