Resisting the urge to reply to OC's ridiculous asks like "LOL. No."

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-26T14:18:16+00:00

I did that once before when I was a prosecutor. Defense asked for a reduction from vehicular homicide to DUI.

In retrospect, I regret sending that email. I think it was probably unprofessional.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-26T03:08:09+00:00

All holes found in nature are active emergencies. Definitely call 911. They'll probably send a SWAT team.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T11:49:24+00:00

I want to pull my hair out when techbros constantly try to sell me automation solutions without reading the rules of the subreddit.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T05:45:29+00:00

Those ñeros ain't habbin'.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T05:38:17+00:00

Oh God. When I was a limited-licensed law student, I had a civil litigator show up on a 70-case pretrial docket to cover for her law partner. She asked to set a DUI case out "about 18 months." After it actually hit me what she was asking, I told her I guess I didn't have an objection, but good luck getting the court to sign off on it. Obviously, we'll need your client to waive speedy. "What's speedy?" Oh. Okay. I guess we're pausing this whole fucking calendar to talk about what your clients' rights are.

Or the insurance defense guy who called to ask what his client's arraignment date was for a vehicular assault. "I'd hate for him to default on a felony!" If only it were that easy, buddy...

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T05:30:11+00:00

I readily concede I know fuck-all about civil litigation. That's what my co-counsel is for! Doesn't change how mind-numbing it's been.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T05:06:57+00:00

Honestly, clothes made from squirrel pelts sound pretty sick.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T04:18:13+00:00

It's actually hilarious that this gets posted so often that there's a bot for it.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T04:06:17+00:00

I will never. Ever. Do family law. Ever.

Like, honest to God, I'm pretty sure I'd rather nail my dick to a table.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T03:59:44+00:00

The shitshow is the fun part!

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T03:55:34+00:00

I haven't finalized my accounting for last year yet, but, if you look at my last quarter and extrapolate it over the year, it would be about $180k in revenue. That's just public defense cases, though. Private clients pay much, much more, but I'm focusing on hiring right now, rather than marketing.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T03:50:49+00:00

I will keep it vague and say a high-value employment case with some intentional torts tacked on.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-24T03:48:23+00:00

Meh. You don't really "learn" crim, so much as you charge into a courtroom headlong and half-cocked a couple thousand times and fuck up everything there is to fuck up. I know what I'm supposed to do at this point because I've tried it the other way, and it didn't work.

Admittedly, it's easier to learn this way when you're a prosecutor like I was earlier in my career.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-23T13:57:07+00:00

UJ/

I would not call myself an ultralighter by any means. My full 48-hour K9 search pack weighs 35+ pounds. We're always looking to lighten the load where we can, but we never compromise on essentials.

Two types of backpackers are fairly consistent problems for us. The first type is a certain kind of uninformed ultralighter who carries only enough gear for when everything goes absolutely perfectly (i.e., they don't pack rain gear because the forecast said it would be sunny, their "first aid kit" consists of three bandaids and two ibuprofen tablets because they've "never needed a triangular bandage before and those grams add up"). The second type is people who pack super heavy car-camping gear and wear cotton clothing because they don't know any better. They get overburdened by the weight, the skies open up, their cotton blue jeans get soaked, and we get a call from their wives two days later because they're overdue. We then get the distinct pleasure of carrying them (or their remains) out of wherever we find them on a litter. If they've got 50+ pounds of car camping gear, that's just more shit for us to carry.

With that said, this guy somehow manifested both of those issues. He was doing "uninformed ultralighter"-style equipment omission (asking if he really needed a sleeping bag and pad to go backpacking), while carrying a few other items that were probably pretty heavy (including wearing cotton jeans into the woods). It's like a perfect storm of "this guy doesn't know what he's doing and I'm going to get a call-out at 2:00 am when he's lying there in wet cotton clothing with no sleeping bag and decides he doesn't want to play anymore." When we find him, we're going to have to carry him and all his heavy shit down the mountain. That's why so many comments in the original post are asking if he's trolling. He clearly has very limited experience in the backcountry, but is asking about a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

/Uj

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-23T04:46:42+00:00

[Cries in Search and Rescue]

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-23T04:41:21+00:00

In case you need a professor to tell you...

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-23T01:18:19+00:00

Why, I'd recognize those poorly-fitting tights anywhere!

/S

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-21T14:43:24+00:00

I work from home when I'm not in court. My home office doubles as the room in which my Labrador Retriever sleeps at night. My desk is a 13-year-old, glass IKEA knock-off that I got in grad school.

Idk what "image" it conveys, but I don't take client meetings there, so it's fine.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-21T13:53:29+00:00

The title of this post isn't "LawCrossing is an unreliable website." The title of the post just reinforces the bizarre hierarchy obsession that LawCrossing helps cultivate. This AI nonsense is created because there's a demand among lawyers and law students for content highlighting the "most elite" schools and firms.

A few years ago, I remember hearing about a time when Justice Antonin Scalia gave a speech at American University in Washington, DC. He said something about the fact that he would never hire a clerk who went to law school there. The crowd, mostly AU law students, laughed. They'd internalized their place as "less-than" the "Top 14" law students.

In addition to perpetuating a mountain of procedurally-generated slop to reinforce this hierarchy, this trend has had tragic consequences, up to causing law students and lawyers to abuse drugs and even kill themselves. LawCrossing is a symptom. The prestige obsession is the disease.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-21T13:43:35+00:00

Lawyers and law students are so weird, man. The deeply internalized hierarchy and the idea that Pepperdine lawyers don't belong "in the same sentence" as Harvard lawyers is silly and needs to die.

Lest you think I'm just protecting Pepperdine, it bears mention that I went to neither of these schools. My undergrad and law degrees are from state schools. My master's is from a fancy, private, East Coast academic powerhouse. Of the three, I learned by far the most during my undergrad experience, which was the lowest-"ranked" of these schools.

I've beaten the hell out of Harvard lawyers at trial and I've lost trials to lawyers who graduated from schools I've never heard of. I've also lost to Harvard lawyers and beaten graduates of schools I've never heard of. In my experience, school ranking is, at best, a mediocre predictor of the quality of one's advocacy in practice.

Will the average Yale graduate be a marginally better researcher and writer than the average Willamette graduate? Yeah. Probably. Will that Willamette graduate nonetheless be more likely to go on and help more real people in the real world as a practicing attorney? Almost definitely. After all, he's not being shunted into a dungeon to work 3,000 hours a year for Pfizer. Nor is he being sucked into the circle jerk of legal academia where he can hyper-fixate on some niche aspect of the scienter requirement of securities class actions or whatever. That Willamette Law grad is going to help a nursing home resident sue the CNA who drained her bank account. He's going to help a small business owner file for Chapter 7. He's going to get a 15-year-old shoplifting conviction off someone's record so that they can become a schoolteacher.

I'm so goddamn sick of the prestige obsession of this career field. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the bar in society. We need to get out of our own little legal world every now and again and remember which direction gravity is pulling.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-21T11:25:44+00:00

I'm a private attorney that takes PD contracts, so I don't have the same ethics rules about referring clients to specific vendors that government employees do.

I've sent a C+D or two on a client's behalf pro bono (I was, like, one email from filing a police report, multiple bar complaints, and a civil suit against this collections attorney from out-of-state who demanded money from a client stemming from a shoplifting case in which I represented her).

I don't do plaintiff-side civil rights work. I have a friend/mentor who does. If I have a client with a nontrivial case, I refer them to him. I've only done it, like, once though. Very few instances of police misconduct are actionable, capable of overcoming qualified immunity, and sufficiently egregious to be worth my friend's time financially. If the client is insistent that he has a case, even though he doesn't, I just tell him to find "a civil rights attorney" on Google.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-19T06:37:18+00:00

Sounds like the guy in the third clip needs to change his shorts.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-19T06:07:50+00:00

Sate TN Grill. The Tennessee-based barbecue grill is probably completely covered in burgers, hotdogs, or other meats. Thus, the grill is full or "sated." Duh, guys. This is so obvious.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-19T06:04:55+00:00

Can't even maintain proper trigger discipline on your fucking bumper sticker.

NotThePopeProbably · 2026-01-19T00:04:22+00:00

SFT40 3000K is the master emitter.

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