[Below is an actual "Serial Writing Paper" submitted in law school to satisfy part of the professional writing requirement for my JD. Ah, law school. Remember law school? Is it any surprise how many lawyers end up twisted, pill-popping, alcoholics? Anyway, the professor was not amused by my work product, but that was no surprise, since I'm pretty sure he had his sense of humor surgically removed and replaced with a second, ah, sphincter.]
Topic: How do you envision your legal career in seven years? Be specific.
In seven years, I envision myself with a diverse practice including divorce law, property law, bankruptcy law, Fifth Amendment law, and prisoner-rights law, tort law, and appellate work.
After incurring significant debt to attend law school and graduating in the bottom quintile, I will take a legal job at a 35% cut in my current pay. I will work 80 hours per week as a junior associate, and my wife will be forced to work overtime and take part‑time jobs to help meet mortgage and student loan payments.
After several years of this, my wife’s health will fail and she will be forced to quit her full‑time job as well as one of her two part-time jobs. She will go on disability and quit the last part time job. In the meantime, I will increase my hours from 80 per week to 100 per week, in a valiant (if not vain) attempt to increase my income from 65% to 75% of the pre-law level.
On the verge of declaring bankruptcy, my lovely wife, having borne a greater burden than any woman should be asked to, will sue for divorce. Overwhelmed with guilt for having effectively abandoned her in my pursuit of a legal career and for having saddled her with a mountain of foolish debt, I will not only agree to the divorce, but to all the terms set forth by her lawyer. I will assume all the debt from student loans, credit cards, and the like. I will agree to the sale of the house, assigning all proceeds to her, agree to spousal maintenance of 50% of my gross income, and agree to guarantee health insurance. She will get the dog.
Bankruptcy court will generously give my creditors most of the rest.
Shortly after moving into a tiny efficiency apartment, and learning the wonders of shopping at the dollar store, my car will break down. The cost of the repairs will make it impossible to meet all my obligations of rent, debt payments, and spousal support, not to mention food, utilities, et cetera. Within a few months, utilities will be cut off, and a few months after that, the landlord will refuse to renew my lease.
After the eviction, I will live in my ’98 Beetle “for just a little while to save money”. The number of hours I work will increase from 100 to 140 per week, since I really do not have anywhere else to be anyway. The increase in my professional productivity will be offset by the deterioration in my personal hygiene.
After years of having taken mass transit in from the suburbs, I will discover that the cost of parking in the city is greater than rent and utilities combined. Parking on the street in an effort to make ends meet, one night, my car will be towed. I will be disoriented and dismayed when I awake in a South Philly impound lot, but it will slowly dawn on me that last night’s wild dream of being towed while sleeping in my car was not so wild after all.
The expense of the cab to and from the bank to withdraw the cash, along with the fees and penalties, will consume almost all of my available funds. Driving out of the lot, I will discover that my brakes have failed because the car had been towed with parking brake on. Unable to stop the car, I will drive into the impound lot administrative building. My car will be impounded. Again.
With all my changes of clothes behind a razor-wire-topped fence, locked in the Beatle, in South Philly, my coworkers will begin complaining to management of the odor wafting from my cube. I will no longer be invited to client meetings. About three weeks after the impoundment, as my hygiene declines, a senior partner will walk in on me late one night as I attempt to take a sponge bath in the executive wash room. I will be fired. (There are just some purposes to which a designer original, color-coordinated, 100% Egyptian cotton, terrycloth, executive face towel should never be put.) The next day I will assign all interest in my pension funds to my wife.
I will win the city’s tort claim against me for damage to the impound building, arguing that the city’s towing contractor owed a duty of care to release the parking brake before actually towing the car (or else to use a flat bed tow truck). I will, however, be held responsible for impound fees that exceed my net worth.
I will homestead a beautiful, undeveloped, open space at 16th and Vine boasting a superb view of the
I will be charged with interfering with a city worker in the lawful performance of his duties, with uttering terroristic threats, with assaulting a police officer, with resisting arrest, and with camping in a public park without a license. Utterly trumped up charges, mind you, but wickedly effective, for from within the bowels of the criminal justice system, my voice—if not unheard—is muffled. I will file appeal after appeal. I will file for writ of mandamus after writ of mandamus. And, even after I am disbarred, I will barter my legal expertise in exchange for my safety.
A little more than seven years after law school, I will be the consigliore of cell block “C”.
1 comment:
I still think that paper deserved an "A."
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