1. Repeat after me: A law degree is not a magic wand that will lead you out of your rut and open doors to life's possibilities.

Continuing the fairy tale that law school is more than just a trade school (click here for post about New York Law School dean), Darby Dickerson, dean at Texas Tech University School of Law, tells Texas Lawyer: "The J.D. degree is a versatile one. It trains individuals how to think clearly, to develop logical, reasoned positions, and to write clearly and concisely. Skills gained during law school can thus be applied in many positions."

2. First, no one cared; now they're fighting over it. There's now a turf war between NALP and the American Bar Association about which organization should keep tabs on law schools about their employment data, reports The National Law Journal.

We find this a bit ironic, because neither was paying that much attention to the issue until those pesky Vanderbilt Law School students started the Law School Transparency Project, hounding law schools to provide reliable employment data. We are agnostic as to who should take on this endeavor, though one of our favorite law professors, William Henderson of Indiana University, argues in the NLJ that NALP should do the job. Henderson claims, among other things, that the ABA's legal education and bar admission section "has a long track record of releasing mountains of data in a format that makes it very difficult to analyze the industry or make meaningful school-to-school comparisons."

Coming from an academic, who's probably used to unreadable gibberish, that sounds truly ominous.

3. You know you've got the right stuff for Big Law when you tough out the bar exam during labor. Elana Nightingale Dawson, a recent graduate of Northwestern University Law, finished her bar exam, then gave birth two hours later, reports the ABA Blog. 

Dawson, who will be joining Kirkland & Ellis after completing two federal clerkships, told ABA, "The hardest part was going through a contraction and not moving." She added, "There's something to be said for determination." No kidding.

4. Not having choices is good for you, says Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, reports Forbes. The research "shows that reversible, keep-your-options-open decisions reliably lead to lower levels of satisfaction than irreversible ones," reports Forbes. "In other words, we are significantly less happy with our choices when we can back out of them."

Words of wisdom to keep in mind as interview seasons rolls around. So maybe it's a blessing if the only job offer you get is from that firm in Cleveland.

Correction: The photo has been changed. Originally, the post had a photo of Texas A&M. We regret the error.

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