law school – LAWYERS & LIQUOR

So You Passed The Bar, Part 1 – Still Not A Lawyer Yet

Welcome back to Lawyers & Liquor, the website where I genuinely don’t care what you think as I ramble about legal stuff and try to impart a bit of wisdom to the Pampers-wearing pestilence that is the baby lawyer and the law student out there, as well as a healthy dose of spite for the experienced attorney who can find their way in the world. I’m the Boozy Barrister, and it’s Wednesday, October 10, 2018 as we enter the dark and depraved world of the recent bar admissions. To a lot of people out there that sat in a stuffy room during two to three days in July to take an exam, and then agonized through the months after, congratulations. You’re lawyers now. Or at least you will be as soon as someone administers the oath of office and character and fitness clears your baby-smooth bottoms for the practice of law. But don’t worry too much about that last point. If Michael Cohen can get a license to practice, so can you.

Instead, let’s take a moment and recognize that despite the fact you have a license to practice law, none of you really have any clue what you’re going to do next or how you’re going to do it. And you definitely lack the bare minimum of experience that turns the license to practice law into something other than a license to commit malpractice. If you don’t have any real-world experience, how are you going to get your first clients? Who’s going to trust a babyface lawyer who has only ever done exams. Even if you do get clients, do you know how to stay within data compliance and protection laws? Do you know where to go to hire Legal IT Services? Or are you going to get fined thousands for not securing your IT system? At the end of the day, without real experience, you might end up taking your client from a million dollar house on the hill to eating Vienna sausages and saltine crackers in the local trailer park, right? Right. Don’t even try that “getting offended” stuff with me here. You still have concepts like “truth” and “justice” ringing in your ears from all the idealistic law school professors that never once in their lives did a client intake. You, folks, are fresh-eyed and happy people. And I’m here to put an end to that right now.

So why don’t you little pricks settle into your high chairs and straighten the tie on your Baby’s First Real Suit as Boozy tells you some stuff you need to know in the real world of the day-to-day lawyer. Because, brothers and sisters, it’s about time someone did.

A Desert Devoid Of Aptitude: The Death of Arizona Summit Law School

You folks may remember not too long ago when I celebrated over the smoldering remains of Charlotte School of Law, a purely for profit enterprise of the wonderful bunch of bastards known as Infinilaw. Infinilaw, which is a for-profit “leader” in the world of shady law school education, is a wonderful set of functional assholes that looked at the model of training and educating the future gatekeepers of justice, tossed a guy with absolutely no legal training or experience in either the practice or education of law in charge, and then boldly went forward to bilk the fuck out of some students as it promised them the chance to become lawyers. It operated three law schools in the not-too-distant days of far off 2016, being the flagship Florida Coastal, the now-defunct and rotting Charlotte School of Law, and the amazingly inept Arizona Summit.

Now it operates, for all intents and purposes, one fucking law school. Because Arizona Summit, with less than two fucking weeks before the start of classes, sent a nice little email out to its students informing them that, no, Virginia, there is not a path to an accredited J.D. from them and therefore the school wasn’t going to hold any goddamn classes whatsoever starting in the fall of 2018.

Liable but not Culpable, Part 4: Lexplaining Negligence and the Reasonably Prudent Person

Good morning you incorrigible idiots that seem to think this should be an educational site and welcome to Lawyers & Liquor! I’m your host, the Boozy Barrister.

So we’ve spent a lot of time over the past week or so working on educating you slobbering shitstains on the face of the legal system about the concept of intent,mens rea, the differences between the criminal and civil legal systems, and generally just all this shit that you should already fucking know if you have a license to practice law anywhere but in your mind. Of course, the issue is that a lot of you don’t have a license to practice law, and are, for all intent and purposes, the Muggles of the legal world. While the rest of us stand around shouting shit like “Ex post facto!” and “Res Ipsa!” you motherfuckers just sort of sit there pounding your puds and staring blankly into the sun. So, to those of you who have to make a conscious effort to both walk and inhale at the same time, this Bud’s for you as we move into the last part of our four part series on the concept of “intent” and shit: the negligence standard.

Let’s…let’s just get this shit over with quickly, okay? I want to go back to talking about other shit now.

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Liable But Not Culpable: Lexplaining The Criminal and Civil Justice Systems, Part 1

It’s May! Well, it’s halfway through May, and so in my infinite wisdom and general niceness, because I’m simply one heck of a guy who cares about those lowly law students, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a bit of a primer on a key difference in law that most people don’t understand. Hell, I’ve met lawyers that don’t really understand it. I know that normal people who get accused of a crime can just hire a marietta lawyer to do all the work for them so they don’t need to know these technicalities but for a lawyer not to know the difference? That’s a red flag! It’s because the difference that we’re talking about here is the difference between criminal culpability and civil liability, and the difference between what criminal intent and civil intent are.

Have I gone long enough without cussing that it won’t show up on the article previews in social media? Thank God. Alright, listen, if you’re a lawyer and you don’t already know this, hand in your law license. There is literally no reason for you to be practicing law. No reason, whatsoever. This is some basic ass stuff, like, so basic we’re talking “pumpkin spice latte wearing ugg boots” levels of basic. There’s absolutely no reason a practicing attorney shouldn’t already be aware of this first-year-of-law-school mess, but it was requested by a reader that I dig into the difference between the two, and that’s what we’re going to do today: the difference between civil liability and criminal culpability.

But before I even start to talk about that, the difference in the state of mind needed and the types of stuff that happens, we gotta make sure the non-lawyers out there understand the difference between criminal and civil, just as much as the lawyers in helltown ohio do. And that means, of course, that we’re going to end up doing a Lexplanation (you like that? I like it. It’s a portmanteau of lex, the Latin for law, and explanation, the English for “talking slowly and loudly to those who don’t understand).

So, I don’t know guys, go get some coffee or something and see what Popehat is up to? He’s normally got some decent stuff on his site. I’ll be over here forcefeeding basic legal knowledge to muggles and walking malpractice suits.

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NCCU and the ABA – A Clash of Wills

OH HAPPY DAY!

So you guys may be familiar with my longstanding opinion that the ABA is something we could do without. It has, for generations now, served as a governing body without a profession to govern, choosing to suggest things and come up with resolutions regarding the practice of law that are entirely non-binding on attorneys. In short, the ABA is the government-that-never-was, dictating the standards and admissions of exactly 0 attorneys and offering nothing more than a series of possible discounts in the form of malpractice insurance and rental car agreements for the attorney who thinks it may mean something, someday. But, unfortunately, this lack of say has not extended to the law schools that educate the attorneys of our fair nation, and the ABA, as the accrediting body for these august institutions of assholery, has long maintained a stranglehold on the profession by governing where someone seeking to learn how big of a mistake lawyering is can go.

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