General

[TREYisRAD]

Are there any lawyers on MCB? I'm not asking about legal advice, but rather about the career itself. I was wondering if the pay/lifestyle of an average lawyer was good, as i'm strongly considering becoming one "when i grow up"

What are the advantages/disadvantages, and whats the general path you take throughout the career?

[oldschool]

oh you should get some good answers to that

:lmao:

[brycelarson]

My wife is an attorney. The job market is pretty tough right now. Think long and hard about the debt before you jump in. Do you know any lawyers?

[Harbinger[TG]]

Originally Posted by oldschool

oh you should get some good answers to that

:lmao:

The oracle shall come from the heavens

[John Satclaire]

I'm an associate at a fairly well known NYC firm, and will answer questions by PM for you if you like.

Drum appears to be a fairly seasoned trial-type lawyer, so there's another legal world for you to explore, too.

As an aside, it appears that being an attorney strongly correlates to owning large numbers of Vectors. Hardly proves causation, but still . . . .

[Stuffy]

Wheres Drum?

[JKR]

Originally Posted by TREYisRAD

What are the advantages/disadvantages...

Keep in mind a fair number of them either sell their souls to Satan or have it surgically removed to prevent it from interfering with their job.

[big jim]

Become an engineer instead. We have more friends and people aren't surprised if we act a little odd.

[John Satclaire]

While I still prefer to answer specific questions via PM (questions about my background, practice, or Firm), what Trey has asked is essentially the same generalized question as in his post here.

So, knowing we have other Esqs. on here (and I hope none of us are big enough dbags to actually ever put that after our own names), I'll post generalized answers here--and hopefully elicit concurring and/or dissenting opinions therefrom.

Full disclosure: I'm still in the office now, working sporadically on a memo and some research while waiting on a partner to turn around a draft of a brief, while waiting for my damn Seamless Web to show up. This will be an ongoing draft, too. My point of view is from someone who more or less went straight through from undergrad--I'll let others opine on the benefits of working between law school.

The questions are: does the average lawyer enjoy a

good lifestyle

and is becoming/being a lawyer

'worth it'

There are no useful answers that actually respond to these questions, but they're sorta in the ballpark--if you'd asked how much the job is like Law & Order, or about how much money you could make, I'd try and steer you into a job at Cadwalader just out of spite. Not really--they won't be around by the time you graduate high school, much less law school. But I digress.

First: what grades you made in high school, what courses you took while there, what your SATs are, where you went to high school, and what you did in your free time . . . all matter. Sorta.

This because they determine where you go to undergrad, which sorta kinda matters for where you can go to law school, though nowhere as much as you might think. It also comes up in interviewing (I've done a couple seasons of that from the employer side of the table, and it can come up as a positive if it's a well regarded institution and the UG major was something serious), but again not as much as anyone who bothered to frame their Ivy League UG degree would want to believe.

Since your MCB profile says you're 17, and I dimly recall being in my junior or senior year of high school around that age, it stands to reason where you're going to undergrad is more or less out of your control at this point. Maybe not the specific school, but probably the general category. One piece of advice before moving on, to the logistics of going to law school: law school is very, very, very expensive. And a J.D. from what is bluntly called a "Third Tier Toilet" or TTT will cost about the same as a J.D. from Harvard, Stanford, or Yale--upwards of $50,000 per year, as of this year. Very good state schools that are in the top ten or top 14 or however you want to rank law schools are not really cheaper: take a look at UVA or Michigan. So, absent a scholarship, you're looking at around $150,000 in law school debt.

If someone offers you a solid undergraduate degree for a free ride/substantially reduced debt, and you really want to be a lawyer, you should strongly consider taking the money. If mommy and daddy are paying your way, so much the better.

So, you're a freshman at some college or university, and you want to become a lawyer. Where you're in school, what grades you get while there, what you do for extracurricular activities, how polished your personal statement is, and whether you're a "prelaw" major . . . all totally irrelevant in the face of one three digit number. Your LSAT score.

Unless you are an Under Represented Minority, a 4.0 double major at an Ivy League undergrad, or decide to have a full (and interesting/possibly useful in law) career before law school . . . that number between 120 and 180 will determine where you go to law school and how much you have to pay to go there. So, best to start practicing now: LSAT Prep Materials

And no, I'm not ing kidding. This is a standardized test, and it will not change by the time you're ready to take it for real. The skills it tests can be taught, and it doesn't matter if it's you or a $1,300 Kaplan course doing the teaching. Either way, the method of prep is the same: do it, do it again, and do it some more. No matter what, always do the questions under realistic time constraints. The LSAT is not a hard test, it is just a bitch to get done in the time you have.

By way of showing you how important the test is to your legal future: a 175 with a 3.5 at a state school of little to no national reconition and one semester of interning at a pro bono services office allows you to go to just about any law school in the top ten, and to get a 50% scholarship at the bottom half of the top ten. A 157 for a more desirable candidate (double major, 3.6) from one of the top universities in the country . . . gets you no scholarship, a J.D. from a third or fourth tier school, and a job paying less than $50,000 after a lot of searching. And that's only if one does very well at that lower ranked school.

Call it a profession obsessed with prestiege--but it matters for where you can go and what you can do. If you can't break a 168 on the LSAT, realize that the upper reaches of the profession (BIGLAW, federal and the upper level state judicial clerkships, teaching) will pretty much be out of your reach. Yes, you can go to a low ranked first tier law school and do these things--but you'd better be top of your class, and even then it's not assured. I like to think of it as a bright side: you can get a reality check anytime you want, just by taking a sample LSAT. Others hate the arbitrary nature of it: they make perfectly wonderful lawyers, much better than some of us who can ace standardized reading comprehension and logical analysis tests in our sleep, but they're shut out of a lot of career paths before they even set foot in the door of their first 1L class.

Let's assume you are very good at, or you get very good at, the LSAT. About applying to law schools.

Your application process is a royal PITA; as Drum said, full disclosure is mandatory. The law school will not bother to scour your application--but they keep it on record for those who will, the bar examiners. After you shell out $150,000 for your J.D., you will have to apply to a bar (and pass the bar exam, but that's the easy part). Those people will find every single thing you've ever done--regardless of whether it was sealed, expunged, purged, or an administrative typo that was instantly corrected. The actual act can be just about anything, up to and including murder--disclose, and you'll be fine. Conceal a parking ticket, even on your law school application, and you'll never be admitted to any bar--anywhere--and you can wipe your tears with the $150,000 tissue you call your J.D. Sorry, no refunds. It's the intent that matters to these people. Do not ever think you can lie as a lawyer. It's the one thing we cannot do.

Where to go to law school? There are those who would say it depends based on what you want to do for a career. Bull****. Go to the best law school you get into, tempered only by your appetite for risk in return for money from a lower ranked school. Does this mean that if you get into Harvard and Michigan, and you hate Harvard, love Michigan, and are offered $25k a year at Michigan to boot that you must go to Harvard? No. But realize that the average Michigan student and the average Harvard student do not have equal opportunities in the legal world. Will you do well enough at Michigan to make it not matter that you didn't go to Harvard? Hard to say for sure. If you can, then you're $75k better off with the same inital opportunities. If not... the $75k less in debt may matter less.

The more important issue is that, below a certain cut off, what the average student can do with a J.D. is limited by where they go to school. Maybe it's the US News top twenty law schools--maybe the top fifty. Regardless of where it is, if you're not able to go to a law school in that upper echelon, you don't make $160,000 + $45,000 bonus to start. Full stop. Will you be a John Edwards and go on to riches as a small time plaintiff's lawyer? Possibly. Will you start at a firm where the first year associates make little and the senior associates make the same as or more than their peers at the highest ranked BIGLAW firms? Could be. But the easy pipeline to a job that both has superior exit opportunities and lets you eliminate your law school debt is most assuredly not there below some fairly fluid cut off. What may not be clear is that there is a huge disparity between starting salaries among lawyers. Check Above the Law - A Legal Tabloid - News, Gossip, and Colorful Commentary on Law Firms and the Legal Profession and The Volokh Conspiracy - - for some posts somewhere in their archives that talk about this... but basically, there's the ~$150k starting salary, and then there's something waaaaay below that... there's not really any kind of middle ground right out the gate.

What about law school, being a lawyer? The answer is basically the answer to every legal question ever asked: it depends. That either is "hard work" would be a pretty basic assumption, but I honestly had more fun in my first semester of law school than I'd ever had before in my life. I also drank more, stayed out later, and a whole bunch of other things--and I wasn't exactly a quiet library dweller in high school or undergrad. To be fair, I probably also slept less during 1L than ever before (at least until I started working at my Firm). I have no idea if this is a good lifestyle for you or if these things would be worth it for you--you probably don't really know, either. Most young associates in BIGLAW would, if honest and introspective, not be able to tell you the answers for those questions about themselves. The nice thing is that, from where I sit, I can go into any other avenue of the legal profession if I want to change directions. That's not true for all lawyers, nor will it be true forever even for me, but the ability to apply one's degree and experience to a wide varity of new paths is something often touted in favor of being a lawyer.

If you're smart enough to really make it as a lawyer, you could also do investment banking or hedge fund work. So don't go into law for the money--it's just not the way to go. Outside of the flyover states, don't go into it for the social prestiege--we're all Michael Claytons here in BIGLAW, even the very best of us (I work with them, and while impressive in their professional accomplishments, these $2-3 million dollar a year earning partners are at the very bottom of the upper class food chain here in NYC). And you probably shouldn't go into it to save the gay baby whales for jesus (or whatever cause or ideal you'd prefer to put here)--you will become bitter and disillusioned. You should only do this job if you'll love the work.

What that is varies widely: my GP friends develop nations by negotiating foreign capital investment there, in places with no real legal system of which to speak (investing a few billion dollars in Sakhalin Island is a scary thing, given what Gazprom will do to you); I litigate everything from commercial contract disputes to the truly arcane stuff nobody's ever dealt with before, and sometimes I advise our tender GP friends as to how to not screw up a deal while trying to make it happen. Others spend their lives in court, be it as AUSA, public defender, pro bono crusader, trial litigation practice, or simply hang out the shingle private practice.

We all share a job where we are the ones who make sense of the factual state of the world--often getting to understand new and fascinating things like the history of the molybendum business, or the history of Dartmouth College--and tell people what those facts mean in light of past history and current law. We read, we comprehend, we think about, we analyse, we debate, we chew over, and then we write in a clear, persuasive manner. Try it, maybe as a paralegal. If you like it, it may be a good career for you--regardless of where you can go or what you can do.

[Drum]

When I am in juvenile court, as I was today, I like to point out to my clients that I, too, was a juvenile delinquent. On occasions, I still play one on weekends.


The law school app was quite intimidating and I am glad that I got the good advice to be as absolutely candid about my sordid young life as I could possibly be at the time. I can recall attaching several pages to the question regarding prior criminal record, etc. and each of the "chief law enforcement officers" of my 3-4 domicile states reported in with criminal records for that part of the application. I did the same thing for my bar exam application and no-one ever once asked me about any part of that which I had confessed.

As it happened, we were all wowed with a story that was probably a (sub)urban legend. A female law school applicant had concealed a minor juvenile matter on her law school entrance app, which event she subsequently revealed on her application to take the bar exam. The state bar examiners, according to the story, noted the discrepancy and ultimately decided to permanently bar the young woman from taking the bar exam in the state of Pennsylvania for her lack of honesty.

True? Who knows, but I am glad I told the truth.





That, plus, it is kinda fun to refer back to those years when I am dealing with crest-fallen juvenile delinquents who think their lives are over and their parent(s) who often assume that their child is a sociopath because he sneaks out at night.

Gives them both some modicum of hope that the delinquent will one day grow up to be a slimy attorney at law.



I, too, eschew the "Esquire" moniker. To me, an "esquire" is nothing more than one of those asss-kissing king lovers with curly-toed shoes and feathery boypimp hats.
Every time I ever had a secretary (who wasn't my mother), it would take me months to break them of the habit of adding that pretentious nonsense to the end of my name.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I am a lawyer.... sometimes.



To the OP, I, too, will volunteer to respond to any specific queries you may have via our illustrious pm system here.

Good luck,
D