OP can search for
net present value law school
to see the assumptions that go into calculating its worth.
Been a lawyer 12 years. It’s a damn slog. There is a lot of drudgery. And lots of duffers who somehow got a degree in a field they had no business being in. Same as any profession. Add to this the ridonkulous networking requirements, something many people loath and many more are lousy at, a capricious clientele and an uneven division of the pie.
It seems your guys expected to have money thrown at them by the truckload right after they got their degree. Yeah, that only happens in the movies and on TV. It’s a a long slog. And no, the lady lawyers aren’t as hot nor the gents that charismatic. If they had been they would have gone info acting. And married a Prince of the Royal Blood. 
In my opinion, the automation has been helpful, by getting rid of a lot of grunt work. I don’t have to slog to the library and pull out books and hunt for cases, than have photocopies made, then trudge back to the office. I just sit at my desk and do my research on the net.
Document discovery is a lot easier. Docs get scanned in, OCR’d, and then I can do key word searches, instead of having to plough through pages and pages, looking for the important bit. Filings are more and more electronic, so I can search the other guy’s stuff at my desk, again using key-word searches. When I’m doing my brief, I can cut and past straight from the e-versions of documents, cases and statutes, instead of asking my secretary to photocopy them, me circle the relevant bits, and then have the secretary type them in.
Overall, I spend more time doing law and much less time fidgeting with paper than I used to do. Automation, as always, does away with routine tasks and leaves the hard, thinking work for people (ie me) to do. Much more fun, really.
This. 
And this. 
And most definitely, this. 
For a completely different system:
in Spain, law school is undergrad and one of the most frequent “not for a profession” degrees (I’m not sure what’s the current ranking between Law and History). While there are certainly a lot of people who go to law school with the intent of making it their profession, there are also many who attend it for “general information”, often through UNED (the National Long Distance University, which has been around since 1972). My Dad had the equivalent to 3 years of Law back when the total coursework was 5: he had a Business degree and worked in Human Resources; he wanted to have a better understanding of labor and contract law than he’d gotten as part of his degree, but had no intent of ever finishing law school. It’s pretty common for people who get involved in being Worker’s Representatives to take some law coursework: I’ve known a couple who realized they’d be over 60% of the way toward the degree by the time they were done with the courses that covered their main interests, so decided to get the pretty paper; again, no intent of ever getting jobs as lawyers. But this is in a system where attending courses at your own not-very-fast speed is perfectly doable and extremely cheap: nobody needs to take out a loan to pay for UNED and it would be very rare to need one for any other public university.
The reaction of Spanish lawers when BOE (the Spanish Government’s “Legal Gazette”) went pdf-only was “Halellujah!”. The reaction of the rest of the country was “wait, weren’t y’all a bunch of Luddites?” “Well, yeah, but we reserve the right to like the technology we do like! This is so much easier than paper!”
I’m an electrical engineer, but I came close to going to law school when I was just starting out. I planned to practice patent law, which paid very well.
I decided against it for a number of reasons, but a big one was that I didn’t meet any lawyers who earned more than I did (as a civil service engineer) and enjoyed their work. The ones making big money all seemed to be hoping to retire as soon as they had saved enough, and the happy ones were making $25,000/year (this was around 1989) working for a non-profit or as a public defender. One PD I met had plans to get experience, and then go into practice defending wealthy criminals for big bucks. Thirty years later, he’s still a PD.
I was also struck by how many people I met who had law degrees but weren’t (and often had never been) employed as lawyers.
I second what was said upthread that having connections makes a big difference. Ever notice how many lawyers have relatives who are lawyers?
I would also add that having affluent parents (or a working spouse) can make the difference between taking that low-paying entry-level job and abandoning law for something that pays a living wage. A guy who edited Law Review at the school I planned to attend had no job when he graduated, but planned to represent indigent clients in medical malpractice suits until he had enough experience to get a job. That would not have been an option for me.
My wife is Canadian. She went to an American law school, and now practices with just one partner.
I’m an IT guy, and have worked in law firms for 20 years. So there’s my background, so you can form an opinion as to the weight of what I say.
Meaningful “social justice” jobs pay terribly. I make more than lawyers doing that kind of work. Usually those lawyers are subsidized by a spouse. That said, at the big (2,000+ lawyer) firms, there are plenty of opportunities to do pro bono work.
The mega-firms pay ridiculous amounts of money to law school graduates. Starting salary at one of them is, these days, around $170,000, plus a signing bonus, plus a bonus every year. That’s on the first day of work, even before passing the bar exam.
But… those jobs are intense. 12 hours a day, six days a week, with a brutal billable hours requirement. And it’s up or out. If the firm decides you’re not partner material after a few (six or seven, at most) years, you’re expected to resign.
And those firms can, obviously, be extremely selective in who they hire. If you didn’t go to one of the best law schools, you had better have been first in your class at a second or third tier law school.
And the life is brutal. You’re required to be available around the clock, every day, seven days a week. You may have to take abuse from partners and clients.
But, if you’re good, and you can stick it out, and if you can live the big firm life, you’ll make partner. And you will be rich (by any rational standard).
So, is law school worth it? If you want that life, absolutely.
But some people hate it. My wife went to Harvard College and Harvard Law, did the big firm thing, and hated it. So she left, and took a couple of clients with her. She makes perfectly good money, and is way happier.
But, but, there are plenty of graduates of third-rate law schools who never even find work as lawyers, or who make 50,000 per year and have huge loans hanging over their heads.
YMMV
Just curious: The serious boost one gets in the business world – is it for getting a law degree, or is it for being an attorney (presumably non-practicing)? That is, does someone with a law degree who has not passed the bar exam and gotten licensed to practice law get the same boost as someone who has also passed the bar and gotten licensed?
On a side note: Anyone got any data on the number of people who get a law degree but never pass the bar exam? A certain percentage I’m sure have taken the test (perhaps multiple times) and not passed, but there must also be some that never bother to take the test, no?
If you went to Harvard, or Yale, or Columbia, or Stanford, and get a job after graduation with Simpson Thacher or Cravath Swaine & Moore, or Skadden Arps, yes, money will be thrown at you by the truckload, as soon as you get your degree. Even before that, if you get a gig as a summer associate at one of those firms.
True; but trust me. If you can manage a classroom of 10-year-olds, the average factory floor or small business is easy-peasy. 
My sister’s BFF went to law school in the mid-1990s, and realized partway through that the concept was way more appealing than the practice, but she did finish and take the bar anyway. To get her loans paid down sooner, and to feel that she got SOMETHING out of that degree, she took a social-service job that didn’t pay well, but the loan-payback benefit approximated her salary, so she marked time doing that, and left active law practice. By the early 00s, she wasn’t even licensed any more.
It’s one of many fields that sounds like a great idea to many people, and then they get into it and realize too late that it isn’t for them. Maybe you could get a job in a law office, or a legal department, and get some experience so you can find out if it’s for you? I have an acquaintance who did that herself years ago because she was considering law school, and told me, “The things that ex-spouses do to each othere! YEESHT!” She knew she wouldn’t see that if she wasn’t doing family law, but it really turned her off and she ended up doing something else.
If you’d gotten a graduate degree in engineering *and *a law degree, you’d be in great shape as a patent lawyer.
The firm where I work (one of the ten biggest in the world) has a patent law department. Many, most, of the lawyers in that department have an advanced degree in a scientific or technical field as well as a JD. We’ve even got a couple of MDs. They make an enormous amount of money.
Interesting.
One concern I’d had was that higher-paying specialties are often targeted for economizing through automation and less expensive practitioners. Thirty years ago, computers and networks had begun eliminating middle management jobs. I was told that patent agents could do much of the work patent lawyers did, for much less money.
But such economies don’t always happen: it sounds like patent lawyers are still in high demand.
Could be. I’m not a lawyer myself, and don’t exactly have a finger on the pulse of the patent law field. That’s just my observation at one firm.
As to automation, I could talk about that for ages (it’s what I do at law firms), and there are some jobs once performed by lawyers that are increasingly automated (like privilege review). The number of lawyers involved may stay the same, but the number of hours they work has been reduced greatly.
But I’d say that support staff jobs are much more threatened by automation than actual lawyers’ jobs.
You’re asking about two things: Is law school in the US generally a good investment? and Is the way law is taught in the US a good way to teach law?
I can’t speak to the second, but on the first the statistics are clear that Campos is generally right. In the US there are far far more people graduating law school each year than there are actual lawyering jobs available (and that includes jobs that aren’t strictly being an attorney but find a law degree useful).
It’s slightly better than a decade ago (in part thanks to people like Campos getting the word out) but the advice is still sound.
You should only go to law school (again, US only) if:
- You have a guaranteed job already lined up (e.g. your father wants you to join his profitable practice; your current employer is willing to pay for you to get a degree, etc.);
- You get into a top-five or so law school AND have talked with enough actual working lawyers to have a realistic view of potential career paths; or
- You’re financially independent enough to pay for law school and not care if you have a legal job afterwards.
Some people still hang up their shingle (either alone or with another new lawyer) and just start practicing law. It’s exciting. But you probably shouldn’t try it if you have massive debt. (in fact, I’d recommend avoiding massive debt in any case, if you want to keep your options open)
Here are my thoughts.
Law School itself if not so bad. I certainly worked harder to get my under graduate degree. Most school have some kind of clinical program, to give you some valuable experience. The basic classes are tolerable.
Many top level schools have programs to allow some students to go without crazy cost. Whether you can access one of those is worth checking out. (the top schools have huge endowments.)
Think about what kind of lawyer you want to be. There are huge differences between negotiating union contracts (if any exist anymore) and defending a major corporation for toxic contamination. Some people love the courtroom, while others would vomit if they had to spend their days arguing with judges and talking to juries. Most people probably change their focus during law school, as the options become more clear (or after law school, as a result of where they found a job).
Most lawyers aren’t “rich,” but many make a decent living.
Despite what you learn via lawyer jokes, the profession of law does give you the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.
I just don’t think those things are true. I think the caveats are that you should do enough research to figure out if you enjoy law or not, and if you are.likely to be successful at law school. You should not go to one of the schools that mostly accepts people who can’t get in to a solid law school. Look at bar passage rates and employment rates, selectivity, etc. There are law schools out there that will let people go to law school who have no chance of passing the bar. Don’t go to one of those.
If you go to a solid law school and can graduate in, say, the upper quarter of the class, and you spend summers clerking at a place you would want to work, you can do well. if you would be happy working at a decent sized firm in your state, a government job, or possibly an in house or niche job, you can do that. I’m in a fairly elite job in my state, and I don’t think any of my colleagues went to top 5 law schools. But many graduated from the state law schools near the top of their class.
Whether it’s worth it or not depends on the time it takes, the tuition it costs, what you were doing before law school and where you end up afterwards. I work for a government agency and know a lot of people who went to law school*. Some of them went to law school and then got hired as lawyers or Administrative Law Judges by my agency - that pays decently if you go to an relatively inexpensive law school and get hired right out of school. But there are a lot of people it didn’t make financial sense for - I know people who went to law school and then got jobs in government agencies that didn’t require law degrees who had no interest in transitioning into legal jobs. My cousin went to law school and couldn’t find a job that paid more than she had been earning as a paralegal. And the ones it really didn’t make sense for- two people who spent thousands of dollars and a few years going to law school at night while working at my agency. They finished law school, passed the bar and did get jobs with the same agency that required a license to practice law - they now make $5K a year more than they did before law school.
- I used to act as a prosecutor in administrative hearings conducted by my agency. Every now and then, a defense attorney would tell me I should go to law school and become an Assistant Attorney General - and the reason I didn’t was because it would involve thousands in tuition, years going to school - and then, a pay cut. It would have been a different calculation right out of college, but I had already been in the workforce for over 10 years.
He’s broadly correct. Law school in the United States is very expensive, and there are far more law school graduates than there are jobs that pay enough to pay for the expense in a reasonable time. And those jobs are not jobs that a lot of people – especially idealistic people – will thrive in.
Law schools in the U.S. are very expensive. Although the study and understanding of law is a good basis for a wide range of work, the expense puts law school graduates in a very difficult position. It can be a life-changing decision to go to law school, and often not in a good way.
Were I to advise someone, I would tell em to first do a very good study of what job will come after law school and find some way to find out if it’s really a job E would want to do. I think a lot of people go to law school thinking that it’s some kind of ticket to wealth and happiness, and it’s not.
If you can get admission to a “solid” law school …
If you can graduate in the top 25 percent of your class …
If you can get the right clerkships …
If you like the work you get afterwards …
Do you see how the odds keep shrinking with each statement? Think about the proportion of potential law school students who are excluded with each clause. Law school is a much riskier investment than people generally consider.