Artful Pleadings

Cute Lawyers #28: The New York Catacombs Wow, have I really not...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 18:55:00 -0400

Cute Lawyers #28: The New York Catacombs

Wow, have I really not updated in a month? Anyway, here’s a comic about document review—the job that Hayley and Kate will get if they don’t get the job they came to interview for.

Just some good ol’ red bean buns, never meaning no harm....

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 01:11:00 -0400

Just some good ol’ red bean buns, never meaning no harm. Also, questionable sanitary practices.

I hear the HEAD of the U.N. is quite a guy pfffftsnrk

Fri, 31 May 2013 01:42:00 -0400

I hear the HEAD of the U.N. is quite a guy pfffftsnrk

To all the new Harvard grads

Thu, 30 May 2013 22:59:59 -0400

Congratulations to all my friends graduating from Harvard Law School this year (and also all the ones who aren’t my friends.) I sat in your uncomfortably warm place just a year ago and I know what it must be like over there right now—crazy, tumultuous, a little foreboding; you’ve done everything you were supposed to and now, you ask yourself, what’s next?

Your graduation speakers and many other august figures will try to answer that question for you. Don’t listen to them. Not because they’re bad—on the contrary, they’re awesome. So awesome, in fact, that they become inured to their own awesomeness, and without realizing it they begin to give advice that’s really meant for similarly awesome people. In other words, doing what these people do is great if you have the same awesome personal qualities that made them so awesome in first place. If not, then they have no more to tell you than Usain Bolt has to tell a baby about how to crawl. These awesome people are playing a whole different ballgame, and trying to ape their moves is a great way to get blown out.

Again, I have no ill will towards awesome people and their inspiring words. But the danger of paying them too much attention is that it feeds into a pernicious myth—propagated by Legally Blonde and Grisham novels and your oh-so-proud parents—that the competition is over; that anything is assured; that going to Harvard somehow insulates you from the all-but-total collapse of the legal market, makes you somehow special. That may be true at Wonder Bar, but not in the real world.

When I was applying for clerkships, I listened to an OCS podcast. Its advice? Steel yourself for the deluge of calls you’ll get the moment the federal Hiring Plan allows prospective judges to contact you. Have room in your voicemail box, have a professional voicemail message, and when the storm passes, start dealing out return calls with a vengeance.

Well, the day the Hiring Plan allowed judges to start scheduling interviews, I sat down with an empty voicemail box, and a nice-sounding voicemail message, and a notepad. The hour of destiny came, then the next hour came, then the one after that. There was no deluge of calls, of course. There wasn’t even one. When I did get a clerkship, it was because I networked my ass off and when I finally got an interview (I called them, by the way), I prepared for that interview like it was a full-time job. OCS told me there was a clerkship for everyone; they were wrong. There’s a clerkship for everyone who’s hungry as hell and impressive as hell and lucky as hell. Actually, scratch that. There’s a clerkship for maybe half to a third of those people.

I realize that OCS has started coming around to the reality of the new legal job landscape, as it were. But progress has been slow. And cute remarks about “Planet Harvard” versus the real world aside, the best career advice I ever got wasn’t from Harvard, but from my dear old mom:

No job is beneath you.

Which is not to say my current job is bad; I’ve talked to a friend with a vaunted Circuit Court clerkship, and I still think my state clerkship is better. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the law schools, or the law student forums, or the firms who give clerkship bonuses for federal clerkships only. It’s not time to start hungrily eyeing that SCOTUS clerkship or that Bristow Fellowship. It’s time to start looking in places you wouldn’t have thought of, places you were never told to look—not only because you might find a pleasant surprise, but because you have no other choice. When the gates close, you don’t start throwing yourself at the locked portcullis. You dig under the walls, you do what you have to. There may have been a time when the HLS alum didn’t have to scrape and scrabble like the Thomas Jefferson School of Law alum; not anymore.

Congratulations on your graduation, men and women of Harvard, and welcome to the only game in town.

Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California. That isn’t a typo,...

Wed, 29 May 2013 21:41:45 -0400

Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California. That isn’t a typo, by the way. Hey, I didn’t name the place. It named itself.

Comic returns soon.

Kind of a fusion take on the Chinese classic gan bian si ji dou,...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:58:00 -0400

Kind of a fusion take on the Chinese classic gan bian si ji dou, dry-fried green beans. It’s not quite as authentic, but at least you can shop for it at a Wal-Mart. You’ll notice that the given ingredient quantities are less than precise. That’s because I never measure out ingredients when I prepare this dish—experimentation is half the fun of cooking, at least for me. So go nuts and adjust anything and everything to your taste. Hell, you could stick one green bean in a pile of chorizo like a birthday candle if you wanted. I won’t judge.

INGREDIENTS:

Couple fistfuls green beans
2 tbsp. of your favorite cooking oil
4 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
As much chorizo as you like (here, I used maybe 3 or 4 oz., or a bit less than half a package of Cacique)
Couple glugs wine
Dash sesame oil
Dash soy sauce
Salt, pepper, and chili powder to taste (if you have actual chilies, you’re obviously too advanced to be reading this blog)

PROCEDURE:

1. Wash the green beans and dry them carefully. Break off the ends and break each bean into approximately 2-inch pieces. As you break the beans, you’ll probably notice a little light green string coming out of the crease in the bean. This is normal; pull the string out like the sand vein on a shrimp. It’ll help your beans stay tender.

2. Heat up your oil in a good cooking pan/pot until it flows easily and a wooden chopstick pressed against the bottom of the pan creates tiny little bubbles at a rapid rate. (Don’t try this with a plastic chopstick.)

3. Dump in the green beans and stir-fry for 4-6 minutes or until the beans start to blister up and look kind of wrinkly. It’s important that you stir vigorously here to ensure even cooking.

4. Remove the beans from your pan and set them aside. Now throw your garlic into the pan and let it crisp up a little in the residual oil. Once the garlic starts to go from white to blonde, immediately add the rest of the ingredients. Stir to combine. If you’re like me and used chorizo from a plastic ‘sausage wrapping’, you’ll want to break up the big hunk of chorizo with your chopsticks or whatever. Just smash it up like a canned cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving.

5. Cook the chorizo through, letting it get a nice angry dark red. Depending on how much chorizo you used, this shouldn’t take very long, like maybe a couple minutes.

6. Add the green beans back into the pan and stir. Turn off the heat and let the flavors marry a bit while you serve your rice.

7. Pour the pan out over the rice and enjoy. If you’re serving this to friends, feel free to smugly tell them, “It’s called gan bian si (pronounced like a short, sharp ‘tsuh’) ji dou. You’ve probably never heard of it.” If you don’t have friends, take a picture of the food next to an anime figurine.

Serve with beer or wine or Kool-Aid or whatever’s on hand. Sichuan food isn’t picky, not even when it’s adulterated in ways that would make P.F. Chang cry.

Cute Lawyers #27.5: An Anniversary Comic Goodness, have I...

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:44:29 -0400

Cute Lawyers #27.5: An Anniversary Comic

Goodness, have I already been doing this comic for a year? And in-universe, only two days have passed. I’d better get cracking on that. For now, you may assume for the purposes of this comic that Hayley was hired by Yonson Urmy.

Cute Lawyers #27: A Lawyer Joke Again, sorry for the delay. Here...

Sun, 12 May 2013 22:53:50 -0400

Cute Lawyers #27: A Lawyer Joke

Again, sorry for the delay. Here I tried some stuff with shading and contrast. The writing is based on a conversation I had with Boston’s Skiffy the Green Cab Driver. That was one night out that I actually remembered.

Comic returns when things calm down at the court, sorry. For...

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:43:19 -0400

Comic returns when things calm down at the court, sorry. For now, here’s some roast chicken with blanched asparagus.

This is what happens when I stay up late listening to the Boston...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:43:00 -0400

This is what happens when I stay up late listening to the Boston Police scanner. Great job to BPD, Cambridge Police, MIT campus police, MBTA police, and everyone else who helped catch Dzhokhar in one piece! You guys are my heroes, seriously.

(I don’t know what a bomb robot looks like so I drew an Aibo, wanna fight about it)

Cute Lawyers #26: True End Sadly, Pink Aurora Heart Blossoms...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:57:00 -0400

Cute Lawyers #26: True End

Sadly, Pink Aurora Heart Blossoms SaGa II ~ephemeral story~ was a classic unappreciated in its time. Kate was the only one with the discerning taste to figure that out, and that taste would go on to serve her well as a lawyer. Nah I’m just kiddin’, she never told anybody else about her VN collection, and never played them again. Mostly because as a big-firm lawyer, she didn’t have any free time.

Dear Suzy

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:59:00 -0400

Let me first just say I understand your pain at being rejected from the college of your choice. You see, I was like you once, Suzy. I had a 1600 on the SAT (this is when it was scored out of 1600—in fact, I got every single question correct.) I don’t recall what my high school GPA was, but it was somewhere over 4 after all the AP credit and grade-inflation shenanigans. Like you, I thought I was pretty well set for college. And like you, I failed to get into a very prestigious school—in my case, Harvard.

I don’t need to tell you how bad that felt. I blamed myself, I thought I was a loser, I thought all my work thus far had been for nothing. But here’s where you and I are different—what I did not do was to blame the least privileged classes in society. In 2004, Harvard matriculated twice as many Asians as it did blacks, and twice as many Asians as it did Latinos. Mathematically speaking, it is much more likely that the spot that should ‘rightfully’ have been mine went to a fellow Asian student or a white student, not a black or Latino student. Nor did I wish that I’d had the foresight to be born an underrepresented minority, or that my parents had been better, more Amy Chua-like Asians. Claiming to understand the experience of another culture, let alone reducing that experience to a bargaining chip*—even under the guise of satire!—is patronizing, it is disgusting, and it says far more about you than about the class in question.

* I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your intention in writing your WSJ piece was to show that admissions officers do just this when they award additional points to underrepresented minorities. Whether they do or do not is beyond the scope of this post. To the extent admissions officers commodify race, they do so in service of the Constitutionally permissible aim of achieving a meaningfully diverse class—Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 156 L Ed. 2d 304 (2003)—and not in service of their own self-pity.

But you know what, I’m not going to hold it against you. Because you’re young, and you’re dumb, and you don’t yet realize that not getting into your top choice isn’t the end of the world. After Harvard rejected me, I picked myself up and went to UC Berkeley. Following that, I smashed the LSAT, did a year of AmeriCorps, and applied to Harvard again, this time for law school. This time, I got in. And you know, it’s not like going to HLS instantly solved all my problems. Life goes on, and everyone from the lowliest community college student to an Ivy League alumnus will have to deal with its slings and arrows, and all we can do is bear them with grace.

So that’s why I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you get into a good school—good enough to broaden your perspective such that four years from now, you can look back and be as embarrassed for yourself as I am for you right now. Being embarrassed at your past mistakes, too, is a part of growing up. And I hope that your prospective future employers will be understanding, and see that you’re more than a kid who said some very dumb, very privileged things in a very public arena one time. Just like I’m more than a Harvard reject, more than a Harvard alum, more than how my parents raised me, and more than a skin color.

Cute Lawyers #25: Old Acquaintances The joke is that Kate is...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:46:53 -0400

Cute Lawyers #25: Old Acquaintances

The joke is that Kate is playing World of Warcraft in class. I do not know what World of Warcraft looks like. Actually the joke is that Hayley is on Facebook in class. I know what Facebook looks like, but not how to render it recognizably in miniature.

Did a little sketching at Sakura-con. A few reprises shaded with...

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:42:00 -0400

Did a little sketching at Sakura-con. A few reprises shaded with my shiny new Copic gray pen, and a few originals. Also, I slung up more pics on Flickr.

Sakura-Con. Because what could be more quintessentially Seattle...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:28:37 -0400

Sakura-Con. Because what could be more quintessentially Seattle than grown men running around in pink dresses, buying things they don’t need, celebrating imaginary little girls, while a third of the world remains without electricity, or food that hasn’t been curiously sniffed by a dingo?

Nah, I’m just playin’, y’alls were cool. Check out my pics here. I’ll upload more plus scan some convention sketches when I get back to Olympia, so keep checking back. And keep watching the skies.

Cute Lawyers #23-24: 212 Sadly, the firm never got around to...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:55:00 -0400

Cute Lawyers #23-24: 212

Sadly, the firm never got around to fixing its number so it wasn’t one digit off from a telemarketer’s. It took a very confused call from a major client to change that.

Cute Lawyers #22: First Tier Problems In honor of St....

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:37:00 -0400

Cute Lawyers #22: First Tier Problems

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, a limerick:

I studied all things juridical,
But my job situation was critical,
For advice I plead,
My counselor said,
“Don’t worry, the market is cyclical.”

brief shoulder study, comic returns soon

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:07:00 -0400

brief shoulder study, comic returns soon

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that waiver would never hold up in...

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 01:45:00 -0500

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that waiver would never hold up in court. For one thing, the language doesn’t limit its scope to “any and all media” actually produced by the company, nor to the footage actually recorded at the con. I mean, I don’t think Never Nominated Productions, LLC, is planning to film some cosplayer in the bathroom and send it to all the newspapers for them to publish. But you never know.

More photos from Emerald City Comic Con 2013 here.

Cute Lawyers #21: Hi, Mom No, mom. This comic is not...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:10:50 -0500

Cute Lawyers #21: Hi, Mom

No, mom. This comic is not autobiographical. You really don’t need to worry about me. Honest.