How to Succeed After Law School

[sallyawp]

<p>The following are some exerpts from an article on the front page of the Marketplace section in today’s Wall Street Journal. I think that some of the perspectives offered differ somewhat from those often stated here (including my own). I, for one, do not agree with some of the advice offered in the article.</p>

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How to Cut Debt, Boost Job Prospects From Law School

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Mike Doty landed a six-figure job this fall as an associate at a big law firm in Minneapolis because of a smart move: The University of Chicago Law School graduate had performed so well at a second-tier school in Cleveland that he was able to transfer to Chicago after his first year.</p>

<p>Many of the friends Mr. Doty left behind in Cleveland graduated with no jobs and a lot of debt. “Law school is definitely a huge financial mistake for a lot of people,” he says. “Schools are asking consumers to spend upwards of $100,000 on a product, and there’s nobody out there giving them the information they need to make an informed decision.”

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Many recent law-school graduates who don’t work at big firms are struggling to pay off student loans in an increasingly tough job market. The legal sector has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2% since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according to Commerce Department data. While the top firms have prospered, leading to ever-rising salaries for new lawyers there, studies suggest salary growth elsewhere has stagnated.

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. . . [M]any schools’ data on graduate employment prospects paint a rosy picture that is sometimes less than reliable. And relying strictly on widely publicized rankings can be a mistake, experts say.

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Useful sites for prospective law students:
• <a href=“http://officialguide.lsac.org%5B/url%5D”>http://officialguide.lsac.org</a>
‘Official guide’ to American Bar Association-approved law schools, with searchable data
• <a href=“http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/stats.html[/url]”>http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/stats.html&lt;/a&gt;
ABA legal education statistics
• <a href=“http://www.leiterrankings.com/[/url]”>http://www.leiterrankings.com/&lt;/a&gt;
Leiter’s law-school rankings
• <a href=“http://www.lawclerkaddict2008.blogspot.com/[/url]”>http://www.lawclerkaddict2008.blogspot.com/&lt;/a&gt;
Ranks schools by percentage of class that gets prestigious federal appeals-court clerkships"If you go to a school ranked 35th or 40th over one that’s ranked 70th or 80th, you are by no means substantially increasing your chances of landing a high-paying job," says Bill Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University-Bloomington who studies the legal job market. For one thing, the talent pool at a higher-ranked school is generally deeper, making it harder to perform better than your classmates – a must if you want a chance at a big-firm job.

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For students aiming for the private sector, here are some tips to help identify the law schools that will provide the best job opportunities and do the least damage to your bank account.

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• Consider an in-state public law school: Unless you’ve been accepted at a nationally recognized top-tier school, where getting a job is easier regardless of your grades, think hard about minimizing cost.

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• Be a big fish: If your law-school admissions test score doesn’t qualify you for admittance at the top 20 to 30 schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report in its annual law-school rankings and your goal is a high-paying law-firm job after graduation, consider going to the school where you will get the biggest tuition discount and where you will be among the top incoming students. That will increase your chances of being ranked at the top of your class (most law schools grade on a curve), making you more attractive to employers.

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• Ask about on-campus recruiting: Many employers consider only the top-ranking students, based on their first-year grades, for interviews for the summer-associate jobs that are the path to full-time employment upon graduation. Ask the school and second-year students what percentage of the class gets interviews with the big law firms that offer the highest starting salaries. At New York Law School, ranked in the bottom half of schools by U.S. News, most big firms will interview the top 5% to 15% of students, says the school’s dean, Richard Matasar; at highly rated Columbia Law School, also in New York, the vast majority of students are courted by big firms.

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Some top schools, such as the University of California-Los Angeles, have a lottery-based system that matches students with employers for on-campus recruitment events and doesn’t allow employers to preselect students based on factors such as GPA. But some firms still won’t seriously consider offering jobs to students with GPAs below a certain level.

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• Look for transfer opportunities: Another perk for big fish: Elite schools are increasingly plucking the best students from lower-ranked schools, administrators say. The top 11 schools in the U.S. News survey had a net gain of about 260 transfer students for the 2005-06 academic year, according to data in the ABA guide, which this year reported those figures for the first time.

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Note of caution: Short of transferring into one of the very top schools, the near certainty of getting a high-paying job opportunity after a transfer starts to fade.

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• Check alternative law-school rankings: Rankings published by U.S. News are dominant in the industry, but they reveal few details about graduates’ employment prospects. Some schools greatly outperform their U.S. News rank in placing students at the highest-paying firms or in prestigious federal appeals-court clerkships.

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Brian Leiter, a law professor at University of Texas-Austin, for example, posts lists on <a href=“http://www.leiterrankings.com%5B/url%5D”>www.leiterrankings.com</a> ranging from Supreme Court clerkship placement to the scholarly reputation of schools.</p>

<p>In the spring, Prof. Henderson of Indiana and another law professor are expected to publish a new ranking in the legal trade publication National Law Journal showing what percentage of a school’s class got jobs at the nation’s 250 largest law firms.

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• Scrutinize schools’ data on graduate employment: Most law schools try to keep track of where their graduates end up and what their salaries are, but some schools are more forthright than others. When schools report that a certain percentage of their students were employed nine months after graduation, the figures can include nonlaw jobs or jobs for hourly wages. Some schools’ salary data are heavily based on their most successful graduates who made it to big firms. Don’t rely on the salary figure unless it’s based on a high percentage of graduates who reported their salaries to the school.

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And schools often include lawyers working on a contract basis in their figures, even though those jobs often don’t offer significant career-growth potential.

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• Think about location: Unless a school is nationally recognized, it’s tough to take its degree to firms on the other side of the country. In fact, in at least half of all states, at least 60% of graduates got an in-state job, according to the National Association for Law Placement, in part because most employers are more familiar with schools in their region.

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[Americanski]

<p>Which pieces of advice don’t you agree with? I think the first two (consider going in-state and being a “big fish”) are dubious, and outweighed by the location factor they mention at the end. I don’t think you should be thinking about transferring when you choose a school, since it’s so difficult to transfer to really high-ranked schools. I wouldn’t suggest that anyone enroll at a school they wouldn’t be content to graduate from. </p>

<p>I also don’t think the alternative rankings they suggest are worth much of anything to prospective applicants. But I think their advice about pressing the career services people for info about their OCI and employment stats is crucial. A lot of prospective students don’t know how the hiring process works or even what questions to ask.</p>

[cartera45]

<p>I think the “big fish” advice is sound. The top grads from schools significantly down in the rankings do very well in the job search - add law review and they can do extremely well, IF, and this can be a big IF, they present themselves as well or better than their counterparts at the top schools. Interviewing skills mean more the further down the rankings you go. At least with lateral placements, I’d rather work with a very presentable Coif grad from Maryland than a dud from the middle of his class at Harvard.</p>

[lonestardad]

<p>sallyawp - Thank you so much for quoting this article! I have forwarded it to my son who is applying to law schools. The questions to ask the career services folks are especially useful.</p>

[bluedevilmike]

<p>The other thing is that the article seems pretty clearly to argue that that’s the case outside of USN’s top thirty. In other words, it’s not a reason to choose Fordham over Columbia, but it might be a reason to choose school #64 over school #51.</p>

[Americanski]

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The top grads from schools significantly down in the rankings do very well in the job search - add law review and they can do extremely well, IF, and this can be a big IF, they present themselves as well or better than their counterparts at the top schools.

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<p>Sure, but you’re talking about the people in the very top of the class. It’s foolish to assume that you’re going to be in the top 10% and make the law review just because your LSAT was a couple points higher than the average student there. And some of these scholarships require maintenance of a GPA that might be fairly high. Law school grading is too arbitrary to take a chance like that. </p>

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Interviewing skills mean more the further down the rankings you go.

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<p>I don’t know. At the very top, few firms are going to have rigorous GPA cut-offs for your school, so interviewing well may get you an offer over somebody with better grades. At lower-ranked schools, where the offers are scarce to begin with, I don’t know how much of a GPA gap interviewing can make up for. Maybe it’ll help somebody in the top 10% get an offer over somebody in the top 5%. The important thing to remember is that the vast majority of students at those schools will never even get a chance to interview with big firms because of rigorous pre-screening standards. </p>

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The other thing is that the article seems pretty clearly to argue that that’s the case outside of USN’s top thirty. In other words, it’s not a reason to choose Fordham over Columbia, but it might be a reason to choose school #64 over school #51.

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<p>Right, though again I think location is really the big factor here. It isn’t just a matter of finishing in the top of your class, because even doing really well at a school in Kansas may very well not be better than doing slightly worse at a school in Alabama if that’s where you want to work.</p>

[cartera45]

<p>I meant that interviewing skills become more important the further down the law school rankings you go - not the GPA rankings. For example, an attorney who does well at Catholic or University of Baltimore will still need to interview very well in order to have choices in “biglaw.” Firms will forgive less than stellar interviewing skills when you graduate from T10. If a student is very confident in his or her interpersonal skills, then the risk of going to a lesser ranked school is less. I’m not saying it’s not risky, but if you’re confident that you’re smart and interview better than most, then being the big fish in the lesser known pond can work out well.</p>

[Americanski]

<p>At some of these schools, only 10-15% of the class will even get a chance to interview with big firms. So banking on good interviewing skills when ~90% of the class doesn’t get any is not a particularly good idea. A good interviewer (whatever that means for a rigid, 20-minute interview) probably won’t end up doing much better than their grades would have predicted.</p>