He’s killing it actually - and an internship after first year is fantastic.
He should be very proud of his accomplishments!!
He’s doing what he wants - and big picture, he’s going to end up great in life because he’s such a go getter.
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She might get in touch with the local bar association to see if they offer any kind of programming/suggestions for high school students who want to learn about the profession.
As we’re talking about financial aid here, I do want to note that (at least as of when I went to law school), law students, even though they’re adults, are nevertheless required to provide their parents’ financial information to qualify for financial aid. I assume that all of the parents here are fine with that, but it came as a big, disqualifying shock to me at 22 years old.
Is that true even if you work a couple of years after graduation?
Stops being true when student is 24 or older, I believe.
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some do ask for parent’s income for need-based aid, but few law schools offer need-based aid; most is merit. (As noted above, Harvard, Yale and Stanford are need-based only.)
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He will not get any benefit of the doubt. Frankly, those majors at Alabama aren’t that rigorous. If it was Engineering, maybe a little. The law schools will all know how he compares to other applicants from Alabama. Also, remember that LSAT is generally more important than GPA.
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That is correct. For the most part, admissions wont’ care. There is a slight allowance for engineering or pure science types as they can be more employable in IP. (And jobs after graduation is a factor in rankings and ABA reports.)
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I realize your son wants the highest GPA possible, but I also think that we’ve lost perspective if anyone is going to look at a > or = 3.8 GPA and be worried about law school or grad school reaction.
He’s doing just fine! I agree with others that the LSAT is going to be very important but I don’t think any school is going to look at a 3.8 and say, “meh”.
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Thanks Bee! Yeah, I tend to think he’ll settle for the 3.8, knowing he’s getting a lot more out of the school than if he dropped all but one major and took a bunch of electives.
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3.8 is going to be 75th percentile or above for lots of law schools. An LSAT also above 75th percentile at law schools is going to get him into many law schools with merit.
Don’t know if he will want to stay at Bama but they have top 30 law school that his 3.8 and a good LSAT will do him very well there.
I guess the point is a 3.8 GPA is a very good GPA for law school admissions.
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For law school, I believe it is 27 or older, at least it was a few years ago.
Some schools, such as Penn, require parent financial information up to age 30.
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I asked a question b4 not answered but I’m curious from the attorneys out there:
Is technology - AI or Chat GPT etc or even offshoring a threat to much of the back end work being done ? Does it diminish future career possibilities.
I know that software, for example, has impacted estate attorneys.
Thanks for your response.
Offshoring was big for a while but I think the consensus is it ended up not being great except for certain specific sorts of tasks.
What is called e-discovery long ago went past the volumes of material where it was realistic in big cases to have a human review every document. So tools have long been in place to help search, sort, tag, prioritize, and so on documents. Similarly, tools to help do legal research have long been in development. All that will likely continue to evolve and improve, but in the end, so far, it still ends up with humans reading the most promising documents, cases, or so on.
Using AI and such to entirely write legal documents has also so far not worked out great. Like, there was a notorious problem with AIs making up authorities to support their arguments. Very persuasive on the surface, and the sort of thing that will get you disbarred when a judge’s clerk tries to look it up.
But like in any writing field there is discussion about how to use it in ways that might work. Who knows about the future, but again for now the humans have to be on top of the process.
In general, early days yet, but nothing totally unprecedented. Frankly, it always seems to me as fast as these helper tools develop, the volume, scale, and expectations for legal tasks are increasing too. So it is more just about maintaining equilibrium, setting current standards and best practices, and so on, not entirely eliminating categories of important legal tasks.
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Appreciate the response.
It’s hard, in most any fields, to know what is impacted by technology or offshoring.
When I read stock research, I see a lot noted where it came from (not the US). So one never knows - and what was yesterday doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same tomorrow.
It’s my concern for all workers - including me.
e-discovery with a very intelligent keyword search has to reduce billable hours by the thousands in big cases. (Thinking of my 1st year associate self in a basement document storage room filled with hundreds of boxes of pages looking through them one by one. For weeks.) It was painful for the lawyer and expensive for the client.
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True, it has to have been a huge time-saver.
And this must’ve been addressed a long time ago by partners who did not want to see those hours slashed and their earnings affected.
I wonder what the answer was? Did the cost per 8 minutes, or whatever it is, go way up?
Adding: I do wonder about the human aspect though. Certainly, keyword search would have narrowed down the relevant documents to look at, but to be honest I did find some stuff that turned out to be very relevant buried in a random email or notes to a board meeting that might be missed by an AI keyword search. That said, as the associate buried in the basement tomb, I would have loved an AI assistant.
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Same here. In the early 2000s I read 500 boxes of paper production (and that was mostly pre-filtered stuff the lawyers didn’t understand). I guess the bill for document review alone was in the high single digit to low double digit millions of dollars. I don’t get the sense that companies expect to spend quite as much on a single case nowadays, but perhaps the increased volume of cases offsets that.
But nowadays the volume of production has increased dramatically and I strongly suspect some of the most important stuff (eg handwritten annotations or abstruse technical material) regularly gets missed.
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So the sheer quantity of documents has also exploded. If you have the human resources to review a lot of documents, you often still can even if that is a fraction of the total.
But yes, some clients have pushed back against massive doc review bills.
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But is all this a risk to the students of tomorrow - that’s sort of what I was asking