I frequently namedrop JD Underground and Tom the Temp. It’s because of those I ever found out about the original toiletlaw.com site. I assumed this would be a narrowcast blog towards the bitter law students and grads who know what toiletlaw really means. However, it appears some are not familiar with the jargon of the bitter lawyer. I guess I will give you the basics. Take it with a grain of salt though, since I’m not as hardened and jaded. In fact this is probably the only post I’ll ever make about this kind of thing. Anyways, it all starts with the TTT.

TTT (Third Tier Toilet)
A Third Tier Toilet (or TTTT for fourth tier toilet) usually refers to any law school that is ranked in the Third Tier (100 and up) by US News and World Report. I’m not sure where it came from, but I saw it first used to describe my law school on JD Underground. Nowadays, the snarkiest and most bitter JDUers and Tom the Tempers use it to refer to any law school outside the top 50. All TTT’s have the following in common nowadays:
1. They are ghastly expensive
2. They hype aspects aside from their US News ranking
3. They try to not tell you exactly how many grads of a certain class are actually working as lawyers full time
4. Employers look at them and laugh.
5. Their primary advice in the career center is to “network”
6. Their grads very rarely if ever get into “biglaw”
7. Most grads are document coders or unemployed and well over 6 figures in debt.
When you graduate from a TTT, you feel like you wasted 3 years of your life and you will spend over 30 of the next years paying for it. TTT’s are primarily concerned with making money to perpetuate their existence and are therefore incentivized to take in as many students as possible despite the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina like oversaturation of the legal market. I got waitlisted at a top 50 tier 2 law school, but was accepted immediately at the TTT. I sent off my TTT deposit, and in between signing my lease and moving to the TTT town, the tier 2 school called and said they had room for me. I shrugged and said too bad, so sad. If I didn’t go to the TTT I wouldn’t have met the reason I am trying to break into Jurisdiction X and leave City 17 behind. I would also probably be 80K less in debt. My TTT law school is respected in City 17 and most of my state, but the 2nd tier school would be more respected nationwide.

ToiletLaw aka Shitlaw
From what I recall, the term Toilet Law originally came from the idea of toilet law firms, which was a phrase to the best of my knowledge coined by http://nycinsurancelaw.googlepages.com/ They use it to refer to ID (Insurance Defense) firms mostly out of New York City and its surrounding environs. In fact, a lot of these terms are coined by New Yorkers/Bostoners, because you can probably hit 6 bitter/unemployed law grads from one of the myriad law firms in those metropolitan areas. Toilet Law firms in reality practice all manner of areas, but are identifiable by horribly low wages, poor working conditions, uninterested/cruel employers, long hours, meaningless copypasta of shitpaper (shitpaper, shitlaw, toiletlaw, such colorful euphemisms – shitpaper being used to refer to boilerplate motions used in Insurance related cases which in most instances vary only by caption) and have high turnover rate. Well, they did until unemployment has scared everyone into clinging desparately to their ever decreasing salaried positions.

Anyone who practices in a toilet law firm practices “shitlaw” by definition. Shitlaw is basically anything that isn’t “Biglaw” or “Midlaw.” It’s an elitist or bitter term, for certain, but I basically interpret it to mean anything that requires the representation of individual human beings as clients. If you represent faceless corporations and handle Mergers and Acquisitions, SEC, Commercial, highbrow sorts of stuff (which I honestly wouldnt do unless they backed the brink truck up to my door) you’re not doing shitlaw. Divorces, DUIs, auto accidents, landlord/tenant, Misdemeanors, Felonies, bankruptcies, this is basically “shitlaw”

And then there is the
Toileteer
Using the above definitions you would understand the following: Toileteers are TTT grads/shitlaw practicioers who push shitlaw in their toilet law firms.

In conclusion, this is all common jargon used by people who like to drone on and on about the “Law School Scam” and will engage you in debate about how law schools are all designed to make slaves out of people by saddling them with insurmountable debt, promising them 150K salaries they could never possibly earn unless they hit the lottery, and in fact give them questionable job prospects in a market where 45K to start even in high priced places such as Manhattan require 6-8 months of resume spamming to hopefully one day get before unemployment benefits run out after your loans start coming due 6 months after graduation. God forbid you be a multiple time test taker.

I generally beleive that going to law school was a good idea. I enjoy most of what I do though I really do despire certain clients and secretly wish they would have large anvils dropped on their heads. However in retrospect I should have abandoned the law school deposit, not taken possession of the apartment or paid the security deposit, and hauled my ass to the tier 2 school despite the protests of my family. (I went to the Tier 2 for some ungergrad and partied my way out of a physics scholarship) However that would also mean I would never have met the future Mrs Toilet Lawyer or ever had the joys of being in Jurisdiction X even though most people do not want to be there. Your mileage will vary.

For more information, check out:
http://www.jdunderground.com
http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com

Its school. I meant law school when I was writing about TTT. I could use a fucking editor I swear.

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