Going To Law School

Why is law school preferable to you to working for a few years to figure out what you want to do? There are lots of jobs available to graduates of colleges such as yours (if I remember correctly).

There are many many different flavors of lawyering out there, but even if one doesn't suit you, you can be a law librarian or a teacher or a politician for sure, or maybe offer legal advice to the poor.

What is your idea of hell? Does it involve a difficult course of study or the idea of doing hard, tedious work? Does it involve competition among classmates? Does it involve great financial burdens or rewards?

Your job opportinities after law school will include jobs that require a law degree + jobs that do not require a law degree - jobs that require a medical degree or other specialized graduate degree (and likely minus professional athlete and ballerina). Alternatives to law school include alternate higher education, getting a job or being unemployed.

(basically what gabbneb said)

In all seriousness, however, your questions seem to indicate that it is very important to you what other people think you should do with your life. Deciding whether to take on the potentially huge debt burden of law school is probably one of the worst life decisions you can make by committee. If you have to borrow money for law school, your family, friends and classmates aren't going to be the ones with the huge debt load around their neck, you are. Even if you don't have to borrow money for law school, well, in this economy I'm sure there are tons of people who would gladly take your place off the wait list if you decided to defer.

My completely subjective impression has been that once you get a job and can do it the only people who are sensitive about where you went to law school are those who went to really elite law schools or those who went to really obscure law schools. It really doesn't matter if you can do the job unless you have your heart set on being a constitutional law professor at Yale law school straight after graduation.

Some lawyers do, in fact seem dissatisfied with their lives because it seemed like the easy thing to do and they were peer/parent pressured into going to law school straight out of college, worked many years at a job they hated to pay off their student loans and then wished they hadn't spent the best years of their lives doing that. It may be worth a year or more of deferring and doing something you've always wanted to do -- travel, apply for fellowships, explore other careers, bartending on a resort island, mooching off your parents -- whatever you feel like doing. Either you will have fewer regrets about things you might have wanted to try in life or you will have a greater appreciation of having the option of studying for a coveted professional degree that many people not as fortunate as you never have the realistic option of pursuing.

Hope that helps and good luck.

gabb and felicity both raised good points. i have some points, too, but i'll do it WHEN I'M DONE WITH THIS FUCKING MEMO!

Felicity's post above is very well-written and helpful, but I have a few more questions.

Firstly, I am not native to the US (originally from England), and it has been a while since I have been involved with academia, so I have no idea how to start this process.

Which resources should I be using to find the right schools and how to apply?

Which tests will I need to take (GREs, LSATs, etc.) and what sort of entry requirements are there?

When will I need to start applying?

I am not particularly concerned with attending the biggest and best, but if I am going to be in for financial hardships then I need to justify it for myself. I'm based in California, so I guess I would be looking at schools here first.

if you want to go to l-school this fall, i think that it might be too late for some -- if memory serves me correctly, applications are due feb. 1 or (maybe?) march 1. you have to contact each individual school.

california has some very good l-schools. Stanford and Cal-Berkeley (Boalt Hall) obviously. ucla, cal-davis, cal-hastings, and loyola-marymount are also very good. the rest, i dunno. i would avoid the ones that aren't ABA-accredited (and CA has a number of those) -- b/c you won't be able to sit for any bar exam outside of CA if you go to one of those.

Actually, I'm talking about applying for NEXT fall, 2005.

Do some schools specialize in certain law disciplines more than others? Is an English BA an acceptable degree for application or do they favor law undergrads?

Also, you should strongly consider taking an LSAT prep course if you can swing it. If nothing else, buy a book on it and practice.

There is no undergrad law major at most top American colleges. An English BA is completely acceptable, common even, and I don't think any one major is favored. I wonder at times if the sciences aren't better preparation for legal study than the humanities.

Last but not least, people that attended/still attend law school - is it everything you had hoped for (for whatever reason you decided to go)? Would you recommend it?

i would recommend trying to get some inside info on whatever law school it is that you will attend -- you will spend 3 years there, so you might as well go where it won't be too painful.

But that's a separate question from whether I would recommend it. D, I'm just not sure how to answer that. Law school in and of itself is neither good nor bad. As some posters have suggested upthread, that question can only be judged in relation to what you want in life and work.

If you have a strong desire to practice law (lawyer) or to create law (politics, legislation, lobbying, policy-making) then law school is the way to go. If however you suspect that your heart is really elsewhere (publishing, journalism, teaching, business, etc), then I'd say think real hard about whether 3 yrs of law school is the best way to get there. And if you're not sure about what you want to do, then I'd say law school is not the right place for you now. Maybe later it will be, but not now.

Sorry if this sounds redundant and obvious.

I'm about a month or so away from hearing from law schools (I got some good advice on old threads which I'll try to find). Law schools like people who have worked and have diverse experience, so don't think that your background is a negative.

Biggest thing I'd reiterate is to really make sure you want to invest the time and money (average debt leaving law school is $100,000). It's understood that law school is highly competitive -- both to get in and once you're there -- in the sense of the school you get into and how well you do have a major impact on your career. Not that that should necessarily guide you, but just know it upfront.

Oh. And for $10 or $20, you can look at the US News law school rankings online. They'll give you a good sense of what sorts of grades and LSAT scores get you into what schools.

You've already heard about the cost, which is significant. You should enjoy speaking in public and be confident about your ability to do so, and you should be competitive by nature--these qualities will serve you well. Think hard about your decision; many of my law school classmates were completely miserable. It's great for some, but it isn't for everyone. Good Luck!

Now she wishes she'd stayed in, as we would be rich. And, probably, the whole dealing-with-me thing.

but you still gotta spend 3 years there and get the JD in order to sit for the bar and (if you pass) practice.

Not necessarily; it's a decent living, but there is no guarantee of richness--plenty of other careers will bring salaries as high as attorney salaries. Also, in order to make the big bucks, you need to bill upwards of 2000 hours/year, and in order to do this generally must work around 70 hours per week. When you break it down, the time/money ratio can really suck.

I will be joining a City firm as a trainee soon. I feel apprehensive to say the least...

On the other hand, if you are willing to work your ass off to make something work and starve for a few years after law school, there are good jobs as a lawyer to be had.

x-post: all of the smartest, most interesting paralegals I ever worked with who took the job as a taste test all decided to do something else with their lives.

Social justice reasons for going to a law school are a whole other thing. They're not illegitimate, but I often find that people go in (1) with an unrealistic expectation of how much money they can make doing it and how easy it will be to get a job doing it at all, and (2) with an unrealistic expectation of how much power they'll have to effect change. Lawyers are tools. You're a weapon, not a general. The cliche is the person who wants to be an "environmental lawyer" and winds up defending companies against toxic tort lawsuits.

I was a paralegal at a biglaw firm for 12 years and I think I got literal PTSD from it

I think I am going to take the LSAT and apply.

me too

Good luck! Curious to know what prompted you guys to do it. Let me know if I can be of any help or give any advice.

Yes, good luck!

I would also make sure to read man alive's two posts from the previous revive and that you are ready for the grind.

Yeah, they're pretty right on. I'd talk to as many actual lawyers as you can.

I’ll add a little to it too - I definitely know people who went in to become public defenders, became public defenders, and loved being public defenders. I know someone who opened a solo shop and is really into it. I know someone who became pretty senior in an interesting area of the law department for a major city. I even know people who found big firm jobs they liked. It’s not like it’s misery for everyone. But it’s important to understand that, especially if you are lucky enough go to a top law school, or get top grades at a non top law school, the recruiting machine is very strong and very hard to avoid. The big firms recruit after your first year, whereas most other jobs don’t recruit at all. So it’s very hard to say “nah, I won’t take the summer associate position at White & Case that lines up a high paying job after school, I’ll just wait two more years and apply to the jobs I really want and might not get.” And on the flip side, if you don’t have that option, getting hired in a job you actually want out of school is pretty tricky. So you need to have some reasonably strong idea why you are going.

I was thinking of doing a combination of tax law (I already have a tax prep practice) and perhaps land use/tenants rights and work for nonprofits?

I don’t really know how these things work, but for retirement “fun” my non-attorney father took the tax bar (and passed). Then he managed an H&R Block branch during tax season (for “fun.” He’d retired from a long engineering career and was oddly obsessed with the tax code). Is that something you could do in lieu of the whole law degree thing?

I am still not sure— I need to do some thinking.

I am primarily interested in contracts, for what it is worth. In my paralegal days, the cases involving nitty-gritty reads of contracts were my favorites.

I am torn between leaning into my current life and work as an educator, which is by all accounts going reasonably well but is financially unstable, or going into law, which seems like the most reasonable option if I want to work in a field I find interesting and have experience in.

I know these aren’t necessarily the best reasons. But I’m a poet who is nearly 40 and whose main marketable skills are in educating and editing, and those jobs are either impossible to find or pay absolute dick.

xp - I could probably fairly easily retake the EA exam and get that credential back and that would allow me to do a lot of the same things a tax lawyer would in terms of income tax stuff.

I just see a bunch of orgs and groups around here that need help with basic stuff like contracts and leases and applying for tax-exempt status and they generally want someone who is a lawyer to do that.

table, as somebody who was on ilx before and after going to law school (and you can probably guess what i practice now, based on my posts in the twitter and elon musk threads):

-you certainly wouldn't be the first punk/poet to have gone to law school. it was a plot point in SLC punk! and i believe our very own TWU itt is also a prime example.

-it sounds like you're looking to go to improve your job prospects / look for financial stability. i think that's a fine reason to go and as good as any other. people who have a genuine interest in law are mostly perverts, ime. but keep in mind that the more likely a law job is to pay adequately and/or be in a field of law that has OK employment prospects, the more likely it is that that job is going to be associated with filthy lucre. as hurting points out there are also a lot of lawyers who go non-traditional routes and end up OK. but that's not a guarantee in the way that working in BIGLAW can be, as hurting also points out, and i'd at least have a plan b and c if i was going to make something non-traditional my plan a.

-people talk about the public service loan forgiveness programs, but i've heard bad things and there are some who do the full ten years or w/e and find out that their loan forgiveness was rejected b/c of some red tape fuckup or another. if you go in banking on this, i'd ask around / do research.

-going on a scholarship will make it overall much less of a risk and will insulate you from the BIGLAW pipeline that hurting mentioned. that means doing well on the lsat. get the powerscore books, take practice tests, find out what scores will get you scholarships at the law schools you're looking at.

-iirc, you're based out of philly. i assume you'd want to go to a philly law school? that'd be nice - i spent a summer interning for a judge in philly, and from what i understand the philly legal scene is pretty insular, they tend to hire only from philly area schools like nova, temple, etc. and don't give a crap about the "top 14" prestigious schools or w/e. in fact, i think they tend to be suspicious of penn grads because they are afraid penn grads will just jump ship to nyc.

-being interested in contracts sounds fine, but keep in mind that in the actual practice of law, analyzing contracts is like, 10% of what you do and generally is not something you're even trusted to do until you're a few years in to the job. law is still very much an apprenticeship model with a licensing requirement on the front-end, where you eat shit for the first couple of years before they let you do anything fun. it's sort of like this new yorker article about a bonsai apprenticeship. the other 90% of the job is a bunch of non-legal work and skillsets.

-my biggest tip for adjusting to the style of thinking required to do well in law school is to remember that law generally is arguing from authority, not arguing from principles. that means that if the controlling case in something is scalia's dogshit opinion based on orginalism, you will need to regurgitate that law and treat it as holy ground if it applies to your case. that means that you may have a law school exam where dobbs controls and you'll need to write about how abortion may not be allowed in this case because of dobbs, really rancid shit. but that's how the law works.

-finally, i know you'll ask around and get a wide variety of perspectives and everything, but ime it's just gonna be one of those things that you won't know if you'll like until you actually do it. and that sucks, because by that time you'll have lost 3 years of your life (and have gone in debt, if you took out loans) and that sucks. there are people who go to law school with the expectation of loving it and find out they absolutely hate it after graduating, and there are those who go in expecting to hate it but find it's tolerable and pays the bills. so, uh, i dunno what to tell you here. at the end of the day, i'd hate for you to go to law school only to end up at an insurance defense mill or something (hopefully not offending any ilxors who are insurance defense attorneys).

-my biggest tip for adjusting to the style of thinking required to do well in law school is to remember that law generally is arguing from authority, not arguing from principles. that means that if the controlling case in something is scalia's dogshit opinion based on orginalism, you will need to regurgitate that law and treat it as holy ground if it applies to your case.

this is really useful advice!

law is still very much an apprenticeship model with a licensing requirement on the front-end, where you eat shit for the first couple of years before they let you do anything fun.

part of why I'm seriously considering it (as opposed to idly considering it) is that there is a lawyer who does a lot of what I am interested in doing who I have a good relationship with and he is highly in demand and has to turn down work. So, part of my thought is I could intern/apprentice under this guy.

-finally, i know you'll ask around and get a wide variety of perspectives and everything, but ime it's just gonna be one of those things that you won't know if you'll like until you actually do it. and that sucks, because by that time you'll have lost 3 years of your life (and have gone in debt, if you took out loans) and that sucks. there are people who go to law school with the expectation of loving it and find out they absolutely hate it after graduating, and there are those who go in expecting to hate it but find it's tolerable and pays the bills. so, uh, i dunno what to tell you here. at the end of the day, i'd hate for you to go to law school only to end up at an insurance defense mill or something (hopefully not offending any ilxors who are insurance defense attorneys).

― 龜, Wednesday, December 7, 2022 1:20 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Great post imo, especially this ^^^, which is what I was thinking of when I used the term “grind”.

I was an insurance defense attorney for two years early in my career and hated it. It doesn’t pay very well, you receive very little training, and it doesn’t really lead to other better careers except maybe plaintiff’s counsel. I was able to maneuver/luck into an in-house position that was much better, but I don’t know if I would be practicing now if I hadn’t.

My new hobby has been reading state supreme court and court of appeals opinions, the main thing I'm learned is some people are crazy as balls

I was thinking of doing a combination of tax law (I already have a tax prep practice) and perhaps land use/tenants rights and work for nonprofits?

― sarahell, Wednesday, 7 December 2022 08:35 (thirteen hours ago) link

I am still not sure— I need to do some thinking.

I am primarily interested in contracts, for what it is worth. In my paralegal days, the cases involving nitty-gritty reads of contracts were my favorites.

I am torn between leaning into my current life and work as an educator, which is by all accounts going reasonably well but is financially unstable, or going into law, which seems like the most reasonable option if I want to work in a field I find interesting and have experience in.

I know these aren’t necessarily the best reasons. But I’m a poet who is nearly 40 and whose main marketable skills are in educating and editing, and those jobs are either impossible to find or pay absolute dick.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Wednesday, 7 December 2022 12:05 (ten hours ago) link

I don't think either of these sound like terrible reasons, fwiw. I definitely went in for reasons somewhat like yours table, although I was 29 rather than 40. I was an english major who had tried journalism and decided it wasn't for me, so it was either law or english teacher. As I said above, I did find a niche I like and ultimately a firm I like.

Fact that you both have some familiarity with the real world aspects of law practice is a good thing.

I honestly don't know a lot about the market for tax lawyers -- I have a vague impression that it's a good specialty to have because it's "unsexy" and therefore you don't have tons of law grads clamoring to do it. But I can't swear to that. The only thing I'd say about being a tax lawyer is that a lot of your work may wind up involving helping well-off people try to avoid paying taxes or avoid punishment for not paying taxes. That's not meant as a judgment on you if you do it, just as a caution if it isn't what you want. But it's pretty far outside my zone, so I would try to talk to tax lawyers about the practice.

All I know is the most expensive outside lawyers my company has ever retained were big law tax lawyers for an m&a deal.

people who have a genuine interest in law are mostly perverts,

lol, otm. What I mainly learned in con law, for example, is that I fucking hate con law, hate the supreme court, and hate people who are on the supreme court's jock. I often found myself thinking, if these are the best legal minds in the country, that's pretty poor reflection on the rest of us. I hated people who said "But you have to admit, Scalia is a great writer." No he fucking isn't, your mind is warped because you haven't read a normal book for the last year. And that was before the court pretty much became a council of fundamentalist clerics. I don't read SCOTUSBlog, I don't listen to the oral arguments, I don't read the journalists who cover SCOTUS, some of whom are admittedly very good. I minimize my exposure to the law to things that are directly relevant to my work.

Too much of the time, law is the art of pretending you are operating on principles when you actually aren't.

I litigate, so I deal with caselaw all the time, but mostly I care about the facts and the story and why they are compelling. Sometimes the law completely hamstrings you in unjust ways, other times you have a gap you can sneak through with a good enough set of facts and story. "Thinking like a lawyer" is mostly sophistry, but I am in a somewhat white hat area of law and try my best to bend things toward justice when I can. And toward money, of course, I don't work for a non-profit and we have to keep the business going.

That's my rant.

The only thing I'd say about being a tax lawyer is that a lot of your work may wind up involving helping well-off people try to avoid paying taxes or avoid punishment for not paying taxes.

Hey, it's a pretty good living.

i would love to hear your advice/thoughts, jim.

part of why I'm seriously considering it (as opposed to idly considering it) is that there is a lawyer who does a lot of what I am interested in doing who I have a good relationship with and he is highly in demand and has to turn down work. So, part of my thought is I could intern/apprentice under this guy.

― sarahell, Wednesday, December 7, 2022 1:29 PM (yesterday)

sounds like a great opportunity to gain experience and do something you're already doing. would there be an expectation of him giving you clients? if so, i'd be a little skeptical. but otherwise it's always great to have a known quantity.

Not necessarily? Like, the way I know him is that we have about a half dozen clients in common -- he is their lawyer and I am their accountant/tax person.

I also have tax clients that will ask me for legal advice and help and I will of course say, "I can't. I am not a lawyer"

Are you a CPA, sara?

I was an EA, then let my credential lapse (didn't do my CPE back in the mid 2000s) ... I currently am just an RTRP and have my state tax credential for limited practice (CTEC in CA), which means I have to be careful about how many clients in NY and OR I get paid to help, because otherwise I would have to get a license in those states. If I got my EA credential back, I wouldn't have to worry about the state accreditation.

This afternoon I get to attend what is hopefully the last meeting with the County Assessor over a client's welfare exemption (from property tax) where I am working with an actual lawyer who mostly specializes in property tax issues for low-income housing. The client is a charitable org, so the lawyer has less familiarity with the code/statutes/caselaw regarding that category of exemption, whereas I am very familiar with tax exemption issues for charitable orgs but not so much on the property tax issues.

income tax exemption issues = I know really well; property tax issues == i know less well, but I also know way more about building codes and permits than most tax people (sigh)

Wow. I was a windbag my third year of law school.

I ended up graduating into a recession so I took the first job I could find, which was at a state workers’ comp agency. That job was trash (although, workers’ comp law is pretty interesting) and I ended up jumping straight into the loving arms of Big Law after five years and doing (sigh) single plaintiff ERISA benefits work aka insurance defense, which is pretty gross. I did that for almost 10 years because I got pregnant shortly after starting and the job was flexible and sometimes the partners were chill and the money was good and the work was interesting. Eventually it was too soul-destroying and now I’m a “knowledge management attorney” for a different big firm specializing in employment law and that is a really sweet gig.

I stayed as union-adjacent as I could for awhile, hoping I could get back into it, working as a steward for my union and doing pro bono worker rights stuff and got too close to how that particular sausage is made. I’m not anti-union, but I’m real glad I didn’t end up in labor law after all.

Anyway, my general advice is the same, which is only go to law school if you want to practice law. I’d refine it a little to say only go to law school if you can do it without incurring any debt or if you’re willing to work a less than ideal job for a decade or so while you pay off debts/get your career sorted out.

Oh, but I think you should both totally go to law school. Why not?

I have decided against for now, will consider again in a few months. A friend of a friend heard I was considering it and messaged me, saying: Look, do what you have to, but I was in your same position a year and half ago and was told to really just push hard at what I was already doing, switched up some language in my resume and CV, and now I have a good fulltime job that allows me to read and write, too.

I am going to see how that works.

I appreciate all of the lawyerly advice, tho. I should mention my dad is a smalltown lawyer who has been working for nearly fifty years and doesn’t show any signs of stopping because he loves his job.

carl! agatha!!!!!

table is your dad going to say good-naturedly grumpy things like "well you could've done that 20 years ago but better late than never here's a new pair of suspenders"

Good luck, table! Hi, silby!

I can’t imagine a more anxiety inducing profession but ymmv

I stayed as union-adjacent as I could for awhile, hoping I could get back into it, working as a steward for my union and doing pro bono worker rights stuff and got too close to how that particular sausage is made. I’m not anti-union, but I’m real glad I didn’t end up in labor law after all.

thanks carl, and silby, my dad has always said “you’d be a great lawyer but i never wanted to pressure you to do anything,” which frankly, thanks dad. obviously he wishes i made more money, but he also understands the unique position i’ve been in— graduated college in 07, got downsized from my first job after the crash, went to get my MFA, could only find weird gigs for years, etc.

I can’t imagine a more anxiety inducing profession but ymmv

Dentistry

Anyway, my general advice is the same, which is only go to law school if you want to practice law. I’d refine it a little to say only go to law school if you can do it without incurring any debt or if you’re willing to work a less than ideal job for a decade or so while you pay off debts/get your career sorted out.

― carl agatha, Thursday, December 8, 2022 2:47 PM (two hours ago)

yeah, I am basically thinking in terms of whether/how much debt it would lead to and what lifestyle changes I'd have to make in order to carry that debt burden. Currently I have no kids, no spouse, no debt .... but am a renter, so, I might just not do law school and buy a house instead. My Great Great Uncle was a lawyer who never went to law school, but there were ways to, I guess work and test out of the academic requirements? He ended up a judge so, I'm assuming he was a pretty good lawyer?

my dad has always said “you’d be a great lawyer but i never wanted to pressure you to do anything,” which frankly, thanks dad. obviously he wishes i made more money,

my mom says the same thing to me, tbh, she will also say, "Sarah, three words, estates and trusts."

I forget which season of Better Call Saul it was where he went into elder law but ... when I watched that, I could hear my mom saying "estates and trusts" and also my grandmother periodically updating her will to change which relative she is going to leave her best china to based on recent behavior

Yeah, I would explore what actually practicing law looks like. I mean, there is huge variety, but I would focus less on "law school" and more on "what my life would be like if I were a lawyer." It's been a great profession for me, but it's not for everyone. Again, I would talk to as many practitioners as you can.

As far as specifically being a tax lawyer goes, I think the biggest difference is that your role is much more as planner and advocate than preparing returns and working in compliance. As someone said upthread, if you are at a big firm you will spend your time working on huge transactions to minimize the economic hit of taxes, or possibly defending very large taxpayers against the IRS (or FTB, NY DOR, etc.). I spend most of my time helping individuals and families plan for wealth transfer. However, I know plenty of practitioners at small shops or solo firms who do quite well for themselves. The guy who does my taxes is a CPA and attorney whose practice is divided between return preparation and representation of clients before the IRS. He has a small staff and an excellent reputation; I don't think he's hurting for work.

]my mom says the same thing to me, tbh, she will also say, "Sarah, three words, estates and trusts."

+1

California probate work is quite abundant and profitable.

Prop 19 that recently passed is probably a gold rush for the profession

It's a gigantic pain in the ass, is what it is.

Welp, paid my fee and I’m taking the LSAT in October

Good luck, table.

yay!!! meanwhile, me and my coworker recently discussed both of us going to law school and being "study partners" ... i don't think this will happen tbh ... i will probably be posting to this thread about considering going to law school until ilx dies or I die haha