QI am a 2L at a fourth-tier school. My grades aren’t spectacular—top 50%. Are my chances of ever having an awesome career and making at least enough money to pay off my student loans (and have some to spare) completely hopeless? Should I just drop out now?
ASlow down and take a deep breath. Having an awesome career and making money have nothing to do with where you went to law school or what your damn grades were.
Having said that, if your goal is to get rich working at a prestigious, high-paying law firm, you have absolutely no shot. Not out of law school anyway. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of great legal opportunities out there for you. Smaller, entrepreneurial firms would seem to make more sense than traditional, grade-sensitive firms. Government jobs present great opportunities, too. Not to mention great training. I have lots of successful friends who started out in the public sector. Some worked at the Manhattan DA’s Office, a few at the SEC, and one, Marc Korman, who began his career at the Chicago Public Defender’s Office.
Bottom line: If your goal is to be a lawyer, dropping out is stupid. You know what they call the person who graduates at the bottom of their law school class? A lawyer. So suck it up, study hard and graduate.
I recently graduated and acquired a bachelors degree. I was wondering what are your views between a JD/MBA program vs. the traditional 3-year JD. I don’t know whether I want to do legal work forever. If I do, would the JD/MBA put me in a disadvantage position compared to a 3-yr JD?
It would give you a competitive advantage, not disadvantage. Especially if you plan to focus on corporate law. It would also make it easier for you to transition out of the law down the road, should that be of interest to you. A JD/MBA shows that you have at least a rudimentary understanding of finance and accounting, something many lawyers don’t have. So, in case of a tie, go for the JD/MBA. But don’t sacrifice academic quality for degree quantity. In other words, it’s better to get a JD from a top 10 school than a JD/MBA from a top 30 school.
P.S. You say you don’t know whether you want to do legal work forever, yet you haven’t even applied to law school yet. Not a good sign. Why spend three years busting your ass to get a degree you’re not sure you even want? Don’t be afraid to take a year off and get some real-life experience. Get a paralegal job at a big firm, see if you like it. If you do, go to law school. If you don’t, do something else. You’ll save lots of money—and avoid lots of career frustration.
Good luck.
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QI’ve heard the only journal experience in law school that has any resume value is Law Review. Is this true? Do firms really care either way or does it just depend on who’s interviewing you?
AFirst off, this conversation is only relevant for those students looking to land jobs at swanky, big city law firms. Everyone else, stop reading now. Because it’s irrelevant and incredibly annoying. But for those of you looking to land prestige jobs, here you go…
The simple truth is: Law Review is the “Harvard” of legal journals. No doubt. It’s the one thing that guarantees a law student multiple interviews and immediate respect. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Law firms covet students on Law Review. Fact. And for good reason too. First off, it’s not easy to get admitted. Second, once you’re admitted, you have to work your ass off to stay a member. Law firms know this—and love this. It proves that you have a high tolerance for pain and are willing to sacrifice any semblance of a social life in pursuit of a higher calling. Kind of sad, if you think about it, but it’s true.
So what if you don’t “make Law Review?” Should you still join some random, junior varsity journal? Answer: Hell yeah! It might not guarantee you a job at Cravath, but it’s definitely a “significant positive” on your resume. It shows that you’re willing to work harder than the average student, and that you’re probably a better researcher and writer than him, too. So do yourself a favor and stop trying to convince yourself that joining the International Law Journal would be a waste of time—because it wouldn’t. Truth is, it would actually help your chances of landing a good job. By a lot. Especially if you don’t go to a top-ten school. So either make Law Review or join a journal as fast as you can. If you want to get a “fancy” job anyway.
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Law schools coast-to-coast are buzzing with the news that the American Bar Association just passed a resolution holding that “law schools may now require students to take and pass bar exam prep courses given by the schools prior to graduation.” Under previous rules, law schools could not technically require successful completion of such courses for graduation. Reports have stated that the “measure passed on an overwhelming voice vote,” with proponents explaining that “the new rule will assist schools in improving the bar pass rates of their students.”
Reports have not confirmed, however, which aspect of this new ruling is more disturbing—the fact that it will likely make the process of getting a law degree even more expensive, or the fact that law schools nationwide apparently need to be forced by legislative action to teach their students some actual law. [ABA Journal]
QI’m heading into my 3rd year of law school at a tier two. I go to class part time and work 50+ hours a week, clerking full time for a staff attorney at a Fortune 500 Company. I’m looking forward to practicing when I graduate, but there’s just one problem. My grades suck, I mean they suck big time. I went from being a Phi Beta Kappa in undergrad to being a C+ average law student. Do I have any shot in hell at making some decent coin after school? With work and school at it is, 100 hour weeks is something I’m already used to, so I know I can do the work. I just don’t know if any decent firm will give me a shot. What’s your sardonic take on my situation?
AI will try to be honest, not sardonic. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, they sort of intersect. Anyway. You absolutely have a shot in hell at making decent coin after school. Why not? You’re a hard-working Phi Beta Kappa with a law degree from a good school. Being blunt, the C+ average will most likely keep you out of the elite, major-city law firms. When I say “most likely,” I mean 98.5%. Someone, somewhere might be super-impressed with your undergraduate grades and 50+ hour work weeks while attending law school. But don’t count on it. These firms typically have hard and fast cut-off points relating to grades. If you had a B+ average, you might be in the hunt. Barely.
Having said that, you seem like a perfect candidate for a quality mid-size or small firm. They’ll care a lot more about your practical, real-life work experience—and work ethic—than your GPA. The prestige firms, on the other hand, look for quantifiable measures of academic aptitude and desire. Excellent grades, top-tier universities, Law Review, federal clerkships. Their goal is to teach you how to practice law “the right way.” Their way. Smaller firms don’t have the time or resources to do this, so they’ll actually appreciate your part-time work experience. Bigger firms are (much) less interested in this. In fact, they might even be worried you picked up some bad habits working for that Fortune 500 staff attorney.
As for the money, the simple truth is the starting salaries at big, fancy firms are significantly higher than at mid-size and small firms. Like double. That’s just a fact. The good news is that, after your first job, grades and law school mean a hell of a lot less than client lists and experience. In the real world, law is a business. The more clients you control, the more money they pay your firm, the more leverage you have. If you care about making money, never forget that. An “A” book of business trumps a C+ GPA every day of the week.
Sources are reporting that one year after an unprecedented federal lawsuit targeting comment trolls on the college-admissions website AutoAdmit.com was filed, a whole lot of nothing has happened. The AutoAdmit controversy began in 2005 when two female law students were the target of bilious and harassing threads on the site which sported messages such as “Women named Hillary and Jill should be raped,” “I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly” and “she has herpes.”
The women filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007, seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and contending that “the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.”
While the plaintiffs have been able to unmask the trolls—an admitted “milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting”—not much else has apparently been resolved in the past year. The plaintiffs themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers, a law professor from Yale Law School and another from Stanford, have repeatedly declined the media’s requests for comment. As a recent article notes, “Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there’s any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.”
We may not know much over here at Bitter Lawyer, but we do know that if depraved losers have the right to make violent and threatening comments about random people over a public message board, then their targets should have the right to expose them for the ball-less douchetards that they are. Fight that fight, ladies. One bit of advice, though: ditch the law professors. If you want someone to write a law review article about your case someday, sure, give them a ring. But if you want to actually win your case, hire someone who knows how to be a real lawyer. [Wired]
The media has recently been buzzing with news of NYU Law School’s crackdown on its students’ time-honored practice of offering to buy and sell their places in popular classes for cash, gifts, and other “inappropriate favors.” In the past couple of weeks, students have apparently posted ads on the school’s intranet forum along the lines of “WANT: Entertainment Law, Will Pay Cash,” and “I really want this class. I don’t have any classes to trade, so I’ll rely on the old capitalist standby, cash.”
But last week, the school’s administration openly condemned the practice when Vice Dean Liam Murphy called it “deplorable” and sent a mass email to the school’s 1,400 students, threatening punishment and “reminding them” that “trading class spots for money or goods, or offering to do so, is a violation of law school rules.”
While some students have expressed their frustration with the “cash-for-class system…since it favors rich students,” others have wisely realized that it’s not a matter of favoring rich law students; it’s a matter of favoring students who want to be rich lawyers. Vice Dean Murphy—a man who presumably never spent a day practicing as a real lawyer—may feel that “trading class spots for money” is “deplorable,” but there’s a whole group of people out there (commonly referred to as “clients”) who expect their lawyers to realize that a little ingenuity and, yes, extra cash, goes a long way. It’s called capitalism. Get over it. And get used it. [NY Post]
Building on a recent trend, Northwestern Law School has announced that starting next Spring, it will offer an accelerated J.D. program, to be completed in two years instead of three. The compressed program will require the same amount of credits as a typical three-year program, but will “squeeze them into five semesters instead of the usual six—the first one taking place during the summer before the start of the first law-school year.” In addition to the more intense courseload, the express program will also only allow students one summer off to “work and hopefully line up a post-graduation job.” Oh, and it will cost the same as the three-year plan, around $128,000.
Commenting on the motivation for the fast-track program, David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern Law, explained, “Part of our thinking was to be competitive and open up a whole new market of applicants.”
Practicing attorneys nationwide have debated which of these applicants, exactly, will be more likely to throw their hat in the ring for this new program—those who prefer to cram three years of classes into two just to get a jump on working at firms they’ll want to leave after six months? Or those who prefer to pay just as much as their three-year counterparts just to graduate one semester early? A semester that also happens to be universally regarded as the last good six months you will ever have in your lifetime before becoming a practicing attorney. When reached for further comment, the debating attorneys noted it was just too tough to call at this point. [Time]
Photo by Jesse Michael Nix
Sources in Orange County, California, are reporting that the O.C.’s first law school, Western State University College of Law, was actually sold on Wednesday to Swiss education company Knowledge Investment Partners. The actual sale price remains unconfirmed, but reports state that the final amount was “between $5 million and $10 million.”
When asked for comment on whether the sale might buoy the law school’s rankings, sources inside the student body at Western State U. have explained that they were not even aware that a law school could be sold like this. Several students did note, however, that after finding out their entire law school was up for sale, they had kinda hoped it would’ve gone for more than the three-bedroom ranch-style fixer-upper down the block. [Legal Pad LA]
