I do okay, but I think every morning about how far wrong I’ve gone in my life. Thanks for playing, though!
I’ll have you know I was watching cartoons in the '80s.
Or maybe the people you are insulting actually do the job, speak with a hell of a lot of other people who do the job, and have their own reasoned opinion on the subject.
But please, continue to expound yourself. Let us know your experience, or at least the experience of the people you sleep with.
This is, arguably, the most uninformed opinion I’ve seen posted in GQ. And, frankly, there have been some doozies. This one, however, takes the cake.
Although it doesn’t merit a serious response, I’m curious as to how you reached your enlighted opinion: someone posts that they believe their legal education to have been a waste of money and paper, and from that you intuit that their legal skills are poor? Why, that’s brilliant, Clarence Darrow! And you attained your legal knowledge precisely how?
Ah. It all becomes so much clearer. Incidentally, SlyFrog, thanks for the Vandy LR link. I’ve printed the article to read in my spare time; the bit that I skimmed looked quite interesting, and, I think, accurate.
Actually, point number three is correct. The rest, not so much. Prep courses can be a complete waste of time and money, depending on the person. Some people will effectively use prep courses to improve their scores; other people will actually see their scores plummet after prep courses; still others will eschew the prep courses and do just fine. It all depends on your personality and test-taking skills.
And, as to the quality of the law school, it really depends on what you want to do afterwards. In each major city, there are a handful of law firms that are top tier. Generally, to get a job at one of them, you should be at the best law school in town. But not always. And what about government work, or criminal prosecution, or academia? In short, pick a school that you like; that has classes you can see yourself taking; a schedule and cost that work for you; and people that you enjoy being with. Best of luck.
Actually, all I meant in that context (in a bout of feeling sorry for myself) was that ordering my business cards was a waste of money and paper. I didn’t bother to mention that I work solely on legal research and writing in my job capacity, so I don’t really get to network with anyone or meet many people to hand my cards out to. I didn’t understand why EJsGirl went out of her way to insult me in such a snarky way, but I appreciate you sticking up for me just the same, Campion! You’re definitely one of the good ones.
Well, here’s where I was coming from, for what it’s worth (probably not much). It has been my experience that people who are extremely unhappy in their jobs don’t tend to be the best practitioners of it. I don’t want to have a heart surgeon who hates his job, I don’t want a waitress who hates serving food, and I don’t want a lawyer who thinks he made the wrong decision to go into law.
My husband (yeah, the guy I sleep with) has had a great experience in the law. He started out as a deputy district attorney, then moved away from criminal law into corporate law. He has done very well and enjoyed what he does, although he does miss the courtroom.
If I felt I had made a terrible decision in my choice of career, I’d change it. I don’t understand being miserable in a job or profession.
It just seems sad that nowadays even the lawyers are bashing the law! Sure, it’s an easy target but hardly the total cesspool you would think.
Anyway, I’m sorry I offended you all.
I also stress the improtance of financial planning.
I went to the best school I could get into regardless of cost because that’s what my advisor told me to do. I thought, “attorneys are paid well, so I won’t worry about finances now.”
I came out of law school with a mountain of student loan debt (~$120K). My school and class rank were good, but not enough to get me a primo law job with primo salary straight out of school.
At the firms, the billable hours and partner egos sucked the life out of me.
Now I am 35 years old and not even close to being able to buy a house that I would like thanks to the student loan payments. I also moved to Sacramento thinking I would like to work in government or public policy. However, the pay in that realm kinda put a damper on that idea.
So I launched a solo practice with no clients or staff of my own. After about 10 months, I have worked my ass off, recouped my start up costs, and have essentially broken even on the whole solo practice. Not bad for a new business, IMHO.
I have worked harder as a solo than I ever did in a firm, mostly because I have no staff support, but I don’t mind because the work I do and the money I make is all mine. I can also set my own schedule and work in my underwear. My goal is to keep pressing forward and “taking it to the next level” just to put a dent in those dang 30-year loans and “get ahead” financially.
Friends have told me that I need to marry someone young and rich, because I am burdened with debt and still working on my career path at 35 and not ready for children. Some women decided not to go out with me citing my student loans as a potential threat to their standard of living. One fine woman was able to overlook all that and we’ll be married soon. She’s a teacher. Well, at least I got the “young” part right. 
The bottom line is that, if you are not careful or lucky, a huge student loan debt can really limit and influence your options and life for years to come in ways you may not think about when signing up for law school.
BTW, when I was in law firms, I thought I may have made a huge mistake going into law. In my mind, I would bash the law and the profession when I should have been bashing law firm mentality.
Now that I am solo, it’s hard, but it ain’t half bad.
Lawyers who bash the law or the profession may just be bashing the wrong thing without realizing it.
This article answered a lot of my questions. I have often considered going back to school for law school, but have heard all the above horror stories. And my question for all of them was always… well yeah, but why does every law student want to get into the most prestigious school, the most prestigious clerkship, the biggest law firm. What is wrong with going to a decent school, getting a moderate clerkship, and getting a job in a small local firm? Wouldn’t that be a good life? Couldn’t I easily make $50-70k/year without working every hour of the day?
And from this article… apparently it would be a good life and I could do just what I thought. Unless there is someone one the board from a small (1-5 person) firm who hates their job and works 90 hour weeks who can tell me otherwise?.
This is not necessarily true. I’ve met at least several people I would say are some of the best in their field, but absolutely hate their jobs. (One a Pultizer-prize winning photographer who has almost quit several times to become a cop; another a British barrister who packed it in shortly after finishing law school, even though he won all four or five cases he’s ever tried). You can be extremely good at something and hate it at the same time; the two are not mutually exclusive. I, for example, found out I have a talent for accounting during some temp years way back when. You couldn’t pay me enough money to do that job for a living.
Nothing wrong with that at all so long as you are able to find or start a firm that is willing to give the associates some autonomy and refrain from attempting to drive their associates into the ground. It happens.
… and it also depends on your student loan burden.
Some small firms don’t want to hire people directly out of law school; they’d rather have their junior people trained by the large firms. So a number of people will plan to work their first three or so years at a large firm, living frugally to pay off student loans, then after three years, lateral to a small firm. If they’ve really been living frugally, the pay cut won’t seem so bad.
But the salary at the big firms is often referred to as “golden handcuffs.” And for very good reason.
But you’re right: the goal for all of us ought to be a sustainable lifestyle, with work and fun balanced, and enough money to get done what you need to get done.
This is incredibly true. I took the LSATs in December 2001, 10 years or so after my Masters. Some schools were really helpful to ‘non-traditional’ students, others less so. I also had the problem of not havign an undergraduate GPA. I did my degree at Oxford, and ended up with a very high 2:1; the average grade I received was a B++. Some schools saw this and assigned me a GPA of 3.4-ish, which I thought was a tad unfair as I missed a First (top 10-15%) by one grade in one paper.
Anyway, as I said, I tool the LSAT in December and did much better than the practice exams. I got a 179, and was turned down from one school, accepted to the other 4, with scholarships at all but Temple. Still, I missed the deadline for applications to a lot of good schools (Duke, UVA) by waiting so long; I also missed the deadline for a lot of scholarships at the schools I did apply to. And the scholarships are not given out after everyone applies. I ended up spending three great years at Vandy, which I would wholeheartedly recommend as a very very very friendly law school for ‘mature’ students, though unfortunately it does not do part time. The earlier you apply, the more chances you are going to have. I would not necessarily bother with a review course, if, as your posts seem to indicate, you have a logical mind. I didn’t take one, but I have always done logic games for fun, the arguments section was just like being in the Pub, and reading comprehension was about the sole thing I learned in my undergrad degree.
Get the good LSAT score and they will come looking for you. Regent’s College (the Nation’s only Baptist law school!) would not leave me alone for some reason.
Best of luck with it. I have no regrets, but I have not started work yet (at a DC firm too). I will now return to Bar Review work…
Thanks for that article, SlyFrog- halfway through your post I started think about it and was wondering if I could find it online, and I was pleased to see you already had. That article helped me to make up my mind to go back to my dad’s solo practice after I left the federal court I worked for, instead of going with a big firm.
Which L.A. law school would that be? I’m just curious…
Loyola. With the caveat that different schools are right for different people, etc., etc. But if I had to do a night program in the LA/OC area, that’s the one I’d pick.
I thought I would add some of my experience to this discussion and I hope it will answer some questions for the OP.
I am an older student. It took me 11 years off and on to get my associate’s degree, 2 more for my bachelor’s, and I’m hoping just 3 and a half more for a Juris Doctor. I have a consistent record of community service that is in my opinion unmatched by anyone I have spoken with.
I graduated magna cum laude, college honors from the community college I attended and summa cum laude with college honors from UCLA. I studied for the LSAT an entire summer for the test in October, which I would recommend to anyone.
Let me explain how I studied for the test. I bought as many actual LSATs from the LSAC as I could. I bought both “10 LSATs” and “10 More LSATs” as well as the latest tests in the single test booklets. Bought a cheap kitchen timer and went at it everyday. I was scoring between 160 and 176 on these tests with 90 percent falling roughly in the high 160s and low to mid 170s. I go to take the LSAT and I do not so good. Like I said, there was a range and I was at the lower end of it. So, I now realized my 3.9 GPA from UCLA didn’t matter and my dreams of attending Yale were down the tubes. Needless to say I hate the LSAT and formed this opinion before I took the test. I feel that I had the ability to score very high on the test but I just had one bad test. I would have taken the test over again but as I am in my 30’s, I felt time was wasting and that a good ABA law school is what you make of it regardless of the rank of the program.
As sad as this is, I did learn something. Study that test! It is the only thing that is important to most of these schools. Study real tests and take a course to keep your mind in it. Do not do either thinking you have covered all bases because I’m here to tell you, I wish I would have. I think that the structured nature of a course would have given me more consistency. I would have taken it myself but I could not afford it.** As far as taking the LSAT over is concerned, YES they do average test scores and you are taking a chance of being worse off if you score lower on the second test.**
As the other posters and I have said, grades are not that important. You can get into a good law school with a shitty GPA and a good LSAT but not vice versa. Something to consider though, I screwed up in junior college and re-took a few classes that I received an “F” in. These disappear from your transcript when transferring to a 4 year but the LSAC thinks they should be factored in. Image my horror when my GPA dropped considerably when the “F” I got in sociology 10 years prior in my dope smoking-ditching class-playing cards in the student lounge in junior college days was factored in. It didn’t matter that I had straight A’s with no drops or retakes in a 4 year program that is in the top 10 in the world as far as my major was concerned. So if you are coming out of a junior college with some blemishes, the LSAC wants to see everything.
I did make it into one of those L.A. evening programs and I’m starting this Fall. I’m attending a school that has endeared itself to me for looking beyond one bad LSAT. Campion, it’s good to see that you think highly of this program because it is the very one I signed up for.
Congrats. We love our Loyola grads because they are good, practical lawyers who don’t have chips on their shoulders or think they are too good to do the work. Study hard, hook up with a good study group, lay your hands on old outlines, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you how to study. That’s my law school advice.
Interesting – so here we are trying to educate the OP about the pros and cons of going to law school and your advice is to ignore anyone who has had a bad experience, put a smile on your face, and go go go for it!
How lovely for him. And you.
Well, some of us have tried to point out that taking on student loans can limit your options regarding changing your career if it turns out it’s not for you. Apparently, though, any of us who have had bad experiences aren’t worth listening to, because we were bad lawyers.
You know, I might tentatively suggest that one doesn’t necessarily have the same experience being a lawyer as being married to a lawyer (or, as you put it, sleeping with one). It’s entirely possible that your husband loves his career. It’s also possible that he sees things he doesn’t tell you about.
A lot of this depends on what market you are in. Obviously, with demand being equal, the more lawyers in the market, the harder it’s going to be to get a job. Also, consider the rent in the market: When I landed my first job out of law school in San Fran, making a decent 6 figure salary, my rent was $1400 for a one bedroom (granted, I could’ve looked for a roommate or lived in not-so-nice a part of town). Considering my law school loans (almost paid off :)), there is no way I could survive on $75/k year – well I could, I suppose, I just would be existing rather than living.
Also, not all small firms are make your own hours type of places. They can still grind you out without making you work long hours, though it will most likely be a factor. A lot of them are small because the partners want all the money. Anyway, in my job search, $50-$75k is typical of a local government job, which involves dealing with the annoying public (I love corporate law). If you’re going to work government, you might as well go fed. Surprisingly, my career services office (CSO - know them well) told me that public service sector, local, and fed governemtn jobs all want the pedigree education, too.
Finding a job, especially in the bigger markets is really competitive. Having experience helps, but for people like me who went straight to law school, we have the Catch-22: firms will only hire non-pedigree, non-top 10% kids who have experience, but you need those qualifications to get experience.