I Would Never Caution You Against Going to Florida Coastal

Some anonymous filmmaker is purportedly making a documentary about law school graduates, and not of the "they're versatile cash machines" type.

I can tell you that I, official ombudsman of the law school industry, have not been contacted, so you know this thing is going to be a biased ball of muckraking spooge requiring the full Simkovic treatment, but in any event it appears the provacateur is conspiring with nefarious agent Paul Campos, because Paul Campos somehow got hold of the provacateur's mail.

[A lawyer] has sent a letter to a documentary filmmaker, who is working on a film about recent law school graduates:

I write on behalf of my client, The InfiLaw System (“InfiLaw”), regarding your inquiry into interviews with Florida Coastal School of Law officials for a documentary you are making.  I write to caution you as you proceed with fact-finding and information gathering associated with your planned documentary.
...
Individuals, such as Paul Campos, have distorted facts and data and engaged in nefarious and inappropriate investigative tactics in order to accomplish a false agenda attacking law school admissions and career advancement policies.....

I would think nefarious Campos might have just made this up, as is his method. In fact, I don't believe a thing Campos says, so take everything herein as a hypothetical, and nothing herein should be taken to mean or imply that Thomas A. Clare, Esq., wrote this letter or is a subject of any criticism herein.

Not that I would criticize such a lawyer, because whether it's real or not, this lawyer's correspondence is brilliant.  I mean, top of the line stuff like they teach at highly-ranked Thomas Cooley.

A lot of average lawyers, I imagine, would have approached the problem differently.  There would have been talk of the First Amendment, truth as a defense, etc., not to mention the strategic issues of not shining a bright fucking light on your efforts to silence criticism.  "No," I can hear the lesser lawyers say, "I'm not going to write a stupid cautionary letter to a documentary filmmaker.  Are you high?  It's going to wind up on the internet and make all of us look like rectal warts."

But this lawyer is a superior lawyer and not a leaking rectal wart at all.  He apparently wrote a letter.

I'm feeling the caution, aren't you? 

Obviously, I love what Florida Coastal does and would never skew facts to show that it is damaging anyone's career opportunities.  After reading this letter, I would think twice before pointing out that sawing your foot off with a jigsaw to gain disability benefits is a better career option than enrolling in Florida Coastal.  No way would I continue with any blog, report, documentary film, or any other speech-y venture that criticizes Florida Coastal's abysmal bar passage rates, full-time employment numbers, or purported tendency to try and stifle criticism of its skilled plundering efforts in Stalinesque fashion.

There's not a chance I would write that anyone so incredibly daffy as to enroll in Florida Coastal in 2016 is as fit to be a lawyer as a typical Judge Judy participant. Not a chance - I've been cautioned.  Pointing out that I would rather bareback a homeless drug addict than hire a recent Coastal grad to defend against a traffic ticket is not only untrue, it's completely off the table.

We all know that Florida Coastal is an excellent law school that produces excellent, employed attorneys in stark contrast to what all the supposedly objective numbers pushed by Campos and Kyle McEntee tell us.  I'm particularly averse to comparing Florida Coastal and its various advocates (which would never include this lawyer, of course) to creationists and climate change deniers.  It's an open debate whether T-Rex ever walked the Earth, but there's no ambiguity that going to Florida Coastal is a life-changing decision.

I know it's tempting to say things like "you don't go to Florida Coastal to follow your dreams, you go there to kill them over and over again like a demonic sadist."  But such statements - even if true or matters of justifiable opinion - are distortions that use "nefarious and inappropriate investigative tactics in order to accomplish a false agenda attacking law school admissions and career advancement policies."

I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds really smart, and had I such inclinations I would be immovably intimidated from claiming that Florida Coastal's "admissions and career advancement policies" are the law school industry's equivalent of skinny-dipping in a latrine with open flesh wounds.

Appropriately cautioned, men and women of civility can govern themselves, and will often reevaluate their opinions and speech in light of stern correspondence.  That's how democracy works.  Artists develop kooky ideas.  Large for-profit ventures politely caution them.  The art changes to a more agreeable form. 

I do hope that Florida Coastal can impart these sorts of wise lawyering lessons onto tomorrow's million-dollar litigators, who need no caution before leaping aboard the train with their $200k tickets, unsure of where, exactly, they're going, but knowing that the "career advancement policies" are going to get them there.