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Options

I need to run through some options about what to do next. My aunt was horrified when I told her I was considering not taking Massachusetts again in July. "That's like giving up," she told me.

Is it?

I suppose you could think about it that way, but I'm looking at things sensibly, to be honest. I am already an attorney and I have the license to prove it. Why do I need to stay in Massachusetts where my law school diploma has little meaning (not Top 20, not one of the Mass 6) and where I won't be Mass licensed until October at the earliest? Not to mention the utter and complete lack of job options here. Isn't it more sensible to think the way I am? To spend my $815 somewhere else? To not torture myself with another bar exam and enjoy my summer? It's not like I'm in the position to get some sort of attorney job where my employer will wait and see what my exam results are like, right? Thursday's informational interview basically proved that to me.

I don't want to wait until October to get a real attorney job here. I just don't.

One of the doc reviewers is heading off to LA in a couple of weeks. We all thought he was talking flights of fancy until we heard him speaking with potential roommates about a May 15 lease. "I want to be a screenwriter," he told us. "I always let someone talk me out of it. And I went to law school, and I became a litigator. And I just couldn't take it anymore. I have no mortgage, no girlfriend, nothing tying me down. So, why not click documents in Los Angeles and follow my dream?"

It was like that point in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy locks the prison guard in the john so he can play the opera record for the whole prison. Okay, so maybe I exaggerate, but seriously, I could see everybody drift off into their own dreams. What would they be doing if life hadn't tied them down?

But what is my dream? I wish I had something more concrete like I_want_to_be_a_screenwriter, but truthfully, I don't. Not really. I love writing, but do I love it enough to follow through? To write a novel? I'm not sure. My heart wasn't in journalism at the end, but something tells me I could learn to love it again. I don't know.

So, options:

1. I stay in Massachusetts, take the bar exam in July, hopefully get a job where bar licensure does not matter in the meantime. For example, FederalJob, which I applied to, does not require it and neither does In-HouseJob, where I'm interviewing next week. I can still doc review with my New York license, obviously, as a last resort.

2. I stay in Massachusetts, and don't take the bar exam in July. As I said above, a couple of my options don't require it. StateJob, however, would require me to at least take the July exam. But I'll be honest with you, my heart really isn't in StateJob. When we first started courting all of the connections to try to get into the StateJob, I thought I'd be doing something either more policy-oriented or business-oriented, and this StateJob is not it. But there are, of course, other potential law jobs in Mass that require the Mass Bar and non-law jobs that do not.

3. I don't take the Mass bar and I seriously start job hunting in New York, where I AM licensed. The downs to that is that my law degree is STILL from another state, and I'd have to move away from my family here. That might not be a horrible thing, though. I love them, but I have the tendency to use them as a crutch. A move would help me to assert that independence again.

4. I take LawSchoolState Bar and start applying down there instead. What? Yes, this option seems out of the blue, especially given my last thoughts on it, but it's really not. The reality check is that my law school credentials carry loads more weight in LawSchoolState and it might be easier to get decent work down there. Of course, I am pretty late to start applying for that exam, and would probably need to pay $950-1350 to get it done properly by the final deadlines, which of course is even costlier than in Mass, but would it be easier to get my career started down there? Who knows? OK, my stomach is in knots just thinking about it, so maybe this option isn't going to happen...

I don't know, there are many more options, obviously, but I'm too tired to think about them right now.

Full post as published by Wicked Words on May 03, 2008 (boomark / email).