SO YOU WERE PRE-MED, AND GOT A 'C' IN ORGANIC CHEMISTRY? Tonight's The Good Wife was mostly about shining a flashlight at a lot of tunnels we won't necessarily explore until weeks from now, plus an unexpected Ashcroft's hospital bed allusion and more production from a bat than what the Phillies displayed today, so instead let's focus on the real practice of law, via Gretchen and others:
I hadn't seen that, and it's pretty fantastic. It is like a much more succinct, better written version of my 3L paper, which was basically an interview-based exploration of the career indecision and self-deluding nonsense that led many of my classmates to law school in the first place, and that stuck with them as they tried to make decisions about their post-law school careers.
ReplyDeleteWhat's fascinating is how the whole lawyering thing has changed in the past few years, in particular the job market. It used to be that pretty much every grad of a top tier law school could expect (if they wanted it, or even if they didn't) a Biglaw job at graduation. Now, that's much more of an uncertain thing.
ReplyDeleteBut law schools aren't changing in light of that shift. They raised their tuitions far beyond inflation in light of the fact that most of their grads would be able to use big firm salaries to pay off their loans, and assumed that everyone else would get loan forgiveness grants to cover their lower-paying, public-service-type jobs. Thus, when I started law school in 1994, if I had gotten 100% loans to cover my tuition and costs, I would have ended up with just over $100K in loans. When my younger brother started law school in 2008, the estimated cost was over $250K. But even with the job market falling apart---and not just for big firm jobs---law school tuitions still went up this past year.
ReplyDeleteJenn., I'm guessing there's a similar phenomenon w/business schools as well, and wouldn't be at all surprised if applications are up across all graduate schools (were I not so lazy, I could probably look this up, but prefer to throw out unsupported assertions to make a point). If applications are up, then it wouldn't be a surprise if tuition costs are as well. I know quite a few people who have, basically, decided to take shelter from the poor employment situation in grad school of some kind. It's a questionable decision given the economics and short-term realities of the job market, but my friends have thought that the market will turn around by the time they emerge and that they'll at least have buttressed their resumes in the mean time.
ReplyDeleteAgree 100% with Matt & Jenn. And sympathies to those who don't graduate from a top tier law school -- nearly all the debt, and even dimmer job prospects.
ReplyDeleteWorking with students at a local law school who tend to be focused on public interest careers, I see firsthand the ripple effects of two years worth of deferred BigLaw associates, who get farmed out to public interest jobs on the firm's dime at something like half the starting salary for a year. It's great, on the one hand, because organizations like ours need smart young lawyers, and getting them for free for a year is tough to beat. But they are taking up spots that ordinarily might go to smart young lawyers who are dedicated to staying in public interest jobs, and that has been detrimental to public interest practice. It's a double whammy -- top tier students are getting the BigLaw jobs AND the public interest jobs, leaving far fewer opportunities for the rest.
I was going to post my favorite lines, but realized that my favorite lines were the WHOLE THING. (The loans, the Blackberry, the "do you ever see your kids" parts hit particularly hard.)
ReplyDeleteThe tuition at law schools has increased so dramatically in the last few years -- I graduated in 2005 and the stated full-price full-time tuition per year was about $30k. This year at my beloved alma mater, tuition is $46k. That's a 50% increase in the last few years to enter a job market that's even worse, and that's at a second tier school, where even in good times not nearly as many grads are going into Biglaw as at a top tier school.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, this may be the problem with American education as a whole. Our highs schools, colleges and universities graduate a lot of smart people without many concrete skills and large number who have avoided as much math and science as possible. After a couple of years in the job market with a BA in history or political science, or as a way to avoid going into the job market with a humanities BA, that professional degree looks like it's going to make the job search easier, right?
But law schools are some of the more profitable programs at universities, and a university would be loathe to close its law school. In fact, more and more are opening because they are profitable and there are plenty of lawyers who want to be legal academics.
I think that's probably right, CH. There certainly were plenty of folks doing just that (law and business schools) when I was graduating college in 1992, which followed what we understood to have been an epically bad hiring year for college seniors in '91.
ReplyDeleteI went to college knowing I wanted to go to law school, but it was certainly because of a very idealized understanding I had of the practice of law based on what I saw of older relatives who were lawyers. That said, a "warts and all" portrayal of the practice of law in the late 1980s-early 1990s would be very different, and I daresay a lot less warty, from the reality of the past 5-10 years.
One odd thing is that despite the massive growth of Texas (particularly the Eastern District) as a legal market, it has yet to be hit by the "open new law schools!" bug. There are several universities in Texas that could immediately open a law school and have it well regarded within Texas and (to some extent, nationally)--Rice and A&M in particular, and there's probably room for one at UTEP.
ReplyDeleteI just checked, and based on inflation, you would have expected the cost of a law school education to go up 46.36% between the time that I started law school in 10/1994 and when my brother started law school in 6/2008. Instead, it went up 150%, or three times the pace of inflation.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for more transparency with law school employment stats. I believe that every accredited law school should be required to provide applicants with basic stats for how many of their grads are employed as lawyers at various stages post-law-school (ranging from pretty soon after law school ends out to, say, 10 years, or maybe even longer), and what those careers look like (firm? public interest? government? in-house?), and what the average pay is. Even before the current job market crisis, many law schools pumped out grads who either could not get a legal job or could not get a legal job that paid well.
Both the boyfriend and I literally laughed out loud at it. That said, I call BS on the "required to check the blackberry every six hours." Can you imagine a law firm letting an associate get away with only checking the blackberry every six hours?
ReplyDeleteAndrew is right about new law schools. Out of a total of around 200 ABA-accredited law schools, 17 were either fully or provisionally accredited just since 2000, compared to only 8 in the 1990s and 8 in the 1980s -- before that, the late 1960s and the 1970s saw a huge number of new accreditations, which one might, without the time to actually research it, consider ascribing at least in part to increased student demand in light of (a) civil rights laws and/or (b) draft deferments.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the first few graduating classes from these new schools will be entering a supremely difficult job market in which most hiring decisionmakers have little to no alumni connection to the schools (if any, it's from undergrad and not law), and little to no experience with the quality of students the schools are turning out. Something of a Catch-22 situation, even if you bust ass to graduate at the top of your class.
It's a good thing that law school is more expensive now. When you are in law school, it is not that difficult to point out a huge number of people who you know will either quit practicing before their loans are paid or stay a lawyer forever but be miserable for every minute of their careers. If raising the price weeds out some of the people who are unrealistic about what it means to be a lawyer, good.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the problems is that at good schools, the loan forgiveness programs for public interest jobs makes it easy for you to wave off the high cost of attending law school. As an applicant, it's easy to tell yourself that the $150,000 in loans are worth it because if you do public service work, you can get them forgiven. But as a 3L looking for a job, it's a lot harder to make that equation work, especially if you live in an expensive city (loan forgiveness programs don't have a cost of living adjustment!) and if you have a family.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you come straight through from high school to undergrad to law school, student loans are kind of like play money. If your loans have always been deferred, you don't have any idea what it will mean to have to repay them, or how long it's going to take.
ReplyDeleteAlso, count me as someone who went to law school completely clueless about law school hiring, what it means to be a lawyer, law school grades- everything. I wasn't the chick in the video- my expectations weren't that well-formed. I wanted to go to grad school and did well on the LSAT- ergo, law school. I did the whole "well, a law degree is useful even if you don't practice" thing, though I had no idea what a law degree might be useful for. Okay, yeah, I had my head up my ass but the point is, I know I'm not alone in this. Cost didn't enter into it, and neither did loan forgiveness. It really was far more of a hideout from the real world with the possibility of a good job and at least a professional degree thereafter. (I'm actually happy being a transactional lawyer, with a good job, but that's just a case of good luck.)
Law school recruiting would need to be far more honest with incoming students about job prospects and the costs of law school, as Jenn noted above, for any of this to really deter some kids, but that would be against their interest. So I imagine we'll continue to have too many lawyers graduating with too much debt.
Nobody should go to law school straight out of college. Everybody should go to work for a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteThis is basically what I did in 2002, and I managed to graduate into an even worse job market than the one I left. Way to make smart life choices, me!
ReplyDeleteI think you could extend this to any graduate work. Figure out what those loans cost before you decide to pile on a few more.
ReplyDeleteI went to law school straight out of college, and have no regrets about it whatsoever. [Well, I wouldn't have taken Alschuler's atrocious legal philosophy course. But that's not the kind of regret that we're discussing here, right?] And if you look at the folks who hated law school and/or hated legal practice, plenty of them worked between college and law school, and I don't know that I could say that the folks in law school who had worked between college and law school typically had a more realistic perspective on what practicing law would be like than folks who went straight through.
ReplyDeleteInstead, what I always say is that no one should go to law school unless s/he is certain that s/he wants to go to law school, and isn't just doing it because s/he doesn't know what else to do, etc. By "certain," I don't mean necessarily "knows everything about going to law school, including all of the ins and outs and the warts of the practice of law. I mean, has really thought about going to law school versus other options and has consciously decided that law school is what s/he wants to do.
If someone is certain about going to law school, then going straight through from college is fine, in my opinion.
But I think it has to be more than "because I'd like to study law." You have to have some sense as to what you might do with a law degree.
ReplyDeleteI respectfully disagree. I wanted to be a lawyer in high school, I was all excited to go straight to law school, and in the many years since, I've really liked about 75-80% of it. Not a bad average, especially for what it pays.
ReplyDeleteThe job situation is terrible. But what might really help free up some jobs would be if a big chunk of the people who hate being lawyers and do nothing but complain about it all day would just quit and go do something else already. I've spent 11 years working at BigLaw, listening to associates complain nonstop about just about everything. This isn't fair, that isn't fair, Skadden pays $5k more, Wilson gives all its associates iPhones, blah blah blah blah blah. And I'm guilty too; I complain plenty. But on balance, it can be a very interesting, engaging profession where you get paid very well to think, debate, and write, often with a team of people who are a lot smarter than you. Maybe it's just because I worked a lot of crappy minimum wage jobs as a teenager, but I still feel lucky to have this job, and I wish people weren't so down on it all the time. Ok, rant over.
My peers who had worked before law school were better students, ranked higher and got onto Law Review, on average. I wish I had done that. But it's not costless. You do lose some years of post-JD income, have to start paying college loans, and take the risk of tuition rising even higher while you wait.
ReplyDeleteI don't know anyone at law school who seemed like they didn't want to be there. You don't need high tuition to wash out the dilettantes. Law school should wash out the dilettantes.
Sing it, spacewoman.
ReplyDeleteI agree, spacewoman, with one big caveat which I'll mention below. I worked biglaw for 5+ years, and ended up leaving because it wasn't a lifestyle I was comfortable with (M&A would unexpectedly kill weekends/months with little or know warning, and I eventually concluded that I wasn't going to happily come to terms with the social unpredictability). Complaining about the job is a little ridiculous, as there is very little subterfuge about what it is, and the downsides to the life of an associate (long hours, always available, etc.) are somewhat linked to the level of pay. The job is the job, and either you like it or you don't. Having been in house now for several years, I am much happier with the lifestyle, but really, truly miss how challenging the work was, and what a pleasure it was to, in general, be surrounded by people smarter than me who would bring the best out of me in my work.
ReplyDeleteThe caveat, however, is that the non-legal job market is also terrible, and I have a hard time faulting people for clinging to their current employment (as unpleasant as they may find it) rather than dropping into the unemployment abyss. Finally, and somewhat jokingly, as a relative of several biglaw partners (and friend to many others), I'm not sure whether there is more whining by associates about their job or by partners about associates whining about their jobs.
I did want to make one Good Wife point: I love Meryl Streep's daughter as the ditzy lawyer savant. It's a great role.
ReplyDeleteDamn, the whole guest-star cast last night was ridiculous: Kate Burton! Griffin Dunne! Edward Herrmann! And most improbably, playing Alicia's client, Corbin Bleu! (Didn't recognize him without his HSM hairdo.)
ReplyDeleteUgh. You self-pitying law talking guys and gals wanna make a video? Pay some human talent, ya skinflints!
ReplyDeleteHe had to ditch the HSM 'do to play Usnavi in In The Heights.
ReplyDeleteI'm not watching The Good Wife yet b/c it conflicts w/something else and we don't have double-tuner, but y'all just moved it up way higher on my rental list. Love Meryl Streep's daughter (Mamie Gummer?), Griffin Dunne, Edwrad Herrman, not to mention Baranski, Josh, and Margulies.
I too went to law school straight from college, because it seemed like the thing to do, without much understanding of the way that biglaw worked, and without a clear idea of what I wanted to do.
ReplyDeleteAfter four miserable years in biglaw, I made my way to suburban mid-size law, which is a much happier place to be, for me. That I was able to make that move amidst the terrible job market was, I think, due to the value of my top-ranked school degree. So I tend to think law school is worth it if you can go to a top school where you will have different opportunities to find a job where you won't be miserable. But when I hear that someone I know is going to a low ranked law school, especially an expensive private one, I feel bad because I don't think they know what they're getting into.
I'm hoping Elizabeth Reaser wasn't a throw-away one ep guest star. A female sportswriter that hates politics and mocks lawyers? She can stick around; she's interesting.
ReplyDeleteHuh. I just kind of assumed a school like Rice & A&AM would already have law schools.
ReplyDeleteCrimeny, Meryl Streep has a 27-year-old daughter? I'm going to go size a burial plot, y'all.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a lot of sympathy for "poor me; the job market is terrible so I'm stuck in this horrible job that pays me ridiculously well but I hate it anyway." If a person is aware that he or she cannot get another job that will have a better pay/satisfaction combination than the job that he or she already has, then that person should be thankful for the job that he or she already has.
ReplyDeleteI think we have officially become curmudgeons, isaac. Or, in my case, "become."
ReplyDeleteIsaac, I'm don't believe that anyone is asking you to pity people who choose to remain in their stable, high paying job for something else. <span>I certainly wasn't asking you to pity such people, just explaining that I could understand why they wouldn't leave even if they didn't love the job. When I was unemployed two years ago (after my first in-house gig went south), it drove me nuts when people with a job I'd love to have complained constantly about it.</span>
ReplyDelete<span>That said, your requiring that they be "thankful" for it is a bit odd, as their job is not exactly charity. Their law firm would fire them in an instant if they thought the individual could be adequately replaced with low transaction costs and that the termination (alone or when combined with others) wouldn't tarnish their reputation when the labor market tightens up again. </span>
True, CH. And, right now, you have a situation where a lot of law firm associates feel very unsafe, have taken paycuts, may be working more hours, have seen friends get laid off, and have seen their firms brag that by laying off people, etc., the firms have managed to increase profits per partner. I also think that it is the case that, for attorneys more junior than many of the commenters on this blog, the work is generally less satisfying, with fewer and fewer opportunities to do interesting work that actually builds skills. It may well be that, at some firms, associates are complaining about perks that other firms are giving out. But plenty of associates these days have complaints that have nothing to do with whether they should have gotten an iPad or a marginally higher bonus.
ReplyDeleteLike the space people, I'd not likely change course in hindsight. I quite enjoyed being a lawyer at a big firm. I somehow ended up with three kids in a four year time span and found it, for me, a bit unworkable. So, now, I work in a pre-law department at an undergraduate institution where I spend a good 20% of my time on "So you think you want to go to law school." (So, yes, this video killed me!! :)). I really don't try to talk anyone out of law school, but I do try to make sure these kids have accurate information. Loan counseling has improved quite a lot since I was borrowing money, but the thing that hasn't changed ... it is still completely unfathomable to most 20-year-olds what it will mean to have to re-pay student debt. It's as unfathomable as the idea that they might not be able to perfectly balance career and family.
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe that's where this needs to be happening but isn't: when students approach their college professors for letters of recommendation for law school, what kind of counseling is being given?
ReplyDeleteI can't begin to imagine that my undergrad professors could have given me anything approaching useful advice on what law school or the practice of law is like.
ReplyDelete<span>Well, as a college professor of history with a good number of pre-law students, I've tried to encourage my students to be realistic about both the experience of law school and the challenges of the legal profession. When students come to me for law-school recommendations, I push them to be more specific about why they're applying to law school and what they expect to do as a lawyer; if they're maddeningly vague, I insist that they educate themselves by talking directly with law students and practicing attorneys, so that they're going into the process with their eyes open. I also discourage students from diving straight into law school unless they have a very clear and articulate sense of why law is for them.
ReplyDeleteIt helps that my father was a law school professor, so that does give me a bit more perspective than some other undergrad advisors. But I don't claim to know the ins and outs of actual lawyering, and again, I really promote the idea of seeking informational interviews with folks working in the field.
As for the issue of loans, I don't tend to dig too deeply into that area, in part because most students are very reluctant to share details about their financial situation. That said, I do make a point of mentioning the enormous cost of law school, and I also talk about the difficulties of getting a good job with a good salary if you're coming out of a second- or third-tier law program.</span>
As an associate more junior than the commenters on this blog, I would say that my peers are grateful to be employed, and are not complaining about bonuses or iPads or whatever. But we're also worried about how to build a career in this industry, worried about our own fungibility, worried about getting enough meaningful work to create value to our firms (or to other firms/companies/etc.), and worried about what happens to us when we become senior associates and our firms explain, gently and lovingly, that they like us very much, but we're just not partner material.
ReplyDeleteMy best friend spent two years working for an Ivy League university counseling undergraduates who wanted to go to law school. She reported that her efforts to provide some realism to their expectations were entirely unsuccessful. Very few undergrads, who are fixated on going to law school as the solution to their "what do I do with my life" ennui, are going to really be able to understand the cost/benefit ratio of actually being a practicing lawyer.
ReplyDeleteDo you find that suburban mid-size law is really a better place to be? Is it better hours? Better coworkers? More collegiality? I sometimes worry that I'd work just as hard in mid-size law, but make less money.
ReplyDeleteBetter hours, better mentoring, and better opportunities to develop actual skills. I went from a biglaw litigation department where I was stuck, as a fourth-year, second-chairing depositions to taking and defending depositions by myself. And then writing the summary judgment brief myself, instead of doing the research and handing it over to a partner would would do the actual writing.
ReplyDeleteBut I understand the concern. It is less money, and not every suburban mid-sized firm has the same culture, and even within firms what your work is like can depend a lot on your specific group or the partners you work with.
All of that sounds useful. I guess from my perspective, professors seemed to have a lot more useful stuff to say about whether getting a PhD and aiming for academia made sense, as opposed to the pluses and minuses of going to law school.
ReplyDeleteI'm not advising anyone to get a Ph.D. in history in this market. Compared to academia, the legal profession is positively swimming in jobs right now.
ReplyDeleteI was speaking (er, typing), from my perspective, which sad to say, was a long time ago.
ReplyDeleteEr, that was a response to Prof. Jeff. Not sure why it is not on the same convo line.
ReplyDeleteIf you think that that conversation will be gentle and loving, I feel bad for you, and I really do mean that.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to assume that anonymous was being sarcastic there. Because it's not. Gentle or loving.
ReplyDeleteI was being sarcastic. Apparently not very effectively.
ReplyDeleteThe sarcasm seemed perfectly effective to me. Anonymous
ReplyDelete