He left one out: "You can do absolutely anything with a law degree!" Certainly you can -- anything you could have done with an undergraduate history degree. Unless it's lawyering, the law degree doesn't get you any closer.
My reasons for going to law school are really embarrassingly dumb -- largely, I went because I couldn't figure out the entry-level job market. When I came back from the Peace Corps, I spent six months or so job hunting, without any really clear idea of what I wanted to do. I was thinking about technical writing, figuring that I had a better technical background than most people who write well, and wrote better than most people with a strong technical background, and I was thinking about publishing, without much more of a rational idea than "Oooo. Books. People who write books. People who make decisions about books." But every job I looked at seemed to involve a career ladder that I should have been on since college: working on the newspaper, something. I couldn't find anything literally entry-level that looked as if it were heading anyplace interesting at all.
So I went to law school -- from the school I got into, I knew I was heading for one of the six-figure jobs, and I knew someone would hire me. I'm not crazy about it, but it's not having red-hot needles stuck under my fingernails either.
Being a lawyer isn't that bad. I am a patent lawyer. It is pretty excellent. Getting fired after 3 weeks shows a certain level of dedication though.
I did it for bad reasons, but I made sure to go to a public law school (middle-tier sadly) so that the debt burden wouldn't be as crushing.
I couldn't figure out the entry-level job market and really needed health insurance.
Ny nore sophisticated rationalizations for why it was a good idea:
(1.) Very succesful managing partner of a large New England firm told me that I'd be a good lawyer.
(2.) There have been lawyers in my family for a couple of hundred years. (My great-grandfather founded that New England law firm.)
(3.) I thought that I would like to do research in comparative law. I wanted to find a way to live abroad and to do something that was practical and worldy, could be lucrative and was academic all at the same time.
I think that I'd make a very good trust-and-estate lawyer, but private client work is not where the prestige is.
I had seriously never heard of Tucker Max until the night after last week's meetup when a friend (a performance artist) complained that I hadn't invited her along. I said, "Pretty much everyone who was there was a blogger. You might not have enjoyed it," and she responded that she would have liked to go around introducing herself as the "real Tucker Max," a female performance artist masquerading as a total douchebag. Coincidence -- suddenly Labs is posting all about TM?
There are always these things written about Ph.D. programs in literature too, and yeah, it's true that there are too many of us, but (a) many of us totally love what we do and feel incredibly lucky to be doing it (even when we pretend to hate it), and (b) as TM says, anyone hearing a speech about how grad school isn't for everyone will respond, "But maybe it's perfect for me!" What's the point? One comes off sounding like a bitter failure, not the voice of reason and wisdom.
Hmm. I suppose that his six main reasons are, in fact, quite awful reasons for choosing to go to law school. But Tucker Max seems to be a walking, talking advertisement for the proposition that you can cruise through law school without doing any work and go on to one day run an internet company. This is the guy I'm supposed to believe when he tells me NOT to go to law school? And let's put aside the bit about law school being easy -- when you don't go to class and only read other students' outlines for the finals, you're going to pass, but what will you have learned? The law is not about regurgitating stale dicta from ancient Supreme Court decisions.
I actually have some personal experience with this. I graduated from law school at UNC Chapel Hill in 1995. I went straight out of undergrad, without the break that Tucker seems to advocate. I'd always wanted to be a prosecutor, but I got seduced into this irresistible desire to live in Manhattan. When it came time to try to get a job that would let me live in New York, my law degree gave me a much broader range of career options than I'd have had with just my undergraduate degree in political science. Eventually, I landed a job as a business consultant in NYC.
And after six years, I quit, moved back home to North Carolina, and became the prosecutor I'd always wanted to be.
What does all this mean? Maybe there is a huge pool of prospective law school applicants that might benefit from hearing Tucker's discouraging words, but I remain firmly convinced by my own personal experience that a law degree can't hurt you in life.
PS -- As for the argument that you shouldn't take on so much student loan debt for a job you might not like, well, I've always considered educational loans to be some of the cheapest money out there. But hey, that's just me... :)
I am a patent lawyer.
Not a fair data point. You're a surfer/patent lawyer. I mean, I guess Michael Jordan could say, "I sell shoes," but....
my own personal experience that a law degree can't hurt you in life
I don't, even watching how real associates (and partners) work during my summer associate-ship, think having a law degree will hurt me. But surely there are people who are hurt in life by, if nothing else, the opportunity cost that law school represents.
you probably won't be happy after you graduate.
As opposed to people doing what?
Having more or less completed my coursework towards an English Ph.D., I soured on the job market and looked about for other applications for my skills, such as they were.
(1) Reads copiously & closely.
(2) Writes copiously and snarkily.
(3) Enjoys arguing with others.
Law school was a no-brainer.
I think the advice to work first -- and I'd say anywhere -- is sound. If you're happy working, then you're happy. If you still want grad school/the law after proving to yourself that you don't need it in order to pay the bills, then it's probably a better fit.
There seem to be a lot of people in Ph.D. programs who are here because they don't know what else to do. And if that's true with law, you're doing that, but with soul-crushing amounts of debt. At least your program is only three years.
Anderson, is this the answer you were looking for?
But every job I looked at seemed to involve a career ladder that I should have been on since college: working on the newspaper, something.
It is rather astonishing to emerge after years of expensive education to discover that one has little to no marketable skills or experience. I was very lucky to manage to find a job more-or-less in my field; I'm not sure what I would be doing if I hadn't. When I was casually told not long ago how many people applied for my position, it made me feel like I was going to throw up. Especially since I doubt the reasons I was hired were any sort of rational ones.
The debt burden has changed enormously in recent years. I'd gone to a public university and had saved money before going to grad school. I only borrowed for law school, and went to a mid-tier. I was able to pay it off relatively easily. I don't regret going; I've had a career mostly as a staff person, a researcher/writer/editor at a legal publisher.
I'd actually like to work as a law clerk/paralegal, if that's possible. It might create "caste" and authority problems for some people. Anybody know of examples of mature lawyers who've had unconventional careers doing that?
I am, admittedly, vague about things like this, but I wandered through college thinking "All sorts of jobs don't require anything but an undergrad degree! And I'm coming out of a good school, and I'm smart -- I don't need to worry about vocational training or planning." And then I hit the job market and felt unemployable.
Anybody know of examples of mature lawyers who've had unconventional careers doing that?
This sounds more like contract attorney to me -- the temps who get pulled in on big cases for work that really should be done by a lawyer, but that big firms don't want to bill at full associate rates. I've met a lot of people who do that, and some were older (although most were young). But I think it can be a reasonable way to work.
Actually, a sandwich sounds nice. I'm in.
13: I think taht this is a very important point. I think that the humanities are very important and that it's wrong for most people to go straight into vocational degrees. Shorter version: I disapprove of undergraduate business degrees.
Having said that, I think that the community of the university ought to play a greater role in preparing its students ofr the real world. Professors in practical fields should provide contacts to their best students and alumni should mentor students. I really think that the Episcopal chaplaincy at my school would have done a lot of good if they'd brought in alums to talk about their career paths. In short, I think that it's a bad idea to leave this to professional career counselors but that students shouldn;t be expected to figure this stuff out on their own.
I've listed with temp agencies before, but never been called. I may try again. I've done exactly that for people I know but there's never enough of that kind of work on an informal basis. I'd really be okay with doing it permanently if there were a position; I don't need status and I don't need any more money than senior paralegals and I can research and write much, much better than that.
18: I've never done legal temping, but I've done admin temping, and the key is getting the first assignment. They assume that anyone who signs up with a temp agency is a useless flake who won't show up until proven otherwise, and don't call anyone who doesn't have a track record until they have to. What you have to do is call repeatedly and nag, begging for work, until they give you one assignment, and once you show up that first time, the assignments will start coming.
(My apologies if I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here -- it's possible that legal temping doesn't work like admin temping.)
Anybody know of examples of mature lawyers who've had unconventional careers doing that?
What Lizard Breath said in 14, plus big firms in New York (and I would guess Chicago, too) his people with law degrees to be paralegals, but being a big firm paralegal is not a lot of fun. Contract lawyer (per 14) sound like a more interesting job. There are, as you likely know, staffing firms which specialize in temp lawyers and paralegals, getting in the market is not terribly hard (although I do not know how much work the average contract or temp attorney gets working for a service; I assume the answer is, as always, YMMV).
As far as being a lawyer is concerned, while I certainly complain about stuff. basically, I like what I do and probably would do it again.
re: 19
I really need to Preview better.
17: research and write
The firm I worked for used a lot of contract attorneys, but never for research or writing, only for huge document review projects. There's often not enough actual research or writing projects around to keep the full-time associates amused in those sort of firms, and my impression is that those sort of firms are where a lot of the demand for contract attorneys comes from.
13: I guess this is something mostly seen in the humanities. None of my friends had much trouble finding jobs, though pretty much everyone was in the medicine-math-econ-engineering-sciences spectrum. Even though most of the engineers took a couple years to realize engineering sucks, it seemed like they still found a job at some finance or consulting firm. It really is a shame that more places don't hire undergrads in a variety of fields, although my company does seem to (I'm amazed at how many literature and art history majors we have at an ostensibly data-driven company).
That said, I'm amazed that a couple of my friends who studied engineering are going or planning on going to law school, entirely to do patent law.
That's true -- contract attorney isn't going to be writing, it's going to be giant document-review projects. But I figured you were up for that, under the assumption that paralegals don't write much either.
Pudic? Yeah, I thought of that, but my friend---whose wine-soaked memories of grad school are probably leading her awry---thought not. I think she's just imagining the missing word, or looking for an excuse to talk about synonyms for "pussy."
Thanks!
Since I've done nearly everything at one time or another, I'm up for document review if it pays the bills. Can you think of keywords that make it more likely I'll be selected to do that? I could write resumes to represent myself as five different people without repeating myself or lying; it's a matter of what people might be looking for.
Given that, IME, the typical contract attorney is fresh out of law school, I don't think your resume will make much difference. If I were you, I'd call agencies and ask what they're looking for, and then edit the resume based on that.
25: My (limited) experience with contract attorneys is that some are really good, and some -- half? -- really are total, total flakes, in the sense of simply not giving a shit at all and just marking documents at random and getting fired within a week after wasting a lot of everyone's time. I would focus on projecting "I am one of the stable, sober ones."
This thread is beautifully on-topic, but I just want to say that in Portland, Oregon there's a "Tucker-Maxon Oral School" for the hearing-impaired, and whenever I hear Tucker Max's name that's what I think of.
So perhaps "Oral School" can be his nickname if we ever choose to make him an Unfogged theme.
13/16: I'm in that very position now, having studied History at an Ivy but finding myself completely unemployable since I graduated in May. I've even found myself terribly jealous of my best friend who went to a different Ivy, majored in Econ and is doing I-Banking in New York. (It's slightly horrifying since I couldn't stand econ in college and knew for certain that I didn't want to go into investment banking.) He studied something he enjoyed, did well, found a job he likes, and is making a ton of money to do it, not to mention making him about twice as attractive to women.
But I think the real problem is that our Career Services was terrible for students who don't want to do either banking, consulting or med/law school. Their typical advice for everyone else is to look at their website, which only lists more banking jobs. I know to have to go grad school eventually just to make myself marketable enough to get an enjoyable job. I've thought of Urban Planning, which I've worked in before, but requires a Masters to get in on the entry level. Anyone have any thoughts on Planning as a field or as a way to get involved in international housing/community development issues? Or, for that matter, can anyone spare a dime?
I recommend working in the reception/data-entry field at a small-town chiropractor's office.
I know nothing about it, beyond reading books like those cited in the 'Trust' thread down the page, but I've always been fascinated -- it's one of my 'wonder if I should have done that' fields.
Oh, and I was also lucky enough to work at a law office one summer during college. Every single lawyer I met that summer, without dissent, told me that I should avoid law school at all costs. Sound advice, I guess.
I-banking sounds, to me at least, much worse than the practice of law. This ties in with my general feelings about Tucker Max, which is that he sometimes hits upon obvious truths, but otherwise says little of value, and overemphasizes everything.
Jobs that pay young people lots of money tend to be mindless, monotonous, and soul crushing. That's why they pay so much--not because they require such special employees. This isn't just true of the legal field, but of basically all high paying corporate jobs. So you either settle for less money and/or prestige, take the soul-crushing job, or take a risk on something that could pay well and also be enjoyable.
It's either low pay, suckyness, or risk. Take your pick.
By "low pay" what I mean is, "not absurdly high pay." You just shouldn't expect to make 140k in a rewarding, risk free job, without any experience. There's nothing like that out there.
29: I went straight to law school, but you don't need to do that, or anything like it. Quite a few people I know just decided to pick a city to live in for one reason or another and find a job there to keep them in rent and food for a year while they thought about what they wanted to do. One spent a year (8 or 9 months really) as a ski-patroller at Mammoth. Another just moved to Atlanta because he had recently started dating a girl there and got odd jobs. Yet another thought he was going into the Peace Corps so got a job waiting tables at a pretty classy place until that worked out, when it didn't he put together another plan. Another whole bunch are doing Teach for America, though I think maybe you would've had to commit to that already, not sure how it works. And these are just people I know from high school, if I get into college friends or people I've met since starting law school, the pool expands drastically.
The problem with the odd jobs route: no health insurance.
I fucking hate the health care system in this country. Until we get a decnt national system, I'm pretty much stuck in Massachusetts.
I sometimes think that I ought to work as an organizer. Most organizers work with poorer people, but I think that there's a huge need to organize middle and upper-middle class people, because the general interest is diffuse, and the special interests are concenrated enough to spend money on lobbyists and campaign contributions. If pols thought they'd lose if they did nothing about healthcare, they'd do something.
33: Yes, but I would like to say that what drove me to law school wasn't looking for high pay, but that I couldn't figure out how to get on a career ladder at all. If I could have found a $28k job as a technical writer when I got home from the PC at 23, I'd be doing that now.
High pay was probably part of the picture for me. But I was surprised--perhaps pleasantly--to learn that it doesn't motivate me very much. I think if I could have preserved my emotional state at age 10 or 11, I would have fit in well at my firm.
Christ, and after reading piles of Hirshmann, I was about to apply for law school and stop wasting my life. Now I'm all of a dither ...
"if I could have preserved my emotional state at age 10 or 11, I would have fit in well at my firm."
This is wrong. Most people at my firm were fine people and probably more mature than I am. What I mean is that, at that emotional state, I probably would have enjoyed better what I was doing.
to the UCLA Greek community on the decision
Did anyone else just figure out that FL meant fraternities and sororities?
I'm pretty sure that every career path that requiers so much comittment that you have to totally neglect every otheraspect of your life is filled mostly with unhappy people. Ambition and careerism in general make people unhappy.
Also, unhappiness corrolates strongly with education. This may in part be because ambition leads to unhappiness. It may also be because happiness correates strongly with unrealistic appraisals of one's own abilities and life prospects, and other signs of poor critical thinking.
(I believe I got these corrolations from books by Kahneman or Denier.)
I was reminded of this post by Tim Burke from long ago (that I give all of my undergrads thinking about going to grad school...)
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/gradschool.html
Should I go to graduate school?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: maybe, but only if you have some glimmering of what you are about to do to yourself.
As a person currently working on his undergrad degree and who was considering going to law school because I don't know what else to do post-graduation, I find this thread deeply, deeply terrifying.
Wait, Glenn, do a tally of what lawyers and law students in this thread (or exclude law students if you want, we don't know much), positive and negative, and see if it's really terrifying.
I went to law school because my brother was going to medical school and I was a little jealous. It worked out ok for me.
Going into law school, despite the downsides, isn't as risky as going to grad school. Law school is shorter. If you get into the right school, you probably will get a job. Plus, you can make good money.
hah. W/D actually makes an excellent point. Hooray empiricism.
I guess Lizardbreath's "it's bad, but not really terrible" resonates with me more strongly than either the ludicrously overwrought stories of soul-annihilating horrow or the stories of reasonable success. I'm not sure why.
39 amuses me because I read this and thought that a lot of the law school/grad school advice (which we usually condone) is pretty much the same advice Hirshman gives: if you invest a lot of money or time in training for X profession, you should practice X profession. If you have no interest in it, you shouldn't spend the money and time training for it just because "it's the thing to do" and then throw it over to go dabble about with other stuff. Yeah, doing so might make you happy; but it's still stupid and puts you in a really shitty financial position. Think carefully before you commit to something, and once you commit, stick with it.
If anyone besides me watches Futurama, do you have trouble to reading "39 amuses me etc." in anything but Hedonism-bot's voice? Because I do. This comment has been rephrased to include a question to avoid the fate of biscuit-conditionality.
I endorse the idea that you should work at a law firm in some capacity and take a year or two after undergraduate and before law school.
I too went to law school because I couldn't figure out the whole entry level job thing. I dunno why they don't teach you about stuff like that in high school, like, here's how you start on a career path.
I've never practiced law at all. I've had an unconventional but nice career so far in publishing. One thing I haven't quite figured out is how to deal with the whole "overqualified" thing when people see the JD. This is a problem for the notion that you can "do anything" with a law degree.
Also, law school is easy like he sais. What I remember of it. I really perfected my binge drinking in those three years.
I once did a post on this subject and got nothing but horror stories. Where were all you happy lawyers then?
One thing I haven't quite figured out is how to deal with the whole "overqualified" thing when people see the JD.
Yeah, I've found that to be a problem as well. Applying for an entry-ish level position somewhere unrelated to law when you have a JD takes some 'splainin.
under the assumption that paralegals don't write much either
Having worked as a paralegal (fresh out of college), it always seems slightly surreal when I hear that there are firms where paralegals write at all. In my firm, we were basically copy/file clerks, with the occasional sideline in deposition summaries and preliminary document reviews; even the senior paralegal in the firm (who'd been there for ages) never got anywhere near actual legal research. And the caste system in law firms drove me insane -- what really drove it home for me was realizing that when I quit the job and went into tech, I'd finally be eligible to play on the firm softball team.
The reason I don't pipe up in this discussion is because I always sound woefully naive. Like w/d said, we're just law students, we don't know much. But it seems to me is that the main problem with becoming a lawyer and the ensuing discontent is overly high expectations. You think, hey, you get paid a lot of money, the work is intellectually challenging, I'm going to be happy as a fucking clam! And then people complain about the work and the debt when they're miserable.
People think that the law is prestigious and challenging and lucrative and that all of these things together will provide some kind of life fulfillment. Just like most other jobs, it is usually pretty unfulfilling. The problem is that the people who become lawyers are so overwhelmingly smart that they think they should be able to use their brains to be fulfilled and make a lot of money. That's just not the way the world works.
I expect that I'll be happy enough practicing law at a firm, but leave after a while because long hours suck, and I have a lot of other hobbies that I'm going to get pretty pissed off when they are neglected for years at a time, and leave doing something else that makes less money for less hours. But that doesn't mean it was a mistake to come to law school. So far, law school has been the best years of my life.
Then again, I've only been pretending to be a lawyer for 10 weeks. We'll talk again in a couple years.
56 goes for me too. Closest I got to actual legal work was doc review and dep summaries, though I was occasionally asked about such and such law.
Another lawyer heard from: it's often boring, but rarely excruciating. A lot depends on how much satisfaction you can derive from other parts of your life, and how much you need to be amused by your work.
Another thing to understand, which surprised me but should not have, is that the modal personality type at a law firm is not open-minded, speculative or curious. There are exceptions, but law tends to attract people who prefer to find conventional answers, and practicing law ruthlessly channels people toward that kind of behavior. They're too busy to speculate, their professional appearance would suffer if they seemed frivolous or like gadflies, and all the pressure at work is against expanding possibilities and toward finding and implementing a single position. I often find this the most frustrating aspect of legal practice. And since I'm here a lot of the day, it tends to be most of my social surround.
There are exceptions, but law tends to attract people who prefer to find conventional answers, and practicing law ruthlessly channels people toward that kind of behavior.
This is really true, and really insightful. Litigation, at least, rewards the test-taker's mind -- you don't want the answer that is objectively right, you want the answer, or argument that the designer of the test/judge will think is right. The goal is mindreading, not necessarily dealing with reality. I'm good at this sort of thing -- I empathize intellectually, if not emotionally, much better than most -- but I find it kind of maddening.
Litigation, at least, rewards the test-taker's mind -- you don't want the answer that is objectively right, you want the answer, or argument that the designer of the test/judge will think is right.
I think this is mostly right, although I would restate it slightly. In litigation, creativity is highly valued in terms of identifying arguments--what are our claims, what are our defenses, what law applies and how etc. However, the "test-taker's mind" comment is exactly right in that all of this creativity is bounded by the law. Thus, the question of whether a particular outcome is objectively the best or most efficient by some other standard generally does not come up.
creativity is bounded by the law
But I'm making a slightly stronger claim than that. A really powerful advocate isn't one who makes the legal argument that most closely approaches a platonic ideal of legal truth. It's one who makes the legal argument that most closely approaches what the judge they are arguing before considers to approach the platonic ideal of legal truth, which may not be the same thing.
what the judge* wants is the shortest distance from a to b, and the least likelihood of getting reversed.
*the Platonic judge, not any judge in particular.
I would see how identifying those arguments and putting them foremost in briefs would be a very valuable skill.
about expectations:
working for a real life d.a. might be close to law & order, I don't know. Working for a firm certainly isn't, but I don't know who expects it to be. There may be ways to get the exciting court room experience, they just aren't the fancy firm jobs.
A really powerful advocate isn't one who makes the legal argument that most closely approaches a platonic ideal of legal truth. It's one who makes the legal argument that most closely approaches what the judge they are arguing before considers to approach the platonic ideal of legal truth, which may not be the same thing.
Fair enough. I would add that if the Federalist Society society had its way, there would not be a diference between the two. May I send you a membership application?
It's a running gag, Joe, don't let it bother you. And Ideal, when the Federalist Society comes out with the Judge-o-matic 2007, tell me about it. I'd love to be a beta tester. While they're still putting mere mortals on the bench, I'll keep my membership in the Lawyers' Guild.
I'm actually hoping Ideal will give us lecture on states' rights.
it's bad, but not really terrible
Is it really that bad? Depends on what you like.
These days I am doing nursing-home defense and some state-level regulatory work for healthcare providers. Mostly litigation. It's not all fun by any means, but one of the crazy things about the law is how every case turns out to be unique. It's amazing that with so many years of case law out there, new and unprecedented fact-patterns still spring up.
But then, I am the kind of person who enjoys researching & arguing fine points of civil procedure and removal jurisdiction.
It has been said that the kind of kid who won't let the other Monopoly players put money on Free Parking, because it's not in the rules, is the one who grows up to be a lawyer. Well, that was me, actually.
It has been said that the kind of kid who won't let the other Monopoly players put money on Free Parking, because it's not in the rules, is the one who grows up to be a lawyer. Well, that was me, actually.
Disagree. Putting the money in Free Parking is part of the common law of Monopoly.
Does anyone actually auction off properties if the person who lands on them doesn't want them? It's in the rules, but I've never seen it done in a game.
(On the other hand, I've really only played with family members, so maybe we just didn't.)
I have never finished a game of monopoly. It's a really dull game after a while.
I have heard it said that good philosophers are not good lawyers. The mindsets are very similar, but different in that lawyers are trying to interpret or argue an interpretation of the law, and the philosophers are sensibly getting drunk because the law is obviously fucked up.
Also, we are nice to our secretaries.
Also, we are nice to our secretaries.
I regret to say that this is probably not true without exception.
Hmm. I got a BA in philosophy. I did spend pretty much the whole three years of law school more or less drunk.
A JD can be a nasty trap if no one will hire you to practice law. You're overqualified for anything else.
Putting the money in Free Parking is part of the common law of Monopoly.
Is it just me, or does someone need to revoke Idealist's Federalist society membership?
Does anyone actually auction off properties if the person who lands on them doesn't want them? It's in the rules, but I've never seen it done in a game.
I've played with people who do that.
I do it when I'm playing with my kids, because then I can get whatever they don't want for about a fiver. Suckers.
Does anyone actually auction off properties if the person who lands on them doesn't want them?
Of course! It's in the rules! Gets pretty dull in a 2-player game, but then, Monopoly sucks with 2 players.
My kid makes me play every now & then, but he has the Lord of the Rings version. So he'll grow up bewildered by Monopoly references.