Going To Law School

Why do you ask

facing a bit of career frustration, which i had a more directly marketable skill set, plus i think i would be interested in learning about more about the american legal system. also being a lawyer is about writing -- albeit, in a dry way -- and debating and hey

Those are the classic bad reasons for wanting to be a lawyer iirc

Haha no law school is about writing and debating

Lawyering is about whatever job you get after the bar and rarely is there much writing or debating afaik

When I was having some of those feelings you describe I went to a graduate engineering program instead because my employer would reimburse me for it and it turns out that was a much better decision

tombot is correct

If you’re a lawyer, you can break any law you want to once a month. That, I think, is a pretty sweet perk.

We interrupt this revive for a brief side trip down memory lane:

you can find out a lot about the LSATs online. Yahoo it.
― don weiner

it's not a good job for people who love writing or debating or for those who don't enjoy career frustration or for those who just want to learn about the american legal system.

do you enjoy stress?

i mean would you go to medical school just because you are curious about the human body? i don't think so

do you want to permanently damage your ability to enjoy reading a book by learning to read too fast?

also did you not read any of the thread above in which you participated that was about the shitty employment prospects for lawyers??!

i'm thinking about applying to law school, for a few reasons:

1) my specific area of focus as an academic librarian has been on copyright and licensing issues in libraries & archives, higher ed, & scholarly publishing, and while many librarians working in this subfield do not have JDs, many of them do, especially the leaders in this subfield, and having one could benefit me professionally, probably bringing higher pay and certainly more authority in the work that i do.
2) there is a pretty good law school at the university where i work and i would have free tuition because of my employee benefits
3) i am generally not very happy at my current job (due to bad management/culture, not the content of my work, which overall i enjoy) and there are few opportunities to work elsewhere, and moving in the next few years is not really a possibility because my family is very much rooted here. getting a JD could be a good use of my time when i otherwise might be wasting it miserably. i.e. if i have to be in this unsatisfying job for 3-5 years i may as well get a free law degree out of it if doing so would benefit me.

all that said i really don't want to go back to school. i already have a graduate degree, and i hated library school and it wasn't even that hard, just a pain in the ass. i asked my close friend who has a JD from this particular program and he strongly recommended that i don't do it, he hated it but how should i know necessarily that i will?

what was your experience like? is it interesting, fun, rewarding? was it stressful? did you find it miserable, and if so, was it worth it?

Hey Marcos!

I have a lot of thoughts on that subject. For starters, I think the economics of the decision are really important, especially for someone in your situation (already into a career, have kids, etc.).

The free degree helps a lot. Do I understand correctly that you'd also be able to do it part-time while working? I went nearly debt-free and I think that made a huge difference in my ability to make a good job decision coming out of school. The people I know who had huge loans were desperate to work for large firms just so they could make enough to pay them off quickly. The "lucky" few who got those jobs were often miserable, and the ones who didn't were financially miserable.

The second consideration IMO is that law school is more like a professional program with some academic trappings/pretense rather than a true academic program. Your first-year courseload will likely be entirely standard/predetermined. From there you will have more choice, and there are some research opportunities and philosophically oriented courses, but most courses revolve around a specific area of law with aim toward understanding the foundation of that area for practice purposes. And yet at the same time, law school isn't as much of a professional program as, say, nursing school, in that it doesn't really teach you how to practice law.

The third consideration, and a corollary to that imo, is, don't get a law degree if you don't want to use a law degree for professional purposes. I found some of law school interesting, but not enough to be a pursuit for its own sake. You go to law school to become a lawyer (or, in your case, maybe a higher-paid and more specialized librarian?), not to explore.

All that said, I didn't hate law school. I found it manageable, sometimes interesting, and only really stressful around finals. Sure, there are assholes, but it wasn't as bad as the stereotypes I had read about. I think a lot of people who say "Oh everyone is so competitive and it's so nasty" are people who are actually competitive themselves and won't admit it. I had friends, we helped each other study, there was none of that Paper Chase-type backstabbing or fighting over outlines or whatever. The kinds of people I met there were a little more straight-laced than my college friends on average but it was ok. Remember also that you will be one of the oldest people in your program, and many of them will be in their early 20s. That dynamic worked well for me -- it was easy to focus on getting my work done, going to class, and going home.

I also went full-time and wasn't working and didn't have kids yet, so I think it's unquestionable that if you go while working and parenting it will be more stressful than my experience.

Copyright law was one of the more interesting courses I took.

I could say a lot more, email or gchat?

hey man alive thank you! this is all super helpful. email is fine! and by the way i owe you an email- i rarely check my ilx email address (it's a one-off account, weeks sometimes months go by, i am trying to be better about it) and didn't realize i missed one from you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMS59sxwxs

Numbered points one and two and weak reasons to go -- the more concrete they get, the stronger they become as positives.

Numbered point three is not in the plus column, and, as a predictor of happiness, statistically speaking, actually more of a negative.

What comes after "all that said" is a killer no-more-calls-we-have-a-winner reason not to go.

I know lots of people for whom these four points are true who went to law school anyway, and a few of them did well in school. I don't know any happy people like that.

Those are good points. I hadn't really focused on the " i really don't want to go back to school. i already have a graduate degree, and i hated library school and it wasn't even that hard, just a pain in the ass" part. Law school will be a pain in the ass too then. I have to remind myself that I got to go to school full time while not working, living in subsidized housing two blocks from my school, in a beautiful and fun neighborhood, and I didn't yet have kids. As such, after six years of working, having to spend 5-7 hours a day studying/in class really didn't seem bad at all, it was almost a luxury that my only job was to read some dumb cases in an aesthetically pleasing library.

Could Shoulda Woulda.

I once took the LSAT and got perfect scores on the verbal and analytical. Not bragging, I was shocked.

But I had been out of university and in the work force for some time.

I talked to someone at Northwestern law and they told me I would have been accepted into any law program in America.

I suppose things would have been much different if I had.

FWIW, I've never heard of anyone separately breaking out their verbal and analytical scores, usually it's just a total score out of 180. Based on Harvard's current stats, median LSAT is 173 and median GPA is 3.9 -- if you had that or higher in both categories (or higher in one and slightly lower in the other) you'd have a pretty likely shot of being admitted, since those are by far the biggest factors in law school admission.

A separate question is why do you wish you did it? What do you think you would have gotten out of being a lawyer? What happens to most people at top law schools is that they get spit out through the recruiting machine into the Cravaths and Skadden Arps and Davis Polks of the world - giant multinational law firms that handle major corporate mergers and defend against employment class actions and securities fraud suits and draft offering documents for IPOs. The massive six figure student debt they've taken on makes the "biglaw" salary pretty much the only way to pay it off in less than two decades (btw almost no one gets scholarships in "top" law programs). 9/10 of them make it maybe 5 years before they either get pushed out or quit because they can't hack 80 hour weeks in which every tiny detail of their exhausted work is scrutinized by angry, egomanaical partners who were the tenth out of ten in their group, and either relish their petty power or resent that they are still there themselves. After that, you admittedly have "options" that aren't always completely terrible, since you have Harvard Law and Skadden Arps on your resume -- you could go to the in-house counsel office of a pharmaceutical company, maybe work for the state DA, do public defense work for subsistence wages if you're a true believer or have a trust fund, and you might even find the mythical "reasonable midsize lifestyle firm," especially if you go to a smaller US city and convince them to take you without local connections. Also, if it's about money, lawyering can certainly yield a nice, professional class income and lifestyle, but it's not a ticket to riches the way tech or finance can be.

I don't want to be all negative, because some people really enjoy being a lawyer, but it takes a certain personality. I don't think I have that personality. I happened to find a niche I like, and then after working two places I didn't love, the third turned out great. I didn't go to a top law school, I went to a law school that let me go for free (ultimately a decision I'm very happy with), and then I studied very hard and happened to get top grades so that I had some options, albeit not the same ones as a Harvard grad. I didn't really want to go into the biglaw machine, and I was also lucky in a way that I graduated into a terrible economy so that hiring at those firms was very low, and in spite of many interviews at those top firms I didn't get an offer. I suspect I also presented as someone who really didn't want to be at one of those firms, because I really didn't. But if the economy had been better I would have been hired anyway, and then there's a good chance I would have just gotten sucked in, being kind of blind to what else was out there and afraid of not finding a job at all. Then I sort of lucked into my niche, and it ultimately worked out, with a fair amount of pain along the way.

Point being that I don't think the short-lived ego boost of having "been accepted into any law program in America" would outweigh the reality of being a lawyer, unless you could find a way to be a lawyer that you really enjoy, and if you did that, that would outweigh the ego boost of where you went to law school anyway. Law school is 3 years, your career is easily 30. No one cares where you went to law school after a couple years of working. I've worked with people from NYU and Penn and UVA and people from St John's and Cardozo and Miami and I don't think of them any differently from one another, I just think about whether I like them as people and whether their work is good. To be clear, there are some people in the world for whom the harvard degree is everything - they really exist. And then it's about being at the right firm, moving to the right town, joining the right country club, etc. I don't really know you but I doubt you're one of those people.

^booming post, man alive

xpost - yeah, I went to law school to become a union-side labor lawyer so that makes my class and career choices pretty easy. As long as I know a ULP from my asshole and never work for management (union folk are such a suspicious lot!), I should be okay.
― Party Time Country Female (pullapartgirl), Wednesday, August 23, 2006 3:23 PM (fifteen years ago)

Perusing this thread to review what my dear Party Time Country Female was saying about her future career. It did not turn out like this AT ALL. Best laid plans certainly awry. It's mostly good now though, but it took awhile. And those loans are nearly paid off.

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.