<p>I’ve heard that the demand for lawyers isn’t keeping up with the amount of people going to law school. I’ve heard that a lot of people are ending up becoming the injury lawyers you always see on the cheap commercials on TV to be able to make a decent living. I have no idea if this is true or not, so I thought I’d see if anyone on here knows. If I don’t go to a top law school, am I going to have trouble finding a decent job?</p>
<p>When one says that the demand hasn’t kept up with the supply, it is mostly true for lawyers (Although the “markets” are starting to respond with a recent downturn in law school admissions).
However, not everyone works as PI lawyers for the rest of their life. Many students do take temp work and have a hard time for the first few years. Some then leave the market, and others eventually find their way into firms. If you do go to a top school or are on the law review or in the top 10% of your class you can usually find placement at larger firms. To answer your question, at first you will have a hard time finding a lucrative job in law (assuming you do not meet the aforementioned criteria), however, that doesn’t mean you will never find a good job in law; it simply means that you’ll have to spend more time looking for a way into a firm.</p>
<p>Milton: Top 10% or law review to get a top job? By “good school” are you referring to top 10 schools?</p>
<p>Yes, considering how much ls costs:</p>
<p>[Hard</a> Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119040786780835602.html]Hard”>http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119040786780835602.html)</p>
<p>[Empirical</a> Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year](<a href=“http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2007/09/distribution-of.html]Empirical”>http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2007/09/distribution-of.html)</p>
<p>Before going to law school, try to get a job at a law firm so you can see what it’s all about before spending the tuition. It isn’t for everyone.</p>
<p>1.) Depends on how you define “decent” jobs. If your standard is: “doesn’t advertise on television,” those are pretty easy to get.</p>
<p>2.) Depends on how you define “top.” There do exist law schools which are almost certainly not worth attending.</p>
<p>I assume that everyone’s talking about the T14s.</p>
<p>To enhance your chances of getting the job you want, you should do your best to determine in what city or region you want to practice, and pick a law school in that area. With the exception of the top 10 or so law schools, most lawyers practice near where they went to school, which means there will be a lot of alums of your law school nearby. Law alumni networks are typically strong and lawyers like to hire from their alma maters.</p>
<p>Second, and this should be obvious, do as well academically as you can. If your grades are not going to put you at or near the top of the class, you must do something else to stand out–if you think you want to be a litigator, participate in moot court, or take advantage of the many clinical programs law schools now offer–and try to excel.</p>
<p>Sometimes people mean Tier 1. Sometimes people mean top 30. Sometimes people include the top of Tier 3, etc.</p>
<p>It’s idiotic to say that you can’t get a biglaw job if you don’t go to a T14. I don’t claim to know where the ‘cutoff’ is, but I know it’s way lower than that.</p>
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<p>Unless you’re at the top of your class, the answer is probably yes. And there’s no way to be sure that you’ll be in the top of your class.</p>
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<p>For quite a few people, it does mean that they’ll never find a good job in law. Some of them will never get jobs with firms, or they’ll get-low paying jobs with insurance defense firms.</p>
<p>If you go to top10, as long as you’re in the top half of your class, biglaw will be banging down your door to get you to to work for them. Biglaw alone gave out ~7,000 offers from a pool of about ~42,000 JDs awarded, and most of the offers went to top10. Total number of top10 students can’t be more than 5,000 (Harvard: 550, Yale, 175, Stanford: 175, Chicago: 190, Columbia:400ish, etc. etc.). By the way, that figure gets smaller as people choose to clerk, go into public interest, go to small law, go inhouse, go into IB/Consulting, pursue a LLM, you name it.</p>
<p>“Milton: Top 10% or law review to get a top job?”
Yes, that is usually the path to get into the “lucrative” jobs I mentioned (for someone who doesn’t go to a T14). There are exceptions of course.
Americanski, I admit that some people will never get jobs in firms; however, I was only saying that you can get into a firm even if you don’t do it right after graduation (provided you are willing to work hard, are competent and that you can accept rejections throughout the process). I would not suggest it is easier or guaranteed by any means. I apologize for any confusion the statement may have caused.</p>
<p>Of course, if your last name is Wachtell, Rosen, Lipton, Katz, Cravath, Swaine, Moore, Sullivan or Cromwell, and your parents happen to be name partners at one of those biglaw firms, you can pretty much go to any law school.</p>
<p>The OP still hasn’t clarified what he means by a decent job. He might not mean BIGLAW at all.</p>
<p>Some of those lawyers who advertise on television are multi-millionaires. The husband of a friend of mine handles lead paint cases - plaintiff side. He advertises quite a bit and makes a lot more money than the top billing partner at most “biglaw” firms. He started off with a tiny 2 man firm making about what a paralegal makes in a large firm. He saw a need and filled it and the rest if history. I know, I know - that’s an exception. All this prognostication and wringing of hands about top this and that is silly. I have resumes of attorneys who graduated from top 10 law schools, law review, federal clerkship, the whole nine yards - who are having trouble getting jobs now - 12 - 15 years later. They took a wrong turn somewhere - never managed to build a client base, went in house with a high tech company that failed, etc. etc. It can be a crapshoot - just like any career.</p>
<p>If I had to borrow anything close to full tuition, I wouldn’t consider schools outside the top 14. It’s too risky. If my parents were helping me or I got merit aid, that would be a different story.</p>
<p>I, for one, only applied to T14 law schools, knowing that I would be taking out a tremendous amount of student loans to put myself through law school (not to mention the student loans I still had outstanding from college). I was very concerned about what might happen if I couldn’t find a job that paid enough to support my debt service and allow me to rent an apartment, eat, ride the subway, etc. at the same time. I was also swayed in my decision by the fact that even lower ranked/tiered law schools were almost always just as expensive as the T14 law schools, so I felt that it wasn’t worth the huge investment in time and money to get a “lesser” product. That was my thinking at the time.</p>
<p>I felt that if I didn’t get in, I would work for another year and then apply again using the same strategy. </p>
<p>This is not necessarily the way to go for everyone, but I was very comfortable with my decision.</p>
<p>sallyawp, do law schools see it as a negative thing when a student reapplies? What more does one have to offer but more work experience?</p>
<p>That’s a great question, lkf, and I don’t know the answer for certain. Most law school applications do ask whether you have ever applied to the program before. I’m quite cerain that if you have applied to a law school before, that the admissions staff will pull your old application file to determine what the reasons were for your prior rejection before making a fresh decision based upon your new application. Back when I was applying, I was told by the admissions staff at a couple of T14 law schools that what you did with that extra year or two between applications could make all the difference, and that there was no predisposition to reject you simply because you had been rejected before. I think that particularly in the situation where one applies straight out of college, but then reapplies after working for a few years (all other things being equal, like LSAT scores), with fresh recommendations from colleagues and superiors at work, there could be a significant difference in admission results. </p>
<p>Anecdotally, I know many people (more than 20) who applied to law school during their senior years of college, didn’t get into the schools of their choice, worked for 2-3 years, and reapplied and gained admission to T14 law schools, including Michigan, NYU, Harvard, Georgetown, Penn and Columbia. At a minimum, it certainly can happen.</p>
<p>As I said though, for me, there was no security, and therefore, no point, in going to any law school other than a top law school. I put myself through college and would be putting myself through law school, and there was too much at stake to risk becoming unable to service my student loan debt and suffer irreparable damage to my credit and my life. That said, I knew that I had the grades and the LSAT score to warrant admission to a top law school (though we all know that nothing is guaranteed in law school admissions), so I was taking a calculated risk. However, as I mentioned in an earlier post, this is not necessarily the right solution for everyone.</p>