Back home / Horse show / Diplomas

We just got back from the World Championship Horse show in Kentucky. The horse show is during the KY state fair which makes for some interesting problems but plenty to look at and do. We came home with one reserve championship (that is what people in the horse show world call second place – if you had any horse sense you would have know that – LOL I crack myself up sometimes – horse – sense – get it? – ok – not that funny)
Anyway, out of all that we showed we wound up with the one ribbon which is good because it is the world championship but bad because we expected to do better. We were gone for over a week. It is good to be at home again. It was fun, but I was tired of living out of a suitcase in a hotel. Try eating at a state fair everyday for a week and you will learn to appreciate a good old peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I am currently looking for a job in the legal community. Which is harder than it sounds for a law graduate who has not yet taken the bar exam. Most job search engines like yahoo or monster are of little help unless you have already passed the bar or live in a downtown metropolitan area. I am preparing to send out resumes by the pound and to emails by the dozens.

The school sent an email saying that our diplomas were ready. I drove down yesterday to pick them up. They are huge. We took them to get framed immediately. I chose a frame the size of a bed sheet with lots of matting. Crystal and her mom kind of frowned on it because it would have taken a whole steel reinforced wall to hold it up. I wound up with a more sensible size frame, it was only the size of pillow and will only require part of a regular wall to hold it up.
We got to pick up our diplomas early because the next graduation is not until the spring and after the bar exam results are back. I guess they wanted us to be able to hang something up on our office wall before then so that clients will actually believe that we went to law school.

Reciprocity

I learned about a nifty little thing called reciprocity yesterday. No, not the kind of reciprocity from one state bar to another, but the reciprocal relationship between two law school career services departments. It is not something that they like to talk about. But the information is readily available if you know that it is there.
Here is how it works:
You apply for reciprocity with another law school to get access to their job postings for grads. You do this if you are trying to get a job in a different area than where your law school is located. In return your law school gives access to one law student from the other school to your law school’s job bank. The access usually last for a few weeks at most.
There are two catches though.
1. Reciprocity is not available from August through December at most schools. This is because the schools are holding their on campus interviews during this time. The bad part is that this is when I am looking for a job. Oh well. I might go ahead and ask for reciprocity with a larger school here in Georgia if I still don’t have a job that I want in December.
2. The other catch is that the job postings are usually only available by going to the school. You don’t get to access them conveniently over the internet.

It is something to put on the back burner for now for me. But if you read this and know that you will be looking for a job away from your law school starting in the spring, you might can use the info to your benefit.

Working on the blog

I have not messed with the settings of the blog for a while and not even looked at my links. I had signed up for “blogroll” but didn’t much like it. I had originally signed up for it because I thought that it would improve web hits. Whatever.
Anyway, I had a terrible time deleting one of my links. It was a blog that at one time was pretty good, but apparently the site got too many hits and the guy sold out his blog to be a porn and link site or something. He had to go. Abracadabra – Alakazam – Alaka-delted.

I decided to take a look at my other links and the guys at those links were not really posting anything worth reading. I had linked the barely legal blog but once again it has stopped being interesting and funny. It turned into nothing more than the guy complaining about how hard it is to find a job with a law degree if you don’t want to practice law. At one time, barely legal was the premier law school blog and was sued by some big porn company that had the same name. At its prime the blog got more hits in one day than most blogs get in a year. They were getting a lot of attention. Not just from the “blogosphere” but from legitimate news sites as well. He could have done something really cool with that or went on writing. Instead it turned into a whine festival. I mean seriously dude, go back to school or something. The rest of us have law school loans to pay for. I can’t afford not to work in the legal field.
So, he got the deleto annoying mosquito treatment as well.
After that I just decided to delete them all and start over.

"FREE AT LAST. FREE AT LAST. GREAT GOD ALMIGHTY, WE ARE FREE AT LAST." - My First Week Out of Law School

So with the first week of no law school it seems amazingly similar to many of the weeks of law school. We are studying for the MPRE, the pre-bar exam ethics exam. The MPRE is this Friday. The test is multiple choice, 60 questions long, only 50 of which count, no one knows which 50 count, takes a little over 2 hours to take, and involves about 4 ½ hours of driving time to get there and back on Friday.

What else is going on:
We have about 2 weeks to get ready for the world Championship horse show in Louisville, KY. There is a lot of prep work that needs to be done before then. We need to be spending our evenings at the barn getting horses ready, but also need to spend plenty of time this week studying for the MPRE. So even though we are not in law school anymore, it is still haunting us. I spent most of the morning at the barn watching the farrier (the horse shoe guy) doing his job and running to the feed store for shavings to put down in the stalls. After seeing how much a barn operation takes to run, I think that most farmers would be well advised to get another job to pay for their farming hobby. The expenses are daily, and the profits are few and far between. This afternoon, I am on the internet looking for legal jobs and getting ready to start beating down doors putting out resumes. At this point it looks like I will have to take some sort of law clerky type position if I can find it or maybe just law office help for the time being. Bills don’t stop arriving just because you don’t have a job or a student loan.

Because the law school will not have another graduation until next May, we will be able to pick up our diplomas in a few weeks. The Diplomas, if they look like the ones they have used in the past, are about the size of a bed sheet and will cost an arm and a leg to frame. As much as I paid them, I hope the diploma is gold plated. Either way, that means that we have to make another 4 ½ hour trip to pick them up some time in the near future. I don’t really trust them to mail it. I am looking forward to staring at it for a while.