Sunday, May 22, 2016

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.

6 comments:

  1. Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance KingMay 23, 2016 at 11:05 AM

    Florida Costal, Marshall, Indiana Tech, Valpo are a good option if you earned a 2.42 from Central Baptist Torah Tech in Psychology and your name is Liam born in 1994 with a beard and working in a cube earning 29K taking orders for diabetes supplies. Or you name is Amber and graduated from Phoenix with a 2.62 GPA and working at Ross as the Assistant Manager of the shoe department. You work 60 hours of irregular hours with no holidays off...(Memorial Day is a good shopping day aka George Bush 9/11 and Disney World). Amber earns 31K and is exhausted. She wants to drink wine just like Alicia Floreck, sleep with hunks and wear nice clothes. She looks up to Diane and pines to be a LAWYER!!!!!! Even if Liam and Amber don't secure a legal job, they can hang a shingle and earn 37K a year and work around 40 hours. They are now LAWYERS in the tradition of Lincoln, Darrow, Cochran and Gregory Peck. They are ministers of JUSTICE...if they pass the Bar. But in time, those standards will be relaxed as well when the exam is administered at the DMV. Thanks to desperate Diploma Mills.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance KingMay 23, 2016 at 11:10 AM

    One more thing: I give full consent and permission to this blog's owner to provide my URL, Name and address to Florida Costal if they ask. I am "ready for trial." Bring it on baby... They have to serve me and try the case "where the defendant" resides or does business. Every Judge and Lawyer in my neck of the woods knows that Florida Costal and its ilk are scam schools owned by a Private Equity Group.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hilarious, I mean nefarious, write-up.

    The only thing wrong with Clare’s letter is that he does not offer salutary guidance to the filmmaker, and collaterally to other Campos-deluded would-be detractors, as to the appropriate and undistorted way to address Florida Coastal’s most recent bar passage rate of 38% or its most recent 10-month-out bar-required full-time employment rate of 36%.

    I was thinking of giving Florida Coastal due praise by noting that 36%-38% is a higher success rate than you get by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but I looked it up and it isn’t.

    ReplyDelete
  4. What the fuck was Thomas Éclair thinking, if anything?

    He never should have written that letter. Obviously Paul Campos was going to receive a copy in three seconds flat. Obviously the thing was going to be published on the Internet. Obviously the InfiLaw scam was going to look even shittier than usual—for trying to squelch a documentary before even knowing what the thing was about. Obviously threatening to sue for defamation before having a basis even to suspect defamation was grossly irresponsible, to put it mildly.

    Now, I share Éclair's apparent opinion that any responsible inquiry into InfiLaw will expose heaps of shit that rival the Himalaya in breadth and height (not to mention dearth of oxygen). If I were sleazy enough to serve as counsel to InfiLaw, however, I would at least show enough damn sense to refrain from making the InfiLaw scamsters look like thugs and crooks. They do that well enough themselves without a lawyer's help.

    ReplyDelete
  5. From the letter:

    "In addition, InfiLaw requests that you notify me immediately upon any decisions to include any references to or subject matter about InfiLaw or any of its affiliate schools in your documentary, and provide InfiLaw the opportunity to review and comment on them prior to any public dissemination."

    Fuck off. InfiLaw has no right to any of that.

    Of course, Éclair can request whatever he wishes, just as the recipient can tell him where to stick his goddamn requests.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "InfiLaw and its affiliated schools will carefully analyze and assess any statements made about them and will not be afraid to pursue legal recourse to protect its reputation against any false and reckless statements."

    Read as follows:

    InfiLaw and its affiliated scam-schools fully expect to be exposed as appalling mother-fucking scams, and they'll attempt damage control by posing as victims and initiating vexatious litigation.

    ReplyDelete