Ok, I’ve been an inmate of the legal profession for six years and I must reply. A few words on my background: N.Y.U. Law '94, Carleton College '90 (magna).
Urgent question for you: What do you know about the profession?
Turnover within law as at an all-time high, and for good reason. Not surprisingly, the work that is best compensated is also the most tedious and detail-oriented. Patent law, for example, is essentially a license to print money, but so godawfully dull that only the bravest survive. Other well-paid practices, like securities law (my own forte) sound much more exciting in theory than they are in practice. The days are spent dealing with the minutiae of agreements, some of which are interesting in a crossword-puzzly sort of way but most of which are not, not even slightly. As a junior lawyer, whether you work as a transaction attorney or as a litigator, you are likely to spend at least a year or two sitting in document rooms, looking for smoking guns that don’t exist.
Well-compensated, yes, but not fun. And often the hourly salary doesn’t work out to much more than what your secretary is making – and he or she gets to go home while it’s still light out.
Plus, much of the corporate side of law can be boiled down to a very simple line a friend of mine used to use when asked what he was doing: “Oh, I’m helping one set of assholes buy a business from another set of assholes.”
There are, of course, intrinsically interesting, fulfilling positions to be found. But most of them don’t pay nearly as well, and that’s a major issue to confront when you’ve got $100 grand or more in law school debts. (Some schools, such as N.Y.U., do have tuition-reimbursement programs for people who want to practice public interest law. Check them out if this is what you want.)
You love constitutional law, which is great, but bear in mind that outside the ACLU and a few think-tanky public law firms (see compensation caveat above), almost no one in the profession actually practices “constitutional law.” Constitutional issues arise much more often in criminal law, but that requires a very particular mindset regardless of which side you’re litigating on. I have enormous respect for people who practice in this area – it’s enormously important, enormously difficult, and only well-paid if you’re Johnny Cochran.
So that’s a bunch of the nasty part of the profession. What’s good? It is, usually, intellectually demanding, which is a plus. Lawyers are often interesting people, although like any profession that attracts smart types it’s filled with more than its share of the socially inept. It’s also a degree with enormous flexibility, and the intellectual skills you develop will serve you well in any future career. That, in the end, is the main attraction for me, which is why I plan to leave law within the next couple of years.
Oh, and at the top end, it’s well paid, although do bear in mind that you won’t be graduating until 2004, and who knows what the economy will be like then. I graduated into one of the toughest legal job markets ever, and only got a job because I had N.Y.U. on my transcript.
Really, do consider exactly what it is you want to be doing every day, and then make the decision. For me and many of my peers, law school was a way for someone with a liberal arts degree (Poli Sci in my case as well) to be sure of a job that paid. That alone isn’t a good enough reason to enter a profession that, anecdotally at least, seems to be losing people almost as quickly as it gains them (AFAIK there are no reliable statistics on this; bar memberships are very approximate because many people keep theirs up just for flexibility).
After that, it’s just a question of doing well on the LSAT, which counts far more than any other factor no matter what law schools try to represent otherwise. When 7000+ applications have to be sorted for 400 positions, you don’t have the luxury of worrying about much else. To increase your odds of getting in, pick a school that’s outside your immediate geographic area. From Minnesota, N.Y.U. was a piece of cake. I’m not sure with the same grades I would’ve been admitted had I been applying from Columbia. And do think about state schools; the cheaper the school (especially if you have a good one in-state) the more flexibility you’ll have in the job market later.
Good luck. Don’t do this lightly. In fact, the best option for you would be to intern at a place you’d like to work, or take a job as a paralegal.
Nothing to it, right?
) If these areas interest you, they’re absolutely the way to go. If you’re not interested in those fields, don’t expect to be making major money just because you’re a lawyer. I, like Sax, have a job I love, but I make less than both my sister (undergrad degree, lives in North Carolina) and my brother (no college degree at all, lives in Texas). So don’t automatically assume you’re headed for the big money just because you got your J.D.