The

Undeniable

Ruth

®

…and the Ruth shall set you free!

  • Business Cards for Law Students

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    Ruth Carter

    Lawyerist recently wrote a great post about why lawyers need business cards. They are a simple yet effective tool to have when networking.  You never know whose hands your card will end up. The same lesson is true for law students, and law students have more freedom to design cards that fit their personality.

    Every law student should have business cards. Over the last year, I’ve picked up a lot of do’s and don’ts when it comes to selecting and designing a personal card. Every card should have the following information:

    • Your Name,
    • Your School,
    • JD Candidate,
    • Class of ______,
    • Your Phone Number, and
    • Your Email Address.

    There are three main options for cards.

    Option #1: School Business Cards
    Many law schools give their students the opportunity to purchase business cards. These tend to have a simple and clean look. Students customize their cards with their personal information.  This is my friend Stephanie Green’s card.

    Stephanie's Business Card – Address & Phone Info Removed

    She realized after she had them printed that she shouldn’t have put her address on them because she’s moved twice since then.  Additionally, you might not want to put your home address on your card because you never know who will end up with that information.

    I was happy when my school offered business card for sale; however, I cringed when I saw the template.  It was way too plain for me.  All the white space was a turn off for me.  I needed something with more personality and color.

    Option #2: Personalized Business Cards
    Vistaprint and Moo have many options for people who want more colorful and creative business cards. Vistaprint has many templates for free business cards that are suitable for law students. These companies make business cards for businesses, and the templates are designed to make the company the focus and not the individual. My classmate input his information exactly as the template suggested, and the result looked similar to this.

    Bad Business Card

    This design was perfect for his personality, but his card looks odd because you focus on the school and not him. Students who opt to have more personalized cards must remember that templates suggest where you put certain information but you can chose what information you put on it and where you put it. If I had this card as a law student, here’s how I’d do it.

    Good Business Card

    I think it’s better for students to put a non-school email address, because the information will continue to be current if someone wants to reach them after they graduate. However, the email address must look professional – something like YourName@gmail.com.

    Option #3: Untraditional Business Cards
    Some people are extremely creative when it comes to their business cards. Jason Tenenbaum got his business cards from Moo. It has a picture on the front and a QR code on the back that links to his information.

    A divorce lawyer has a sassy business card that’s perforated in the middle with the same information on both sides. It pushes the envelope on appropriateness, but it makes me laugh. It’s a great gimmick.

    In some industries, it’s common to have MiniCards – half sized business cards. I considered getting these instead of business cards, but I changed my mind when I showed a MiniCard to a young up-to-date lawyer, and he couldn’t understand what it was. In the future, I think I will have both standard business cards and MiniCards and will let the setting determine which one I use.

    Along with business cards, every law students should have a business card case.  Without a case, the corners of the cards will become bent and dirty in a wallet or pocket. Reasonably priced ones are available from Amazon and VistaPrint, and more exciting ones are available on ThinkGeek and UncommonGoods.

  • Lawyers’ Bad Reputations Start with Arrogant Law Students

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    Ruth Carter

    In every industry, there appear to be some people who cling to the old school ways and others who fully embrace innovation. Apparently in publishing, there is animosity between writers whose work is published by the Big Publishing Houses and writers who self-publish.  Allegedly some people who are represented by Big Publishing claim that people who are self-published do not qualify as authors because they didn’t go through the same process to publish their work. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter. All writers have the desire to communicate their work and have to work hard to cultivate a following — let alone put the words on the page.

    Gavel | Andrew F. Scott: P6033675
    Image by afsart via Flickr

    In the Arizona legal community, one source of animosity is the law school from which one matriculated. Until recently, Arizona had only two law schools: Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Arizona (UofA). There is an ongoing rivalry between these school based on who is ranked higher. In 2004, a new law school entered the scene: Phoenix School of Law (PSL). This school is accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA); however it is not ranked in the top 100 law schools by the U.S. News. PSL has the reputation of being the school that people go to when they couldn’t get into ASU or UofA and that students hope to perform well enough during their 1L year so they can transfer to a better school.

    I was not prepared for the hostility that some people have towards PSL graduates. Earlier this summer, an article was released that stated that 1/3 of 2010 law school graduates have jobs that do not require passing a bar exam. The responses from two of my classmates were appalling.

    • “This is why I hate…… PSL kids….. yes I’m going public with this comment and I don’t G.A.F.  If you want to be a lawyer, go to a real school and stop saturating the saturated market.  Was that too harsh? Whatever, I know everyone is thinking it.”
    • “I agree.  And the ABA could have a huge role to play by making law school accreditation more difficult. The problem is that there is a consent decree with the FTC which means that the ABA can’t refuse accreditation to more law schools or cut off accreditation to make fewer lawyers because it would be “anti-competitive.”  The problem now, of course, is that there’s too much competition and too many bottom-feeding, hungry lawyers.”

    These comments were made by two people who had not yet taken the bar when they made these statements. My response: Who are they to judge? We all took the LSAT, got into a law school, passed our classes, and graduated. Everyone who passes a bar exam has the right to be a lawyer if they chose to be (and can find work), regardless of the road they took to get there.

    These comments show the immaturity, insecurity, and enormity of their egos. During my 1L orientation, the then-dean of the law school encouraged us not to tell lawyer jokes because it perpetuated the image of the legal profession as being full of soulless, greedy, and unscrupulous ladder climbers. Unfortunately, this reputation is still earned by many lawyers now coming out of the gate.

    My friend, Eric Mayer, is a brilliant criminal defense lawyer who says, “Good lawyers are not made by their law schools.” Law school is just the beginning of a legal career. A lawyer’s reputation should not be based on where they went to law school, but rather on their intelligence, competence, and ethics. I surprised an ASU law professor this week when I told her that I did not care about the future reputation of my law school because the body of my work will be more determinative of whether I’m a good lawyer.

    If the legal profession wants to change its reputation, it should try to screen out these arrogant people when they apply to law school and continuously foster the idea that there’s a place for all types of people to be lawyers. More realistically, I suppose, schools should integrate elitist conversations into their classrooms and truly take the time to debate students who repeatedly demonstrate this type of arrogance. I hope comments like those enumerated by my classmates are not the norm for my class, my school, or the legal profession, but I have my doubts.

    Having a different educational background does not make a person a bad lawyer. It just makes them different, and it’s this diversification that permits the profession to grow and remain relevant. Just as self-published writers may be looked down upon as being less credible, it is those who take a different path that are now spearheading certain areas of the industry. If you have a hang up about a person’s legal education, hire someone else.

  • Top 3 Money Savers for Law Students

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    Ruth Carter

    Law school is atrociously expensive. Not only is tuition expensive, you still have to pay for your rent, utilities, books, supplies, and your living expenses. Besides only buying things when they are on sale, having roommates, and keeping your apartment a few degrees colder in the winter, I want to share my top 3 tip money saving tips.

    Spare Change
    Image by kayaker1204 via Flickr1. Used Books

    1. Used Books
    When I started law school, I thought it was important to have pristine books so I wouldn’t be distracted by a previous owner’s marks. With new books, I could highlight them using my own 6-color system and fill the margins with my own notes. I also thought I’d keep these books forever because they were a resource for my new career.

    After one semester of believing that, I switched to used books. They were so much cheaper, and other people’s highlights and notes weren’t distracting at all.  If anything, they enhanced my reading experience.  I sought out books that had more highlighting and dings because they were cheaper.

    One time, I was looking at the listings on Amazon for a particular used text book. One was $40 cheaper than all the others because the owner accidentally spilled coffee on the book. I bought it. The coffee was only on the first page and the edge of the subsequent pages.  It didn’t even touch any of the text. Thanks clumsy guy!

    At the end of every semester I turned around and resold as many books as I could on Amazon, including my study guides. The only downside to this system is a lot of books have new editions every year so you have a small window in which to sell your used ones.

    (cc) Bede Jackson from Flickr

    2. Free Lunch
    My law school had lots of lunch time events and networking functions. Usually my first question wasn’t, “What’s the topic?,” but “What’s for lunch?” It was a win-win situation. The club got a big turnout for their speaker, and I got a free lunch. Even better, sometimes clubs would order too much food and at the end, they were giving the leftovers away to anyone, including non-attendees.

    Another way to get free lunch is to network. Most attorneys understand that law students are poor and will pick up the check. For many of them, it’s a business write-off. However, you should always offer and be willing to pay, and you should only ask an attorney to lunch if you’re genuinely interested in getting to know them. The free lunch is a bonus, not the goal.

    3. Free/Cheap Parking
    I think parking on campus is one of the biggest rip offs of education.  My school has a big parking structure that is a 5-minute walk away from the law school. Parking there costs $720/year. Do you know how much ramen I can buy for $720?! There’s a campus parking lot that’s only 5-10 minutes further away.  A permit for the lot costs $210/year. This is where I parked my first year.

    When I was in school, students could get a light rail pass for the whole year for $80. For my last two years of law school, I opted for this. I parked for free at the park and ride, rode 5-15 minutes into campus, and walked for 5 minutes from the station to the law school. If I needed my car on campus, I paid the $8/day for visitor parking. At the end of the year, it was cheaper than buying a parking pass.

    The super frugal student can park on the street for free.  The only issue is they have to get there early in the morning when space is still available or possibly the afternoon after the morning students have left. Sometimes you have to be willing to drive around looking for a space.

    These are just my top 3 money saving tips. There are plenty of other ways to save money while going to school. If you want to share your tips, please leave them as comments. I’d love to hear them.

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