Sep 25 2007
Law School Grads?
Seeing as we have so many loyal readers with law school backgrounds, I’d like to hear some comments regarding a Wall Street Journal article that appeared today titled The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market. I’ve always thought those median post graduation statistics seemed high. We get a similar type of skewness in the financial industry when the media reports “average” salaries or median incomes.
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Those median salary figures are determined by asking third year law students to report the salary of the job they will be entering after graduation. So it’s self-selecting. Also, most small and many medium sized firms don’t have established summer associate programs to recruit new associates. Those firms aren’t likely to give out offers until after you’ve been admitted, so you wouldn’t have a job anyway. So those figures are based on voluntary reporting dominated by people going into big firms, who have jobs right out of school and are going to be getting paid the big bucks. Then the law schools like USC publish those like they’re the gospel because it’s much more impressive to say 90% have jobs out right out of school and will be making $125k than to say 50-60% have jobs and, while some will be making $125k, most won’t and will be making $60k or less while working in private practice. (figures based on what I was told in 2002 v. what it was like at graduation) And the loans suck too.
Don’t get me wrong, I make more money than I would have made if I hadn’t gone to law school. Still, law schools just flat out misrepresent and it’s pretty damned ridiculous.
“Don’t get me wrong, I make more money than I would have made if I hadn’t gone to law school.”
Ditto. With my bachelor’s degree I only made $7.25 an hour as a paralegal. Now I make twice that as a lawyer!
Thank you Juris Doctor! Those $70,000 loans will disappear in no time!
- Jak “Wishes He’d Applied for Law Review During 1L Year” Grabit
$70,000 in loans? Piker.
Piker? I’m offended for two reasons:
1 - $70,000 in student loans - PUBLIC SCHOOLS ONLY!
2 - I may be 1/4 gypsy, but I am 0% IRISH. Cymru am byth, motherfucker!
what’s a piker?
Piker
N. (Slang) 1) a cautious gambler; 2) a person regarded as petty or stingy.
Also:
2. From the word pikey, refers to a person belonging to that group. Pikey/Piker is an Irish gypsy, english trailer trash, and just generally a person not to be trusted, who’s past times include stealing, sinnning, gambling and living in caravans. They tend to have a gravitational vortex that attratcts dogs, horses, scrap and junk, and of course, things they have stolen.
i’ll just call you both nerds.
So do you lawyers think that the recruiting materials should be corrected to reflect the true graduate experience? If you all could do it again, would you all still be lawyers?
i think they need to be more clear about their reporting sample when publishing those bogus stats. and yes, i would go to law school; no, i wouldn’t be a lawyer. well let me clarify: i’d go to UH, since you don’t break the bank paying in-state tuition, and i had a great experience (just as much fun, if not more, than in college). plus you learn how to read and absorb and pick through extraneous crap really fast. i don’t know if it would be worth a sizeable down payment on a house though (ie, paying private school tuition). as for being a lawyer … the novelty of saying “i’m a lawyer” and seeing esq. after your name wears off really quick, and then you just have a very stressful, oftentimes tedious and sometimes boring job. just pray you work with cool people … i got lucky.
El Jeffe commented in a Punahou/private school post that he went to public school and a small, regional liberal arts college, and I went to a prep school and a top 20 university. We both ended up at USC Law. My retort fits this comment thread better. We did both indeed end up at the same law school. All that means is that I shouldn’t have gone to law school.
It’s sort of clear that not everyone is going to come out of law school with a starting 6 figure salary, but nobody really prepares you for the fact that you will spend the next 30 years paying six figures’ worth of private and public loans. I wish I had known that a sizeable amount of my monthly take home will be funneled directly to my loan provider.
As a lawyer, associate life is very much how the bear described it. It’s no surprise that you hear about so many attorneys who change careers. It’s hard for me to focus on changing careers with my large amount of student loans. El Jeffe’s right — $70k is a lot for all public schools, but I owe more than double that. Right now I’m just trying to work on my skills to become as good of an attorney as I can.
My primary frustration was with the “a law degree is excellent for whatever career you pursue . . . not just practicing law” line that you get fed all the time in the beginning.
It’s true. I chose law school rather than graduate school for anthropology because I felt that law school would teach me to use my brain, where as grad school would just cloister me in a constructed fantasy land of competing political and emotional ideologies from which I would get little other than the life long lingering flavor of asshole in my mouth.
Law school succeeded in that. However, the same people who touted the benefits of a law degree in alternative career routes were the same people who, once in law school, had no idea what those careers were or how to help students pursue them. And these people get paid three times as much as I am now to help students do exactly this. Well, this person, I should say . . . .
Pretty much the underlying theme of these reports represents a bigger insight into the mindset of the legal academy. These earnings figures only, generally, represent the top 24% of a class because those are the only students that the school gives a damn about. They’ll keep the other 75% around to pay tuition, but the top grade earners, (law review) are treated almost like a different species from the rest of the students.
This isn’t, of course, universal from every professor, every administrator. Some are great, some are elitist douchenozzles. Some say things like “if you’re not in the top 15% of the grade range, nobody would even hire you. You wouldn’t even hire you because you’re not fit to practice law.” But the big expansive special dinners held at hotels in Waikiki every year honor the top students (law review) and all the alumni who were, in their law school days, of this same species (law review). I know this will likely offend somebody who reads this page, but maybe others can comment on this if they weren’t in that category (law review).
Maybe my perception is colored by a combination of going to a very small law school that already has, even before 1L grades were posted, a mechanism for sorting who will be a future “peer” to the professors and big firms (i.e. Punahou).
And maybe I’m just bitter.
Personally, I think it’s both.
I think its just bitterness
i think it’s both. just to clarify:
1) at UH, half the lrev slots are reserved for grade-ons, ie, the top 8 people in the class gpa-wise. the other half is for write-ons, ie, people — ANYONE — who spend a week after finals writing a paper, which means #9 can be beat out by #78 if #78 writes a kick-ass paper. grading is blind - no names associated with the papers; just randomly-drawn numbers.
2) they have lrev dinners at hotels now? my 2 years, it was 1) chinese restaurant, and 2) at a professor’s house and someone’s wife or something cooked for everyone.
that said, can’t say i entirely agree with the system, even though i admittedly benefitted from it. i know for a fact that the lrev advisor is against instituting an all-write-on system because he believes in rewarding those who get good grades. which would sit fine with me, if law school grades weren’t so damn arbitrary. then again, it makes sense in a twisted way … in the practice of law, some lawyers, for whatever reason, are put on the pedestal and rewarded, even if they may be a total waste of space as a human being.* there are a few really rich and/or famous ones … and then there’s everyone else. maybe that’s the one real-life thing law school actually prepares you for.
* i’m not saying that every powerful/influential/well-known attorney is scum. there are great attorneys who are recognized and deservedly so. same goes for students. but there are some that slip through the cracks…
Yeah I would be totally pissed if I moved back to hawaii and couldn’t get a job because someone that went to a better High School than I did had more perceived value.