Wow. The blogs are ablaze about a front page article in the WSJ about the Dark Side of the Legal Job Market. An entry on the WSJ Law Blog can be found here. I’m not in a lower ranked school and I’ve got a $160K job at a top firm, but I really had no idea how bad the law market is for those in the lower tiers. It really is a scam.
What’s really interesting to me, though, are the comments in the WSJ blog. For example, this comment encourages readers to do something they love or they risk being merely competent at something they hate just to make a buck. That’s my biggest fear about going into law! This comment suggests that the author would not have gone to law school had he read this article first! Having read the article, I might not have gone to law school either. This comment admonishes readers to not pursue a career merely to get a big paycheck. I would say that is definitely true of law where the work is especially uninteresting and at the same time demanding. I LOVE this comment about how law school is a scam, mostly because the people who teach at law school are not really lawyers and therefore their desires and goals are not aligned with 99% of the people they are teaching. “Consequently,” the poster says, “these people do not care when you can’t get a job dong corporate law or personal injury (neither of them are very intellectual), and they do not care that you don’t learn anything of value in their classes.” I’ve basically felt that way about every class I’ve taken. Law professors strike me as the worst of faux-academics. They don’t want to acknowledge that they teach at a professional school because that would somehow make them not as good as real academics who went through a lot more education and training. So they go really overboard on the academic side making the rest of us feel like time spent with them is useless. It’s very aggravating!
It does suck that I’ve taken on over $120K worth of debt to get a degree for a job I pretty much know I am going to hate. But at the same time, I realize that I’m still way ahead of people in lower-tier law schools. It’s too late for me, but if you are reading this and thinking about going into law school, you should read the WSJ article first. And if you are still intent on going, get into a top 10 law school. If you don’t, and have to borrow heavily to go to school, I suggest you don’t do it. The competition in school will demoralize you, the fight for jobs will be excruciating, and the debt will crush you. It just isn’t worth it!
Hi Baby Corporate,
Got your email and have been meaning to write back for a while. My take on law school is very different from yours — I’m one of those weirdos who loves law school — but I agree that, at least at my school, classes tend to be very intellectual and theoretical. Recently one of my profs said, “So what do we think about this, as lawyers and philosophers?” Dude, I signed up to be a lawyer, but I’m not a philosopher! Still, I don’t find it to be a huge problem because we have lots of clinical and pro bono opportunities to get practical experience.
Good luck with the career stuff — I hope you find something you enjoy doing! Thanks for writing and for dropping by my blog.
-CM