Once you’re in the workforce, any sort of graduate school involves this calculation; you’re giving up your salary for two, three or more years, plus there’s the cost of attendance and possible debt and so forth.
Thats a very small proportion of fresh graduates. I was in England, but I was the equivalent, and I dealt with my colleagues in the US pretty much every day.
Firstly, while it’s a good starting salary, the median for a first year American associates in a top law firm (I dealt mostly with Baker MacKenzie and the US offices of Allen and Overy) was in 2007 about 120,000 USD per year pre tax.
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Living in NYC (or London, Singapore or Dubai for that matter) is not cheap.
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Associate pays are peanuts, for most litigation and transactions, individual associate fees are a rounding error.
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The pay is absolutely not in consonance with the amount of work expected to be done. 100 hour weeks, be on call pretty much all the time. It takes several years for
(a. lawyers to figure out how to deal with the workflow to have something resembling a normal life and
(b. Even have the ability to do the above
- Besides your assigned responsibilities, working in these places involves a metric fuckton of obligations which are ancillary to but absolutely necessary to your job. No one realise just how much networking lawyers have to do and just how expensive that can be.
A new suit can easily set you back a couple of grand. Now buy several of them. Do some fine dining with clients. Maybe the damn opera.
And sure the firm will cover the costs of some of it, but if you want to get ahead, you’ll do plenty on your own.
Honestly, as a lawyer, my biggest asset is my country club membership
See here.
Starting salary at Allen & Overy (a firm with which I am very familiar – I actually worked in their NY office for a while some years back): $190,000.
How well I know it – I live here in New York City. And the vast majority of people here in the city do not make anything close to what a first-year associate, let alone a partner, at a big Wall Street firm makes. And yet they manage to live here. $200,000 a year or more (with bonuses) is not peanuts. Anyone complaining about that, well, has an exaggerated sense of their own worth.
If you say so. I know this firm’s clients don’t agree.
I know, I know, I see it every day. I’m married to it. I grew up with it (father was a lawyer).
Yes and no - I wouldn’t have had to give up my salary to go to most types of graduate schools, including law school since part-time programs are available where I live. But the particular path being recommended to me ( go to law school and become an AAG) involved an actual pay cut* and I would most likely have been prohibited from having a private practice on the side. Which means I would have been better off getting an MSW/license as my actual job would have allowed me to practice social work on the side.
- I think at the time it was a $25K a year pay cut.
For the US, even this depends a lot on your practice area, firm, and location. If you are a corporate associate on the East Coast of the USA at an old-school firm, then this is still kinda accurate. But if you’re outside that practice area or location or at less stodgy firm, then it isn’t true any longer.
Many firms are slowly figuring out that women are also smart human beings, and that many of their existing practices and customs exclude women. Also, as CEOs and General Counsel are decreasingly Baby Boomers and increasingly Gen X or Millenials, there is less business being done on golf courses–a trend that seems to be faster based on what my friends tell me on the West Coast than the East.
You can certainly in 2019 go work for a AmLaw 100 firm and have billable targets of 1800/year, own a couple of crappy suits from Macy’s, and never golf and be just peachy and on track for partnership. You’d just have to choose practice areas and firms more carefully.
I was responding to a post about what top tier firms require.
That’s always been true about the next level down.
I am a millennial myself, the issue is not us, but the fact that decision makers for clients are stodgy and old. ;).
Plus, we have our own likes and dislikes, there is an artisanal cofffee shop near my office, full of young lawyers and other professionals.
Not cheap.
Networking is like a car. You can have a Mercedes S class or a small hatchback. Still gonna have to do it.
I agree that lots of people should not go to law school, but do. It was unclear because of the intervening post, (I should have quoted) but I was responding to this:
Those are far too restrictive. There are way more people that law school can make sense for than this set of guidelines covers. You don’t have to go to a top 5 law school, or have a guaranteed job, or be independently wealthy.
Another consideration is that there are public service law school loan assistance and forgiveness programs out there for those who want to work in low-paying non-profit and government service jobs. Something one needs to research and understand before relying on, but law school grads with debt won’t necessarily be crippled by their debt if they take the jobs they want.
My point is that each of those things represents a limited resource. Only X percent of applicants will get into a “solid” law school. Only 25 percent of a class will be in the top 25 percent of the class. The right clerkships, etc., are limited.
So one must be prepared to consider things like “What will I do if I don’t make the top 25 percent of the class, or get the right clerkships?”
The way law school admissions are set up, for the most part when you enter any particular law school, your classmates are almost all within a very narrow band of aptitude. Most of the people in the class are as good as you, as smart as you, etc. But you are graded on a curve, and it matters what grades you get in relation to your classmates.
That makes competition among classmates very difficult. You’re competing with a bunch of people who are largely as good as you are. But someone is going to be a B-minus student. The curve demands it.
Well, if you want to be a lawyer, I’d say its damned necessary. If you don’t REALLY want to be a lawyer, don’t have a really good idea of what is involved in lawyering, aren’t able to get into a top-tier school, if you don’t have connections, and don’t have what it takes to graduate at the top of whatever school you attend, I’d suggest you try to figure out something that you DO really enjoy and figure out how to make a living out of it.
I’ve only been doing this for 34 years as a lawyer and a judge, and have only encountered several thousand lawyers, but my limited experience is that folk like eschrodinger who proclaim their “love for the law” before, during, and after law school are definitely in the minority. Good for you, man, but check any of the available surveys of young lawyer job satisfaction to see how common that attitude is.
I make a very comfortable living at a job that is relatively easy for me given my skillset, but I derive not a moments pleasure or satisfaction out of any aspect of my job. It is just a job. And, there are many MANY lawyers who get paid very poorly for jobs they detest. Good luck on not being one of them.
For the vast majority of practitioners, being a lawyer is just a job. There are special sorts of stresses involved, and in many instances, it is not “happy” work. Good luck figuring if the plusses and minuses work out for you.
BTW - I know ZERO about Canadian law.
You’re missing the Catch-22. Only 25 percent of a class can be in the top 25 percent of the class. That means that no matter how many people decide NOT to attend a law school, 75 percent of the class will not be in the top 25 percent. That’s how the curve works.
I’m not sure it is reasonable to ask someone to know in advance whether E “has what it takes to graduate at the top of whatever school you attend.” How is it possible? You can’t know until after you get the results.
You can’t build a legal career plan based on the requirement that you are going to graduate at the top of your class. You have to consider what happens if you don’t.
Also, a career develops over time, based on choices, luck, and opportunities that could not be anticipated. I got my first job out of a law school from an interview on campus. That part was pretty standard. From there, however, my career has taken twists and turns that could not have been planned.
(Other than my first job, I don’t think anyone has ever asked what law school I attended. Your reputation in the legal community quickly eclipses anything on your CV)
Well, you can bet it will require a LOT of reading. And not history or literature which you might read for enjoyment. While many folk may enjoy the study of law, I’d wager relatively few actually enjoy reading casebooks. Law school, and law students, are also quite competitive. You should have an idea of whether or not that environment is right for you.
One of my personal peeves is that, IMO, US law schools do a pretty shit job of training folk to be lawyers. I think law is the kind of think you learn best by doing. Of course you need some vocabulary and theory, but IMO you learn the most through practical experience. Unfortunately, US law schools can lose accreditation if they offer TOO MANY practical/clinical courses. So young lawyers learn at the expense of their clients. :rolleyes:
Sure, you can have all kinds of ideas of the type of law you WANT to practice. But for most grads, you end up practicing the type of law someone is willing to pay you to do.
Ask young lawyers - or partners - about the quality of life in large law firms. How hard do you have to work for how many years for what chance of making partner?
Sure, you can hang out your own shingle. But not everyone has the entrepreneurial spirit, and not all small businesses succeed. You are dependent on next month’s rent and utility bill walking in the front door.
Sure you can try to practice public interest law. But they often pay shit, and there are HUNDREDS of applicants for each low paying position.
Right now, the simple fact is that there are WAY more lawyers in the US than are needed. And clients are more and more conscious about keeping legal bills down. Makes for a challenging market.
Not saying any specific person ought not pursue it. But they ought have no misconceptions of what is involved. And IMO they ought to be VERY wary about going into debt as they pursue it.
I was on many hiring panels in the oughts, when the law job market was tanking (along with others). My experience was limited, but I was shocked at the emphasis TPTB were willing to put on law school pedigree. So many Ivy Leaguers had been shitcanned by the big firms, that our governmental agency recalibrated what they sought in a candidate. Of course, those Ivy Leaguers were not looking to stay with us…
I can’t remember where I read that some law school was doing something very sleazy.
Students were admitted, and given scholarships, which contained a GPA requirement. (Which is perfectly reasonable, right?)
Except, after the first year or so, the law school quietly raised grading standards, such that many fewer students kept their scholarships.
Those students were faced with a choice between continuing law school by paying out of pocket (either by taking out loans, or tapping family resources) and dropping out.
This struck me as particularly nasty. Conscientious students would assume that they were failing to meet the standards of an honest meritocracy, when they were essentially being conned. It’s hard enough for lawyers to succeed in an honest system, without lining the pockets of crooks with law degrees.
Anyone heard of this?
I really hope I’ve imagined it.
I agree with a lot of what has been written here. Law school is a hell of a gamble. The tuition costs are substantial, yet are dwarfed by the opportunity costs of spending three or more years of your life on something that may not work out at all if you can’t pass the bar or can’t find a job you like better than your old one. Most lawyers I know are not living the life they envisioned when they applied to law school, and mostly that means it’s less than they’d hoped for. I would strongly discourage anyone who thinks it’s a safe bet, a sensible thing to do after graduation when you don’t know what you want, or something that will be an asset in any field, so why not? It should be something you’ve thought through, considering all the reasons not to, and still really want to do. (Like parenting, I suppose. Is anyone making a law school Think It Over doll that wakes you in the middle of the night screaming about the rule against perpetuities?)
That said, I’m a lawyer and I love my job. It’s exciting, challenging, creative, fulfilling, well-compensated, and just a great fit for my strengths and personality. It’s also absolutely not for everyone. I work for a nonprofit defending parents in juvenile dependency proceedings; basically I’m like a public defender, but in the court where they take your kids away, not the court where they put you in jail, though many of my clients have simultaneous cases there too. I get screamed at by clients with mental illness and meth addictions. I have to look at autopsy photos of children who have been beaten to death. I have to cross-examine children who claim to have been sexually abused and question their truthfulness. I put in long and sometimes futile hours. There are times I really want to talk about what I’m going through and can’t because there’s no one around willing to listen to whom I can ethically disclose, and there are times I can’t bear to talk about it at all.
But there are upsides. I get hugs from clients and see grown men weep tears of gratitude. I laugh out loud at the darndest things kids say to the social workers. I go up against lawyers with decades of experience to my five years, with all the power of the government behind them, and knock them down with my slingshot. I form the kind of bond with my co-workers that war or hazing helps forge, and we help each other prepare for battle and celebrate each other’s victories. I teach new lawyers and feel proud when they apply what I taught them to their clients’ advantage, and I alter the law in small ways by getting successful appeals published so that families in the future need not be torn apart over the petty offenses for which my clients were punished. And I earn enough to go scuba diving on weekends, so.
Once piece of advice I would add, or elaborate on, is to come up with and really research a plan or two for what to do with your law degree before you enroll in school. Ideally, find a mentor who does what you’d like to do and shadow them, maybe volunteer or work for them doing menial tasks, to get a sense of whether you want that life. Some lawyers work crazy long hours; some don’t. Some make really good money; some don’t. Some work in competitive, even cutthroat environments; some are best buds with their colleagues. Some do really exciting work (that can also really haunt you); some do more transactional work, or at least less dramatic litigation. Some get to work on lots of different projects; some spend years on a single case. Find out what you’re training for and if it suits you. Then, find out if you’re qualified for it. Some jobs are harder to get than others. Take the LSAT, and compare your score and your grades to the average for the schools that feed in to the places you think you want to work. You may not have to graduate in the top 10% from a top 14 law school–I didn’t, either of those things–but resist the temptation to fantasize about becoming a judge or working for a top firm if your numbers aren’t up there. There are exceptions to every rule, but you probably won’t be one of them.
Serious question: is it POSSIBLE to go to law school without going into serious debt? My understanding is that it’s $150K or so in tuition for the full three years, and of course you have to eat and sleep while you go. While you might can make some money in the summers, it’s not going to cover more than a third of the total tuition, if that. You can go part time, or, if you have good scores, to a relatively low-ranked school–but the conventional wisdom seems to be that graduates from part-time and/or weak programs are the least likely to make their money back.
It seems to me that a world where only people who could self-finance law school are lawyers is a world where only children of serious affluence can be lawyers. That seems problematic, at best.
Just realised I had no idea what tuition costs are nowadays here in Canada, so I googled my province’s law school
Total cost for a year appears to be under $CAN 20,000, not including food and residence. That means you could leave with a debt, for sure, but nothing like $UD 150,000.
https://law.usask.ca/students/becoming-a-law-student/applying-to-law.php#Stepstoapply
I got my Australian (Vic) law degree for less than 5000 (AUD). Probably not at all possible these days.
I think you’re missing my point. You can be absolutely certain that the environment is right for you. However, you must consider that you are entering a class in which almost everyone else is also certain that the environment is right for them.
Except for a small number of outliers, the people in your class are going to be equally suited to the environment and the type of work that must be done.
However, the majority of law schools grade on a curve. So, given the situation that you are in a class full of people equally as good as you, and your performance is likely more or less of equal quality, the curve requires a normal distribution. You’re not going to all get top grades, even if you’re all doing the same quality of work. To a significant extent, therefore, your performance results are out of your control.
Possible, yes. The law school of my city’s public university charges in-state residents about $16K a year in tuition (out-of state is about $26K) for full-time and you can attend part time, which of course takes longer but also allows you to stretch tuition payments over a longer period. Likely is another story - I’m not sure there’s another law school in the entire US with such a low tuition.
*For comparison, undergrad is about $7K/yr for residents , other graduate degrees are $10K-$16K a year and the high schools my kids went to are about $10K per year.
I don’t know if I agree or disagree with that part. When I got top of the class for a subject (which happened only twice), I felt I had done more work but maybe I just had a better grounding from which to start than anyone else (dad was a QC, judge, then head of admin appeals court, mum was lawyer at the best IP firm in town, so maybe I had a head start?). I still feel I worked really hard though to understand issues at the deepest level possible, which was what dad always impressed upon me. I graduated in the top 15 people. Australian universities don’t rank graduates in the same way US does so it feels weird to say that, but only the top selected students get picked for honors and I was one of those 15, so I was somewhere in there.