Regret Attending Law School?

NYULawyer
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:33:58 +0000

Many are discontent with their choices of having gone to law school, since these folks would’ve been better served not going in first place.

In my view, law school is only worth it if all of the following conditions are met:

1) You get into at least a top 14 law school, or a strong regional school in the state in which you want to practice with large merit scholarship,

2) You have no other decent alternate career to fall back on: your B.A. in history or poli sci ain’t getting you any decent employment prospects. If you can get a 60k/yr entry level job in any field, seriously re-think law school and at least work for a few years and think more.

3) You are mentally prepared to drop out of law school, in case your grades after 1L year don’t make the cutoff for the legal employment of your desire, or early 2L year when you strike out at OCI, thus being able to minimize law school debt.

In my view, law school, if you are at the right school and get the right grades, can open doors that otherwise wouldn’t exist for many. At my law school, close to 55-60% of students my year managed to get something from OCI and scored Biglaw or other desired type of legal employment, salaries usually starting at 160k/ yr.

Compare this odds to the job prospects of my undergrad - I attended a top 15 college and majored in Economics. From the recruiters I’ve talked to that came to info sessions on campus, most Investment Banks or top consulting firms (such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, et al) typically received ~250 applicants from my college alone, each year. Out of that pool, usually around 10% were invited for FIRST ROUND interviews. After all was said and done, each bank would end up giving offers to 4-5 students from my school, each year on average. Not exactly high odds that someone can receive an offer from finance/ consulting employers, even coming from a top-level undergrad. I know dozens of kids from my Ivy undergrad who are still unemployed, 2 years after graduation, despite having 3.5+ GPA. Yes, the job market really is that brutal.

Compared to those figures, getting top employment with legal employers gives students much higher odds of success - again, provided that you are at the right school to begin with. I would argue that outside of Top 14 law school - your odds of “success” goes down significantly and combined with the cost of law school, one should be extremely careful and think things through before making the decision to enroll in law school.

Law school is basically like a lottery. Harvard Law = 70-75% chance of success, Columbia/ NYU = ~60-65% chance of success, Georgetown = ~40-45% chance of success, Fordham = ~20=25% chance of success… a tier two law school = ~ 5-10% chance of success, and the list goes on.