A Geezer Lawyer’s Letter to a 3L

By Franklin Drake

UNC School of Law ’78

Dear Megan,

Congratulations on completion of your 2L year! The rest of your law school career will pass a lot faster than you might think it will. The tedium of your 3L year will quickly give way to terror of the bar exam. I predict you will pass. Your license will mean you can begin to learn how to make a living as a lawyer. Word has it that you will choose to enter private practice, preferably as an associate in a law firm. Good.

Law school has done a good job of teaching you how to think. I doubt it has done a good job of teaching you how to build a law practice. I know my law school did not. Those hard lessons came later for me, with a painfully high tuition of experience. You are at the threshold of a long legal career, just as I am concluding one of 40+ years. It’s time someone whispered the secret truths and showed you the secret handshake. Let me.

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Juvenile Justice Pandemic Lessons

This article was originally published on the UNC School of Government blog On the Civil Side and has been republished with permission.

The Juvenile Jurisdiction Advisory Committee (JJAC) met on May 15. The meeting began with a presentation from William Lassiter, Deputy Secretary for Juvenile Justice. While the goal of the presentation was to provide data on trends since implementation of raise the age and the resulting resource needs, the presentation included information and data about juvenile justice system trends during this unprecedented pandemic. The data left me wondering—can changes in juvenile justice system utilization during the pandemic teach us lessons for the functioning of the system outside of a pandemic?

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