I graduated today. And since a J.D. is technically a doctorate I got doctoral robes (law is purple) and a hood (fancy). I don’t officially have a diploma yet since grades from finals aren’t back yet, but given how hard it is to fail a class in law school I don’t really think that’s a concern. Next up, the bar.

I made Easter bunny pancakes for breakfast. Cute and tasty. I got the idea from an easter bunny cake that my mom used to make when I was little. I don’t know if it is traditional for the easter bunny to have a bow tie, but it comes from having left over cake (or pancake) from making the ears and not wanting any to go to waste.

One of the reasons I haven’t posted an update on my job search since the hand lotion incident was that I was waiting until I had some good news to share so that I could tell the bad stories and the good at the same time. Problem was, there wasn’t any good news. Every single firm I interviewed with in Portland (as well as a couple I never interviewed with) and the firm in Mountain View all told me they weren’t interested.^* It was kind of frustrating. I was all set to do an unpaid internship with the DA this summer (which would have been really interesting because they let you try misdemeanor trials for them!) when a classmate suggested that I check out a midsized firm in Westwood that didn’t participate in the on-campus interview process.

To cut a long, and somewhat interesting, story short. They made me an offer, and I accepted. So I have a job for the summer and likely following graduation at a 70-80 attorney general practice firm in Westwood. Their area of strength is business litigation, but they also have an intellectual property department in which I will try to do a rotation during the summer.

Now that I have that taken care of, I can focus all my attention on finals. First one in five days.

        
^* There was also a firm in Santa Monica that said no after an interview, but since none of you knew I interviewed there it didn’t make the list. The list of firms that have rejected me is long and distinguished. The current count stands at 11 for those of you keeping score at home.

I find it amusing that the case Procter & Gamble Co. v. J. L. Prescott Co., a trademark dispute as to whether “Chas-O” and “Chipso” were too similar names for competing brands of soap, was dismissed because of unclean hands.

I’m not going to spend much time on my actual interviews besides saying that they went well, and after a point it’s hard to distinguish in my mind between one lawyer at one firm and another at a different one. The offices look the same and things start to blur. I do, however, want to elaborate slightly on the hand lotion incident mentioned below.

Contrary to Ian’s suggestion, there are not puddles of hand lotion sitting in the street in Portland (I’m up here interviewing at the moment, not in LA). I was walking between firms #2 and #3 for the day–about an eight block walk. I had stopped at a street corner to wait for the light to change when a car drove around the corner. I heard a pop, looked down, and I was covered from the knee down in a spray of white hand lotion. (For those of you who have not seen my suit: note that it is not white). Upon closer examination of the street it seems that there had been a plastic bottle of lotion in the street, with the bottom facing directly at me, over which this car had run. The bottom burst out and the entire contents ended up on the sidewalk; minus of course a very leg-shapped shaddow of clean pavement. Needless to say it was not the ideal event to have happen when on the way to an interview.

Fortunately I had about 45 minutes to kill and a woman who was crossing the street going the other direction gave me her handkerchief with which to clean off. So I have an interesting story and, aside from a brief moment of concern, the only down side is that I need to take my suit to the cleaners when I get back to LA, and I had been planning on doing that soon anyway.

So that was my day interviewing, the interesting parts version.

I quote from the Minnesota State Code

1.1496 State muffin

The blueberry muffin is adopted as the official muffin of the state of Minnesota.Minn. Stat. § 1.1496 (2005)

Interviews went well; am exhausted; got hand lotion splattered all over my suit by a passing car; more later.