Publisher's Notebook

If you think the idea being a lawyer sounded better before you went to law school, took the bar exam and started practice, you are not alone.

“Attorney” made the list of the “Most Overrated Jobs of 2011,” just released by the Internet job site CareerCast.com, taking sixth place.

The folks at CareerCast.com define overrated jobs as “those that on the surface seem to be outstanding, but in reality carry unrecognized downsides that can, at times, make them not so great after all.”

Some of the drawbacks are more stress, environmental dangers and physical demands than are typically recognized. In the overrated fields, the hiring outlook may be dismal, even depressing.

Topping the 2011 list was “Senior Corporate Executive” (and this was before the Occupy Wall Street people started agitating), followed by “Surgeon.”

All is not lost at a law firm, reports CareerCast.com. They also publish a companion list of the “Most Underrated Jobs of 2011.”

Number one on the underrated list: “Paralegal/Legal Assistant.”

Sue Yoo is a lawyer. Really – she works in L.A.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal has a story on how names may determine what a person does for a living. Or not.

Dr. Hart may have been predestined to be a cardiologist, according to a controversial study published a few years back. But a lot of people aren’t buying it, including Hart.

You be the judge. For guidance, you can ask Jacqueline Rose Hott, a sex therapist in New York, and Patricia Boguslawski, who is an attorney practicing in New Jersey, what they think.

About 40,000 people will graduate from law school this month and next, and according to the Wall Street Journal, they face one of the worst hiring markets for new lawyers in a generation.

One of the problems is supply and demand. Law school enrollments and graduation rates have steady reasonably steady. But law firms and a host of other employers have cut hiring during the recession.

Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, formerly of the Supreme Court of Virginia and now of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has some advice for more senior lawyers: Don’t be afraid to try something new, even at a later stage of your career.

Keenan (right), the featured speaker at yesterday’s Richmond Bar luncheon and Law Day celebration, spent more than 18 years as a member of Virginia’s high court. She said that now that she’s a federal judge, she feels like a “newbie.”

Speaking of her new job, she noted that the analysis is the same, but the subject matter is all new, And that’s exciting at the age of, well, she allowed that she turns 60 this year.

And she counseled the more senior members of the audience that you can indeed do something different even at “a respectable age,” she said, to chuckles in the audience.

Think of something fresh and “put a new twist on your career,” she urged.