<p>i think HYS law students wouldn’t find it that big of a challenge to find a job. i mean unless they bid only on DC market (which is really a dumb move on anyone), have horrible grades, or personality/ interviewing skills are subpar, they should land something.</p>
<p>“I mean, bluntly I don’t think T2 or T3 schools are even worth the three years, even on a full ride.”</p>
<p>There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of medium-sized firms that do great work for small businesses and indviduals who can’t afford (or don’t want to) white shoe firms. There are probably hundreds of thousands of attorneys from second and third tier schools who make very respectable careers out of working at small and mid-size firms that hire primarily from local law schools. </p>
<p>lev,</p>
<p>Obviously, it’s harder to be young and in the legal job market now than any time recently. Graduates from all over the spectrum are finding themselves disappointed with the results law school is offering them thus far. As with any major investment, it’s important to have realistic expectations and a plan to meet them.</p>
<p>If you are interested in career at second tier schools, identify some candidate institutions and do some research. Look at the numbers the school posts about career (keep the salt handy). Check out some mid-sized firms and see if they have associates from the target school. Email them. </p>
<p>You aren’t real likely to get a biglaw job out of a second tier school, but the T14/biglaw recruitment cycle is not the alpha and omega of the legal economy. In fact, it’s not necessarily the best place for everyone, anyway. I finished law school five years ago and probably half my friends that went to large firms have left for smaller shops, in-house gigs or to pursue non-legal careers. </p>
<p>This website (and most like it) are bad places to come for this kind of advice. Well meaning as everyone might be, we can’t know enough about you to know if you’d be happy in a given career. What’s more, these sites have a certain amount of tunnel vision toward the most competetive, visible sectors of legal practice. Get out and talking face to face with people doing what you want to do instead.</p>
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<p>That’s absolutely true. But there’s three things you have to ask. (1) How well does that apply to young grads over the next few years? The fact that many successful alums exist isn’t necessarily a harbinger of potential right now. (2) How many attorneys didn’t make it? It isn’t absolute numbers that matter, but percentages. (3) Even among the ones who will make it, what would they have done with their lives otherwise? Might they have been similarly successful?</p>
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<p>The problem is that these firms generally do little to no entry-level hiring, and are obviously doing even less now than before. It’s not easy to get jobs at most of them, and the salaries often make it difficult to pay off $150K+ in student loan debt.</p>
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<p>Of course they hire right out of law school. What do you think happens to students that don’t get biglaw offers? Far, far more law students start at mid-size firms than land jobs through OCI programs. And they are hiring right now, although at slower rates. There is no evidence that mid-size firms have suffered more during the downturn than large firms.</p>
<p>No, they don’t pay like large firms (usually), but the salaries are high enough to manage that debt load over 30 years. Plus, BDM’s assertion was that going for FREE was STILL not worth it.</p>
<p>BDM,</p>
<p>1) Worse, for sure. I did agree that this market is bad and that this should be taken into consideration. However, I have litigated recently against new hires from smaller firms, so it’s still happening.</p>
<p>2) It’s a risk, and it’s clearly less of a risk for a Harvard grad. My personal perception is that dedicated student that understands second tier placement is about networking more than grades will find a job. Again, research a reasonable expectations are key. If we all took the horror stories as deterrents, no one would attend grad school.</p>
<p>3) In my esteem, it’s obvious that most arts or social science BAs would do better to be at a mid-size firm starting at $50-90K than most careers available out of college. I don’t think many people whose college record qualifies them for a T2 school are heading straight from school into $40K jobs, but if they are, your point is taken for them. My argument isn’t that T2s are right for everyone, but rather that they are patently not a “waste of three years” for a lot of people that decide to attend.</p>
<p>thats why i stick with the notion of attending grad school that leaves you with the LEAST amount of debt possible(unless of course you get into a T14 then it becomes a super difficult decision) If you graduate Making $60-80K with ZERO Law school debt you’re living life just fine.</p>
<p>The problem – maybe it’s improved now – has been that a ton of law grads are having trouble finding <em>any</em> work at all. The horror stories are replete, although admittedly probably not representative.</p>
<p>The question is: can you find work which is worth the opportunity cost of forgoing three years of work? And I think, too often, the answer is “… maybe not.”</p>
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<p>A lot of them get temp jobs that don’t provide benefits, have little to no opportunity for advancement and look bad on a resume. Some of them get non-legal jobs they could have gotten without a JD (indeed, some go back to the jobs they had before law school), or volunteer at non-profits in an attempt to build up marketable experience. Many of the full-time jobs they do get are at miserable insurance defense or personal injury firms that pay $60K or less, which is pretty tough to survive on when you have over $150K in debt. And, of course, many of them can’t find any work at all. </p>
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<p>They often are not high enough to comfortably pay off $150K in loans while living in a big city, where most legal jobs are. Extending repayment to 30 years could result in paying a total of something like $350K or more for a JD-which is insane-assuming you could even get the lender to extend it that long, which won’t always be possible, especially for private loans. And again, most students at second-, third- and fourth-tier schools can’t even get those jobs.</p>
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<p>It’s far from obvious that someone making $50K at an ID firm with massive debt is in a better position that somebody who took an entry-level position out of college and has been working for three years.</p>
<p>Law School tiers are thus: </p>
<p>Tier 1 = top 50.
Tier 2 = 51-100.</p>
<p>Tier 3 = 101-150</p>
<p>Tier 4 = all the others after that. There are 250 law schools, but not all are accredited.</p>
<p>You can find good jobs from tier 3 schools. I would stay away from tier 4 schools. </p>
<p>Law firms know the LSAT scores of every law school. The law professsion is a credentialist society. They want someone with credentials they can brag to clients about. Its sort of a sick form of marketing. </p>
<p>Its very difficult to hang out a shingle and make money. Many fail. </p>
<p>The top law firms paying the top salaries are becoming fewer and fewer and they only want students from the very top 25 law schools and only students who are Law Review and/or top 10% of their law class. Its a meat grinder.</p>
<p>I would NOT take on gargantuan debt to get a law degree. Even from Harvard that puts on enormous stress in your life once you graduate and likely imperils your ability to enjoy life through a healthy relationship, buying a house or car etc. or taking a vacation. The law profession is changing by the day. Many law firms are now outsourcing work to India! </p>
<p>But in short, tier 1 and 2 law graduates who graduate HIGH in their respective law class (top 25% or better) will find good jobs. Proceed accordingly.</p>
<p>Zap: In fairness to gopher, he was responding to a statement I made that even debt-free, low-ranked law schools are usually not worth it.</p>
<p>i guess whether it is worth it to go to a lower T1 school or higher up T2 school depends on the individual - I know a couple of kids who started at a T50 school, with no scholarship, who managed to get top 10% grades during 1L and both transferred to Columbia and Chicago law, respectively. Both ended up getting offers from V100 firms as 2Ls at their new schools. </p>
<p>On the other hand, they told me that there were quite a few people at both Chicago and Columbia Law, who started their law school there, who struck out. (some had poor grades, bad interviews, bad luck etc)</p>
<p>I think that even going to top 10 law school is a big gamble in this economy. And, I find it kinda weird that the kids who got top 10% grades at top 50 law schools got like 3 biglaw offers while many who started out at Columbia et al struck out. It seems that this whole law school thing isn’t as clear cut of a choice anymore.</p>
<p>My friend recommended that the best way to maximize your investment/reward ratio is to attend a decent law school on high amounts of scholarship, and ace your 1L. </p>
<p>I guess my point is that in the long run, attending a top 50 law school on scholarship may turn out to be a better investment than attending a T14 school with no scholarship. This is so because obviously, many below-median people at T14 schools aren’t getting biglaw. Someone correct me if I am wrong on this…</p>
<p>As a senior in college, I obviously don’t have the best knowledge on this subject, however.</p>
<p>BDM,</p>
<p>I think we agree that choosing law school, especially now, is risky and that (at least in terms of money or breadth of opportunity) going T14 is better than going second tier. In financial terms, at least, our OP is probably a good example of your point about losing three working years for great uncertainty.</p>
<p>zap,</p>
<p>Like I said in my original post, just flipping through my outlook account I could post links to almost a hundred firms with 10-20* attorneys primarily made up of second tier graduates. I personally know at least a dozen attorneys who started at firms of that type in the last two or three years. BDM’s statement, which seems to suggest that a second tier school is rarely if ever right for ANYONE under any circumstances, overstates the risk second tier students </p>
<p>The idea that anyone who’s not getting offers at biglaw is just sifting to temp, non-legal work or unemployment demonstrated the vastly polarized view of the legal profession that plagues this site and others like it. It’s flatly wrong. Take the OP as an example; there is only one (lower) top tier law school in the tri-state area. Do you really think the Washington state market for legal work can be met by the top tier grads that move to Washington? What about Montana or the Dakotas? </p>
<p>The idea that the average second tier law student graduates with 150K in debt is similarly bizarre. Who needs to spend $50K a year for living expenses? Even setting aside that I’m arguing about FREE LAW SCHOOL, I don’t know very many people that finished with that kind of debt. A lot of your math seems to rely on this massive debt load, but I went to a top tier in an urban area and still finished under $80K. Even if you only assume that the attorney makes $10K more a year than his career projection out of undergrad AND took out $150K, you’re looking at roughly a wash in financial terms over a 30 year career.</p>
<p>*Looking through, to come up with that many people, I’d need to include firms with 40ish attorneys that hire a mix of top and second tier.</p>
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<p>OK, but what about the other ~90,000 people who have graduated from non-top tier schools over the last two or three years?</p>
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<p>That may overstate the risk, but a handful of people getting jobs at small firms that probably don’t pay very much isn’t evidence that second-tier schools are a good investment in general.</p>
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<p>The legal profession is massively polarized. That’s what prospective students fail to grasp when they look at averages, or just a non-representative sample of successful grads. Starting salaries are bimodally distributed. According to the NALP report on the class of '09, about 12% were unemployed and almost a quarter of those employed had only temporary work. And that’s for all graduates; the numbers would be much worse if you excluded top schools. </p>
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<p>No, but how much of the legal work not being done by top tier grads pays well enough to justify paying $30K+ in tuition for Gonzaga or Seattle University?</p>
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<p>The average student doesn’t, but plenty do. </p>
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<p>That’s nice for you, but I’d like to hear how someone is supposed to pay the $40K (or more) that a lot of schools in urban areas charge without racking up $150K in debt.</p>
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<p>Not really, since their loan payments would mean that they’re actually taking home significantly less for years after graduating. Which means that they’re not able to save as much (if they’re able to save anything at all). That’s probably going to result in a bigger disparity in net worth than could be made up by 10 or even 20 thousand in additional salary. And that ignores the non-trivial risk of default, which can screw them financially for life.</p>