“[T]here are only three reasons to go to law school: (1) the law school you were accepted to is named Harvard, Yale, or Stanford; (2) you got a full or very nearly-full scholarship; or (3) you have a family member or close friend who can 100% guarantee you a secure lawyer position.”
TLTR, nothing new here. Become a plumber
It depends on the person and the school. You need to go to law school with a plan, like going to business school. Maybe a good plan is that you have two years of experience in engineering, go to law school, then be a patent lawyer. Or maybe you have some accounting knowledge, then be a tax attorney. However, if you have no plan, don’t expect that law school will sort it out for you. This is the mistake that people make.
Among the top 8 or so law schools, recruiting is substantially better than what this article represents. 20% big law placement is maybe representative of a #20 school, but certainly not any school that is ranked much higher than that, even if it is not HYS (it should be about 50%). Consider also that there is a tier below that, where graduates work for smaller law firms and make maybe $110k. The person in this article is probably just unlucky or is ranked low in his class.
It is known though, that some law schools inflate employment statistics by employing their own graduates, for instance.
Although law school, like everything else, does not guarantee anything, it is still as close as I can imagine to securing highly predictable, high paying employment with a very good chance of success. This, of course, is contingent on the person themselves having a marketable background and the ability to get good grades.
I believe the last stats I saw were that the number of lawyers was in ridicuous oversupply relative to how much is needed. It makes it even more important being at a top school.
Sounds pretty similar to the complaining I’ve heard from MBA grads that entered a top-20 business school in 2007-08, hoping to work on Wall Street.
Columbia and NYU are pretty cool places to go too
Columbia actually has the best big law placement, if I recall correctly. Certainly, the average salary is the highest. People at law firms also like to do things like government or clerkship (Yale, GW), work for public interest, or if you go to Stanford or Berkeley, join some Google or other company. NYU law school has a weird vibe. Like they transplanted all the valley girls there. I can’t put my finger on it. Columbia Law School is all nerds, like basically all Columbia programs…
Too many f…ing lawyers around.
There’s probably too much college (grad and undergrad) around, regardless of the field of study.
A lot of law jobs are being outsourced to India. Companies are realizing that some of the contract and paperwork stuff can be done much cheaper by people who aren’t even technically lawyers in USA.
Agree, but $160k lawyers are not the type of job that are readily outsourced to developing countries. You can outsource back office jobs to India for your investment bank, but you really don’t want to outsource your front office, for instance.
Can’t be that much considering one must be an registered attorney to practice law in a particular state. Most paperwork itself is done by lower-priced paralegals, anyway.
This is the article in one picture. And that $165M mark is almost certainly the top schools being mentioned here.
That graph is interesting. Thanks for posting.
inky: yes - every big law office has stratified staff - partners, associates, then support people like paralegals and assistants. Some basic work like filing the documents, and even proof reading and editing, is done by non-attorneys.
In case you are interested:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/10/AR2008051002355.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4626716
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/opinion/outsourcing-the-law-to-india/9803/
And I show that graph to all my friends who say they want to quit their jobs and go to law school and a not-free ride.
I know an attorney who graduated from that hacksaw school in South Bend making $55k a year in trusts/estate planning. The managers at the firm are barely cracking $90k.
an attorney making 55k a year is a giant Fail.
Perhaps in terms of NPV. But if you look at the graphic above, you’d see it’s not all that rare percentile wise.
Yeah median isn’t that good. Some newly minted lawyers can’t get any job. Places like WLRK where they get $160k +$160k bonus are extremely tough to get into.
I couldn’t see anything relating to the size of the market, but a little googling tells me that the outsourcing market is about $2.4 billion/year and thelegal indsutry in the US is about $274 billion/year by revenue. So less than 1%. I think that would qualify as “not that much”.
Every industry is susceptible to offshoring and low-touch jobs are the most likely candidates. You should also tell your friends not to be radiologists or pharmaceutical researchers or engineers or anything else that deals in data.
The outsourcing is disproportionately going to impact entry level jobs for lawyers. And no, the school debt per graduating income for those professions you listed are not nearly the same as the current law market.