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.

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

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!

N. (Slang) 1) a cautious gambler; 2) a person regarded as petty or stingy.

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.

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.

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.

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…