Free Republic

I think Harry Markopolos would make an excellent SEC charimen, and posted my thoughts on same:

http://bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/why-coffee-trashed-harry/

Check out this blog post on the evils of law school & ABA president Carolyn Lamm, buddy of 3rd world dictators:

bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com

Bernake is a joke. Remember the 60 minutes interview with Steve “Softball” Croft a few months ago? When Croft asked him why regualr American taxpayers should bail out Wall St bankers Ben said:

“If your neighbor smokes in bed and starts his house on fire, do you want the fire dept to come or would you rather the whole house burn down?” Softball Steve then changed topics.

The proper response that a REAL journalist would’ve asked is:

“Gee Ben, what if my neighbor wasn’t smoking in bed, but instead dumping gasoline on his house to burn it down and collect the insurance money? Isn’t that perhaps a better anaolgy? Shouldn’t arsonists go to prison instead of collecting money for the havoc they’ve wreaked?”

This bailout/TARP/ Fed secret $$$ printing is a disaster. All of the big banks should’ve been left to fail, the shareholders wiped out, and the buildings/assets/office equipment liquidated at a fire sale. Then the perps should’ve done serious prison time. Make no mistake, we’re back in moral hazard land again and when the CRE and alt-arm loans start resetting (as they are now) we’ll be looking at Bailout 2.0.

Fact is, we overbuilt residential and CRE to an absurd extent and the values of most of these properties will NEVER recover to anything close to what was expected. This economy will continue worsening and by 2012 we’ll be in the iron grip of what trends seer Gerald Celente calls the “Greatest Depression.”

Thanks gang, glad you’re enjoying the blog. Please fwd my blog’s link to ANYONE & EVERYONE you know who may be considering law school.

Also, please write your congressman/senators and tell them to withdraw Stafford funding for law school. You taxpayers are picking up the tab for the billions in law student loans that are NEVER getting paid back!

bigdebtsmalllaw.wordpress.com

An industry, not a profession. That’s our motto here at Big Debt, Small Law. What legal practice has been morphing into for the past 20 years certainly bears little resemblance to the halcyon “profession of ideals” that Webster, Lincoln, and Darrow once practiced. Rather, it’s degenerated into a money-grubbing, paper-churning farce, where the “winners” walk away with millions and the “losers” are packed elbow-to-elbow in sunless boiler rooms and forced to work sweatshop hours for slave wages, under conditions that often shock the conscience. We here feel that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and aim to shine our spotlight on the festering petri-dish that this former profession has lately become. Without further adieu:

Much noise is made about “ethics” in the hallowed halls of legal academia. All ABA schools require mandatory classes in professional responsibility, empower “honor councils” of fellow students, and even devote an entire examination (the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam) to the subject. A hapless One L caught writing 0.0009 seconds after time is called may be summarily hauled before a dean, dressed down, and have permanent doubt cast upon their moral fitness for entry into this exalted industry. Some even need to retain lawyers to “explain” these heinous transgressions to the Character and Fitness Committees of their respective state bars three years hence.

Yet is seems that the law schools themselves may need a refresher course when it comes to ethics and honesty. That same crowned dean who sits regally in judgment of his students is held to a far different standard in the discharge of his own duties. He can supply patently false employment statistics to US News and molest salary data like a sleep-over party at the old Neverland Ranch, yet encounter nary a peep of admonition from his peers. He may install recent grads in temp assignments to fudge employment stats, hound the few “success stories” for salary data while blindly ignoring the struggling also-rans, and publish slick admissions brochures that brazenly broadcast these self-serving lies. The stakes are high, after all: a rise of a few rankings slots in US News can mean big bonus bucks for the perpetrators of this fraud and a lifetime of crushing debt for the victims of same.

This double standard is not only the height of hypocrisy; it is downright wrong. If publicly traded companies engaged in the type of statistical chicanery and elastic truth-stretching that the legal education racket routinely engages in, newspapers would scream with the scandal. Heads would roll. Lest we forget, young people are borrowing well into six-figures of non-dischargeable debt based on patently bogus statistics and purely false promises. As we write, third and fourth tier law schools regularly list “average” starting salaries in the mid 80s, and report employment numbers that bear scant relationship to reality. Law student lemmings are led down the Yellow Brick Road of this fantasy-plagued scam, only to find the sorcerer at the end is a grizzled old clown behind a thin curtain, working some smoke and mirrors. Today’s law school deans are the modern day “Wizards of Oz.” They know full well (perhaps better than anyone) the gruesome market and long-shot odds that their grads will soon face, yet allow personal greed to trump all tenets of honesty and fair disclosure. And no, you can’t get away with blaming the “recession” for the struggles of your grads. Not here. We graduated in 2005, at the zenith of American economic hegemony, and faced a market not significantly different from what exists today. The truth is this: Small firms in most US markets pay south of 50 K, offer minimal (if any) health benefits, and provide baptism by fire “training” at the expense of clients who can ill afford it. A brief Digression:

I’m not just a click monkey or self-entitled malcontent. No, I haven’t spent my entire legal career, as it were, in the sub-basements of Biglaw. In fact, I worked sixty-hour weeks for two years as an associate at one of the most infamous personal-injury boiler rooms on the island of Manhattan, out there daily in the trenches of “practice.” My starting salary from a solid 2nd tier school, top 1/3 of the class (and top 15% after first year) was a whopping 45 K, with a Third World health plan to which I contributed $200 a month. I have taken and defended over 200 depositions, picked 14 juries first-chair (and taken two of these turds thru to verdict by myself with one 21 K win), and appeared in NYC Supreme and Civil Courts to argue countless motions and other papers more times than I can count. One would think that this “experience” would have some serious value, right?

Dead wrong. First off, the “trial experience” scam. For starters, about 0.0000001% of shitlaw fender-bender cases ever get as far as trial. Under NY’s tough “threshold” law, most accident lawsuits are dismissed outright for failure to state a “serious injury” under NY Insurance Law 5101(d). The few “winners” with significant injuries (broken bones, paralysis, etc) usually settle long before trial since most of the time the insurance policies are but a mere pittance (25 K state minimum or less). Much is read about 18 million dollar verdicts, and pre-law lemmings get excited doing the math, but the harsh reality is that you can’t take what folks don’t have. Your client could have a broken neck with halo traction and spinal fusion surgery, but if the car that struck him carried a 25 K policy with Allstate and the defendant is a Haitian cabdriver who lives in a cardboard box, I wish you good luck in collecting said judgment. And even getting access to these gutter cases is tough: most rinky-dink PI lawyers engage in criminal “kickback” arrangements where the case is referred by a “medical mill” that staged said accident and then engaged in bogus treatment to rip off the no-fault system before selling the PI lawyer the “injury” part of the case on a points-kickback system. You won’t learn this in One L torts, but after about five minutes in actual practice it will all start to make sense. The tiny handful of decent, legitimate cases usually go to firms with six-figure advertising budgets, not struggling recent grads. Sadly, most new “shingle hangers” will be quickly hung out to dry.

I’m also sick of hearing all the lectures about “building experience” in these 45 K gutter jobs. News bulletin: my landlord doesn’t accept “experience points” in lieu of rent payments. Sallie Mae likewise deemed my experience points non-negotiable when proffered to pay my loans. So saddled with debt are today’s grads that the salaries offered by small-law are simply impossible to survive on even if one wanted to try. And the “experience” gained from shitlaw just leads to more dead-end shitlaw at miniscule salary increases. In insurance defense, one can metaphorically “lateral” from McDonald’s to Burger King, but you ain’t gonna be chef at Waldorf anytime soon. There’s an endless supply of losers with the “experience” to cut n’ paste this low-end garbage and show up in kangaroo court to bicker over these turd cases. Thus, huge firms like Sullivan can walk into the middle of a doc review project (as they did recently) and cut all the coder’s pay by $2 an hour knowing that no one will leave. There’s nowhere else to go. That $2 may not mean much to these repulsive pigs, but to many recent grads it’s an electric bill payment or student loan that now has to enter forbearance. In a 160 hour month it’s $320 before taxes, after all. Multiplied by all the coders in that sewer, the partners can treat themselves to an extra round of golf or new drapes for the mansions in Greenwich.

And trials aside, the rest of the “court appearance experience” in injury cases are a complete joke. Preliminary and status conferences are just ways to waste time, and all one does is fill out carbon-paper stips that set deposition dates and other filing deadlines. A lobotomized circus chimp could do as well as most newbie law grads in this endeavor. One notorious insurance defense firm actually sent one of those tuxedo-clad monkeys that you can rent for kid’s birthday parties to a status conference once on a trip and fall matter. The judge didn’t even notice as the puckish primate honked his tin horn and hurled feces at the other shit-lawyers in the bullpen. I think the little fellow may have been a NYLS grad, but I’m not positive. Last I saw of him he was supplementing his pathetic insurance-defense income by playing a miniature accordion in the L train station on First Avenue.

As evidenced by the above, that’s why most personal injury & insurance defense mills in NYC pay 40 K or less to new grads (and the rest just cheat and send secretaries or paras to court to sign the “toilet paper” stips that pass for pleadings in this gutter area of law). Go ahead and scan NYC craigslist’s “legal services” section right now and count the hordes of older lawyers begging for per-diem work at $50 an appearance. Some of them will even mow your lawn and perform other non-legal work on the side. All new grads should pay a visit to the “courtrooms” of personal injury before plunking down the seat deposit. Just swing by CCP on the first floor of King’s Supreme or the dreaded landlord-tenant part over on Livingston Street. “Lawyers” who reek of cheap booze and look like they woke up on a subway grate haggle and bicker over $125 cases and, when it gets too loud, the court officer resorts to hammering a stapler inside a metal trashcan to get everyone to quiet down. Usually the air conditioner is broken. The elevators are as packed as a Springsteen concert and contain more disease-causing microbes than a biological warfare lab. The Republic of Myanmar’s court proceedings probably unfold with more dignity and decorum than what is seen in King’s “Un-Civil” Court on a daily basis.

Here in 2009, America’s legal system is the laughingstock of the entire Western world. From the infamous McDonald’s cup of coffee case to the Sarb-Ox sideshow to the asleep at the switch SEC, no other nation subscribes to the parasitic, money-sucking, time-wasting circus that is “law” in the U.S. It’s really downright comical. An example: From my first week of law school, I’ve often dreamt of being a “fly on the wall” at a meeting of the Bluebook committee. Those august Harvard 3 L’s and the tweed jacket profs who guide them, bereft of their briar pipes thanks to politically correct “smoking bans” which they themselves have championed. One can hardly imagine the heated debates about whether to underline punctuation marks in case citations or establish the font size employed when quoting King’s Bench cases from the fourteenth century. What a “war room” it must be! These nerds make Steve Urkel look like George Clooney. Really, how could mankind possibly conceive of a more pointless, boring, and all-around worthless waste of time? And let’s not kid ourselves, folks: behind this pedantic, tedious time-wasting is the sad realization that 99.98% of this shit is just totally fucking pointless. It’s like a mania that borders on autism: one could glean as much from memorizing a White Pages phone directory a la Rain Man as studying for the MBE or reading the Bluebook.

Most hilarious is the new “Legal Rebels” campaign spawned by the American Biglaw Association (ABA). Cry me a river for the recently laid-off AmLaw crew and their well-padded “plight.” Here’s a newsflash assholes: you’re about as “rebellious” as a 19 year old lesbian women’s studies major at Barnard pedaling her bicycle to a Natalie Merchant concert. Remember the Happy Days episode when Ralph Malph borrowed Fonzie’s leather jacket to impress a chick? It didn’t work for him, did it? You were never cool and certainly never “rebels,” as evidenced by your inaugural video of a twitchy 37 year-old geek who needs a hairpiece reading his “manifesto” straight into the camera, Unabomber style. Your “rule of law” plank and its hallowed relationship to civilized society is especially side-splitting! Surely you jest? I’m sure we’d quickly revert to cave-dwelling and pissing in chamber pots without such legal chestnuts as UCC-§2-207 and ERISA and the rest of the cash-sapping, needlessly complex, paper-pushing plagues that this parasitic joke of an industry extracts from its hosts.

We here at Big Debt are launching a quiet rebellion. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, we simply “prefer not to.” We prefer not be crammed elbow to elbow in document review gulags for less money than an ex-con gets paid to stamp holes in sheet metal. We prefer not to run around toilet courts and haggle over $500 whiplash cases for 45 K a year and no health benefits. Our sole purpose is to dissuade, deter and prevent more hapless lemmings from repeating the mistake of law school. Law has no rewards. Instead of pots of gold, you’ll find only piles of shit.

Law is 4 Losers, August 2009

I checked the federal sentencing guidlines for Scammarano’s crime- he is looking at 27-33 YEARS in the federal joint. He better start singing real quick. As he is an elected offical and there were miltiple bribes, this elevates it to a Level 18 offense for sentencing. This is some really serious stuff. And judging by the tapes, they have him nailed dead to rights. No jury in the world is letting this guy off, esp. since he’s an election law lawyer and not some naive layperson. He knew exactly what he was doing, and they have the tapes to prove it.

He gave a press conference at noon and apparently is going Blogoivich on everyone, hanging on to power to the bitter end. What a complete and utter creep. I can’t wait to see how this plays out. He is a vile, obnoxious, egomaniac jerk from a comical toilet of a law school. Seton Hall was full of creeps like him.

And is there any real doubt that he stole this election? Didn’t he win the runoff when a “forgotten” box of like 700 absentee ballots was found in a broom closet or something? He’s gonna have to start naming names to shave some time off that sentence- this guy is no Madoff, he’s only 32 years old and looking to spend nearly a lifetime in prison. Forget entrapment or any other BS defense: i’m a lawyer myself and that defense is totally inapplicable here. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on and he knows it. This is the FBI, folks, not some clown NJ cop squad. The Federal boys dot their eyes and cross their T’s. They don’t go hauling mayors out of their office in cuffs if the case isn’t a 100% slam dunk. And as an attorney myself, I can tell you that Petey is as screwed as it gets. How dumb is this hair-gelled Hoboken meathead? Did the CW even wear a wire, or did he just hold the microphone right up to Petey’s lips!ROTFL!

How much you wanna bet that the boiler room law firm he worked at is knee-deep in this cesspool too? Even if he talks his way down to a 5 or 10 year sentence, he will certainly be disbarred (any felony plea or conviction in NJ is automatic grounds for disbarrment). His law license will be gone and no one but a fast food restaurant is ever going to employ him again. He’ll be ineligble for any other professional licenses for life: Series 7, realtor, CPA, etc. Amazing that someone would sell their freedom and career so cheaply.

There will be no parsing words and wriggling around like Clintoon when a jury of working class Hudson County folks hear this cocky young lawyer on tape selling them down the river for a pitiful amount of $$$. Remember, this case will be brought by the US Attorneys, who are the absolute best litigators in the country. You simply cannot belive how good these lawyers are, esp. when given the kind of ammo that Scammarano gave them to work with. The cross examination will be better than a Grisham novel!

What’s funny is that he could’ve gone to the Feds the first time the CW offered the cash and spilled his guts, then offered to cooperate himself and been a hero. But his arrogance and apparent mental retardation instead led him to flush his entire life and career down the sewer for less than the price of a Hyndaui!

This could also be the iceberg that sinks Corzine for good. He looked like someone just ran over his dog at that press conference yesterday.

Check out this youTube video of Scammarano in 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_5fuQq32E

What a tool. Have fun for the next 30 years in the federal joint you obnoxious jerk. Lecturing people on the law of contributions! This is beyond hilarious!

Hey did you see this video?

http://www.nj.com/hobokennow/index.ssf/2009/05/hoboken_mayoral_candidate_pete.html

This dirtbag knocked up a chick in high school and lied about it, then bactracked and admitted it. What a vile, repuslive creep. Reminds me of most of my Seton Hall Law alum. That dump is an incubator for scuz-bag NJ pols and corruption.

What kind of jail time is Cammarano facing?

This is too funny: Read Cammarano’s campaign site:

http://www.cammarano09.com/platform.pdf

This is too funny. Here’s his “going green” plank from the platform:

Being green makes economic sense. A greener Hoboken
requires a change in the way we think, plan, and act. The
time has come to employ energy-smart policies that will
reduce our carbon footprint and lower our municipal energy
consumption. In developing our environmental policy,
we must think globally and act locally.
Solutions:
• Endorse a municipal Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) ordinance for all future development
• Purchase Energy Star devices to conserve electricity
consumption in city-owned facilities
• Replace conventional vehicles that have reached their
end life with energy efficient hybrid vehicles
• Install green roof parks to augment our inventory of
open space and alleviate flooding issues
• Invest in solar panels and other renewable energy technologies
• Pursue grants and programs that promote the use of
renewable energy. Google the Berkeley, California’s
FIRST Solar financing for an example of one such plan
• Explore the use of bio-fuels to operate city vehicles
• Work with the school district to help implement a recycling
program in every school.

And here is his quote from the wiretap:

“I told [defendant Cammarano]
when we get elected, we put our friends on the boards so we know
we get the – don’t listen to these morons who say put this
environmentalist on, but they’re, they’re all f*cking kooks.”
The CW added that “[y]ou wanna have guys that will support guys
like me,” and defendant Schaffer stated “[g]uys that worked in
7
the campaign, put ‘em on.”

Hilarious leftist hypocrisy! God, this state is such a sewer.

Hey Dead, do you have a link to those Cammarano transcripts? That is GREAT stuff! Love it.

I went to Seton Hall Law School the same time as Cammarao. He was a “gunner”, which is law school is an ass kisser who raises their hand every 5 minutes. Total d-bag even back then.

BTW Seton Hall is a comically bad law school, a repuslive, corrupt swamp that needs to be padlcoked. For God’s sake, check out their Wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seton_Hall_University_School_of_Law&oldid=294827354