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It's kind of sad for those of us who have always wanted to be lawyers and are facing reality. I have ALWAYS envisioned myself as being a lawyer and by the time I saw the writing on the wall my sophomore year of college, it was too late. My entire college resume is geared towards law school or grad school- specifically focusing on Latin American indigenous and natural resource rights. Right now, it does not make sense to go to get a grad degree despite that really being needed for my field (can't even afford to take the GRE or application fees) and makes even less sense to go to law school. I'd rather graduate now with no student loans than 3 years down the line with at least $60,000 and possibly more unemployable because I stayed out of the job market for 3 additional years.
My two best friends are in even less ideal situations than I am (less internships and work experience) and are full steam ahead for law school. For one, dad is paying. For the other, she is graduating with $50,000 of debt from undergrad and will probably accrue $100,000+ more for law school. I am encouraging them not to go through with it, but no one listens to me. :P
Hollywood and network television also puts the field (and medicine) in the limelight.
What was the last TV show about engineers?
There are few cases where tech professionals are shown as cool. You'll see Chloe O Brien on '24' hacking an algorithm to help Jack save the day, but those instances are far fewer.
Last edited by subwayfan; 10-28-2009 at 11:21 AM..
It's kind of sad for those of us who have always wanted to be lawyers and are facing reality. I have ALWAYS envisioned myself as being a lawyer and by the time I saw the writing on the wall my sophomore year of college, it was too late. My entire college resume is geared towards law school or grad school- specifically focusing on Latin American indigenous and natural resource rights. Right now, it does not make sense to go to get a grad degree despite that really being needed for my field (can't even afford to take the GRE or application fees) and makes even less sense to go to law school. I'd rather graduate now with no student loans than 3 years down the line with at least $60,000 and possibly more unemployable because I stayed out of the job market for 3 additional years.
My two best friends are in even less ideal situations than I am (less internships and work experience) and are full steam ahead for law school. For one, dad is paying. For the other, she is graduating with $50,000 of debt from undergrad and will probably accrue $100,000+ more for law school. I am encouraging them not to go through with it, but no one listens to me. :P
Congratulations -- you are wise beyond your years.
If you find down the road you still have the "law school bug" the best way to address it is to attend law school at night whilst working full time. This is an expensive and time-consuming "hobby" but it may be the only way to get the "law school bug" out of your system. And it could lead to some kind of legal career.
I would advise you to send your law-school bound friends who will not listen over to "Third Tier Reality" for a "reality check."
Congratulations -- you are wise beyond your years.
If you find down the road you still have the "law school bug" the best way to address it is to attend law school at night whilst working full time. This is an expensive and time-consuming "hobby" but it may be the only way to get the "law school bug" out of your system. And it could lead to some kind of legal career.
I would advise you to send your law-school bound friends who will not listen over to "Third Tier Reality" for a "reality check."
Does the Third Tier Reality actually have anything to do with the third tier of law school? These friends are both on the path to T14 which actually might be worthwhile. Why someone would go somewhere like Drake or Roger Williams for law school, even in a good economy, is beyond me.
Reputable law schools don't really have night programs. If I am ever to go to law school, it would only be a top 25 or so school. Otherwise it's really not worth the immense amounts of money or time. I don't even know how you could work full time in 1L- most schools I am familiar with strongly suggest students not work even part time jobs and based on my friends in 1L now, I have no idea how you would have time to work 10 hours a week, much less 40.
Does the Third Tier Reality actually have anything to do with the third tier of law school? These friends are both on the path to T14 which actually might be worthwhile. Why someone would go somewhere like Drake or Roger Williams for law school, even in a good economy, is beyond me.
Reputable law schools don't really have night programs. If I am ever to go to law school, it would only be a top 25 or so school. Otherwise it's really not worth the immense amounts of money or time. I don't even know how you could work full time in 1L- most schools I am familiar with strongly suggest students not work even part time jobs and based on my friends in 1L now, I have no idea how you would have time to work 10 hours a week, much less 40.
"Third Tier Reality" deals mainly with the "non-elite" law schools -- however the writer is excellent, and reflects on many aspects of the profession.
I didn't realise that you only wanted to go to a top-25 law school--I thought you were interested in becoming a lawyer per se, not in a credential only from a specific type of school. That certainly does change the equation.
If your friends are both headed toward T14 schools, it is still a calculated risk, but the odds are weighted much more heavily in their favor. I have heard anecdotally though that some T14 law students are also struggling to find employment.
But then again, take what I say with a grain of salt of course--I attended mostly "non-reputable" schools, so what do I know?
I don't even know how you could work full time in 1L- most schools I am familiar with strongly suggest students not work even part time jobs and based on my friends in 1L now, I have no idea how you would have time to work 10 hours a week, much less 40.
Not only do they strongly suggest you not work, but the ABA actually restricts full-time 1Ls from working more than 15 hours a week during school. I think for 2Ls the restriction is 20 hours. I don't remember what if any restrictions there are for 3Ls.
I'll be honest - as an attorney, I'm very glad that I didn't graduate from law school in this market. One of the issues is that unlike prior recessions, where law firms temporarily cut back hiring and then ramped right back up again (along with raising salaries) when the economy turned around, we may be witnessing a fundamental shift in law firm economics this time. That is, the rising salaries at BIGLAW have become unsustainable since even blue chip clients are increasingly holding the line on their outside legal costs and insisting on alternative billing schemes (i.e. fixed fees) outside of the standard hourly billing.
Of course, as the OP mentioned,the number of law school applicats have increased even higher, which isn't surprising at all considering that lots of students that can't find jobs and think of law school as a place to park themselves for 3 years. People just have to be careful about going to law school as simply "something to do" if there aren't any jobs available after undergrad. As someone that graduated from a Tier 2 law school that did end up in BIGLAW and now working in an in-house counsel position for a major corporation, it's not an easy road for those that go to schools outside of the Top 14. I got great grades and made Law Review and Moot Court, but lots of classmates of mine that I considered extremely bright and hard-working weren't so fortunate. While I worked hard in law school, I'll be the first to admit that there's a bit of a crapshoot when it comes to 1L grades since they are always graded on a mandatory curve. Pretty much everyone starts out law school thinking that they'll be in the top 10% of their class, but that obviously can't happen for everyone. That's really the advantage of going to a Top 14 school - you don't have to worry (as much) about class rank and law review since employers will hire much deeper in those classes. (I'll agree with some other posters that even elite law school grads are having a tough time getting hired right now.)
So, just make sure that you go through a deep analysis in terms of committing a lot of time and money to going to law school and what you really want to get out of it.
Does the Third Tier Reality actually have anything to do with the third tier of law school? These friends are both on the path to T14 which actually might be worthwhile. Why someone would go somewhere like Drake or Roger Williams for law school, even in a good economy, is beyond me.
Non-T14 isn't necessarily a bad thing. There certainly is a strong relationship between where you went to school and getting a job, but this is also done regionally. I live in Colorado and we have 3 law schools here: Colorado-Boulder, Denver, and Regis (lower tier 1, tier 2, and tier 4 respectively). Regis might not be the best option, but CU and DU definitely have big networks here and are not bad decisions. So if Drake and Roger Williams have respectable networks in their region then it's not necessarily a bad decision.
Smart kids (and their presumably smart and wiser parents) should be able to figure this stuff out on own....silly to blame loser educators who can't figure out basic career and industrial logic for absurd choices of kids and their allegedly shrewd parents in pursuing some costly lib arts college and then law or business or med school to find some low-income, non-quant job....
The problem is, there's so much brainwashing and misinformation going on in k-12. College marketing (like US News and World Report rankings, or Business Weeks best colleges), it's been pumped up so much, its drowned out any common sense or ability to rationalize. That's how so many students get led over a cliff.
Not everyone has shrewd parents. Parents are working so much and are so busy, I think the torch or information and guidance has been passed to educators, couselors, "helpers".
I think there's going to be a mini revolution in this country in the next 5-10 years, if not sooner, when people wake up from all this debt, and all this nonsense they've been told.
The problem is, there's so much brainwashing and misinformation going on in k-12. College marketing (like US News and World Report rankings, or Business Weeks best colleges), it's been pumped up so much, its drowned out any common sense or ability to rationalize. That's how so many students get led over a cliff.
Not everyone has shrewd parents. Parents are working so much and are so busy, I think the torch or information and guidance has been passed to educators, couselors, "helpers".
I think there's going to be a mini revolution in this country in the next 5-10 years, if not sooner, when people wake up from all this debt, and all this nonsense they've been told.
I'm not sure what "brainwashing" was occurring for at least top students - big law firms have been paying in excess of $150,000 for first year associates, which is more than what 99% of people in their early 20s could possibly earn. Smart rational people tend to migrate toward higher paying careers and law has typically been the highest paying "traditional" career outside of investment banking and medicine. (When I say "traditional" career, I mean that something that a smart person could reasonably aim for as a goal and achieve. This doesn't count making a gazillion dollars from a start-up that's bought by Google or Microsoft, where the chances of achieving that are more lottery-esque.)
Now, whether these salaries are sustainable, as I alluded to in my prior post, is a different question. At the same time, I do agree that there has been some "brainwashing" where people seem to think that ALL lawyers make those $150,000 first year salaries, which definitely isn't true. Even in great economic times, the distribution of law school grad salaries has looked like a "V" - that is, there are tons of $40-50,000/year jobs on the low end and a number of $150,000/year jobs on the high end, but very little in between those extremes. If there's one thing that too many people that want to go into law don't understand, it's this "boom or bust" type of dichotomy when it comes to salaries. So, there definitely is a big risk of incurring lots of debt by going to law school without reaping the financial rewards.
I was a finance major that went into law, so I definitely have an understanding and respect for the "quant" side of the ledger. However, the arguments from you and hsw seem to intimate that smart people are ignoring quant jobs in finance in order to go into law, which really hasn't been the case. What really has been happening is that smart people that have been majoring in engineering and hard sciences have gone into Wall Street quant jobs as opposed to scientific professions because those Wall Street jobs have such outsized financial rewards. Law has long closely followed those Wall Street dollars (as more deals means more billable hours for armies of lawyers). I understand what hsw is trying to argue, but he misses the fact that law (at least BIGLAW) is very much "finance" - it's those M&A deals that bring outsized returns to large law firms.
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