Coffee Break: 18K Rock Candy Small Suspension Earrings in Mother-of-Pearl

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1. Has anyone heard of a Masters of Science in Law (MSL) degree? I just read about an online program that gives this degree with a specialization in Government Law and Policy. I don’t want to be a lawyer. I’m interested because I work in government and would like to stay here, and the degree says it teaches US law theory and procedure, regulations, legal research, analysis, reasoning, legal and policy concepts, etc. I think the degree could be beneficial to me. Any thoughts/perspective would be appreciated.

   1. I don’t know a ton about this, but I did meet someone recently who was doing this. She wanted to ultimately be in finance (investing VCs/PEs). Honestly, as a corporate non-lawyer person, I didn’t get it. I wasn’t clear on why she wouldn’t have just done a JD which is much more easily recognizable by others. When I see someone with a JD apply to a non-legal role, I just read it as “I have all the legal background/experience but didn’t want to be a lawyer.” I have no idea how to parse a MSL degree.

   2. Do you already work in policy? I work in policy and the degree sounds useless to me. Because while policy staff draft the spirit of the laws and Shepard the laws through the process there are actual lawyers who write the legalese.

      1. I think it’s the lawyers who do the Shepardizing.

         1. Ooooooooo!

   3. If your work will pay for you to do it and you’ll get some kind of salary bump for having a master’s degree, then maybe it’s worth it. But from a substantive standpoint, I have heard this is pretty much useless. Some law schools have added programs like this in the last few years to try to get more students/money

      1. This. I would say that the JD, and to a lesser extent LLM (for internatiomal students), is recognized widely, with the latter already considered a cash cow for many law schools. MSL sounds like an attempt to extend offerings and draw in students, but it’s not a traditional degree and a lot of people will scratch their head. Why not do an MPP instead?

   4. Eh, most of the masters degrees in the policy world are pretty useless, but you need them because everyone’s expected to have graduate degrees these days. Ditto pp – if your employer will pay for it and/or you get a good raise from it, why not?

2. Curious if you ladies can fill me in on the structure of daycare costs. I’m trying to help a family member figure out whether they could get by financially if they moved to my area and took care of a few kids. There is plenty of demand. But asking working moms I know here, the pricing seems abysmally low for the provider, even though I believe the moms that it is a very challenging to afford.
   I know the pricing in my rural area won’t compare to where most of you live. But I would still be interested in hearing about the relative pricing for nannying vs small groups in someone’s home vs stereotypical “daycare centers”. And I’d be especially interested to hear what factors make the price go up, what extra services you pay a premium for, etc. Extended hours? Transportation? Good food?
   Thanks!

   1. Your best bet is to just start calling around. In my area (Northern VA) daycare is either full-time or part-time, though not all centers offer part-time. The extras seem to largely be part of the preschools — the preschool “curriculum” goes until lunchtime and then there’s an extra charge for lunch to 3pm, and a larger charge for lunch to 6 pm. A couple of the very fancy preschools offer bus service from your door for a premium. Ours offers add-on sports like swimming and soccer for like $50/8 weeks each.

   2. I pay around 1800/month for my 2 year old and 1200 for my 1 year old for M-F 6:30-6:30p daycare with 5 stars. Breakfast lunch pm snack included. Usually with a 25 or 50$ monthly activity fee or something or other.

      I pay $20/hr for the occasional babysitter.

      1. Same. Seattle.

   3. Centers in my area range $225-$350/wk for full-time preschool, and $325-$500/wk for full-time infants (and virtually no centers offer a part-time option for infants). I had to do the daycare hunt in late December when our much beloved center closed very suddenly, and I couldn’t find much difference between the places that charge $350/wk vs $225/wk for preschool – it’s mostly a prestige thing but overall the kids are learning the same things, getting served breakfast/lunch/snack, and following a similar curriculum. In-home daycares are cheaper, but most do not take infants so they are only an option once your kid are older than 16 months.

   4. Teacher student ratio is the big determinant. There is usually a prescribed ratio which varies by age (for the youngest infants something like 1:7 or 8 and for kindergartners could be 1:25). California has a higher required ratio I believe so check on the state regulation if any. And finally, NYAEC accredited centers have an even higher ratio which is something like 1:4 for the youngest babies and they can charge higher fees with this justification.
      The second thing I look for is teacher certification and credentials, some centers require teachers to have some child ed certification or to take annual re-certifications in addition to the usual safety trainings.
      Beyond that, the other factors are the space (indoor, outdoor, playground, enough for kids to spread around in different activities) and food (meals included or extra).

   5. My mother owns and operates a family daycare in rural Tennessee. Her pricing is $140 a week, with a state-mandated seven child limit. She takes the week of Christmas and the week of the 4th of July off. Her contract stipulates that she is paid weekly whether the client’s child attends or not.

3. We can WFH all the time. Basically, if we’re not in a coma, every hour is a billable hour. IDK how long a not-mild case of coronavirus might be, but I’m scared that I will be too sick to work. I worked during maternity leave and if I get sick and schools are closed at the same time, I am really not going to be able to function. This is the only time I think I’ve honestly been worried that it may because of me that a deal fails to price or close (and I do a weird DOL-ERISA area where the only other non-third year associate is old enough to be deep into the complications age for coronavirus).

   Have any firms talked about this? Ours discusses WFH but assumes you’ll be able to work. What if you are truly ill? [IDK what the odds are of that vs just feeling mildly ill, but I’ve never worried about this before.]

   1. Firms need to have a plan for WFH and a plan for what happens when people are unable to work due to illness. Italy is seeing hospitalizations of some younger people as well, so the L variant in particular can be quite serious.

   2. You have never been sick before?

      1. No. I have worked through just about everything, from home. I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to schedule some surgeries for the day after a closing, so I could be away (and then had a weekend or short week to recover). A couple years ago I got a mild case of the flu and was ready to crawl into bed by 6pm each day, but did WFH and was maybe at 70%, so keeping up with the most important things. That was two rough weeks. The week prior I was home with a kid with full-blown flu, then a week of overlap where I was sick and a week after when she was better and back at school. We both had had flu shots.

         This is why my kids will see that they don’t want to be lawyers.

         1. “This is why my kids will see that they don’t want to be lawyers.” Correction – they don’t want to be lawyers in BigLaw. Lots of other places will let you be a lawyer and have a life!

         2. This is so sad and not normal. You should re-evaluate. You’re a slave basically.

      2. The impression I get of Big Law is that if you’re not dead you should be billing hours.

         1. I think you get a pass for a coma or enough drugs that you aren’t in your right mind. Otherwise, OMG yes.

   3. Step away from the kool aid. You should not have worked during mat leave. You should not work if you are truly ill. The world will not end.

      1. +1. Step away from the Kool-aid seems like the only reasonable response here. Yes, your job is important, both to you and to your company. It’s not more important than your life.

   4. If you’re too sick to work, your form will restaff and cope. Same as if you got hit by a bus. Don’t buy into the myth that you are indispensable.

      1. I get that BigLaw in some areas is not that deep for bench strength. This may show them why that is a really bad business model.

      2. I think the pressure to bill in Big Law, at least for associates, is that you are entirely dispensable. The firm will restaff and cope. You’ll be the person who caused the inconvenience and billed fewer hours.

         That’s not to say that you should put your job ahead of your health. But my experience was that when I put my health first, I had one year to the day to find a new job.

         1. This (last sentence).

   5. I mean, a bad case of COVID-19 (where you’re on a ventilator) can last 4-6 weeks. But if you’re on a ventilator, I reaaaaaaalllllly don’t think work is going to be your biggest concern. You seriously didn’t take even a few weeks off after giving birth!? I was in Big Law and, yeah, you’re expected to work through the common cold. But it is ok even in Big Law, to take off time for serious illnesses. You should never, ever put your health before a job, because the company considers you just another cog in the wheel.

      1. In BigLaw, associates get the time off. I think that the more senior you are, that is leave that is largely theoretical. And maybe you are only working 50%-60%, but you can’t be non-reachable or non-responsive and expect to keep the work or the relationship. It’s just not how it works.

         1. This must be firm dependent. In my AmLaw 50 firm, it was common even for senior associates and partners to take a real maternity leave of at least 12 weeks. They weren’t “off the grid” in the same way someone who goes camping somewhere without cell phone reception is, but they weren’t billing anything close to 50% hours. My sense from talking to people who took leave was that they were monitoring email/phone calls, but not actually doing any substantive work and their billable hours were next to zero for months on end. I imagine people would be at least as understanding of serious COVID-19 complications as they are of maternity leave (probably more so, because women choose to have children and no one chooses to get a deadly virus).

         2. Nah. I am one month back from leave. Standard 18 weeks plus 6 weeks banked vacation. I worked maybe 30 minutes the entire time, and that was just chatting to colleagues by phone. And I’m a senior associate. And am extremely well-regarded and have come back to all my client relationships in tact and happy to have me back, and with the explicitly stated expectation by senior partner that they want me to stay and will do whatever they can within reason to make that happen.

            I am convinced that about 1/3 the problem with biglaw is people acting down to expectations that they should not. Of course the other 2/3 are genuinely oawful partners/clients/expectations.

            1. +1000

               I think a lot of this is made up by people who want to feel special. I am in big law, took a real maternity leave, and would absolutely be able to stop working if I came down with something serious.

            2. This. And I work at a biglaw firm known as a sweatshop. I think a solid 30-40% of that is self imposed. Then add to it that it’s not in partners interest to tell you to work less/bill less (well in the long run it is but we are all very short term biased creatures by nature). Especially if your are someone who is well-liked by the right people internal lake externally, I think a lot of this isn’t real. All the well regarded senior associates (and a few partners) I know who recently had kids all took a real leave and it was fine.

         3. Former AmLaw 50 partner, now in-house: all of our associates took full mat leave and we didn’t so much as send them an email during it, except for friendly/social stuff and return-to-work planning toward the end. Same with associates on paternity leave.

            For partners, maternity leave wasn’t really a possibility.

   6. Your firm may only have one other experienced lawyer in your area, but guess what? There are hundreds of other firms your clients can turn to on one hour’s notice. Might not be great for your firm, but there’s no way a deal isn’t going to close or price because of you. Chill.

4. Welp, I received an offer to join a boutique law firm earlier this week and was excited to leave big law but got a phone call today from the managing partner that they’ve decided to put the conversation on hold and rescind the offer until they have a better sense of how the economy is going to shake out …. trying to look on the bright side but definitely bummed.

   1. That sucks, I’m really sorry.

   2. I’m sorry! Had you already given notice?

5. If your company mandates WFH, what do you wish your team did in preparation for it? If you’re in a school closure area, what do you wish YOU had done in preparation for school closure?

6. Are schools/daycares/summer camps going to be closed indefinitely? I just don’t understand what a two to three week closure is going to do. I understand the concept behind flattening the curve, but given that the incubation period can be as long as two weeks, it seems like schools would have to be closed for MUCH longer than that to make any real difference in how fast this things spreads. But I also don’t understand how businesses are going to function if all their employees with young kids have to be taking care of them for the next several months.
   Tl;dr… am I still going to be “working” from home while watching a 2 year old in July!?

   1. Not everything will be closed at the same time. China is starting to crawl back to recovery after just a couple months. In another month or two, Italy will have things under better control as well in all likelihood. Most developed countries are trying to avoid Italy type situations by shutting things down sooner than Italy did. I’d expect closures to continue through Easter and then start to open up again. Places that don’t have covid yet (like my small city) won’t likely shut down for a few more weeks and will start up again later. It’s going to be a rough, uncertain 5-6 months but hopefully an Italy type situation with literally running out of ICU beds and ventilators can be avoided through rolling shut downs.

      TL, DR – you likely won’t be WFH in July

   2. For two parent families, they can at least swap off who is home with the kids and who is at work so it will be a 50% reduction in staff with kids not 100%. Still a huge deal of course!

   3. The Seattle Times is just now reporting that our schools will be closed until APRIL 24. I don’t know what people are going to do.

      1. Have the high school kids that are now free watch the younger kids in the neighborhood? Do their remote learning in the evenings instead?

         1. Our city said we couldn’t even do play dates at the park, and hiring a caregiver to work in your home is much less “social distancing” than playing at the park.

   4. Yeah, I am concerned. I have one kid who could fend for himself (with much screen time) and another who still needs quite a lot of supervision and would have a hard time being with me — but not really being with me. The grandparents who live nearby are in their 70s, so that’s not a great backup option. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

   5. I want guidance from my employer on this topic. I am dependent on childcare. My nanny has to commute from another borough on public trans. How horrible is it for me to use my greater economic power to keep her working and risking her health? But my employer, with its greater economic power than me, is kinda forcing my hand…

7. Whoa — so Disneyland is closing indefinitely?

   We have a trip to Disney World booked for June and are seriously considering canceling. Overreaction, or not? Things could change a lot by then, but I’m not sure the risk is really worth it.

   1. Not indefinitely. For now it’s just through the end of the month. June is so very far away, I would give it at least another month and see how this rides.

   2. I have a flight to the UK on June 30 that I’m still hoping to take. I think there’s still some chance this will be controlled by then.

   3. Assuming you’re staying at Disney World, I don’t think there’s any real disadvantage to a “wait and see” approach until you’re closer to June. If Disney World is closed, then they’ll refund you. If you’re uncomfortable making the trip but it’s not technically closed, their cancellation policy will apply (unless they’re more generous for customer service reasons). Under their policies, if you booked a vacation package, you’ll get a full refund if you cancel 30+ days out, and it will cost $200 per person if you cancel within 29-2 days out. If you’ve made separate hotel and ticket reservations, then you can cancel the hotel reservation up to 5 days out with no charge and incur one night’s charge if you cancel within 4 days. For tickets, if you haven’t use any of them yet, then you have a certain amount of time (I think the end of next year) to use them at the price you paid, and after that, you can apply the value toward tickets.

   4. We have a Disney World trip planned for mid-April, and I’m not going to cancel until mid-April. Things may improve, things may get worse – either way I have nothing to gain by cancelling now.

8. I work in a courthouse in California and practice criminal law. We are still summoning jurors as usual – hundreds of strangers, drawn from every section of our community, mingling together in our jury room, pushing the same elevator buttons. We are still running calendar as usual – hundreds of people in and out of our courtrooms, many of whom are the most vulnerable to COVID-19 because of age, health, exposure or access to healthcare. There are confirmed cases in my county, more every day. And still we power on. There’s not even a realistic conversation in my jurisdiction about closing down, because of the stakes involved. (Speedy trial rights yield for no one, not even Coronavirus(for now?). Others in criminal law – are your courts closing? Restricting access? Rethinking their methods for summoning jurors?

   1. NH courts have suspended jury trials for a month.

   2. My county (with weeks of community transmission) has not changed anything in their jury-trial process. But the county public health is insisting that “misinformation” is the greatest risk, and exhorting people not to go to the doctor or ask for tests, so…

   3. Same here in California. It’s nuts. There is hand sanitizer on the counsel table and that’s about it.

   4. I work in a state with recent coronavirus cases but no known community spread as of yet (though I’m sure it has already spread.) Anyway, our courts have decided to limit the number of people summoned to jury duty, limiting pools to no more than 25 people. If additional jurors are needed, they will keep then in a separate room. Jurors who have traveled to areas with high concentration of the virus are supposed to contact the court before coming in. Civil jury trials are postponed for now. Judges are encouraged to conduct telephonic hearings where appropriate. Jails are supposed to limit the number of inmates transported to the courthouse. I don’t know what that actually means. I work for a statewide public defender agency and we are struggling with how to best continue to represent clients (which requires jail visits, contact with witnesses, etc.) while also minimizing contact. Like many states, our jails are also over-crowded and it is only a matter of time before there is an outbreak and much of the jail population are vulnerable people with health concerns.

   5. I have had to bill all the time even when sick in the past, but with our value billing plan, it allows for bill leveling between cleints, and that might help. For those who are sick now, don’t hesitate to rest and get well. If I do get sick, guess what, I will rest and forget about billing. What will happen then? I am critical for our firm to stay healthy and I think we all are, so tell them you cannot bill until you get well.

   6. Ugh, same. I’m a law clerk at a civil court in California and we’re not allowed to work from home (even as thousands of people crowd into the courthouse every day from all over…). I’m definitely going to get sick. Don’t really understand why they are taking zero measures. It feels like a petri dish just waiting for all employees to be sick.

   7. same situation as you, also practice crim law in California. No special precautions at this time, which is kind of mind boggling. Someone stole the bottle of hand sanitizer at our front desk earlier this week. SMDH.

   8. I suspect that shortly we will see many criminal continue to operate but many civil matters will be postponed.

   9. I was just talking to my clerk and she was just talking to the bailiff, who opined that he expects the courts to be closed within in a week. In my opinion the balance of hardships could reasonably tilt towards keeping felony courts open and closing misdemeanor and civil courts in the interest of public health.

9. So my kids’ school just closed until the end of March.

   DH and I are WFH.

   Stay safe. Send wine.

10. My office is now WFH until further notice, schools are closed, big events too. Would not mind that much, but I am also now switching roles, doing handover for both, old and new role and my (old) team is going through internal recruitment process. So not the best time to disappear. We have an active whatsapp group chat and we will have all meetings via video. Any other tips?

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