August 12, 2010

As I mentioned Friday, last week concluded my summer at Bet Tzedek. This week I am spending each weekday camped out at the Hotel Angeleno, where On-Campus Interviews are being held with a big law firms (oddly off campus). OCI is an interesting time—stressful, indeed, but I rather enjoy the barrage of 20-minute interviews. I only wish the conversations could last longer, and that a little less rode on them.

Finding work as a lawyer in 2010 is not as tough as being a journalist now, or even five years ago, but the economic downturn certainly reversed the fortunes of the meaty middle of law students at top schools who for a few years there were basically guaranteed a job at a big law firm. With it came big money, long hours and invaluable legal experience. By comparison, I’m interviewing with firms this week who are considering somewhere between 50 and 100 additional candidates for two or three summer spots. Summer spots that turn into first jobs when law school ends.

None of this is news to me. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article on the waning value of just having any J.D. That article focused on both the high numbers of attorneys and the over-saturation of the legal education market. Still, the top schools were, and largely remain, strong indicators of a promising legal career. You just might need a little longer to take off.

Employment prospects remain dim, though not as ugly as they were last year. (Making the NBA is still more of a long shot.) There are indications the tide is turning. For now, what we know is that the legal profession is rebounding—but how quickly?

Writing earlier this summer in The Jewish Journal, Idan Ivri, a fellow double Bruin licensed to practice in California, told some very familiar tales.

The gist of his article: Three 6 Mafia was right. Ivri writes:

The Web site Law Shucks determined that “2009 will go down as the worst year ever for law-firm layoffs,” based on its archive of press releases, leaked e-mails and news reports. The data show that 4,633 lawyers were let go last year from the group of high-powered, high-paying national firms loosely known as “Big Law.” And those numbers don’t even include lawyers whose firms dissolved completely, who were the victims of “stealth layoffs” masquerading as firings, or who were laid off by smaller firms. In other words, Law Shucks concluded that, in 2009, “More people were laid off by more firms than had been reported for all previous years combined.”

“Whenever you see layoffs like that, people are going to get very worried about their job future,” said Scott Schaefer, a professor of finance at the University of Utah. Schaefer and Stanford professor Paul Oyer published an academic study in March titled “What Drives Turnover and Layoffs at Large Law Firms?” based in part on the Law Shucks numbers. “Because of [the layoffs], this year’s law grads are facing a very difficult job market,” Schaefer said. “There are a lot of last year’s class, the year before, and even the year before that who are now competing with this year’s graduates.”

Much of that competition is rooted in the pre-recession Big Law salaries of 2007-2008, which peaked at $160,000 per year for beginning attorneys. The dream of earning that salary in one’s 20s or early 30s — and paying off student loans — was enough for many young lawyers to bear the 80-plus-hour weeks and the routine night and weekend work. Now, though, salaries anywhere near that range are exceedingly rare, and many students will simply settle for a job.

Before the recession, law students looking to earn the top salaries had to follow a straight and narrow but somewhat navigable road: The first step was to earn top grades at a good school in the first year. Next, students had to gain some legal experience — through public service or at a firm — during the first summer that, in combination with those excellent grades, would wow Big Law interviewers the following fall. Ideally, that would lead to a lucrative “summer associate” job at a firm the following year. Finally, in the fall of the third year, students would tensely wait for firms to extend offers of full-time employment to their best summer associates.

But today, even the most impressive law students with fantastic grades and advanced degrees are routinely eliminated every step of the way, making it ferociously difficult to stay on the path to Big Law.

Why was this a Jewish story? Well …—insert Jewish lawyer joke here. or just watch this video via Heeb, embedded after the jump.

Anyway, for all my friends participating in OCI now and over the coming weeks across the country, good luck and godspeed. Just save a job for me. Preferably not at the firm mentioned in the following video clip. I don’t think I’m, uh, qualified for that job.

How could I have missed this story? Oh yeah: OCI. Too bad. This story really has everything: churchgoers, strippers, Ohio.

Here we go:

Strip-club owner Tommy George rolled up to the church in his grabber-orange Dodge Challenger, drinking a Mountain Dew at 9 in the morning and smoking a cigarette he had just rolled himself.

Pastor Bill Dunfee stepped out of a tan Nissan Murano, clutching a Bible in one hand and his sermon in the other, a touch of spray holding his perfectly coiffed ‘do in place.

Inside the New Beginnings Ministries church, Dunfee’s worshippers wore polyester and pearls.

Outside, George’s strippers wore bikinis and belly rings.

Both men agree it is classic sinners vs. saints. But George says it is up to America to decide which is which and who is who.

Dunfee says God already has chosen.

“Tom George is a parasite, a man without judgment,” Dunfee said. “The word of Jesus Christ says you cannot share territory with the devil.”

The battle that has heretofore played out in the parking lot of George’s strip club – the Foxhole, a run-down, garage-like building at a Coshocton County crossroads called Newcastle – has shifted 7 miles east to Church Street.

Every weekend for the last four years, Dunfee and members of his ministry have stood watch over George’s joint, taking up residence in the right of way with signs, video cameras and bullhorns in hand. They videotape customers’ license plates and post them online, and they try to save the souls of anyone who comes and goes.

Ah, so the strippers protesting in the church parking lot is a little tit for tat.

This isn’t so much sinners vs. saints, at least not from the perspective of churchgoers, as it is good vs. evil. For one, everyone sins and none of these folks have been beatified. Not sure why the strip club owner thinks the American public has a dog in this fight. But an interesting story, nonetheless, and the kind that gets news editors salivating at the prospect of filling newspace with a quirky story that titillates while providing a little window into an odd suburban squabble.

Lots of somewhat cliche, and misused religious imagery sprinkled throughout detailed that paint a pretty vivid picture:

Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church.

It’s just that they’ve come wearing see-through shorts and toting Super Soakers.

In many ways, what Dunfee and his congregation have done reminds me of the work of XXXChurch and those spreading the gospel at porn conventions. I wrote a lot about that in 2007 after following Craig Gross for three very exhausting days at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, which I reflected on the following year as pornstar ministries seemed to be growing:

There is no question that patrons and performers at the porn convention are open to Veitch and XXXChurch and the handful of other ministries. But after watching these interactions, I wasn’t sure how effective they were. A lot of people listened, few people turned down the “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” Bibles handed out by XXXChurch, but they seemed to think it was more kitsch than Gospel.

Craig Gross, who runs XXXChurch, told me that people ask him all the time whether he feels like he is making a difference. And at one point he wasn’t so sure. In his book “The Dirty Little Secret,” he writes about a guy who he thought he had helped free from the bondage of porn—only to find the guy later fly off the deep end.

Some Christians are cynical of Gross and his colleagues, claiming they’re a bunch of perverts who want an excuse to cavort with unnaturally endowed women. In a documentary, “Missionary Positions,” one of the guys from XXXChurch (I can’t remember who) gets smacked by a more fire-and-brimstone preacher who thinks Gross is doing the work of the devil.

I don’t buy this. Certainly there are people who want out of the adult business. People like Keri Humble. And knowing that, these ministries just want to be there. Even if there is there.