Florida Coastal School of Law...should I go? (Jacksonville: 2014, wealthy)

[I Play Foosball]

New poster here. I have read this thread in the past and it seems like it will never die, so I will do my part to keep it going. I am an FCSL grad ('09) who is fortunate enough to have a good job here in town. I agree with the prevailing sentiment that an FCSL JD is not worth it unless the circumstances are exceptional. I genuinely do feel bad for the posters that are drowning in debt because they attended Coastal.

Now that I have introduced myself, I will attempt to lighten the mood.

If any of you have spend time on law school/lawyer discussion boards such as autoadmit, TLS, LSD, etc., you may be familiar with a particular scam blogger who writes some of the most classic stories I have ever heard. For those of you not familiar with him, I will link some of his posts and I guarantee you will be in stitches. The backstory is that this guy attended a lower tier lawschool in NYC in the mid-2000's. The NYC job market is apparently one of the worst in the nation for new grads and he was stuck doing some very crappy jobs at lower tier PI firms and doing doc review. His stories are so ridiculously over the top that I can't imagine he made them up. So for anyone interested, check out this thread on TLS and look for posts by someone named areyouinsane. He posts periodically throughout this thread and his musings paint an interesting portrait of the job prospects faced by many 3/4th tier grads. I assure you that it is worth the read.

Link: Where do contract / temp attorneys come from?

Edit: here is a brief sample of one of his posts:

So I was on this huge doc review for a pharma tort case and somehow got promoted to QC. One day the staff attorney tells me to go help this old bald Indian dude who called himself "Gahdhi" (like prison, most people in doc review have "street names" while on project, in case you haven't noticed). He was a really nice guy and was saving money so he could retire in India. His wife was already over there scouting out houses, etc. His real name was impossible to pronounce unless you have a certain kind of tongue or something, according to him.

Bigger problem is, apparently Gandhi had zero experience using computers, which isn't exactly great news when your job involves using one 16 hours a day. According to the staff attorney, all of the PDF docs that Gandhi was doing redactions on were seriously screwed up, with like half the page blacked out. Rather than "redactions," Gahndi's docs looked like random grafitti or modern art or whatever. Furthermore, his redactions were over parts of the page that were blank to begin with, so something was seriously wrong.

So I go to his workstation to see what's going on and have him pull up a PDF doc. He does and the doc is displayed on the screen sideways. I tell him to rotate the doc and Gandi grabs hold of the whole computer monitor (this was pre-flat screen) and starts trying to turn the entire rig sideways. It was mounted on one of those swivel, ball-joint type bases (remember those?). Before I could tell him that he didn't need to move the monitor upside down and ****, somehow the wires from his monitor unplugged the computer of the chick sitting next to him (as I said, everyone sits elbow to elbow and there are wires all over the place, and like 500 things plugged into one outlet, etc).

So the screen of the chick next to home goes dark, and she starts going utterly bat**** crazy and says "This guy is a terrorist, I can't ****ing stand him- he does this like 50 times a day! " She was livid and said 'he shouldn't ****ing be here if he can't use a computer" and things of that nature. I guess it never occured to her to investigate why Gahndi turned his monitor extremely sideways like 200 times a day, but coders aren't always the most helpful or cordial people. This chick in particular had a reputation for being really aggressive, and for some reason she had like a hundred Bic lighters all over her work table and used to chew on them, etc. They were all gnawed down like those toys you give a gerbil or whatever.

Anyway, Gahndi got really offended that she called him a "terrorist" (this was back when the Iraq war was still big news and such). He was threatening to report her to the staff attorney for racial slurs, etc, and the whole situation was becoming a huge scene. I crawled under the table to try and get the wires plugged back in while the two of them were having at it. It got out of hand pretty quickly and Gandhi starts marching up and knocking on the staff attorneys door.

I got the computers back up and running and like 2 minutes later the staff attorney comes out and calls the chick into the office to get her side of the story. Then like 2 minutes later the aggressive chick storms out, grabs all her lighters and **** off the table, says "**** you" to me, and rolls off the project. These randomly aggressive incidents are actually pretty common on doc review, so it wasn't really as big a deal as it would be at a normal job. In fact, my definition of "normal" is now so screwed up I could probably never return to any type of legitimate office environment.

[falcon910]

Welcome I Play Foosball! Your post was a breath of fresh air, as this thread has really gotten stale. Trying to get your FCSL cohorts to share some of their stories on here is like pulling teeth. Glad to hear your story is not so sad.

On other note, despite the lack effort of most other 4th tier grads to try to save future generations from the same fate, somehow word is getting out.

Read all about it.


Fiscal Calamity Ahead for Some Law Schools? Applicants for 2013 Drop 22% in 'Free Fall'

http://www.abajournal.com/news/artic...n=weekly_email[/SIZE]

[falcon910]

The ABA just released an article that states FCSL is at the bottom of list for income verses debt.


"At the bottom of the list is Florida Coastal School of Law, where graduates earned median starting salaries of $45,000 in 2011 and graduated with an average debt load of $143,111 in 2012."


Law grads get the best and worst return on their investment at these schools - ABA Journal

[grayrunner]

I was reading where scientists are switching to using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments.
Apparently after years of testing they have found there are some things a rat won't do!

[Wunderkinder]

Originally Posted by grayrunner

I was reading where scientists are switching to using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments.
Apparently after years of testing they have found there are some things a rat won't do!

And PETA doesn't complain about animal testing!

[JohnnyIllini]

What the InfiLaw System schools are doing should be criminal IMO. Sure, there are a lot of kids at Florida Coastal who come from wealthy families who just want to say that they have a son or daughter with a JD. However, there are lots of more of these kids who still believe that a JD will pay off regardless of where they go to law school, and thus take out an insane amount of debt from the only school that will take accept them and spend the rest of their lives paying back these loans.

Florida Coastal has a horrible reputation in the community, and unless you are independently wealthy and just want to say that you have a JD you would be incredibly foolish to attend this sham institution.

[904jax]

Here is a Jacksonville Times Union article detailing Florida Coastal students' passage rate for the most recent bar exam (July, 2014) in which Florida Coastal had the second lowest passage rate out of Florida's eleven law schools. The passage rate was about 58 percent. Florida Coastal School of Law graduates finish second-to-last in passing the Bar | members.jacksonville.com

The article states that the average Florida Coastal student incurs $175,000 in debt. That's a massive amount of debt both individually and in the aggregate. Who is going to pay this debt if these students are unable to become lawyers?

[Information1234]

Yeah, there are plenty of successful attorneys from Florida Coastal. One off the top of my head is Matthew Shirk, he's the head public defender for the 4th judicial circuit making over $150,000+

[projectmaximus]

hmm, I guess he does count as a financially "successful" example. But I'm not sure he's a good symbol for the school...he's more of a black mark for them than anything.

Among the key conclusions from the grand jury’s report:

■ Shirk fired three women from his office solely to help repair his marriage

■ Shirk violated local law by offering alcohol in his office

■ Shirk violated attorney-client privilege when he shared details from a conversation he had with Cristian Fernandez with a documentary crew

■ Shirk and his staff redirected funds to pay for an unapproved shower in his office

■ Shirk’s chief of staff was looking to keep the public from knowing about Shirk’s wife’s altercation at the Public Defender’s Office when he order the removal of her access badge data

■ Shirk embarrassed his office and used it as his personal playpen to satisfy his whims

■ Shirk’s behavior unnecessarily exposed the taxpayers to a lawsuit

http://jacksonville.com/news/crime/2...blic-defenders

[EricBoyd]

Originally Posted by Information1234

Yeah, there are plenty of successful attorneys from Florida Coastal. One off the top of my head is Matthew Shirk, he's the head public defender for the 4th judicial circuit making over $150,000+

Wow, Talk about a softball comment. LoL