Who gives a rat's ass about a lawyer suffering. I guess he's just getting it paid forward.

I am tired of this becoming a hate fest. The guy is no deadbeat. If anything, the deadbeat is Sallie Mae. I read this in the New York Times. Here is the more balanced and complete story....

Full Story in NYT

He graduated with only 270K in debt (still normal for law school, I don't care how long he took), but it grew to over $435 in JUST FOUR YEARS!

I'm sure he would have made payments on his student loans if he could, seeing as he was medically incapable to work, but Sallie Mae refused to allow him to postpone payments until he was able to work. Since he refused to pay while incapacitated, they sent it to collections and tacked on a 25% fee! They then re-sold it to another collector and they too tacked on another 25% fee! OMG! Criminal!

Oh, but I know it's typical for Sallie Male to create anonymous accounts on forums to trash people and call them deadbeats. They do this whenever a news item comes out that is critical of them. Just ask the guys at Student Loan Justice what kind of creeps they are!

NPR Story on the Student Loan Industry: click here

This is the new subprime! Only thing is, you can declare bankruptcy with a mortgage, have Truth-in-Lending protection, have rights under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, etc. NOT so with a student loan. Sallie Mae has turned from a government agency to a profits-driven, publicly-traded crook and student loans have gone from that easy to handle 6% 10-year "good debt" to the most oppressive kind of consumer debt in history!

MikeR397 said:

I guess when I go through this next year, I need to keep my credit reports free from the $150k of AOR balances I'm normally carrying around with me to simplify things .
Mike when I saw this the first thing I did was think about you. I remember warning you awhile ago to be careful with the games you play. Still think what you are doing is a bit risky, I know you trust all your family members but if something were to happen and issues about what you have done with getting credit in others names came up it could potentially hurt you. Will be good that soon you will be a lawyer and start using that clever mind of yours to make some serious money

greling said:He graduated with only 270K in debt (still normal for law school, I don't care how long he took), but it grew to over $435 in JUST FOUR YEARS!It is mostly the capitalized interest. 26 years is a long time for the compound interest really work its wonders.

greling said:I'm sure he would have made payments on his student loans if he could, seeing as he was medically incapable to work...According to the article the jet-ski accident occured some time after February 2008. Roughly the 25 year point of not one single payment made. Nice try.

geo123 said:ppatin said:The idea that you need "character" to be a lawyer is ridiculous. If that was the case every medical malpractice and personal injury lawyer in the country would be disbarred.

That being said, this guy is clearly a deadbeat.Believe it or not, the character and fitness applications in most if not all states are anything but a joke. Back when I had to apply for it in my state, the application was something like 25 pages long and asked for every single address that you had over the past 10 years and every single credit card, loan or any other type of an indebtedness that was outstanding. They asked about not just about your convictions but also arrests and even criminal or civil charges that were merely threatened and it made no difference whether something had been dismissed, expunged, sealed, etc... I believe the statement on the front page was that if anyone, including a court, had ever told you that you were not required to disclose something, it still had to be disclosed for the purposes of the character and fitness examination. You had to disclose whether you had ever visited a psychiatrist, psychologist or any other type of therapist and whether you had ever experienced any mental health issues including but not limited to things like depression. You also had to disclose every single lawsuit that you were ever involved in in as a plaintiff or a defendant.

They also pulled a copy of your credit report, criminal report and the driving record. They sent out questionnaires to your previous employers asking them about the circumstances of your employment, your conduct while employed there, circumstances involving your departure, etc...

Now, it obviously doesn't mean that if something popped up in the course of these examinations, it necessarily precluded you from practicing law. They just wanted to have the total picture of a person's past to ensure his/her "good moral character."

This meant, for instance, that while an old DUI would not in and of itself cause a denial (my law school roommate had an old DUI that he had to disclose) but recent DUI's were known to cause significant problems. Crimes and other infractions of moral turpitude, especially recent ones, were especially problematic. For instance, failing to disclose something that you were required to disclose on your law school application would typically result in an almost automatic denial. The same applied to any recent evidence of failing to responsibly manage your finances, so that substantial student loan indebtedness was not a problem, but a history of late payments was a very big problem.

Far be it from me to insinuate that the bar associations might be interested in reducing the number of new lawyers so that the existing ones have less competition....

StevenColorado said:Far be it from me to insinuate that the bar associations might be interested in reducing the number of new lawyers so that the existing ones have less competition....That would be one of the most ineffective ways to control the number of lawyers entering the legal profession. The VAST majority of law students have no problem with the character and fitness reviews since the requirements are known up front, so those with issues tend to stay away from even applying to law school or, if they do, are rejected by law schools outright (all law schools require you to disclose if you've ever been convincted or have any charges pending against you).

If the Bar really wanted to limit the number of new lawyers, it'd be far easier and more effective for them to simply limit the size of law school classes, make the bar exam even more difficult, etc...

geo123They asked about not just about your convict said:ions but also arrests and even criminal or civil charges that were merely threatened and it made no difference whether something had been dismissed, expunged, sealed, etc... I believe the statement on the front page was that if anyone, including a court, had ever told you that you were not required to disclose something, it still had to be disclosed for the purposes of the character and fitness examination. You had to disclose whether you had ever visited a psychiatrist, psychologist or any other type of therapist and whether you had ever experienced any mental health issues including but not limited to things like depression. You also had to disclose every single lawsuit that you were ever involved in in as a plaintiff or a defendant.

They also pulled a copy of your credit report, criminal report and driving record. They sent out questionnaires to your previous employers asking them about the circumstances of your employment, your conduct while employed there, circumstances involving your departure, etc...

You don't have to disclose a lot of this. There is no central, comprehensive database that stores most of this information, and also if a court ever stated you don't have to disclose, that means it won't show up on background checks.

Background checks are not that comprehensive, especially if you've lived in more than one state. Any law school applicant looking to maximize their chances of admissions would best run a few background checks on themself and see what comes up. Expungement means sealed--not even the sentencing judge would know about your past record with one of those. And for driving record, etc: nobody is going to make you put down your drivers license number. Just leave it blank.

It appears that these admissions committees only use this personal information to the applicants detriment so it makes sense to withhold as much information as possible, to both maximize their chances as well as to make the background check company work for it.

LeveragedSpeculator said:You don't have to disclose a lot of this. There is no central, comprehensive database that stores most of this information, and also if a court ever stated you don't have to disclose, that means it won't show up on background checks.

Background checks are not that comprehensive, especially if you've lived in more than one state. Any law school applicant looking to maximize their chances of admissions would best run a few background checks on themself and see what comes up. Expungement means sealed--not even the sentencing judge would know about your past record with one of those. And for driving record, etc: nobody is going to make you put down your drivers license number. Just leave it blank.

It appears that these admissions committees only use this personal information to the applicants detriment so it makes sense to withhold as much information as possible, to both maximize their chances as well as to make the background check company work for it.If you want my opinion, you would be a fool to play games with character and fitness committees. Do you know how many times something that is supposed to be sealed isn't properly sealed and still shows up in certain searches while it does not show up in other searches? If you withhold information (it's pretty easy to tell if you've made a good faith effort to disclose all the information or if you are intentionally withholding it) and character and fitness investigators find out about it, you are GUARANTEEING yourself a denial, all over things that most likely would not be a big deal anyway. Frankly, if there is ever a time not to play games, character and fitness examination is that time.

yeah, I'd trust this guy with a 500,000 settlement check.

What, he never said anything to me about a vacation to the Caymans!