The Rooster Bar

by John Grisham
352 pgs

Mark, Todd, and Zola are three law students about to start their final semester at Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington D.C., and while for many in their position, it's an exciting time, for them, there's little to look forward to. Combined, they owe over $600,000 in student loans, and because Foggy Bottom is a low-level school, the only have about a 50% chance of passing the bar exam after graduation, and little-to-no chance to find jobs with decent law firms even if they did.

They are victims of a real-life scam Grisham shines a light on in The Rooster Bar, in which for-profit law schools recruit mediocre students, who have no business being in an law school, and then encourage them to rack up exorbitant student loans from the federal government to pay for it, with the assurance that they'll have no problem getting on with a firm when they graduate, who will help them wipe out their debt. The students then graduate and find out those promises were empty, and have a lifetime of insurmountable debt ahead of them. The only people making any money are the owners of the schools.

After one of their classmates decides to take his own life because of the circumstances he now finds himself in, the three classmates come up with a scam of their own. They decide school is a waste of money and time and since lawyers are never asked to prove they've earned their J.D. and passed the bar, why not just start acting like lawyers? Mark and Todd start hanging out around courthouses, hustling clients there with DUI and other traffic charges and taking in cash retainers. Zola starts chasing ambulances in hospital waiting rooms. They change their names and start a bogus firm, and they live and work out of an apartment above their favorite bar, The Rooster Bar.

The appeal of Grisham's story is finding out how far they can take their scheme before their house of cards comes crashing down, along with the lengths they're willing to go to to keep it up. But I found myself wishing for characters I could root for. Zola is the most sympathetic of the three, but eventually I was ready for all three of them to get caught.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆