My client is finishing her 1L year. She’s bored.
“I study. Then I study some more. Then I go to sleep. Then I get up and study again. It’s the same for everyone.”
At least, I proposed, the subject matter was interesting.
She demurred. “Yeah, I guess…but – really? I mean…Property law? Contracts? Torts?”
Her demurrer was sustained. She had a point.
Maybe it’s your turn to demur. The subject matter of law school – law itself – not interesting!?? That’s unthinkable. It has to be the school’s fault – my client must be attending some fourth-tier degree mill, with sub-par teaching and a dull-witted student body…
But the school’s not at issue here. She’s attending one of the top places in the country. Not that it would make much difference, since every law school essentially teaches the same thing, first-tier or fourth-tier.
Then it must be her fault. If she doesn’t appreciate the study of law – if this Philistine isn’t drawn to the greatness of legal scholarship – she doesn’t deserve her seat at an exalted institution.
I’m not convinced. This young woman projects intelligence, and turns heart-felt-y and passionate discussing her real interest – international human rights law. Unlike most law students, she did an internship and reads books, so she knows what international human rights law is (even if, like most law students, she vastly over-estimates its significance.)
It’s possible things will get better next year, when she takes a course on international human rights law. On the other hand, law school courses have a way of making topics less interesting than they were before you took them.
Maybe the fault doesn’t lie with any particular school, or any particular student. Maybe it lies with the myths surrounding law school itself.
Let’s gather for a moment, and contemplate the inconceivable: Maybe law school is just…well…not that big a deal. Maybe it isn’t engrossing or life-altering or – much of anything. Maybe the whole schtick – law school as the turning point in a young lawyer’s existence – is oversold. The legal industry itself is a bubble recently popped. Perhaps the mystique surrounding law school is due for puncture.
Ask yourself – is the subject matter taught in law schools really so engrossing? Or were you taught to believe the subject matter taught in law schools is really so engrossing?
It would make sense, in the greater scheme of things, if the whole “law school experience” were massively over-hyped. Lawyers remain, after centuries of skill-honing, master bullshit artists – especially with regard to any matter touching upon their own significance. To judge from their own press, you’d think lawyers were free-lance philosophers rather than the guys who draft purchase agreements to keep holding corporations from paying taxes, or file minutiae-laden briefs to sustain Big Pharma’s eternal patent infringement battles.
Lawyers incline towards the hoity-toity the way heliotropes incline towards the sunny-sunny. Phrases such as “precise intellect,” “formidable legal mind” and “brilliant analytical prowess” get tossed about like so many croutons over a caesar.
I doubt accountants speak of a “formidable accounting intellect” or dentists praise one another for “brilliant dental prowess.” I hope not.
It follows logically that the legal world’s fetish for pretension trickles down to the law schools, and the law students themselves – who soak up all that pomposity and behave during their first year as though their cosmic entireties lay balanced each hour on a fulcrum between existential completeness and the barren void. They take it so seriously you want to smack them. No, the professor doesn’t want to stay late after lecture and argue some point of tort analysis. He wants to go home and play that new level of Angry Birds set in outer space, just like you should want to do. He’s only pretending he cares that much about tort stuff because that’s what law school is about – pretending law is the most fascinating thing in the entire world. Maintaining this illusion plays a key role in keeping law professors, and law schools, earning big bucks.
Remember the official schtick beaten into every law student’s cranium: Law school is where they re-make you. Law school is where you learn to think like a lawyer.
In case you were wondering, here is the formal definition of to think like a lawyer: verb, 1) to display a neurotic tendency to hostile, oppositional behavior; and/or 2) to obsess over unnecessary, pointless detail.
The extravagance of lawyer egotism is matched – if not exceeded – by lawyer humorlessness. The result is a professional edifice so laden with pretension that, if anyone so much as farted, the whole rig might tumble Earthward, accompanied by giggles.
For better or worse, in a room full of lawyers, no one could ever loosen up sufficiently to launch such blessed mirth. So, once again, The People’s Therapist steps into the breach – and does what he must.
Without further ado – and just in time for exams! – I present The People’s Therapist’s Three Key Rules to Surviving Law School…
Rule number one: avoid your classmates.
A 1L client refuses to so much as avail herself of the “study break” events planned by extracurricular groups at her school. Spending time with classmates pointlessly spikes her anxiety level.
“I’ll be chatting with the one friend who’s cool – shooting the breeze. Then some idiot from our section walks up and suddenly it’s like: Have you done your outline for Torts yet? Oh my God, do you think there’ll be a question on fault liability?”
Ignoring your classmates is an essential key to surviving law school. For starters, eschew “study groups.” Those other people will get you riled up and distracted, and they won’t help you do any better on the exam. And by the way – hello! – you’re competing against them. What’s the point of pretending you’re not?
Go home and study. To heck with those other people. Shun them like plague victims.
I had exactly one friend in law school. Later on, after spending time in the company of real live lawyers, I still had exactly one attorney friend and it was the same guy. That’s when it clicked, and all became clear.
(In the interests of receiving no more than my usual quota of hate mail, I’ll try to put this delicately.)
Lawyers, as a group, are pompous, uptight, miserable, or boring. That begins in law school.
(Of course you’re the exception, so yes, you can relax.)
Rule number two: use commercial outlines.
It’s that simple. One client, who attended a tippy-top school and earned lousy grades first year, told me his big mistake – embracing his professors’ snobbery against commercial outlines. He bought outlines second and third year and, predictably, his grades shot up. Unfortunately, no one cares about second and third year.
Law school is about first year. First year grades. That’s it. And that means memorizing commercial outlines from day one, then practicing essays until your fingers bleed.
The professors are charming and eccentric and amusing, but it’s rare to find one who can deliver a coherent lecture. More common are coots mumbling into their notes, or psychos who fetishize wasting class time tormenting students with the “Socratic method.” That’s another bit of schtick, where you call on people at random with confusing, arbitrary trivia questions and try to humiliate them until they cry. At least for the professor, it’s fun – and easier than preparing a lecture.
In terms of the content of the classes, law schools – all law schools – hit you with one thing – a pointless tsunami of legal doctrine. Doctrine, doctrine and more doctrine. More “three-pronged tests” than you can shake a three-pronged stick at.
For actual, practical legal skills, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Schools don’t teach that stuff. Neither does anyone else.
Happily, there’s nothing on Earth better-suited to the task of cramming an assload of pointless legal doctrine into your head than a commercial outline. They do the trick because that’s what they’re for.
A guy in my NYU section skipped lectures and crammed commercial outlines all semester. The following year he transferred to Yale. You can do it too! Just memorize everything, and practice those damned essays until you reflexively plop out something shiny and nice on command. If it’s a teensy bit shinier and nicer than what the people sitting next to you plop out, you’re golden.
(By the way – in case you’ve never contemplated the horror of grading those exams, an old friend of mine is a law professor, and he took me there. He sits on the floor with a big pile of the hideous things, dips into a few, divides them into A B and C piles, then keeps reading and sorting. The awful process takes weeks, is admittedly rather arbitrary, and the sheer drudgery of it almost justifies his bloated salary.)
If you want to act all holier-than-thou about using commercial outlines, I invite you to go ahead and read the sacred “cases” in your “casebook.” But be forewarned – the old ones were penned in Saxon dialect during the Bronze Age. I defy anyone to elucidate, without a commercial outline, what Marbury v. Madison is trying to say. Might as well be carved in stone with hieroglyphs.
(Of course, as an attorney, I am eminently qualified to discourse at length on the crucial role this seminal work of jurisprudence played in weaving the fabric of our democracy. But somehow I sense you’d rather I not.)
More recent cases remain dense, self-indulgent and circumlocutory. Of particular note are those super-annoying and utterly impenetrable “concur in part but dissent in part” Supreme Court decisions that make you want to pull your hair out trying to deduce the bottom line.
Buy an outline and save yourself the agita. Deciphering recent high court decisions is as fulfilling as trying to coax Antonin Scalia over his terror of homosexuals, or teach John Roberts how it feels to be poor. A pointless exercise.
Rule Number Three: Don’t kid yourself this is either a big deal, or going to be a lot of fun.
It’s isn’t and it isn’t. The only thing that matters to anyone in law school – including you – is your grades. Each semester amounts to a waiting period before you take exams.
A client told me he could strangle the Supreme Court Justice who advised his class (at a hot-shot law school): “Grades don’t matter anymore. You’re here. Now you can relax.”
Doh! He landed at the bottom third of his class and is still looking for a job.
Don’t fool yourself. It’s all about grades – which means it’s all about exams – and the difference between an A and a B on a law school exam can be measured under an electron scanning microscope. So good luck.
As for the material itself – there are two kinds of law students.
If you cherish and adore Civ Pro – if the subtle distinctions between subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction ignite your mind with radiant epiphanies – then kudos to you. Maybe you were born to be a lawyer.
For the rest of us, Con Law is the most interesting course, first, because there isn’t much competition – Torts, anyone? – and second, because Con Law boils down to a self-gratifying debate over values disguised as an intellectual debate over legalities. Here’s the big insight: In any Con Law case that you actually care about, Republican judges vote one way and Democrat judges vote the other way. That’s why elections matter. The rest is so much pontificating.
Con Law isn’t merely bogus – it’s also useless. It might make you feel like a better, more educated citizen, and perhaps that’s a legitimate purpose. Most Americans don’t realize there is a Constitution, or know what one is – but – as a nation – we all adore pondering the meaning of liberty. I suppose the few of us with the money to purchase a higher education ought to possess a smattering of familiarity with the foundational documents.
On the other hand, the staggering loans you’re taking out to pay for that education are real – and you’ll never get paid for patriotic navel-gazing. Maybe half a dozen times per year, a law suit actually raises an issue in the US Constitution – something like gay marriage. Then it gets voted down along party lines, and that’s that. The chances that you’ll ever litigate an issue under the First Amendment parallel the chances that you’ll win the Mega Millions – or that my client will wield the authority of international human rights law to wipe evil dictators off the globe. Not gonna happen.
You study Con Law because it’s part of the schtick – the law school gestalt. You play along and savor the ambience of hushed libraries and leather-bound tomes. The exam, and your grades, are all that matters. Then passing the bar. Then year after year after year after year in hell, paying loans.
If you’re attending Yale, you might spend third year in a seminar with a federal circuit judge, mulling “Law and the Experimental Films of Southeast Asia.” One client – a Yale grad in her 60’s – experienced paroxysms of nostalgia recalling a long-ago seminar on the “history and philosophical underpinnings of injunctions.” Yes, an entire semester plumbing the etiology, phenomenology and epistemology of injunctions.
Whatevers. It’s still law. It’s still a bit boring, and a bit pointless. You’re not splitting the atom – you’re fussing over fine distinctions, splitting hairs, exhausting exhausted arguments.
I invite you to savor a lively discussion of injunctions – among yourselves – while I grab a beer from the fridge and watch reruns of “Fashion Police.”
Law school is oversold – the law-school/law-firm establishment makes it out to be a life-altering peak experience. It’s not. The intellectual challenge is more like philosophy lite. You might find it rather ho-hum. If you do, you’ll be following in the well-worn footsteps of those who went before.
Basically, it’s college all over again – but less fun.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning
I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy
(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)
The People's Therapist 
“I don’t think there’s anyone back there.”
Once again, you speak the truth. (And this from someone who actually enjoyed law school).
It is all because of TV. People are attracted to the field of law especially those who have no clue about what they want to do in life without knowing what is really involved. Even the International Human Rights law is full of bureaucracy, political games and yes worst of all injustice.
“In case you were wondering, here is the formal definition of to think like a lawyer: verb, 1) to display a neurotic tendency to hostile, oppositional behavior; and/or 2) to obsess over unnecessary, pointless detail.”
I disagree with the second “prong” of thinking like a lawyer. Thinking like a lawyer is the exact opposite: the ability and skill to separate what is important from what is not important, and distilling sometimes complex legal principles into easy to digest rules.
It is true that in the daily practice of law you will encounter many times of attorneys bickering over the placement of commas, or the use of a certain word. But that is not what law schools teach students in thinking like a lawyer.
On a more global note, I am having a hard time remembering when I read a positive word in this blog. I like this blog, but it is the law school/law practice equivalent to Rush Limbaugh on conservative radio. It is the most extreme (though thoughtful) opinion on one side of the spectrum. Well, I’m not sure how thoughtful Rush is. But you get the point.
Everyone reading this blog must remember, this is the opinion of one person — though of course not alone – who went to big time schools, worked in big law, in New York, burned out in a relatively short amount of time, and then moved careers and almost seems to have a dedicated cause to ending the psychological black hole of law school and law practice. Keep that in mind, and this blog is useful.
Anyways, I think the author of this blog serves a great purpose in being a therapist and helps people, on a deeper level, much more than lawyers do on a daily basis. In fact, I think he has genuinely dedicated his profession to making peoples’ lives happier. And that is awesome. But I do think that those in the law who embrace the true, intended meaning of the role as “counselor” can have a similar affect on people.
Agree with article.
When I say things like this to my classmates, having been correctly educated in the many ways of the law school bullshit mill by two practicing attorneys before I went to law school, people look at me like a heretic. I laugh and go back to browsing the internet during class before I go home to study a perfect outline, prepared by someone else.
Who’s got the paid internship *****?
You are awesome. All true.
I agree with Larry that this is but one side of the coin.
But I have to say I followed (sometimes unintentionally) Will’s three rules, and I fared very well in law school (and am happily practicing in a stress-free small firm).
I think his points are important for people who want to go to law school but haven’t put any serious thought into the subject matter they’re pursuing.
I guess I should have also mentioned I was married and lived an hour way from my law school. I highly recommend the former. I guarantee your spouse will not get as worked up about Civ Pro outlines as your classmates.
Sure, avoid classmates. Get out of the law library. But saying that study groups are only increase stress wasn’t true for me. My study groups consisted of people (lawyers, even!) that I’m still friends with to this day. Find good people to help you get through.
I think your last sentence really nails it. It’s all about finding the people you relate to, who are helpful and won’t drive you nuts. Personally, I hated study groups, but I still found “my people” which made the experience far more bearable. Some tips here: http://thegirlsguidetolawschool.com/08/surviving-law-school-find-your-people/.
And, for the panicking law students out there, here’s a (I think) relatively amusing account of my almost disastrous second semester of law school, whereby I have a total breakdown, refuse to go to class or do the reading, and manage to pull things together for exams anyway: http://thegirlsguidetolawschool.com/04/the-story-of-my-almost-disastrous-second-semester-of-law-school/.
Will’s totally right, it doesn’t have to be that hard! You can do very little work and get okay grades, if you work strategically.
Law school was like sitting poolside with a mixed drink. How could it possibly cause you to have a “total breakdown”?
Wow, you are really trolling every law-related board on the net trying to get people to read your ridiculous site, aren’t you?
My study group was horrible. I mean, I loved them as friends and they were great people, but I found the study group to consist of nothing more than their complete intellectual masturbation and my waste of time.
Fortunately, we went our separate ways as a group, remained friends, they continued to focus on non-issues, and I got better grades because, apparently, the professors couldn’t figure out what they were talking about, either.
Never had a study group – second tier law school back in the day and used commercial outlines (Legalines worked wonders) – but used to sneak out of boring lectures with similarly minded folk to play pinball in the student lounge.
Definitely agree with this one. Law school is way overrated. Lawyers like to pretend it’s meaningful and symbolic, and law schools like to oversell themselves, but then every profession overestimates its rites of passage and every institution likes to oversell itself.
Law school did not teach me to “think like a lawyer.” I was already awfully contrarian, stubborn and skeptical. Actually, if I followed their example I’d probably be a less effective lawyer and a more effective kindergarten teacher. They just taught me the finer points of concepts almost anybody could grasp. The major exception is my many tax courses, which do actually impart practical knowledge that would be unwieldy to accumulate without some sort of guidance.
And I think my longtime partner helps me out here. She’s great in general, since we’re able to get along so well and just hang and talk for hours on end, but it’s also fun not having to be around law students too much, since they are a surprisingly awkward bunch (though less awkward than the med students). It would be terrible to spend all my time around awkward hypercritical contrarians like me.
Also, anybody who just really wants to study law out of pure curiosity (an excuse parroted by thousands of 0Ls awaiting admission decisions) can do the lion’s share by reading Wikipedia and some law professor blogs. I did plenty of that years before law school, and I enjoyed it and learned a lot – as could anybody with the inclination and an Internet connection. Law school is just a hurdle to jump through to be a lawyer.
As a 1L (back in 1974), I felt the same way. I thought then (and still think) that law schools are pretentious trade schools. However, I’m still a lawyer, and a generally happy one. My part-time job with a small firm made the difference. It taught me that law may be boring, but clients are interesting. Law is simply a tool with which to solve client’s problems. Simple, but enough.
This is gospel.
Will, great post.
Our professors and students have a great sense of humor and actually do enjoy the law. Surprising the guy with one friend didn’t like it.
You should make sure you “moderate” out all the comments that you don’t like.
15 mins later…woohoo..maybe consider moderating after the posts like everybody else on the internet
I agree with the premise that law school is mostly pointless (we should go back to apprenticeships).
I strongly disagree with the “first rule.” Yes, there were plenty of kids I had no interest in being around at my law school, but I also came out of those three years with 6-7 great friends. Similarly, shunning your fellow students who are going through the same things seems counterproductive. Going it alone is a bad idea. Yeah, sometimes one asshole is going to bring up annoying topics, but just ignore him/her.
I don’t know why that client is working so hard though. I loved law school for the most part. You chill with a relaxed schedule for the first two months of each semester and then hunker down for the last month of each. It was a more intense version of college, but preferable to working a 9-5 or 9-9.
While I was pretty bored throughout property class, I think it was important to at least gain a basic understanding of many different areas of law before I decided to focus on my specific interests during the later years.
So let me get this straight. Through three years of law school and a few (2? ish?) years of practice, you made one friend, and you’ve decided the problem is with the rest of the world?
I’m not saying law school is the answer for everyone, everywhere, but Jesus, man, calm down.
[…] –The People’s Therapist, https://thepeoplestherapist.com/2012/04/25/oversold/ […]
Seriously, is this psychotherapy? What do you actually do for your clients? I wonder if this editorializing is truly beneficial to anyone.
Willster — this is a painfully accurate description of law school… It takes a lot of bright, idealistic young folks and ruins them – makes them cynical and broke w/ student loans.
And law profs are the biggest pieces of shit on earth — creeps that get their jollies out of yelling at a new 1Ls every year about the same fucking case they’ve assigned every year for 20+ years. (Who hasn’t seen a Contracts professor try to grill some poor 23-year old over what was the cargo on the ship in In re Peerless.) And the punch line is that none of that crap is on their exams…
You’ve probably already done so, but if not, you should read some Seligman (esteemed psychologist from Penn)….. He goes into great detail in one of his books about why lawyers have more mental illness than the general population… Several reasons, but one is that law is the ONLY profession on earth that actually rewards pessimism. I believe another is touched on in your post — the complete fetish towards pretense…. At least I think.. haven’t read that stuff in a while….
Hahaha! Will, I truly loved that post (well written and made me laugh) but I completely and utterly disagree with you! I loved law school, I loved studying most of those obscure and difficult topics, the more technical the better. The only two topics I didn’t particularly enjoy were constitutional and administrative law and equity & trust.
What really makes my brain explode is that a lot of people realise in their first year of law school that the actual topic of law bores them and they still go on for another two years. Seriously, why? I recently had what I consider to be a crazy conversation with an American student where, when she learnt, I was a lawyer (UK) started chatting to me. She asked me what I thought of law in general and practice in particular. I explained that I loved studying it but that practice turned out to be less exciting than what I had envisaged. She then proceeded to explain to me how horrible she found the study of law and that her summer internship had terrified her. So I asked her why it was she was continuing since she was only 1L. Surely if she hated both the study and practice of law why go on for another two years? Her answer: “Oh I’ve started now, I should finish”… Surely at that point people have only got themselves to blame if they’re unhappy.
Finally, I’m still puzzled as to why American students don’t question the fact that law is a graduate degree (therefore making it doubly expensive). We study law at undergraduate level and still make very decent lawyers…
SO TRUE!!!!
But rule one should be: save yourself while you can by getting out asap. Run and don’t look back!
Anytime I meet someone who wants to go to law school I take as much time as I can to talk them out of it. Any other job will lead to a much happier life. Three different legal jobs (private practice, child welfare work, and criminal prosecution) in three years have led me to believe that law school was a big mistake.
I believe you have many valid criticisms of law, law school, and the legal profession. It bothers me, however, in the universal way in which you cast it. For example, you describe law school as abjectly boring and dismiss many legal arguments as “over fine distinctions, splitting hairs, exhausting exhausted arguments.” First, those “fine distinctions” matter. They assist in reaching decisions that affect people’s lives. And no, I’m not referring to Constitutional Law, but real life disputes involving injuries, crimes, and the property of people. This stuff matters because it affects people’s lives.
More importantly for your exercise, maybe YOU find law boring. And that’s fine. It is not for everyone. And I don’t mean that in the sense that not everyone is capable of it. I mean that in the sense that not everyone likes what I like. I like being a lawyer. I find my work to be interesting, gratifying, and intellectually stimulating. But I probably wouldn’t like being a therapist anymore than you like being a lawyer. This shouldn’t be a criticism of either you, me, or our respective professions, but rather simply an acknowledge that different people require different things in a fulfilling career.
Again, I agree with many of your criticisms. Lawyers can be pompous, and law school (more than being an actual lawyer, I find) can get caught up in quite a bit of dochue-bagery. But law school, and the profession itself, is what you make of it. If you treat law school as a real learning experience, I found that you can get something out of it and even make a lot of great friends along the way. If you treat it like some soul-sucking warehouse where you go for three years, then that’s exactly what you’ll get. (I should know, I did it both ways). Even then, though, perhaps it’s more about “fit.” Some people should be lawyers. Some people shouldn’t be. And it has nothing to do with abilities or intelligence. It has to do with “fit,” and what makes a person happy. Different strokes for different folks.
I wish you would acknowledge this more in your writing because you do have a valid message to get across, but I fear that sometimes it is lost in the rhetoric.
Awesome read, Will! Learning the law is a lot like memorizing the rules to dungeons and dragons type overcomplicated board game that takes 16 hours to play, like RuneWars or Dune. I read things so closely, in fact, that the more I studied, the worse I did. Law school is really about NOT thinking, and even moreso the bar exam! It’s not really about memorizing either. It’s about getting good outlines, and for the open note exams, having good search terms or knowing where to put the tabs.
This post makes me think of two episodes from when I was a law student.
I remember one evening when I was a 1L spending a whole night banging my head against the wall trying to understand some dull, arcane, frustrating aspect of Civil Procedure in my school library. My classmates and I had spent so much time agonizing over and investing a great deal of importance in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and questions of jurisdiction, and venue, and whatever, and our understanding of the same. Feeling drained, I decided to take a walk to a grassy, empty area on campus and look at the stars. I remember looking at the Pleiades and thinking to myself, “there’s an entire universe out there, and in the overwhelmingly vast expanse of it, Rule 12(b) means absolutely nothing.” I found myself strangely comforted by this thought. Now, years later having escaped the practice of law, this seems obvious and banal, but at the time, it felt very subversive and liberating. I felt like I was, in a small way, deflating this image I had created for myself as a naive young law student of law being the the most important thing ever.
Another memory I have is of interviewing for my 2L summer associate position. I was interviewing at a big law firm full of not-terribly-pleasant people. I had prepared a more or less standard slate of canned answers to anticipated interview questions, but one associate at the firm who was interviewing me kept hammering me with the “why do you want to practice law?” question. I gave the standard set of canned answers like, “I like the intellectual challenge!” and “I liked that job I had one summer in college working as an intern at a law firm!” Unlike other interviewers who would move on from answers like that, she kept probing, asking “but how does that make you actually want to be a lawyer?” I ultimately didn’t have an answer that satisfied her, and I gained the palpable sense by the conclusion of the interview that I had not made the best impression. At the time, I thought she was just being a jerk, but reflecting on that now, she saw right through me for who I was – someone who wandered into law school because it was the supposedly safe default option for someone who was good at school, not someone who was ready, willing, or able to cope with the rigors, stresses, and sleep deprivation of big law. I’m sure she played a substantial role in the firm’s decision not to hire me as a summer associate. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have hired me then either.
“Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have hired me then either.”
Yep, I must have been a great bullshitter myself as I did get offers and also had myself convinced that I wanted to practice. Or in the late 1990s firms were so desperate for bodies that the didn’t care. Likely both.