First of all, I am not encouraging anyone to attend law school, for the very good reason that attending law school has become pointless financial suicide. This will not deter many prospective law students; unfortunately, the type of personality that is attracted to law school is one that is convinced of their uniqueness. The odds simply don’t apply to them.
“Steve, you’re too negative. We need people to be part of the solution.“ Well, I have some advice that a prospective law student who cannot be deterred by my overall warning would still do well to consider:
Rankings Matter
US News and World Report began ranking law schools in the late 1980’s. One result of this is that older lawyers scoff at them when giving advice to prospective law students. Make no mistake - rankings matter. Top-ranked Yale has a higher bar passage rate than bottom of the barrel schools. Yale also puts a much, much higher percentage of its graduates in jobs that actually involve the practice of law than "Rank Not Reported" schools. We live in a culture that values designer labels; and in a glutted job market, the name brand of your school is critical to your employment prospects.
LSAT Scores Matter
Your score on the Law School Admissions Test is the single most important factor in determining what schools you can get into, and what financial aid packages you can get from them. Schools will “buy” high LSAT score to boost their US News rankings.
Schools claim to have “holistic” admission criterion, aimed at creating a diverse and multi-faceted student body. Schools that do this are low-performing diploma mills with bad bar passage rates; schools that claim to do this but don’t will holistically look at your LSAT score before diversely admitting high-scoring students.
Schools Lie About Employment Outcomes
Back in 2011, Senators Charles Grassley and Barbara Boxer sent a letter/thinly-veiled threat to the American Bar Association, which is the accrediting body and primary regulator of law schools in America. The Senators demanded parsed employment statistics from law schools, which hitherto had reported only the total percentage of employed graduates, without any indications of what kind of jobs grads were getting.
Schools that reported “over 90 percent employment” suddenly were revealed to be placing only about half their grads in actual jobs as licensed, practicing attorneys. Law schools promptly invented a category called “JD-Advantage” jobs, which they define so loosely that it could include pizza delivery drivers, and are now reporting that “80 percent of our grads are employed as attorneys or in JD-Advantage jobs, 10 months after graduation.”
Get Acquainted With Law School Transparency
Law School Transparency is a website run by underemployed law school graduates dedicated to shedding some light on law school operations. Most importantly, they publish reports on individual law schools, especially on their employment outcomes. LST examines the mandated ABA reports that law schools file, and narrow them down into an employment score comprised of long-term, full-time, actual jobs as lawyers.
You shouldn’t even apply to a law school without examining it on Law School Transparency first, in the interest of not wasting your time. You should never, under any circumstances, attend a law school with an LST employment score below 70 percent without getting serious financial aid. Schools with a score below 50 percent shouldn’t even be considered for a full-ride scholarship, because you’ll still waste 3 years of valuable and irrecoverable time. If you’ve been accepted to a school with a sub-50 percent employment score, decline. If you’re attending a school like that, drop out or transfer.
The most elite scholarships are not only for tuition, but include stipends that can turn law school into roughly a minimum wage job. If you can snag one of those, and can’t find anything better to do, then fine. Go ahead and go. You’ll even be shown favoritism by career services, but more on that later.
First Year Grades Matter the Most
I told you that rankings matter. That’s true for schools, and true for your rank within the class. First-year classes are almost always graded on a curve, and being at the top of your class improves your employment prospects immensely.
After the first year, grades are somewhat less important. First, it is nearly impossible to recover from a bad first year. If you are in the bottom half of the class at a middling school, you should consider dropping out, especially if you lost your “merit scholarship” in the process.
If you got good grades your first year, your second and third years would be better used for internships, clerkships, and networking than on obsessing over every detail of the casebook to gun for more good grades. It won’t help you any more.
Your Professors Aren’t Really Lawyers
“The Paperchase” is the standard law school movie, and that SOB Kingsfield is the standard stock-character law professor. His little questions turn the tumblers of your mind, you know. “You teach yourself the law, but I train your mind.”
Read the CV’s of the professors for the first year classes of a school you’re considering - law professors have CV’s instead of resumes, which are longer, and include all the law review articles they’ve published but nobody’s actually read.
Very few law professors have more than 3 or 4 years of legal practice experience. You see, most professors went to Top 14-ranked schools, and after graduating they got prestigious jobs as BigLaw associates or federal judicial clerks. After being passed over for promotion to full associate - and thus no longer on the partner track - they decided to jump into academia.
So, don’t be intimidated by their falderal and their “Socratic Method,” or anything that resembles snotty elitism. Try to master the art of using superficial politeness as a thin veil for abject contempt. It helps if you know some British people…
…and They’re Overpaid
The average salary for law professors is running at about $180,000 per year. This is for about 35 weeks of school, working about 20 hours per week. Not a bad life, when you think about it.
These salaries are paid from the coffers of the law school, which gathered them primarily from the student loans of their students. The professors aren’t charity workers; they aren’t modest-living; and they aren’t inner city “Stand and Deliver” teachers trying to make a difference in the world. They are well-compensated holders of protected, tenured jobs. Like the Mob, law schools have associates, made-guys (with tenure!), capos, underbosses, and bosses. They gather money and kick it upstairs where it gets whacked up and everybody gets a cut.
Law School Is No Place for Crusaders
Law school is not the place to go if you want to change the world. If you have a cause to fight, like inner city education, international development, human rights, or whatever; go do that. Join the Peace Corps, join the Marine Corps, become a cop or a teacher if your goal is to “help people.” Law school will not help you pursue a career in activism.
Law school is the place to go to become lawyer, and most of what lawyers do is transactional work. That is to say, they draft documents for other people. Wills, trusts, letters of agreement, contracts, memoranda, and whatever else people who make more money than you need written up as they conduct their business. Some lawyers also through punks in jail. Some seriously impoverished lawyers try to stop these jailhouse tenancy arrangements by court-appointment.
Your law degree isn’t going to stop child abuse, save the orphans, heal broken families, save the dolphins, get people raises, or increase the wealth and prosperity of the nation. Your law degree will leave you in serious debt, and badly in need of a paying job. If it is a job in the law, it will be a job that involves paperwork or bureaucracies. Nearly half of graduates don’t get jobs in the law at all.
Oh, and you will not be able to help all the “poor and working-class Americans who can’t afford a lawyer” that law school deans talk about all the time. They can’t afford legal services. They. Can’t. Afford. Lawyers. When you graduate from law school with six-figure student loan debt on top of the normal costs of life, you will not be able to work for free. Put it together, genius.
Law Is a Business
Law is a service industry; it provides legal services to those who can pay for them. Your decision to attend law school needs to be approached in a business-like manner as well. It is an extremely expensive and time-consuming venture whose outcome is not guaranteed.
The costs and the benefits need to be weighed carefully, and the risks of failure and disaster are present and need to be accounted for along with things like tuition. Those costs can and should be minimized, like in any other investment. If the costs outweigh the likely benefits, you should consider staying away from law school.
More romantic people than I will tell you that law is a “calling,” and that it isn’t just about the money. Ask these people to contribute money for your tuition. Yes, we need lawyers. We may not need you as a lawyer. Of 1.5 million law school graduates, only about half actually practice law for a living, and it isn’t because of a lack of “calling.” It is because of a lack of “money.” The business of law is just as susceptible to supply-and-demand as any other market. Supply now outstrips demand, and the business of law is financially strapped as a result.
The Career Development Office is Not Your Friend
Unless you are in the top 10 percent or so of your class, the Career Office will be worthless. They might be worse than worthless, actually. Never volunteer information to them about jobs you’re looking into, unless you want everyone on the “Top Students” email list to know about it by the end of the day.
The school will send you a survey 10 months after graduating. This is mandated by the ABA and meant to determine your employment status. After you submit that form, you are officially dead to the CDO staff. The alumni development staff - the beggars for donations - are a different story.
Alternative Career Paths are a Lie
Back in the day, in the Before Time of the long, long ago, having a JD was a benefit in the business world as well as the legal world. A law graduate had taken coursework on contracts, business associations, taxation, and torts. These could be put to use in many different ways.
And then the MBA exploded in popularity. Rising from about 40,000 graduates in 1980 to about 160,000 graduates in 2011, MBA’s have become the standard flat-pack IKEA business yokel employed to weigh down flat-pack IKEA office furniture.
Good Luck
You cannot say that you weren’t warned. You’re determined to flush your life down the toilet all to chase your dream of being a “lawya” and possibly out of a paralyzing fear of manual labor, and nothing I say is going to dissuade you. I earned more last year as a factory worker than I ever did in a single year as a lawyer, by the way.
Anyway, you have your reasons. I hope it works out for you, sincerely. Don’t let the academic façade intimidate you, don’t be afraid to speak your mind, and remember that you’re there for a reason. Good luck.
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