So you're telling me they're getting paychecks. . . AND THEY'RE GOING BACK TO THE APPLICANT POOL?

So Rob sent me this link:  http://abovethelaw.com/2009/05/stroock_offers_75000_in_stay_a.php

For those of you too lazy to read, it's another story of how another firm that gave offers to hotshot 3Ls are buying out their offers cause they can't afford new associates.  Now this isn't some chump change, but $75,000, half this year, half the next.

At first, I thought it was a nice gesture by a law firm to try to cover its ass while not entirely dumping on the fresh graduates it bagged.  Then I realized that these guys are coming back into MY applicant pool, WITH a financial cushion, while I'm stuck here with no real income, a bucketful of loans, and no top 1%, 5%, 15%, 20% or 25% to my CV.

To illustrate how utterly screwed us regular folk our, let's examine how 3Ls get jobs.  Obviously, the graduates in the T14 will not have to worry about getting jobs in fall on campus interviews at hot firms.  In a school like LC, which is in the bottom quartile of the Top 100, we probably get the top 5% hired (ignoring connections, nepotism, contracts with the devil, etc.) through this process.  I mean, I know really smart dudes hovering around the top 15% who have no job secured, so they're basically in the same boat as me when the rest of the firms and other places that need attorneys finally lock down how many associates they'll need in the spring.  So here's the factors I have to face when trying to shoot for a public interest or government job:

(1) Top school (don't got that)

(2) Top 1-30% (don't got that)

(3) Top Environmental nerds (don't got that, except for one year in NEDC)

(4) Law Review (don't got that)

(5) Public Interest experience (don't got that)

(6) Government experience (got that)

(7) Connections (barely got anything related to that)

(8) Community service (got that)

(9) Leadership (got that)

(10) Sex appeal/charisma/nice teeth/"it" factor (we don't even have to go there)

Now, this isn't an exact list, but the major point I want to make is that schools matter, and grades matter.  The rest of us mere mortals rely on the guys who hit home-runs on the top two of my list to get quickly scooped up so that we don't have to deal with them in the spring.  Now because of the economy, we get screwed in two ways.  Overqualified attorneys are now taking up our applicant pool space, as well as the cream of the crop (who also have money).  This means that I am going to be screwed for the next 2 years of applications.  Maybe by then I'll have hit a high enough GRE to go back to school.