Legal News

Sizing Up a Student-Loan Horror Story

By Ashby Jones

We found Jonathan Glater’s page-one story in today’s NYT highly entertaining. A brief synopsis: Robert Bowman, an aspiring 47-year old lawyer, took the New York bar exam four times before passing, which he finally did last year. Thing is, the New York bar said no to his application for admission, largely because of Bowman’s debt history. Over the years, he’d amassed some $400,000 in student debt and penalties, accrued to pay for his undergraduate and legal education, which included an LL.M. degree.

The thing we struggled with, however, was whether to feel badly for Bowman. Rather than come down on one side or another, we’re going to lay out the pros and cons and “kick the can” over to you, LBers.

Reasons to feel for Bowman:

• Getthing through college took him 10 years, because he had spent “nearly six in rehabilitation, re-learning how to walk after an all-terrain vehicle hit him while he was stopped on his motorcycle.”
• “He put himself through community college, worked and borrowed heavily to help pay for college, graduate school and even law school.”
• Shortly after he passed the bar in February of last year, “while living with his once-estranged mother in Miramar, Fla., he was swimming at a beach when a Jet Ski lost control and slammed into him, breaking his good leg in four places.
• He claims Sallie Mae overcharged him, “imposing hefty and unjustified fees; did not allow him to defer payments when he was entitled to do so and improperly accounted for periods when he did defer.”

Reason to not feel for Bowman:

• He has somehow managed to run up $400,000 in student-loan debt. Said Martha Holler, a Sallie Mae spokeswoman, “The size of this account is extremely unusual, but not surprising given that the customer took out 32 loans to pursue undergraduate, law and masters of law studies and has not made a single monthly payment over his 26-year student loan history.”

Oy. What a mess. Couple of questions for you, LBers. For starters, do you buy Bowman’s assertion that “his only hope is to begin practicing law . . . ?” How much of a chance does he have in getting a good law job that would pay him what he’s going to need to cover his monthly student-law payments?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 02, 2009 (boomark / email).