Finished a mediocre John Grisham thriller -
The Rooster Bar (2017).
The value of
The Rooster Bar is its exploration of the
for-profit law school scam—
“producing handsome profits while cranking out little in the way of legal talent”—by charging students inflated tuition rates designed to hit federal student loan maximums. In other words:
“…the scam that easy federal money could make law school possible for everyone.” The result, for too many students who wouldn’t have a chance for admittance into competitive law schools, was low bar passage rates and dismal job prospects.
For third-year law students Mark, Todd, and Zola the scam indebting them $200k in loans becomes their rationalization for running a scam of their own by posing as licensed attorneys and haggling for criminal cases at the DC courthouse. The story starts out a bit scattered while gradually building its case for how its main characters resort to the unauthorized practice of law:
“My worthless little brother is about to go to prison…Zola’s family gets rounded up and tossed in a prison to wait on deportation…Now we’re supposed to somehow push it all aside and hustle back to law school for our last semester…followed by two months in hell studying for the bar exam, so we can do something to make a little money, and start repayment.”Chapter 16, partially composed of email correspondence, offers a practical glimpse into loan servicers contacting each character to
“begin the process of structuring a repayment plan.” As one message explains,
“As you know, the law requires a repayment plan to be signed at graduation, with your first payment due exactly six months after that.”The pressure of steep loan repayment adds to the trio’s justification for scouring courtrooms and emergency rooms for clients. There’s an amusing showiness with how they watch and learn from real attorneys, mimicking what they themselves set out to do. Their scheme stumbles forward under pretenses too false to root on their deceptions:
“They felt lousy about a lot of things, but the clients they were stiffing really bothered them. Those people had trusted them, had paid them, were now getting cheated, and would get chewed up again by the system.”Inevitably, a suspicious client tracks them to the Rooster Bar—the Washington DC address they list for their fake law firm, which also happens to be where two of them, the interchangeable Mark and Todd, work as bartenders. From then on, it’s a matter of corralling any remaining profits and fleeing the scene of mounting plaintiff complaints and bar investigations.
In its latter stretches,
The Rooster Bar falls back on Grisham’s familiar bag of unrealistic stunts, such as offshoring large sums of money to cash out after fleeing legal jurisdiction. As with much of Grisham’s work,
The Rooster Bar reads as easily transferable to the screen, though unlikely to be taken seriously by an experienced attorney.
