Say it ain't so, Half-Cocked!

Sadness. Mr. Half-Cocked says he's hanging up the keyboard. He's a 3L and says:

I have nothing left to say about law school other than incoherent rants about the state bar association and Bar/BRI.

That's exactly what I'm looking for these days—like-minded individuals! Bring on those incoherent rants, please!

As I said before, I understand the impulse to stop blogging. I've taken more and more frequent breaks from it myself recently (such as the last few days), but I'm still sad to watch blogs I've read regularly for years now start to drift away into internet oblivion. It's really too bad b/c I'm sure the next year of our lives (for those of us who are graduating from law school) is going to be packed with uncertainty and new experiences—exactly the kind of thing that makes for excellent blog posts and comment conversations. Law student blogs have become a great resource for law students to commiserate with and learn from each other as we all go through this roughly similar process. Why should that end at graduation?

Ok, I know why—or at least some of the reasons why. It's one thing to blog about how you were so scared you almost peed your pants when you were a 1L getting cold-called, but it's an entirely different thing to be a new law firm associate or other lawyer feeling exactly the same way. The two situations are very similar in how they make us feel—stupid, scared, totally unprepared. Yet, in the law school setting we feel free to blog about it because we know we're expected to be clueless, while in the work setting we seem to think we're expected to know what we're doing so we become afraid to admit to the world how clueless we are. That's silly, really. Anyone who expects a newly-minted J.D. to be anything but clueless about the actual practice of law is sadly misinformed about the nature of law school. We don't learn to practice law, we learn to live with huge amounts of debt!

Another reason I suspect recent graduates don't want to blog is that they aren't sure what they can say in their new lives as working attorneys. In law school you can talk about pretty much anything that happens in your daily life without concern about professional privilege or ethics or whatever. That's obviously not true once you've started working with actual clients and cases. Lawyers who have been at it for a while (e.g., Evan Schaeffer) probably feel more confident about what they can and can't say with regard to work. They are also not overwhelmed by the newness of their working lives and so have time and energy to think and blog about other things.

Still, it's possible to blog about the transition from school to work, about the bar exam and about being a recent grad just starting your first legal job. If you don't believe me, just check out Woman of the Law (WotL). As she noted in the comments here, she's one of the few law student bloggers to make the transition to practitioner blogger. And although she doesn't have much time to post these days, I know I'm willing to wait for each and every post, and I know I'm not alone.

I understand that not everyone can or wants to try to do what WotL is doing. Who knows? I may even end up hanging up the keyboard in the next year or so. But until that happens, I'll still be sad to see great law student blogs die as their authors move into the working world.

Best of luck to you, Half-Cocked. I'll stay subscribed to your feed so if you ever decide to post one of those incoherent rants, please know you'll still have at least one reader.

Posted March 7, 2006 08:57 AM | 3L meta-blogging