Katie Zacharia, we hardly knew ye: on being a lawyer
Katie Zacharia seems to have set a record for shortness of stay in the press secretary role. It’s probably one of the most pressured and stressful jobs in government, and she simply was not up to the task:
Zacharia held her first brief press briefing on Tuesday, just one day after she started the job, and came under scrutiny after she had represented herself as a lawyer but acknowledged this week that she did not pass her bar exam following law school.
Zacharia’s first White House press briefing lasted less than 15 minutes, during which she took only a few questions from reporters and couldn’t answer one about whether the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
It’s that part about being a lawyer that interests me – for personal reasons. I, too, am a law school graduate but not a lawyer. The Zacharia flap brought back a ton of memories, few of them good.
Why did I even go to law school? The main reasons were threefold: I was aimless and undirected even in my senior year of college, my father was a lawyer (a real one), and I took the LSAT test and did very very well indeed. That last bit told me I could pretty much write my ticket to any law school in the land, and so I did and was admitted to an elite law school. I had mild dreams of Clarence Darrow-like defense and eloquence in my head, dreams of which I was disabused rather quickly – in fact, my very first day of class.
I was forced to confront the fact that I was very shy and hated being put on the spot in front of a crowd. Yes, I should have thought of that to begin with, but somehow I hadn’t. During my second year, I spoke to a professor who had been assigned to me as an advisor, and said I wanted to quit. It was the first and last time I ever spoke to any advisor there; although nowadays they have plenty of them, back then you were pretty much on your own. He talked me into staying by pointing out that I still didn’t know what else I should do, and that at the time I was in the middle of my second year. Only one and a half years to go and I’d have a law degree. So why not stay?
You might answer: “money.” Didn’t law school, especially an elite one, cost an absolute ton of money? These days it certainly does; according to Google AI:
According to recent data compiled via U.S. News Best Law School Rankings and Above the Law, annual tuition and fee rates for top-tier private programs include:
– Columbia University: $88,390 per year
– New York University (NYU): $87,214 per year
– University of Chicago: $84,906 per year
– University of Pennsylvania (Carey): $84,492 per year
– Duke University: $81,829 per year
– Northwestern University (Pritzker): $80,583 per year
– Stanford University: $79,707 per year
– Yale University: $78,961 per year
– Harvard University: $78,692 per yearTotal 3-Year J.D. Cost Estimates
– Tuition and Fees (3 Years): A standard three-year Juris Doctor (J.D.) program totals roughly $230,000 to $265,000 in tuition alone.
– Full Cost of Attendance (3 Years): When adding rent, meals, health insurance, and books, the complete 3-year price tag often scales between $330,000 and $390,000+.
That’s sobering. But it’s nothing like when I went to law school. My tuition was $2K a year, which in present-day dollars would be about $18K. Not the least bit comparable to today’s tuition. What’s more, my rent was $65 a month. So it was not that much of a hardship for me or my family, unlike today.
Back then, also, I was told – although I don’t know where this statistic came from or whether it was correct – that about half of the graduates from elite law schools never practiced law. Nowadays, the percentage is smaller, but nevertheless sizeable percentages leave.
To be blunt, I found law to be very very very boring, except for certain pockets that were interesting. Might I have found work within those pockets? The main one was jurisprudence, or philosophy of law, and the only job that might lead to was to be a law professor. I had neither the grades, nor the inclination – nor, to be frank, the sex chromosomes (law professors were male in those days) – for that job. Now, strangely enough, jurisprudence is a topic I do explore with some regularity on the blog.
So does it all work out in the end?
Via the Instapundit, the Babylon Bee on Trump’s new press secretary (if you can’t see X, it’s Jessica Rabbit):
https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/2111215657878446147?s=20
I also took the LSAT, scored very well, but decided my ambition of going from law school to the Supreme Court was unlikely to be realized. Plus, I don’t like arguing.
The cost of higher education was driven through the roof, some by one stage thinking, others to get the Cultural Marxists Seminaries making hundreds of millions to grow and pump out Marxists.
Never went myself.
You don’t walk among a pack of hungry wolves with a raw pork chop hanging from your neck. The fact that she didn’t seem to know she would be hounded on this item tells it’s either her intelligence or her vanity. Did she actually think it would just fade away????
Ditto on doing well on the LSAT. I was in my last semester of getting a BS in engineering and a local law firm had a long-standing relationship with a local law school to ID future patent attorneys and they sent me a flyer, which I took up. Decided the years-long process wasn’t going to work for me; I was tired of being poor and the 30k starting engineering salary was too attractive.
I took the GRE about the same time, and I remember it actually being a little more challenging than the LSAT.
My wife is a UPENN law graduate. She practiced for a few years, hated it, and moved into non-profit administration (she didn’t have any debt – her father paid for it) before we met. Elizabeth Warren was one of her professors, and she had dinner at her house at least once. She tells me how brilliant she is (was?) – and I have to stop myself from laughing.
I’m a claims manager for a very large insurance carrier. I’m not an attorney, but I’ve worked with them closely for many years. I’ve attended numerous trials and testified in both civil and criminal trials. Law can be very boring – it’s usually nothing like what people see on TV. The only people watching most civil trials are the participants/parties, support staff for the law firms, and perhaps an insurance adjuster.
I do operations research for the Air Force. When the Army needed to stand up a robust operational research wing to help us work our way through the problems of World War II, the first person that they hired was a lawyer to run it. I think it has to be because one of the things that law school gives you is this practical approach to problem solving and analysis. One of the first problems that that ops research team was given was to improve our bomb accuracy by a factor of two. They solved that problem by about three months into analyzing it and passing it on to the crews, and by the end of the war, they had improved our accuracy by a factor of 10.
In my experience a lot of people go to law school because when they graduate from undergraduate school at age 21 or 22 they stll do not know what to do with their lives so they try to put off facing reality for three more years.
I am glad you did what you did.
I went to law school on something of a whim. My B.A. was useless, and a friend suggested law school, not a bad bet for someone who’s good at standardized tests. As you say, it was a LOT cheaper back then. I, too, am shy and disliked being put on the spot in front of people. Somehow I got over that, and at this point I’m nearly indifferent to it. Some parts of practicing law were very interesting, others awful, especially the networking part: torture for an introvert. Still, it was an OK way to save up for retirement, and knowing some law often comes in handy even if you don’t want to practice law, or don’t want to practice it any more. In retrospect, I wonder if I ought to have been a radiologist.
If you have a law degree you are a lawyer, full stop. What you *aren’t* is licensed to practice law, for which you have to pass the bar; doing so makes you an attorney, which is a separate thing. That distinction is one I have had to make to varous attorneys that I encounter when I am called for jury duty. The judge has backed me up every time so far.
AesopSpouse wanted to be a lawyer because he wanted to be Sir Thomas More; in fact, he played that part in one of our college productions.
However, after the JD was over and he became an attorney (thank you Tim for the explanation!), he hated general practice: boundary line disputes, stolen pigs, and one irate gun-toting father of a soon-to-be divorced woman.
He started clerking for a patent attorney, proceeded to get his third degree (mechanical engineering) and was happy as a clam for the next 50 years.
Digression: “originating from the longer 19th?century American phrase “as happy as a clam at high water,” which refers to clams being safest and thus metaphorically “happiest” when covered by the tide.” I guess he felt safer covered by the “high water” of engineering designs.
If you think regular law briefs & trials are boring, try reading a patent application!
I did it.
Once.
I’m beginning to believe that Trump does indeed hire (at least some of his staff) based on attractiveness or that they may be engaging people, just not qualified. How do you hire a person that will be working in the WH, in front facing communications no less, without a doing a basic background check?
A friend of mine went to law school and told me it was easy. So, when I need a lawyer, I ask them how they did at law school. If they tell me how tough it was, I decide I don’t want this person because they aren’t very smart.
A good high school firend graduated with a degree in philosophy. Afterwards he wanted to be a sculptor. He was talented and had done some lovely busts in wood and clay.
However, his wife was more ambitious. Behind his back she got him accepted to Pepperdine Law. He acquiesced to her fait accompli, studied, made law review and got hired by a first-rate law firm.
He told me at the end of law school, they took all the new grads into a room and gave them a serious lecture on the dangers of alcohol for lawyers.
Well, sure enough. He didn’t enjoy the long hours, the insane LA commute, the stress and the tedious uncreative work. He became an alcoholic, which has dogged him since. Two stints in rehab.
He downshifted into law librarian then private practice. Too late he switched into film school, tried screenwriting, producing and filmmaking.
He got his foot in the door. He wrote a script in a Shane Black class that he swears was stolen and refashioned into “Minority Report” using Philip K. Dick as protection. He took a pitch from two guys for “Independence Day,” but thought they were crazy.
He made a couple of small films. He wrote a cold war thriller script which he said was just about green-lit then … the cold war ended.
By then he was in his fifties, aged out of the Hollywood game, and retired on his wife’s money.
A little déjà vu (pardon the spelling). Maybe about the same age bracket as Neo. A lot of friends from college went to LS. Maybe half stuck, as lawyers. Typical was being pushed there by parents. Often an attorney father. One had his way greased. After LS, father got him a job as an ADA. was supposed to take over his father’s law practice, while his older brother got the farm. Except he hated running into his weekend drinking buddies in court Monday as defendants. And at that point, who hadn’t tried a bit of weed? Ended up as a private jet pilot (Gulfstreams, etc) with much of his career spent flying around the world just under Mach 1. Great stories. Another, started with the family beer distributor ship in Chicago, then supplying airline food there, thence to nationally distributing square pizza.
I had the advantage of taking a Dale Carnegie course a couple years before LS (and repeating as an assistant). Went into it almost as shy as Neo. Alternative might be a good PhD program – worked phenomenally for my daughter. By the time I went to LS, I was the guy everyone hated in class. I sat in the front row and hogged the answers and the profs’ time. Little did they know that that let me slack off a lot – I would get to pick and choose the questions I got to answer, resulting in only having to brief half the cases. Entering LS, I would bet that better than half were severe introverts, just like Neo (and I had been). Looking back, i would tell those introverts not to bother going. It can be a fun intellectual challenge, but you aren’t going to make that much money. That goes to the extroverts, and esp those who can bring in the business.
Before LS, I had spent more than a decade as a software engineer. It was a natural progression into patent law. Which was plenty challenging. The law was hoary and complex, and the technology fascinating. My dream had been to follow my father into his law practice. Glad now that I couldn’t. He did real estate law, plus some wills and taxes. I would have been bored out of my mind. For him, it was like going to the plant every day, to put food on the table for his 5 boys. That’s just what his generation did. My next brother (MS/ME) followed me into patent law, and is just now retiring, at 74. I would have been bored with his (mostly mechanical) clients. I got lucky, and dealt with a lot of bleeding edged electronics and software inventions.
My daughter grew up listening to legal discussions at the dinner table. Which is why she went for a PhD (MechE, focused on lasers).
In my sophmore year as a software engineering student, I took Business Law to fill in my schedule. I found the reasoning fascinating (unsurprising given the bent of most programmer types). I briefly thought about patent law as Software patent and Copyright law was evolving at that time. However, this was 1981 and although there were ways to search for cases and other citations via westlaw and a 1200 baud modem an hour on one of those services would likely have run to a large portion of my food and entertainment money for the month. The drudgery of trekking to the Worcester Superior court (about 3/4 mile from my campus) and slogging through index after index to find various state and federal register cases and then verifying that they had not been overruled or modified in ways adverse to my point was amazing. I spent less time cranking out and testing complicated LISP and ALGOL programs sitting at a terminal then I did messing with the musty tomes at the law library. The thought of 3 years fighting with that to then spend years becoming a patent lawyer for a (albeit large) pecuniary reward just didn’t do it for me. Admittedly, I as a Software type, had seen where this would go as databases got filled out and searching and indexing got better I just didn’t see how fast that would happen. Honestly, I don’t think I missed much. I have several relations in law firms (Including one who reached senior partner at Hale & Door ). Their work life balance throughout their career made my 10 hour a day efforts as a rising software engineer look like fun. The up-or-out pressure at the big firms was also brutal, something that an ’80s software engineering didn’t have, as the industry was desperate for people.
Yeah, I went to law school. It was easy, really, and not terribly expensive back then. (When? There were 3 women in a starting class of about 90, and only 1 graduated.) Two bar exams passed on the first shot – not that tough. Then, practicing law for 30 years was tough, constantly pushing to win, to succeed, striving, head down and pulling through. For 30 years I was emotionally a doubled-up fist. One day it finally occurred to me that I was not all that good at it, and that I hated it all along. It turns out that a large fraction of lawyers turn to doing something else because they hate the practice. I suspect most of those are smarter than I, and didn’t need 30 years to wise up. I know of one who quit after 2 weeks and became a disk jockey.
The intellectual side of law can be attractive, but the practice amounts to alternating periods of boredom and stress overlaying the possibility of making a lot of money with damn little intellectual satisfaction.
@ Tregonsee314
As noted above, I grew up in a family headed by an attorney. I had Buisness Law in both undergraduate and and grad (MBA) school. Mostly logical. Esp RE law. Flew through RE brokers licensing.
In the 1980s, copyrights (C) were the big thing in computer law, and part of why I went to LS. That was the era of Look and Feel, etc. Patents weren’t really an issue. The law said that algorithms weren’t patentable, because they were like laws of nature (hence excluded under 35 USC § 101). Wrote chapters in my Computer Law prof’s case book on C/R and antitrust (easy As). My goal in LS was Computer Law all the way.
But then I graduated, and found that there were few jobs there. Talked to one of the few trying to practice there in town, and he told me that he was continuously losing Computer Law clients to patent firms. Looked into it defensively, so I too wouldn’t lose Computer Law clients to patent attorneys. Turns out that one of the members of our church was a patent atty, and he took me on as an apprentice. Couldn’t sit for the patent bar, because CS classes didn’t count for the required science and engineering classes. So started taking EE classes at night. And then, the USPTO changed their rules. CS courses now counted, but practical work experience did not. And I was in.
After 4-5 years, of making very little money, I got my big break. I got a job as a patent attorney for Motorola Semiconductor as their “software” patent expert. That’s where I first got to deal with bleeding edge technology. Since Software was combined there with Systems level electronics, which is where the action was in patents, i became fairly expert there too. It helped that much of my CS career had been at the OS level, where I routinely had to deal with the hardware. And that coming from CS, I looked at the electronics more from a systems/block diagram functionality, that from a circuits point of view, which most EE patent attorneys were stuck in. Which, by then, was becoming useless, because finding one particular circuit among millions, or billions, on an IC had become effectively infeasible. Infringement by our competitors was what funded our department, through cross licensing negotiations. We could only assert out patents if we could prove infringement, and no longer really could with circuit patents.
It was a fun career, but look back and think that a PhD in CS might have been better. Back then, I thought that only the very top students could get them. Nope. Turns out that the average IQ of a JD and PhD are comparable. It just takes 4-5 years (if your prof has funding) working on a single project – that was what I was already heading to as a software engineer. But much of this knowledge came decades later when my daughter was working on hers (in Mech Engineering, in variable frequency lasers).
Part of this was because Microsoft and its competitors did such an abysmal job initially of implementing multiprocessor and multiprograming OSes. It was old technology that I knew and understood well, having worked on mainframe and minicomputer OSes for so long.
Neo and everybody: your stories are fascinating and charming. Thanks!
And once again we have an example that many of neo’s comments come from those who are “smarter than your average bear.”
I learn things every day here.
On being a lawyer?
Well here’s the incredible Senator Slotkin on “BEING A DEMOCRAT (a “FEMOCRAT”?)…
As Turley notes:
‘”I Want That Deterrence Message”: Michigan Dem Slotkin Wants To Prosecute Trump Admin To Scare Off Young Conservatives’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-want-deterrence-message-michigan-dem-slotkin-wants-prosecute-trump-admin-scare-young
Opening graf:
Hey, what’s a savage threat now and then from an earnest woman whose only goal is to “preserve our democracy”
Another commenter a while back said that Trump favors “long legs and short skirts” when he hires, and I think there’s something to that. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that, and he must have reasons (if it is true).
I think Zacharia was a bad hire, and he reassigned her gently, as he should have.
It seems to me that most Presidential Press Secretaries have been women, going back several administrations.
I wonder if this is because they would be treated more kindly by the press, than would male Press Secretaries.
My late wife & I rented a house in Carmel for about 6 years, which was a lovely time for us. Our across the street neighbor was an elderly Hungarian artist who worked in ceramic tile, and tile mosaics. His name was Geza Saint Galy. We got to know him a little and he told us about some of his life.
His father was an attorney in Hungary and he insisted that his son, Geza, follow in his footsteps, at least until he got his law degree. So he did that, in spite of the fact that art was the only thing that interested him. (In retrospect, I wonder if some inheritance was involved, but I don’t believe that was mentioned at the time.)
As soon as the law degree was obtained, he began to pursue his work in the art world. He told us that his work was displayed in a number of important Catholic churches across Europe and possibly one or two in the US. For many years he had a 10 ft. tall mosaic of Father Junipero Sera mounted on the corner of a building at intersection of Junipero St. and Ocean Ave. Not long after he died, it was removed from the building. Sadly, Father Sera had become too politically incorrect, and probably the building had new owners.
Back when we first moved to Carmel there were still a number of artist cottages there. By the time we left, the transition to new smaller second home mansions bought by wealthy LA and SF residents was well underway.
My late wife visited Geza often in his final days in our local hospital.
Tommy Jay, I’m glad you shared Geza’s life, as you knew it.
I must say he was fortunate to have you & your wife as Carmel friends.
Barry Meislen, 2:55 pm,:
So, Sen. Slotken wants to intimidate young conservatives by going after Trump & associates. And likely supporters too, as did prosecutor Jeff Smith.
It’s useful to know that she’s a thug.
Like Pelosi was, and other powerful Democrats. Eg, the “squad”.
Yet they all project that it is Republicans who weaponize the government!
They are exhausting!
Indeed, “THUGOCRACY” is what they cultivated in the past (from Obama onward) and it’s their goal now and in the future.
(I think that’s the official name…)
Well, well, well. Whoda thunk there were so many lawyers, law school grads and legal wannabes among this readership? I share many of the same experiences, viz., the lack of viable alternative engagements following graduation from college, useless undergraduate degree, postponement of “real life,” etc. I specifically shared two of Our Gracious Hostess’s experiences, but had a father who left school in eighth grade to go to work and eventually spent his working years in the employe of Bethlehem Steel Co. When I told him I was going to law school, he frowned and growled out something along the lines of, “Well alright, but try to stay honest and don’t get arrested,” if I recall correctly. I followed his advice, mostly, and wound up litigating on behalf of insurance companies. I appreciated the straightforward economics as well as the lack of 3 AM phone calls from clients who had been arrested or had their children hijacked by a wayward co-parent. Good times, good times.
Hmm. Glad it was “good times”.
(“Retired/recovering” leaves a somewhat different impression.)
Law, from a different perspective:
I’m a chemical engineer, who spent my whole career in R&D. But I had an unusual amount of interaction with lawyers, due to issues around patenting, and what we called RTP (right to practice) problems. I got involved a fair amount because I was known as a good technical writer, mainly because of being taught technical writing by Dave Barry (another story).
Most lawyers drove me nuts! They were surprisingly bad writers, considering their jobs. They also tended to be arrogant, and think they knew more about the technology than I did. I had one lawyer tell me, “You think you know what you invented, but you don’t. I am going to tell you what you invented.” His patent application was a disaster, and went nowhere. I finally started working with a young woman lawyer, who was excellent. Unfortunately, she died young from a heart attack.
Another time, I wanted to test a concept in the lab, but there was a patent on a related idea. I was told to clear it with the lawyer assigned to our business area, to be sure that it did not conflict with the patent. The usual approach in this case is for the lawyer to review the patent, and then write a RTP opinion, stating that there was no conflict, so I could go ahead. It dragged on for months, and he would never deliver the RTP, so I was stuck, and could not do the work. Finally, when he was visiting our location, I cornered him during a break in his meeting. He hemmed and hawed, but finally told me that he would never write the RTP opinion, on way or the other. He said that judges are technically illiterate, and in the remote chance we were sued for patent infringement, we might lose the case. This would make him look bad, and he did not want to take that chance. So, he refused to do the work.
Writing this is reminding me of a couple other bad experiences, but I don’t have the energy to write them down…