Who am I to know The Secret to Happiness, you ask. Mankind has struggled with this question for eons, yet here I am, purporting to know The Answer. What kind of pretentious jerk would make such a claim, especially on New Year’s Day? These are fair points. In my defense, I am currently hung over. I am also not much in the mood to write about all the bad news that’s fit to print–and there is a never-ending supply of that, which I presume we’ll get to soon enough. No, today is a holiday, the beginning of a new year, a time for optimism even–especially–when realism calls for pessimism. And the fact is, in my years of observing asylum seekers, people who have suffered much and are under continuous stress, I have learned The Secret to Happiness, which I will reveal to you forthwith.
Immigration Attorneys
If Immigration Attorneys Said What They Were Thinking
Trigger Warning: This post contains a lot of curse words.
What’s the reason for the forthcoming salty language? It’s because we immigration lawyers work in a system that is utterly broken, and in order to make any progress at all for our clients, we need to hold our tongues and remain professional with our government colleagues.
Immigration Judges, court staff, DHS attorneys (the prosecutors in Immigration Court), USCIS officers, and Asylum Officers all have a lot of power over our clients’ lives. Losing our temper with these people rarely results in good outcomes for our clients, and so we attorneys must practice forbearance. We often can’t say what we are thinking for fear of jeopardizing our clients’ cases. But today, I propose to throw off the veil of civility and say what’s on my mind.
Immigration Law and AI
If you follow tech news, you probably know about Chat-GPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) program that has been writing college essays, designing buildings, and even crafting condolence emails after mass shootings. Just last week, we learned that this program “can now outperform most law school graduates on the bar exam, the grueling two-day test aspiring attorneys must pass to practice law in the United States.” The test consists of multiple choice and essay questions, and Chat-GPT’s score placed it “in the 90th percentile of actual test takers,” which “is enough to be admitted to practice law in most states.”
Perhaps in an effort to make lawyers feel better, the “National Conference of Bar Examiners, which designs the multiple choice section, said… that attorneys have unique skills gained through education and experience that AI cannot currently match.” “Currently” being the operative word.
While I do not expect to lose my job in the immediate future, I can see areas of immigration law where AI would be able to assist attorneys and increase efficiency. And I can also imagine a future where AI takes over many, if not all, tasks performed by attorneys, Asylum Officers, and Immigration Judges.
On the Benefits of Having a Lawyer
A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Immigrants Need Better Protection–From Their Lawyers” by Professor Benjamin Edwards) laments the poor quality of immigration attorneys, and postulates that as a group, “the private immigration bar now contains the worst lawyers in all of law.” The author’s primary solution to the problem of “incompetent” and “predatory” lawyers is … Read more
Ten Reasons for Optimism in ’15
To work as an asylum attorney in the era of the backlog, you need to be either an optimist or a masochist. And I’m no optimist. But, as they say, “Fake it until you make it.” In that spirit, and in the hope of better things to come in the Year of Our Lord 2015, … Read more
The Problem With Immigration Lawyers and How to Fix It, Part 4: Attorneys
If you have been reading this series of posts, you know that so far I’ve blamed several people/organizations for the poor quality of immigration attorneys: Immigration Judges, Bar Associations, and Notarios. I suppose some of the blame for bad attorneys might possibly… perhaps… maybe rest with the attorneys themselves (ourselves). So what’s wrong with immigration … Read more
Do Immigration Lawyers Suck?
According to the EOIR website’s List of Currently Disciplined Practitioners, almost 400 immigration attorneys (397 by my count) have been seriously disciplined since 2000. What I mean by “seriously disciplined” is suspended or expelled from the practice of law. The list does not include attorneys who have been subjected to lesser punishments, such as “reprimands” or “admonishments,” … Read more