but rather had simply wanted to attend law school. She was accepted at Yale even though "Her combined LSAT score of 160 was, as she put it, 'adequately bad' ... 'Suffice it to say I was admitted for other reasons,' Wurtzel said. 'My books, my accomplishments.'" She was a summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. She received her J.D. in 2008, but failed the New York state bar exam on her first attempt. The legal community criticized Wurtzel for holding herself out as a lawyer in interviews, because she was not licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction at the time. Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam, and was employed full-time at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York City from 2008 to 2012. She continued to work for the firm as a case manager and on special projects. In July 2010, she wrote in the Brennan Center for Justice blog to make a proposal for the abolition of bar exams. Writing career While an intern at the Dallas Morning News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly for plagiarism, although a 2002 The New York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an article that was never published. Wurtzel wrote regularly for The Wall Street Journal. On September 21, 2008, after the suicide of writer David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York magazine about the time she had spent with him. She acknowledged that "I never knew David well." In January 2009, she wrote an article for The Guardian, arguing that the vehemence of opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, when compared to the international reaction to human rights abuses in the People's Republic of China, Darfur, and Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic undercurrent fueling the outrage. In 2009, Wurtzel published an article in Elle magazine about societal pressures related to aging. Regretting her youth of casual sex and drug-taking, and realizing that she was not as beautiful as she once had been, she reflected that "whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is wasted on the old." Wurtzel's publisher, Penguin, sued her in September 2012 in an effort to reclaim a $100,000 advance for a 2003 book contract for "a book for teenagers to help them cope with depression" that Wurtzel failed to complete.