They are not horror stories they are REAL life the same would be true if you graduated from college or an MBA program or any form of higher education getting job and starting a career will be difficult in any field period. In the legal field going to a tier 3/4 school doesn't make the road easier, but no law school guarantees you anything not even Harvard. If you want to be a lawyer you should take responsibility and accountability for yourself. The guy who posted and deleted talked about his class rank and working for some judges in law school and apparently people are supposed to be lined out the block to hire him? Uh no that is not the way it works. The one thing anyone that complains about law school employment etc on sites like JDunderground never seem to do is take any accountability for themselves. If you are sitting on an internet website complaining about how unfair everything is for you then you are going to be a shi**y lawyer, because if you can't handle your own problems how can you expect someone else to pay you to handle their problems?. The legal profession is intense it is not sitting around talking about how smart you are. People don't go to lawyers to talk about their law school experience they go to get problems fixed. Whether it be a murder, foreclosure, bankruptcy, divorce, whatever it might be these are not trivial things in these people's lives. If you tell them well I went to U.S. News 48th best school they probably aren't gonna give a sh**. Instead they want to know how their problem can be solved and if you can solve . If you things don't go your way on a step they don't hear you complain that the other attorney is being nice, or the judge is making it difficult, they want a result. If you want to be a successful lawyer whether you went to Harvard or Cooley you have to get results and if you do then you will be a good lawyer. If you don't you will be a sh**y lawyer.
Honestly, the lack of accountability law students have for themselves is simply astonishing. Any law student that graduated from an ABA school made the decision to go to law school after doing reasonably well in undergrad probably 3.0 or better. Then they do reasonably well on the LSAT at least in the top 50 percentile of people that actually took the test and this means they are reasonably intelligent people. They write a personal statement describing how successful, ambitious, and resilient they are. A law school admissions committee then says ok you can come to our school and as far as I can tell law schools don't threaten you into attending. They say you seem to be an intelligent and motivated person and if you want to pay us to educate you then we will let you. We will not guarantee a successful legal career or even that you will graduate. They assume that you have a ounce of common sense and a shred of accountability for yourself and if that is an outrageous expectation then I guess law schools are terrible evils places, but I guarantee you no law school anywhere says we guarantee you will pass the bar and get a great job. Not even Harvard would guarantee that hence Harvard does not have a 100% bar passage or employment rate. How well you do in a profession is largely up to YOU. If you want to be a lawyer then you really need to be accountable for yourself and the fact that people bi**h and moan on internet forums about how unfair it is likely the reason they are not finding employment and not their school. I would never want to hire someone to handle something important like defending my kid from prosecution, handling a divorce, suing a doctor that cut my leg off, so and so on the law is SERIOUS s***. Nobody sees a lawyer for shi** and giggles they come to get a problem solved and if an obstacle like applying to jobs is to difficult how can you EVER expect to be a competent attorney. Finding jobs happens everyday, but it is HARD! to find a job and it sucks to look for work. Looking for a job is more than sending out a few resumes a week. Anytime I have looked for a job I have been at a computer 10 hours a day applying to anything I am remotely qualifed for. I have found work in a week before, but I remember when I first graduated from college with my prestigious no name undergraduate degree it took me 8 frustrating and scary weeks, but I eventually got a good job. I never blamed my school for anything it was my responsibility to figure my own life out and I did. When I graduate from law school and hopefully pass the bar the same obstacle will be present, but it will be a little easier because if you think there are to many people J.D's out there well the amount of people with B.A's in political science is SIGNIFICANTLY higher. If you think there are no jobs for lawyers the amount of jobs looking for recent college grads with an emphasis in political science is not exactly staggering.
The OP seems to get that going to a tier 3/4 school is not going to be an easy road. Common sense tells you that and I can't imagine RWU or NESL of law saying all your dreams will come true as soon as you get a J.D. from our university. My school told me when I "asked' nobody is going to roll out the red carpet for you, but you can get a job. That seems to the case for my friends that are 3L's graduating right now. Many got jobs many did not. I am not surprised that the people that found jobs did and the people that haven't found jobs haven't. Whether or not YOU succeed is up to YOU not your school. A law degree gives you the bare minimum qualification to be a lawyer, but what you do from there is up to shockingly YOU.
To the OP one thing to be careful about is the conditions on the scholarship you have been offered. I asked questions about the conditions unlike these people at my school
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html. Wanting to go law school and realizing schools probably just hand out 50,000 dollars without some strings attached I asked questions and they told me to keep a 3.0 you need to be in the top 35% of the class in your first year. This meant I had a 65% of losing the scholarship, but I asked that question and found out. Unlike the people who again as college graduates who wrote personal statements outlining how great they were take no accountability for themselves. The law school tricked them, but explicitly saying you need to a keep 3.0 in their scholarship letter, which is what mine said. Through the grapevine and again common sense I had heard grading is different in law school and I figured keeping a 3.0 in law school is probably not the same as undergrad seeing that only 35% of the class can keep a 3.0 made that quite clear. I took accountability for myself and asked a question. So I urge you to do the same and make sure you fully understand the conditions of the scholarship and if only 35% of the class can keep a 3.0 there is a 65% chance you will lose and this is because anyone at an ABA law school is intelligent. You will need to work your butt off to keep it and even if you do work your but off you might fall short. Again that is life you take a risk and even if you work hard things might not work out perfectly.
I suppose you could go work at McDonalds never fail at anything because you never took a risk and that is the safe route. Or you can take a risk law school might be yours and it might go horribly wrong or it might go wonderfully nobody can really say, but YOU can make a big impact on how it turns out. Good luck to you!
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