Going To Law School

So I have no idea what the fuck to do in terms of OCI/bidding -- anyone have any tips?

Perhaps this also belongs in the quidities and agonies of the ruling class thread?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/business/26lawyers.html?ref=business

Downturn Dims Prospects Even at Top Law Schools
By GERRY SHIH
This fall, law students are competing for half as many openings at big firms as they were last year in what is shaping up to be the most wrenching job search season in over 50 years.

For students now, the promise of the big law firm career — and its paychecks — is slipping through their fingers, forcing them to look at lesser firms in smaller markets as well as opportunities in government or with public interest groups, law school faculty and students say.

The frenzy has even pushed the nation’s top firms, a tradition-bound coterie, into discussing how to reform the recruitment process with an earnestness that would have been unthinkable just years ago.

Even if the economy is beginning to pick up, the legal profession has been pummeled over the last year, with some firms closing and survivors often asking associates to take leaves of absence.

How bad is it? Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the juggernaut of New York, has slashed its hiring by more than half. For the first time in 136 years, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a respected Philadelphia firm, has canceled its recruiting entirely. Global firms like DLA Piper and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe have postponed recruiting for several months to see if the market improves.

At Yale, students accustomed to being wooed by Big Law’s glittering names — like Baker & McKenzie; Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, & McCloy; and White & Case — were stunned when those firms canceled interviews in New Haven this month.

New York University, Georgetown, Northwestern and other top universities confirm that interviews are down by a third to a half compared with a year ago, while lower-ranked schools are suffering more. What is more, when interviews finish in a few weeks, even fewer offers will be extended, said Howard L. Ellin, the chairman of global hiring at Skadden, Arps, because many firms are interviewing students for slots they may not fill.

After he lost his job as a television reporter two years ago, Derek Fanciullo considered law school, thinking it was a historically sure bet. He took out “a ferocious amount of debt,” he said — $210,000, to be exact — and enrolled last September in the School of Law at New York University.

“It was thought to be this green pasture of stability, a more comfortable life,” said Mr. Fanciullo, who had heard that 90 percent of N.Y.U. law graduates land jobs at firms, and counted on that to repay his loans. “It was almost written in stone that you’ll end up in a law firm, almost like a birthright.”

With the cost of law school skyrocketing over the years, the implicit arrangement between students and the most expensive and prestigious schools has only strengthened: the student takes on hefty debt to pay tuition, and the school issues the golden ticket to a job at a high-paying firm — if that’s what the student wants.

“Students came in with a certain sense of what the compact was going to be,” said Irene Dorzback, the assistant dean for career services at the New York University School of Law. But with the system crumbling in recent months, Ms. Dorzback said, “people are now accepting this notion of a lost year.”

The timing is worst for the class of 2011, the second-years now looking to get into firms, because of a unique logjam created last year. After the September financial crisis, firms chose to defer their new hires at the price of steeply cutting recruiting this year.

But students who miss the brief window of opportunity to land an offer this fall may struggle to break into firms once next year’s class rises. When Julia Figurelli, a second-year student at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to enter law school a year ago, she expected to find a lucrative law firm job in three years — if not collecting the $160,000-a-year associate salaries at one of the uppermost partnerships. By the time she obtains her J.D., she says, she will have around $200,000 in debt.

“Had I seen where the market was going, I would’ve gone to a lower-ranked but less expensive public school,” she said. “I’m questioning whether law school was the right choice at all.”

Once aiming to work in Philadelphia, Ms. Figurelli is now hunting for jobs in lower-paying markets, like Pittsburgh and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I’m looking anywhere my competition isn’t looking,” she added.

School officials are pushing students to look beyond the white-shoe firms, to delve deep into alumni networks and to start mass letter-writing campaigns to potential employers. Like Ms. Figurelli, many students say that for the first time, they are considering and seeking work with government and public-interest groups.

The Social Security Administration, for example, said applications for lawyer positions and clerkships had more than doubled this year, to 2,000, from 800. The public-interest job fair at N.Y.U. this year was “packed to the gills,” Mr. Fanciullo recalled, but whereas in past years students had seven or eight interviews, some of his classmates this year had zero. “There’s a humongous trickle-down effect,” he said. “When the big firms don’t hire, everyone looks to government. And when those get filled up, then what happens?”

It has been a bizarre new reality, especially for elite schools. At Harvard, officials have had to hawk résumés or tell students, quite simply, to buck up. (“Now is not the time for avoidance, denial or panic,” Mark Weber, the assistant dean of career services, wrote in a March memo to Harvard Law’s graduating class.)

With the system’s frailties exposed by the recession, said Mr. Ellin from Skadden, Arps, the time could be ripe for “massive overhaul.”

Discussions at industry roundtables and casual talk among officials at leading schools and firms suggest a consensus that interview dates should be pushed back to the spring of the second year, if not the third year. The recent problems have arisen, reform-minded critics say, because the legal industry essentially hires two full years ahead of when employees begin to work. And because young lawyers have to be advanced by lockstep every year, it is difficult to make recruiting changes that are responsive to shocks in business.

“There’s a long list of issues that need re-examining,” said Ralph Baxter, the chairman of Orrick. “The current economic circumstances have helped people see the economic inefficiencies we’ve been living with.”

Even lockstep, as sacred a pillar of Big Law as the billable hour, has been undermined by the hiring headaches of the last year, some argue. Orrick and another major firm, Howrey, have introduced innovative programs for associates based on apprenticeships or tiered systems that depart from the traditional “up or out” partner-track models. Some industry observers say their moves represent first steps that may ultimately give firms greater flexibility in hiring.

“The situation is so dramatic it has freed them up to make changes that they wouldn’t otherwise,” said James G. Leipold, the executive director of the Association for Legal Career Professionals. “We’re going through a period of a surprising amount of experimentation.”

Not that any of those changes will come into effect soon enough to help the class of 2011.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Mr. Fanciullo sat at home waiting anxiously for his first callback after four days of interviews. Firms customarily called within 48 hours, he explained.

“You almost bank on the big firms hiring you because they’re really the only ones who can help you pay your debt,” he said, his mind already skipping forward to a situation he didn’t choose to articulate. “Quite frankly it would be an absolute disaster. I don’t know what I’d do."

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-law-schools/2009/04/22/why-law-school-is-for-everyone.html

made me think of this thread

http://www.usnews.com/dbimages/master/10434/FE_PR_090406_WUvert.jpg

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