The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

My career as a New York lawyer is off to an auspicious start. Due to a ridiculous and poorly articulated procedure, the Board of Law Examiners didn't receive from me the certification that I had passed the bar in time to schedule my interview and swearing in for January. They got everything else that I needed to send, but not that.

It is, of course, my fault. I suppose. I obviously misinterpreted their instructions. I would suggest that such misinterpretation was entirely reasonable, but that hardly matters since it was apparently wrong.

It is though baffling to me that the Board of Law Examiners would need the applicants to send in the certifications that we passed the bar that the Board of Law Examiners itself produces, but apparently that's the way it is. And I knew that. I just didn't realize there was such a rush to do it since by their own admission the certifications were sent out in bulk mail and might take a few weeks to show up (in other words, they might not arrive in applicants' hands until after the deadline to have sent them back in). Since the bulk of applicants' efforts was to get the moral character application together, it struck me that the carrot and stick was to have that part sent in early if you wanted to be sworn in at the first opportunity (seemingly so they could get a jump on processing them without waiting for all the certifications to come back at the same time and cause a backlog, which apparently is what has actually happened). Sending back the certification seemed like a mere formality, since surely they could have simply received a roster of those applicants eligible to be admitted from the Board of Law Examiners directly.

(It is conceivably possible that there's actually two different departments here, but it's very unclear, and even if there are two different departments it's also not clear why it wouldn't be more efficient for them to simply talk to each other rather than relying on thousands of applicants to cut-paste-copy-collate a generally illegible document and then twice play USPS-roulette to get it back to them in time. Yes, I'm mad at myself for not having met the deadline, but I legitimately still abhor inefficient processes. There's just no excuse for them; petty governmental bureaucracies should not be able to disadvantage the public simply because they refuse to easily correct their own institutional deficiencies.)

Fortunately, however, it doesn't really matter. I'm in no rush to be sworn in, and it will simply swap one hectic time (mid-January, while I'm in the middle of BarBri), with another hectic time (the day after the California bar is over, which means I'll finish and then need to hop a red-eye to Albany - won't that be fun...). The biggest disappointment is that all my law school friends will be in Albany in January, and we won't get to be sworn in together. Unless, of course, they screwed up getting their forms in too, and then, hey! we can all be sworn in together in March...

(This also means that I'll need to find someone in California to swear me into New Jersey, since I guess I won't be swinging past there in January to do it like I'd originally planned.)