Law School Discussion

Yeah, you're right.  OP didn't want to do PT, but it sounds like that could be the best option for someone with an established lifestyle and financial commitments. 

I do want to re-emphasize that OP should be prepared to take unpaid summer jobs, even though it would be tempting to take a temp or PT job in his old field.  I am always shocked by the people who are willing to put $50k, 100k, or 150k into law school but not take out an extra 3k to get through the summer in an unpaid legal gig. People on another thread decided the poster was a troll, but I do know 3Ls who have graduated with no relevant legal experience.

This is actually not uncommon at all, at least in my part-time program, and something I was surprised about when  I got here (as at the time I went the traditional route moving to go to law school, planning to get summer work ect, I was really surprised at how many of my classmates, the majority, only applied to my school and only PT with no thought to moving or going FT or applying to other schools even though their LSAT/GPA could have gotten them into top schools).

About half of my class will graduate with no legal experience or clerkships or clinics or anything. About half quit their pervious professions during law school and either switched to legal work FT or switched to the fulltime program. The other half kept their original jobs (many because they had families and financial obligations that required them to do so, but a significant number of my classmates also had higher paying jobs than lawyers; MDs, commercial pilots, executives, business owners ect.).

Some of them plan to use their JDs in their current work, or have panned it out so they have enough money to take the pay cut and enter the legal profession in a starter job after school. These people have had to find other than traditional routes (OCI or summer clerkships) to land legal jobs, but it can be done, it just takes networking and other ways of making contacts when you can’t get experience over the summers. 

I agree, given the OP’s situation keeping their job and going PT might be the best bet, but if they go that route they need to think about alternative ways of finding employment over what works best for FT students. 

Wow.  Where to start?

If the maximum amount of loans won't do you and your wife, then you need to have her work full-time in a high-paying job.  If you have credit card debt or car loans, then you should pay it off before you go to law school. If you have an unsustainable mortgage payment, then you should sell your house (even at a loss).  Otherwise you should wait to go to law school or not go at all.

By the time you realize that you cannot go to law school full-time and do the things you need to do (journals, moot court/mock trial, legal writing assignments, reading, prepare for the job search), it will be too late and you will have screwed yourself over with bad first-year grades.  At this point in your life, you need to view law school as an investment unless you have money to throw around (which you obviously don't). If you don't commit to it and do the things that you need to do to get a good legal job, you will be putting your wife through a bunch of crap, forgoing pay for three years, spending a lot of time and effort for three years, and have a lot of student loans for little or no return. That's a bad decision.

Re: working. You do not work and "hope the school doesn't find out!"  You would be better off, once accepted, going to the dean and asking for a waiver of some kind. You should generally assume 1) that anything that seems ethically sketchy falls into one of the broad catch-all provisions of your honor code, 2) that people will always find out if you do something bad in law school, and 3) that you will not be able to weasel out of it. 

ABA Standard 304(f): (f) A student may not be employed more than 20 hours per week in any week in which the student is enrolled in more than twelve class hours.   

Here's the ABA Interpretation: Interpretation 3

04-6
A law school shall demonstrate that it has adopted and enforces policies insuring that
individual students satisfy the requirements of this Standard, including the
implementation of policies relating to class scheduling, attendance, and limitation on
employment. 

So, every law school has the responsibility of implementing a policy limiting employment.  Is it likely they'll find out? Maybe not, but you will have to list all of the employers on the bar application. I imagine it's possible that someone familiar with the rule could raise it as an issue.  That would be a crappy time to find out that you f'd up. But the real question is whether you want to start off law school planning to knowingly break the rules. And I hope not. So, cut down the hours to 20 (still a bad idea, IMO), cut down your lifestyle, or don't go to law school.  Sorry. Those are the options.

Honestly, your circumstances don't sound very compelling.  You are not particularly special in the having of children and a mortgage before law school.  People have done it for decades.  The real problems seems to be that you just don't want to live like a student and give up the lifestyle you've grown accustomed to.  But law school makes you, at least for the first year, necessarily a "poor grad student." If you don't already have money, then you need to get with the stereotype of the poor grad student.

I live in a very nice 2BR/2BA apartment, have nice furniture, eat at nice restaurants once or twice a month, don't think twice at the grocery store, go on vacations (generally within a few hours of here, but do it up 5-star), have DVR/cable, decent TV, rack up crazy bar tabs, get my hair done at $150 a pop, bought a Wii, go to concerts, go out to movies when I feel like, and wear mostly designer clothes (that I tend to get on sale, sure). And that is all before I even touch my summer money, which is already dedicated to major life expenses.

I'm sorry if your kids will have to share a bedroom or something else horrible or your wife (horror of horrors!) has to work and help support the family for a measly three years while you're in school, but you can live a very nice life on the law school loans + a working wife + <20 hours of work for you.  And if your grades don't suck and you landed a market 2L job, that's an extra $40k. It sucks that you were homeless, but my standard of living as a "poor grad student" is so far above "homeless" or poverty that someone saying it's impossible to live on it is pretty shocking. With two kids, your wife may not be able to get the $150 hairstyles that I can, but you can survive without exactly scraping the bottom.  The only way that you will force the family to live a crap lifestyle while you're in law school is if you continue on with a mortgage you can't afford instead of an apartment you can afford.  The idea of your children "suffering" because you can't afford a Wii for Christmas makes me laugh. My family was poor until I was in middle school, and I hardly even noticed.

I did like the he/she, or someone venturing a guess, but I decided to come out on the very important issue of hair costs. 

Quote from: Stole Your Nose! on January 14, 2009, 10:11:11 AM

I did like the he/she, or someone venturing a guess, but I decided to come out on the very important issue of hair costs. 

and now i also have some idea of what kind of girl you are. 

High maintenance that thinks she's low maintenance? Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.....