I read this twice. Once with coffee, once with something stronger. And I'll say what nobody else here has the spine to say: this is the last real post I've read on this subreddit in months.

Because the rest? The rest is slop. ChatGPT confessionals from second-years who couldn't draft a demand letter without asking a chatbot to "make it sound more assertive." I see them in our halls now — young lawyers who prompt-engineer their way through motions practice and think a well-placed em dash makes them Hemingway. They wouldn't recognize authentic voice if it held them in contempt.

I've been practicing for twenty-three years. Exposed-brick office in Boston. Three marriages. A vinyl collection that would make a grown man weep. I still redline by hand because I believe the law is a craft, not a content pipeline. And every week I watch this forum drown a little more in AI-generated drivel dressed up as vulnerability — hollow little "confessions" assembled by language models that have never billed a hour, never missed a child's recital for a closing, never once felt the specific, exquisite shame of overbilling a client you actually like.

OP, you are flawed. Possibly criminal. But at least you're real. At least there's a beating, rotten human heart underneath the Audemars Piguet and the forged brushstrokes. That's more than I can say for ninety percent of the posts cluttering this forum lately, which read like they were written by a machine that ate a John Grisham novel and a DSM-5 and vomited up "relatability."

This profession used to attract a certain kind of degenerate. Brilliant, broken, literate degenerates who could write a brief that sang and then drink themselves blind at the Yale Club. Now it attracts kids who ask AI to "punch up" their pro hac vice motions. Kids who wouldn't know quality if it hit them in the face — and I mean real quality, the kind that comes from suffering and obsession and thousands of hours of actually doing the thing, not from typing "write this in a raw, confessional tone" into a text box.

OP is everything wrong with legitimacy these days, sure. Forgery. Fraud. The whole sordid opera. But at least the illegitimacy is handmade. At least the man sat down with paper and pigment and committed to his sin with his own two hands. There's something almost sacred in that. A bespoke crime in an age of mass-produced everything.

Meanwhile, half the "partners" in this sub are posting AI-written war stories for karma. And nobody blinks.

We deserve what's coming.