FirstLawJob.com Is A Scam, Scam, Scam

Hey Tom, a new company has opened to prey on the hordes of TTT losers who just took last week's NY Bar. There name is FirstLawJob.com and they spamming the job boards.

These scammers have been around in various mutations and forms since the late 1990s. Here's the deal: They tweak your TTT resume and cover letters a bit (like putting your Touro Sports Law Journal experience in boldface type), pull a 1996 Martindale directory out of a dumpster, and mail-bomb a bunch of marginal (and often defunct) shitlaw firms, many of whom haven't hired anyone since the Nixon administration. Of course, they've never actually gotten anyone a job, but the desperation and hopelessness of this market often lulls TTT grads into falling for this scam. They're a bit like the "after-scammers" who phone Ponzi scheme victims and claim to be able to recover their lost investments for an upfront fee. Smart move. After all, if someone was dumb enough to fall for the law school scam, why wouldn't they also fall for this "secondary" charade? This website was alive and well in 2006 when this year's crop of lemmings marched off to the NYC diploma mills. They all thought they'd "beat the system," and now are stuck in a lifetime of non-dischargable debt with no hope of finding ANY job, period. Ain't happening in this market.

Actually, the word "market" is a misnomer when applied to TTT grads, or even bottom half of marginally decent schools like Fordham. There is no non-biglaw legal "market" and hasn't been for years. All there is is hordes of desperately indebted losers begging for whatever gutter job they can scrounge, often under-bidding each other in the process. It's like a reverse auction: "I'll do no-fault for 35 K, 35 K going once, going twice...wait, I'll do it for 33 K. 33 K! Gavel bangs. "Sold!" One no-fault job at Melli Guerin to the 'Bozo grad in the red necktie for 33 K!"

The recent agency postings here calling for unadmitted 2009 grads are telling. These sweatshops want to exploit the false hope of the recent group of lemmings, lulling them into thinking doc review is a "resume booster" and shows initiative, etc. As the old saw goes, "if you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrell. Get it off the tree. If they let anyone other than 2009 grads into this gulag, word would quickly spead about the dead-end nature of the job and kill morale like a pestilience.

We are at the end of times. Back in 2005, an unadmitted JD could toil in the Paul Weiss cockroach pit for $21 an hour + unlimited OT and $10 a day for food. Now, almost 5 years later, the same shitwork is paying $1 an hour LESS. Just you wait. There's nowhere left to stash these over-leveraged lemmings anymore, and a shitstorm of very pissed-off people are going to start speaking out more and more. You can't have 85-90% of a law school class unemployed and not expect some serious repercussions to follow.