Going To Law School

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There is no typical law student. As many law students matriculate straight from college as enter after having taken a break in their formal education. Some have aspired to be advocates since they were children and became determined to right the wrongs they had witnessed; others happened to do well on the LSAT taken on a whim.

Whether they ever appear in court or draft a will, they will have been well served by learning how to stand up and speak out. They have been inspired by a sense of civil rights as well as civic responsibilities. They are ready to become leaders.

So it's a meme, but is it catching on with the right people?
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/another-view-lock-the-law-school-doors/?apage=2#comments

September 2, 2009, 10:00 am
Another View: Lock the Law School Doors

Dan Slater, a former litigator, argues that there are too many places at too many law schools, especially with the current hiring slump at law firms.

This summer, in the staid world of legal education, where curriculum is uniform and scholars are trained in the art of like-mindedness, one dean hatched a contrary plan.

In a memo to incoming students, Patricia D. White, the dean of University of Miami School of Law, surmised: “Perhaps many of you are looking to law school as a safe harbor in which you can wait out the current economic storm.” She then urged them to “think hard” about their plans and offered incentives for those willing to defer for one year.

“The nature of the legal profession is in great flux,” Dean White observed. “It is very difficult to predict what the employment landscape for young lawyers will be in May 2012 and thereafter.”

Recently, The New York Times reported on the dire straits of today’s law student. As firms begin an industrywide overhaul, which has entailed slashing jobs and reconsidering hidebound inefficiencies like the lockstep salary, students will compete for half as many $160,000-a-year jobs this year as they did last. According to the National Association for Legal Career Professionals, the 2008 recruiting season marked “what is likely to be the beginning of a weaker legal employment market that may last for a number of years.”

Meanwhile, as job opportunities abate, law school matriculation rates rise unchecked. Each year, the number of students who enroll at one of 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association inches closer to 50,000. Even at Miami, where 32 students took Dean White up on her offer to defer, the school is still left with a first-year population of 527 — ­ 35 percent more than last year’s incoming class.

This fall, as thousands of second-year law students wait in vain for callback interviews and ponder instructions to cast a wider net, they might wonder why, when they signed up for all of this, no one mentioned times were changing. They might even look at Miami’s attempt, however futile, to stanch enrollment and call it an honorable thing.

The American Bar Association, which continues to approve law schools with impunity and with no end in sight, bears complicity in creating this mess. Yet a spokeswoman, citing antitrust concerns, says the A.B.A. takes no position on the optimal number of lawyers or law schools. So then how about the schools? Can they save future generations of students from themselves?

If it means shrinking classes, don’t count on it. Limiting education is un-American, not to mention anticapitalist, even if many law schools appear to profit from what may charitably be called an inefficient distribution of market information.

Take, for instance, the employment statistics posted on the Web sites of three low-ranked law schools in New York City, the country’s biggest market for legal employment. All three advertise that 45 to 60 percent of their 2008 graduates who reported salary information are making a median salary of $150,000 to $160,000.

Now, of course there must be some way of slicing and dicing the numbers to yield that magic result. But what happens, in practice, is that prospective degree-purchasers enroll in these $43,000-a-year programs believing their chances of landing that Big Law job are about one in two. Tempting odds.

Other schools market their degrees without six-figure promises. “If you counted on starting at $160,000 per year, then you’re in for a huge disappointment,” said Bryant Garth, the dean at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, where enrollment is up 11 percent. He disagrees with Miami’s approach and believes that trying to shrink class size amounts to panicking. “I insist law is still a good career,” he said. “Students may just have to make it in a more entrepreneurial fashion.”

Either way, the burden falls ultimately to aspiring legal eagles to reconsider motivations rather than borrow money on the expectation that they’ll make fat salaries, pay off debt in short order and win that express ticket to an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Because those days, grand as they might have been, are gone.

But will next year’s round of applicants heed the signals? Or, like Gatsby’s revelers, will they simply push on at an ever greater clip, boats against the current, toward that green light in the ivory tower and the promising future that, quite literally, recedes before them? After all, there will always be the possibility, however faint, of Big Law money and white-shoe prestige — ­ those powerful tonics for every new batch of wandering liberal arts graduates.

“I don’t know if we can take it for granted that a 22-year-old knows what it means to borrow $100,000,” said Nora V. Demleitner, the dean of Hofstra Law School, where enrollment is up a relatively modest 5 percent. “They look at the $100,000 in loans, and then they look at the $160,000 salary. And they think, ‘Well, that’s not so bad.’”

Dan Slater, a former litigator, is a freelance journalist in New York and a former writer of The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.

hey law school and law-practicing folks

I had a realization today that focusing on soft IP courses is a waste of time -- I'll probably never practice IP without a science (patent) background, no one gives people TM/Copyright work out of school, and everyone thinks they want to do these practice areas because they seem sexy. So I want to change directions -- what courses should I take that will actually contribute to my employability?

You take the courses you want to. Nobody looks at your courses but your first employer, and there are ways to get around a bad first job.

Missed the Slater article the first time around, but I would react with a big "duh" and a suggestion that it would be even more important to reform financial aid, even (maybe especially) at the elite law schools, as the status quo is clearly based on the inevitability of graduates heading for BIGLAW sooner or later.

TWU is right. And generally I don't think law school classes prepare you to do the nuts-and-bolts work of any practice area besides litigation (which is just an extension of what you do in law school). Hiring partners know this. Do well in the courses you choose and your employability will take care of itself.

BTW, did you wind up transferring to a different law school? (Apologies if my memory is faulty and you weren't considering a transfer. In my defense: I am old/have Early Onset Senility.)

i agree. just take them if you think they're interesting. taking classes just because you feel like you should can be sooooo miserable. also patent is obviously not the only type of IP so why do you think you'll *never* do IP?

Kind of just feel like getting an update from ilx attorneyfolk - how are things at your jobs? Feeling the effects of the market/recession at all? I think I'm starting to outgrow that buzzy law student panic and settling into things a bit more, even though I struck out at OCI. In the long run maybe it's better that I did.

as a city lawyer, job security is a big perk. the pay is the only negative but lifestyle makes up for it in spades.

if you are interested in working for NYC I could get your resume to the right person.

E-mailed you.

i can't email you back though!

You can't use ilx webmail?

O YEA

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Business/images/kool-aid-man.jpg

Sorry, didn't know the way webmail worked had changed. Sending you a reply to your reply via webmail, will include name and proper e-mail address.

bump

btw cutty u get my proper e-mail address?

Maybe you should attach your proper email address to your ilx account.

Things are good over here. Working at an employment-centered lawfirm that represents large public entities (community colleges, school districts and other liability factories) means more work than we can possible handle. Which is good.

See Also - low billable requirements.

cutty can scots lawyers work in NYC? no, not easily anyway and it makes me sad I shd probably just emigrate to aus

I'm scared to jinx it, but we've been fine. In fact, if anything, there's been more litigation than usual in the past year and a half.

Tip to those who want to work in Louisiana: brush up on your Napoleonic Code.

hurting i think i just saw your buddy in the elevator

woot

2 years finished, got job.

congratulations!

Congratulations.

ty

Small lit firm with decent clients, interesting work. Pay is low for the market but liveable.

nice. what kind of litigation?

General commercial I guess - the stuff they're working on right now is a mix. Two of their main things right now are a trademark case and a holocaust art restitution case, although I don't think they're necessarily art and IP oriented.

wonder what burt_stanton is doing right now

Oh man, would love to know. Was he banned?

i hate being a lawyer now, as i sit in the renovated law library from my alma mater.

Two months and four days until the first day of law school. Somehow pulled a 180 on my LSATs last summer and seriously considered applying to Ivies etc. until I realized that 90% of funding in the states is earmarked for domestic students, even at Columbia, Harvard, etc. etc.

Coming from a background in poli sci and internat'l development, was hoping to be at McGill here in Montreal, where you get training in both common law and the civil code in one go-around, but I'm still waitlisted as of today (LSATs not considered in Quebec since they're English-language aptitude tests) and once I can find an apartment I'm off to University of Toronto. School's got biglaw/corporate vibe to it and a relatively cut-throat reputation, but adequate space for other stuff.

Just scanned through the thread and trying to decide where I should stand on the excitement/dread matrix

good luck, AIM.

Feel like there are fewer law schools overall (and maybe relatively) in Canada, but given population discrepancy I'm not sure if that changes market saturation/job prospects/etc. Not that that matters, necessarily.

jdunderground is the most terrifying thing I've seen all week, mind you. Heh.

unlikely you'd know, at this point, where you stand on that matrix. but it's good that you're thinking about it. too many people go into law for the wrong reasons, and regret it.

yeah, good idea to stay away from jdunderground -- for mental health reasons, if nothing else. not that it can't be rough, but you don't need to have your face rubbed in it.

i feel like a rotting husk of a former man. will law school give me back my humanity?

― burt_stanton

rip

Thanks!

More excited about this than I come off. Surely this will be beaten out of me eventually, but entering with total cynicism can't possibly be a wise move.

My mom was a real estate lawyer in Toronto in biglaw for a while until my sisters and I were young. Having had a front row seat to what that lifestyle means and does to you, I know I'm not heading that way - not a BAD thing to do, but not a balanced thing to do.

At the moment, part of me wants to use law as a means into policy work with internat'l orgs/ngos that line up with what i've already been studying for the past however many years, but I spoken to enough people to know that halfway through first year, I could fall madly in love with Torts. Or something.

Basically:

- entering with a vague sense of direction and optimism, but with enough cynicism and openness to change to not get totally blind-sided by the nasty surprises of law school
- willingness and acknowledgement that the only way through this is a SHIT TON of difficult work of intense volume, and that you thus need to reallly want to do this
- just enough of a non-law life to maintain sanity (1 evening a week?)

Am I missing anything?

First of all, congrats on the 180, I assume you know how rare that is. I imagine that you got a very nice scholarship given that you opted out of the top US private schools, and low debt is a great way to go.

What you have there sounds basically like the right attitude and approach. I would also add that it's a good idea to get in touch with and embrace your competitive side, because you need it for motivation. I think this is kind of counterinstinctual for left-leaning liberal artsy types, but I really found it useful to be able to admit to myself that I DID want the A, which meant beating 90% of my classmates in any given class.

About those three points, Alex (and repeating here that Hurting's law school advice is uniformly awful, and his rude awakening will be coming in the next 24 months):

- the first one is good; but more important than cynicism is an "eyes on the prize" attitude. Think about what you really want to do and how law school can help you get there throughout your time at law school. People who enter law school to do NGO work and end up doing corporate law stuff generally did NOT get converted by the magical genius of their Contracts professor -- they simply started stopped thinking like themselves and started thinking like the rest of their classmates. Keep the end in sight, and think about the kin of lawyer you want to be (as opposed to the kind of lawyer you can easily get a job and make some money as),

- take the word "difficult" out and this point is true for a handful of law schools (Chicago, McGill, I dunno about Toronto); take out "difficult" and replace "SHIT TON" with "fair amount", and the sentence is true for 98% of law schools in North America. This stuff is not generally that difficult, although law students have enjoyed convincing themselves that it is for generations.

- you want as much personal life as you can possibly fit into your life. One full night a week and one full day every weekend is a MINIMUM, and you will also have and want to have some down time every day.

i'm a really competitive person but generally found it impossible to want As very badly and didn't like to be around people who did (nb i did sometimes get better grades than them anyway). you are gonna turn into a different person but it's not all bad. the bad parts i feel are slowly lifting away 14 months after graduation and i'm becoming myself again and having fun, it's weird. and i am going to be the kind of lawyer i wanted to be, though not in the same subject area.

i mean not the same as i thought i would do when i started law school, i changed my mind pretty soon after that

Changing your mind is legitimate and can happen, but +10 years out of law school it becomes clearer who changed their mind and who had their mind changed for them, you know?

yeah

and repeating here that Hurting's law school advice is uniformly awful, and his rude awakening will be coming in the next 24 months)

Not really sure what this means, especially since I haven't given very much "advice" here other than that post. But so far my experience is that better grades open more doors, whatever you want to do. So it's worth it to buckle down for at least your first year and say "fuck it, I'm going to try as hard as I can to get the best grades I can." And to that end, it's better to just be honest with yourself. I do NOT mean that you should go blabbing about grades with your classmates. But I don't really believe people who say they don't care about grades, unless they go to a high enough ranked school that grades don't matter.

If by "rude awakening" you mean that big law firm life sucks, (1) I missed my shot at it anyway because of the economy and (2) I don't have any illusions about it. Even if you want to work in a non-profit or government, you need the best grades you can get today because there are just many more graduating law students than there are jobs. I don't think things were anywhere near as competitive ten years ago. But I happen to like the little firm where I landed quite a lot, and hope to stay there.

"Not really sure what this means, especially since I haven't given very much "advice" here other than that post."

"Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (1638 of them)" -- I would understand why you wouldn't want to click there, but if you did, you'd see the absurdity of what you just typed.

The rude awakening is one that comes to all who chase grades -- soon there are no more grades to chase, and failure is something more substantial than a letter.