The most prestigious law jobs are those lawyers who learn how to get the biggest verdicts or those lawyers who get paid to defend the big white collar criminals. You have to be good to get those jobs . It doesnt matter where you go to law school. Lots of those lawyers went to fourth rate law schools. @HappyAlumnus you keep digging yourself in a deeper and deeper hole with @Pizzagirl . Lots of lawyers who work for big firms are seen as complete jerks who only survive because they have duped big corporations into payiing their outrageous bills
Sounds like a John Grisham book!
Hmmmm John Grisham Harvard Yale law school??? Nope How about the university of Mississippi law school!!! How could that possibly happen?
I don’t even get this focus on law schools. . Agree that probably most top lawyers didn’t go to places like Columbia or Harvard. Same with top doctors, engineers, scientists and teachers, let alone top plumbers and electricians. And I know a couple of Harvard Law School grads-great peopke but so are the UVa and William and Mary law grads I know.
What was that guys name who dropped out of reed college? I think he did something with computers I think his name was Steve Jobs. What did he do with his fourth rate education?
@florida26, please show third-party studies showing that the most prestigious lawyers are trial lawyers and criminal lawyers.
The third-party polls and other surveys that I see show exactly the opposite: that the most prestigious lawyers and law firms are the large, well-paying ones that hire disproportionately from better law schools:
- Above the Law (a legal online magazine) and Vault (an employment site):
Most prestigious law firm? Wachtell Lipton in New York, a high-powered corporate firm in New York that hires disproportionately from Harvard, Columbia, etc.
- National Jurist (a legal online magazine) and Vault:
http://www.nationaljurist.com/content/most-prestigious-firms-region
Again, Wachtell is up there.
- American Bar Association publication and Vault:
Again, Wachtell is at the top.
- US News:
http://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/lfoty.aspx
Similar firms are on this list: generally large “corporate” firms. There is a “plaintiff” firm listed, so the trial lawyers that you look up to did get a mention, but that’s just one of many areas of law that are mentioned.
- American Lawyer (legal publication):
http://www.lawfirmstats.com/rankings/complete/profits-per-equity-partner-rankings.php
Again, Wachtell is the most profitable firm, and other similar firms (large corporate ones) make the most.
So, @florida26, by a variety of measures, both third-party polls and rankings based on profits, large “corporate” firms that hire disproportionately from higher-ranked schools seem to dominate these rankings–not criminal lawyers or plaintiff’s lawyers.
What’s your basis for your assertion, then? Is it from your own experience as a lawyer?
I’d have thought that the Supreme Court was considered as a prestigious place for a lawyer to work. Is it not?
Also from Above the Law-an article about fellowships and employment by law schools, which you seem critical of. The Powell and Kennedy fellowships at UVa were in place by 2002 and 2007. There is also a link at the bottom of the article to another article about the Kennedy fellowship. http://abovethelaw.com/2013/03/In-defense-of-law-schools-hiring-their-own-graduates/
I think most of us can agree that HappyAlumnus must be a gifted lawyer. He (I had guessed that the OP was female, but nobody as omniscient as HappyAlumnus could possibly have used a misnomer) has the tenacity to keep pummeling an equine corpse that characterizes all successful attorneys.
@sevmom, as I’ve stated, there have long been a few fellowships that are “legitimate” and are well-regarded. HLS has a few, and they’ve been around for a long, long time and are difficult to get. Some other university-paid jobs are very attracting; for example, Harvard hires a few graduates every year (usually from among the best students in the class) as teaching fellows and assistant professors, and it has done so for a long time, way before the recession.
UVA’s hiring of up to 59 (!) of its own graduates in the Class of 2013, to make its employment statistics look better, is a new thing and is different.
Of course UVA will put a good spin on the program on its website, and of course there are a few people who take them when they have other options, but they’re largely a cover for weak placement.
Did you even read the articles I linked to? How do you really know what particular schools are or aren’t doing and their motives? Yale also shows a large percentage of funded employment I suppose that’s a problem for you too.
@sevmom, yes, I read both the Above the Law article and the link to the UVA site that was available through it.
Did you read my post #969? That answers your partial question in the third sentence of your post #970.
Did you read my earlier article about GW, American and UVA? That answers the question in the second sentence of your post #970. Further, you can very easily look at the Above the Law article’s statistics showing the percentage of each school’s class employed by the school, and you can compare that to the description of fellowships on the school’s websites, and you can see how many people would have gotten “legitimate” fellowships versus the number who would have gotten “US News placement statistics padding fellowships”.
Yes, I have had the pleasure of reading all of your posts.
Great, it looks like we’re all set. @Sevmom, your posts are well-informed and well-thought out.
@woogzmama, thank you for the compliment about being a gifted lawyer and for being tenacious, which I am.
If people such as @florida 26 and @Pizzagirl wish to dislike people who work in certain areas of the economy, such as finance, and anything else, that’s totally fine. They should just not claim that their dislike is based on others’ assertions or the facts; they should just recognize their dislike for what it is: their own feelings, and nothing more.
I don’t dislike anyone who works in finance. I find it amusing how some of them like to think they’re all that and everyone wants to be them, but I don’t dislike them. You came on here swinging - everyone wants to be in finance, mgt consulting or law and only an idiot wouldn’t. You were clearly unaware that no one outside those fields GAS about any of them. Just like my media clients who think they are god’s gift - no one outside media cares. prestige is field specific and typically lost on those outside the field.
@Iglooo, could be a generational as well as geographic thing. People who went to college before USN rankings got big and are outside the Northeast (or where Northeasterners migrate: FL, Chicago, and now the Bay Area) and had never met anyone from Williams (if someone from my HS hadn’t gone there, I would be in that group) very well would never had heard of Williams.
This is true of LACs in general. I grew up in the Midwest so knew of the high reputations of Carleton, Grinnell, and Oberlin (and I grew up in the USN era, so knew about the WAS LACs). But when I was in HS and college, Colgate was a toothpaste, Colby was a cheese, and Bates was a motel (and actually, even after I had heard of Colgate, for the longest time, I thought that they were a local university; something like a Seton Hall, for instance).
BTW, the problem with chasing prestige for prestige’s sake is that it may lead lemmings down a less fulfilling path. For instance, law school, where kids may take out 6 figure debt to attend an elite law school (rather than paying no tuition elsewhere) and then either not get in to Big Law and be screwed or get in to Big Law and hate their lives because they have to work all the time on stuff they don’t like and have no time for anything else (80 hour work weeks take up a chunk of time) but can’t leave because they have that 6-figure debt to service.
@Pizzagirl, your repeated diatribes against finance in particular, and lots of other things, make it clear that you have no warm feelings towards people who work in finance. It’s a common claim to actually like someone despite repeated actions and words that show a fundamental hostility towards “their kind”.
Again: I NEVER stated that “everyone” wants to be in those fields. I NEVER stated that “only an idiot” wouldn’t. Again, please read–and please read carefully, and do not make up your own views and attribute them to me.
(And why do you think of your media clients like that? Do they know that you view them that way? If someone in media is, say, the CEO of NBC Universal, people outside media certainly could care!)
@PurpleTitan, not sure. People in my circle are from all over including South. They all knew LACs. Not just top ones, williams, amherst, swarthmore and pomona. They knew franklin marshals, kenyons. That was long ago in the 80’s.
To me, the real danger of seeking prestige for kids at this age is it may force them focus away from self-exploration doing what looks good more than what fits them. Instaed of exploring what excite them, thinking what a proper havard or mit should do. They are still growing rapidly. If it hinders their growth, it can’t be good in the long run.
@Igloo, to your point in your second paragraph, the numerous threads I see on this site by even pre-teenagers, asking what they can do so that their application to Elite School X will be accepted when they are 18 are sad–people at that age should focus on learning what they love, and college will fall into place.
dstark, talking about neurosurgeon, have you seen this article?
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/before-i-go.html
Wants to make you cry…