Thinking about going to law school....

[IPFreely]

Your really cool! 

I looked you up.  Golden Gate?  No wonder you're defending going to a T4.  Good luck with that.  What are their employment stats like?

[bigs5068]

You make many good points in your posts.  The danger is in conflating what we control with what we cannot.

This is rather different from the odds of getting that shot in the first place.  These are related, however, as a personal insistence on excellent nearly always leads to the "lucky" opportunities we seek.

This is neither to challenge nor to affirm, but to reinforce your and other points that, in addition to debt, stress, hard work, etc., there is the very real factor of one's own quality.

I do not think there is any doubt that if you go to a lower ranked school you are going to have to work a lot harder at finding a job. You should know that going in, but it can and is done. People like IPfreely seem to look down on people that are actually working and whose clients are not ideal.   I honestly never heard of such things until reading his post about his ex-girlfriend's horrible employment story. As I understood most lawyers deal with wonderful clients who are always happy to talk to their attorney.  Generally these clients always pay their bills on time without dispute and these high paying clients are always of the highest moral character.  They go to church every Sunday and are only interested in the good of the community. Heaven forbid that a client might actually have done something wrong or want take advantage of a situation.  Certainly no client seeks an attorney for selfish monetary gain that would be unheard of! Maybe there are a few despicable people like this out there seeking monetary gain for their own selfish reasons, but only a lowly tier 3 student would take such a horrendous client.

[bigs5068]

Well the employment for me has been pretty good up to this point and I have made some straight cash homie. Honestly, there are bitter people at tier 1's and at a tier 4's and it certainly does not help you to be in that category in any aspect of life. You seem to be taking it way to personally man it is an internet board.  Anyways, good luck to you out there.

[IPFreely]

Well the employment for me has been pretty good up to this point and I have made some straight cash homie. Honestly, there are bitter people at tier 1's and at a tier 4's and it certainly does not help you to be in that category in any aspect of life. You seem to be taking it way to personally man it is an internet board.  Anyways, good luck to you out there.

Glad to hear, really.  And likewise.

BTW, I'm not bitter about law school.  I enjoy the hell out of it.  But I don't think it's a good idea for people to waste huge amounts of money on a degree with little likelihood of getting a job out of it.  Better to go do something that doesn't require $150K for an entry fee.

[bigs5068]

I agree law school is WAY TO EXPENSIVE for what it is. That goes from tier 1 to tier 4 for the amount of money any ABA school charges the halls should be made of gold. Almost every school charges around 30k a year give or take a few thousand dollars. I have seen every school in the Bay Area and no law student is getting anywhere near 30k worth in facilities, services, etc at any of them from Stanford to GGU. 

I do not think the employment is as awful as people make it out to be though. It is hard to find a job particularly when staring out. That is true in all professions and from every institution. However, education is a LONG TERM INVESTMENT. If you are an attorney it is a career that will likely last 30 to 40 years and in the long run 100k is worth 30 years of a job you enjoy doing. The key though is to make sure that being a lawyer is something you want to do and you will need to realize that a J.D. is no golden ticket to riches or special treatment. It is very likely at the beginning you will need to deal with masturbators and other various f***ed up people. Nobody starts out at the top even Lebron James had to bring the donuts when he was a rookie. Even if you went to Harvard for law school I imagine there is no great special treatment once you start out. There is probably more for them than a GGU student and I certainly don't expect anything to be handed to me and I know I will need to work my ass off for anything that I get in the legal profession. However, I knew that going in and if you go to a tier 3 or 4 school you will need to work harder than anyone else. You are going in as an underdog if you are tier 3/4 student and the only way an underdog succeeds in anything is by busting his or her ass. Even if they do work 100x harder than anyone else they still might not succeed.

[Tanrael]

Don't feed the trolls.  :-p

You see that?  Where was I trolling?  I was simply telling her the truth.

There is an art to explaining to someone that the path they are choosing isn't wise.  For a board like this one, full of aspiring professionals, one would expect at least an attempt at professionalism.  Telling a women that she is better off as a stripper is rude and insulting.  Treating anyone with such disrespect demonstrates a lack of fitness for the vocation we aspire to.

[Angelvoice]

I appreciate that.  Thank you!

[sethc]

Not to sound jaded, but..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMvARy0lBLE

..I feel like this is obligatory.

[john4040]

Think long and hard about going to law school.  I wouldn't pay more than ~$15,000 in TOTAL tuition to go to a T3 or T4.

[bigs5068]

That was honestly a pretty funny video. Still I will stand by my old position that a lot of jobs are hard and you can meet people in almost every profession that say they are underpaid and overworked. Yes there is a lot of debt to get education in those fields as well. I very rarely meet people that say man I am so underworked and overpaid and got this position with no educational debt whatsoever. Now is law school a guarantee of anything absolutely not. Is an MBA a guarantee absolutely not. Maybe an M.D. is a guarantee if it you get through the education and the residency, but I think it takes 12 years and yes you will also have a lot of debt and be quite busy and have your personal life interfered with. Finding work is a pain in the ass and generally most of the time so is working. I would love to be paid exorbiant amounts of money to just hang out like  a Kardashian, but unfortunately my Dad was not a rich lawyer and I am not a really hot girl. So I have to deal with the cards I was dealt and that is what most people have to do.

I constantly plead on this website for someone to tell me of some field that is easy to get into, pays me exorbitant amounts of money, guarantees me a sweet corner office, and would never interfere with my personal life. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF THERE IS A JOB THAT WILL PAY ME A 100K to WORK 10 HOURS A WEEK IS NOT COMPETITIVE TO GET INTO AND WILL NOT PUT ANY STRAIN ON ME PLEASE PLEASE LET ME KNOW! Because I will drop out of law school ASAP. Until then I have chosen law school, because of the different things have done it is the most enjoyable to me.  It has worked out for me up to this point, but who knows how it will turn out.