Any advice for an undergrad freshman?

Graduate School Law School
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<p>Yeah, early, I know. Better early than too late, from what I've learned in high school. I was wondering if anyone could give me any tidbits of advice and whatnot.</p>

<p>I know the importance of GPA and LSAT, but anything else would be appreciated. Any websites that give good advice to undergraduates, reliable rankings, etc.</p>

<p>I go to a good school (Cal) so I don't think it's impossible for me to go to a higher-up law school.</p>

<p>One question is that I've heard its nigh impossible to ever land a job with a well-established firm if you're not in one of the top 14 schools. Just for clarification, do law firms invite the top law school grads to work for them, or is it like a normal job application process?</p>

<p>Thanks a lot for any advice shared.</p>

2

<p>it is a normal application process I believe, except maybe if your top in your class at Yale or something.</p>

<p>While Cal is a great school, it is also difficult and known for great deflation. The name Won’t make up for a lower gpa. If you want to get into a top law school, you still need a 3.8, 3.9+</p>

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<p>Not really. At your typical top 14 law school (and plenty of other law schools too), rising 2Ls interview for law firms (in the fall) for a summer position for the summer between their 2L and 3L years, with the intention of securing a permanent offer after graduation. These interviews are arranged through an “on-campus interview” week, where hundreds upon hundreds of employers descend on “campus” (usually it’s just a hotel nearby) and conduct screening interviews. At most T14 law schools, students bid for specific screening interviews, and whom they end up screening with is determined by lottery. These screening interviews typically last 30 minutes, at which point the interviewee also provides the interviewer with his or her 1L grades (process is a little different for UVA). If the interviewer gave a thumbs-up to the interviewee, the interviewee will be invited for a callback interview at the firm; callback interviews typically involve half a day to a full day at the firm, interviewing with four to five attorneys, ranging from junior associates to senior partners.</p>

<p>Now, according to rank and region, different schools get a different amount of employers for their on campus program. At my law school (Columbia/NYU), we had about 400 employers come to campus to interview a class of approximately 450 students. I’d imagine this number is the highest for any law school, since we’re in the center of the biggest legal market in the nation (well… I think maybe Georgetown’s is a little bigger). By contrast, I remember Michigan’s being south of 300, and Berkeley being above 200 (please correct me if I’m wrong). The number of employers who participate in these programs drops precipitously as you go outside the T14.</p>

<p>Clearly, students at schools where employers come to recruit them, and where students can pretty much select the employers with whom they wish to interview, are at an advantage compared to students who have to mail in a resume, cover letter, and transcript. In a sense, that’s what a T14 law school gets you (among other fantastic things).</p>

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<p>Not really true. Really, anything above a 3.5 is good enough for a T14 law school. Of course, the lower the GPA, the greater the onus on the applicant to attain a higher LSAT score. But, as a matter of principle, a 3.5 is too low only for a handful of top 14 law schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Boalt); coupled with, say, a 174, the applicant would be competitive at any other school.</p>

<p>(Note: I just picked a 3.5 out of the air; one of my classmates got in with a 3.0, though his/her LSAT was north of a 178).</p>

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<p>I know Cal has that thing with grade deflation (whether it’s notoriously vicious for it I’m not too sure), but I’ve heard that some law schools recalculate GPA and somehow end up giving us (Berkeley students) a higher GPA.</p>

<p>I don’t know if this person is credible or not, perhaps he was just trying to make himself feel better as he was applying to various law schools while telling me this.</p>

<p>Anyways, are there any websites or books I should look into? Thanks so far!</p>

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<p>This is false.</p>

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<p>This chart I’m posting is now obsolete – that is, it is no longer in official use. Once upon a time, it was used by UC Berkeley’s law school to adjust GPAs in the manner you suggested. </p>

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<a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm[/url]”>http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>UC Berkeley received no grade adjustment. I’ve done a little bit of math on my own, and this chart roughly accords with my intuitions.</p>

7

<p>I would advise you not to go. I say this as someone who went to law school and was reasonably happy with the decision. What’s changed is that law school has become ridiculously expensive and all of the loans are now non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.</p>

<p>So if you go to law school and then decide you hate being a lawyer, you’re pretty much completely screwed. If you can’t find a high paying job or decide you hate your high paying job, you’re screwed.</p>

<p>I would consider going only under extremely limited circumstances, such as </p>

<p>(1) You are from a wealthy family (or are wealthy yourself) and can just pay the tuition without incurring debt;</p>

<p>(2) The military is paying for your law school;</p>

<p>(3) You are willing to hang a shingle straight out of law school AND your law school is offering you a full ride scholarship AND that scholarship will not require a ridiculously high GPA to maintain; </p>

<p>(4) You have your heart set on becoming a public interest lawyer AND you are admitted to a law school with a solid loan repayment program; or</p>

<p>(5) You are admitted to a well respected state school and will be paying low in-state tuition (if any such institutions still exist in 4 years).</p>

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<p>Otherwise, I would advise you to forget about law school. There are plenty of paths to an intellectually challenging and decent paying career which don’t involve taking on massive amounts of non-dischargeable loans.</p>

<p>JMHO.</p>

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<p>i wouldn’t be quite as negative a lskinner (and mind you, i am a former attorney who was not happy with my career decision), but i would strongly urge you to really make sure you know why you want to be a lawyer – lskinner is absolutely right about how expensive it has become. i was fortunate in that when i discovered i hated being a lawyer, i did not have a mountain of law school debt to keep me tied to my well paying legal job.</p>

<p>too many students aspire to law without really understanding what it means to be a lawyer. i wanted to be a lawyer from the time i was in high school. i took every “law” course i could in college – which in NO way prepared me for law school, but rather give me a false impression of what the study of law would be like and encouraged an interest in law without helping to give me a clue as to what being a lawyer really involved. nevertheless, i actually enjoyed law school as well - i found it incredibly intellectually challenging. i absolutely hated the practice of law – and that was after working long enough to be in a position to actually have responsibility on cases.</p>

<p>most college freshman don’t know what it really means to be a lawyer – they also have no idea about the huge number of other careers out there in the world. college is a time for exploring interests you may not have even been able to realize you had when you were in high school. use that time to expand your horizons, not narrow them by a focus on law. </p>

<p>but if you think law is something you have to consider, talk to as many lawyers as you possibly can – find out what they like and what they hate about their lives; find out what they do on a day to day basis and how long it took in their careers to be at the point at which they are doing that; find out how they balance career and family life. don’t just take “it’s good” or “i’m happy” answers at face value – really try to get to the facts underlying their conclusions about their life so that you can judge if you’d reach the same conclusions. i knew lawyers who claimed to have balanced career and family life who never saw their kids during the week (and also worked on weekends). i knew one lawyer who always talked about how great it was that he could take an entire month off over the summer to go on vacation with his family – he spent the entire day while “on vacation” on the phone with the office, having us fedex papers back and forth to him (this was back in the dark ages before email :wink: ).</p>

<p>there is always a lot of focus on these forums about how much lawyers make and about working at top firms. the economy has drastically changed things in the legal market lately – my guess is it’ll take a while to recover, and in the meantime there is now a glut of lawyers who don’t have the types of jobs they’d thought they’d have when they decided to enter law school. and those salaries come with a heavy heavy price tag in terms of hours – no matter how hard a worker you think you are, you can not imagine the type of hours that can be expected at a law firm. at one firm i worked at (a small office of a large national firm), partners talked about one secretary saying, she was really great, but if you kept her working overnight more than once or twice a week, it really affected her performance during the rest of the week – i never heard them worry about similar effects on the associates.</p>

<p>as for your question about having to go to a top school to get a job at a “well established” firm – i guess it depends on what you mean by a “well established” firm. if you mean a biglaw firm – ie large prestigious corporate law firm – yes, they mostly hire from top law schools. there is some leeway depending on geography – some firms will hire from top local law schools. also someone who is truly top at a lower tier school may have a shot, but it is hard to predict. but you can have a small local “well established” firm in the sense that they have been around awhile a with an established client base – their hiring practices are more likely to vary - i worked at a small well respected specialized law firm after i left the national law firm – they also liked hiring people from top tier schools, but simply didn’t have the same access to those grads as biglaw firms did. so they also hired from lower tiered schools – but someone who went to the same lower tiered school as several of the partners had a much greater chance of being hired than someone from a similarly tiered school that was not represented among the partnership.</p>

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<p>I really do think that anyone who is a college sophomore or lower really has to think about their motivation for law school, which is why I think these threads borderline on ridiculous. Part of why I tend to cooperate with inquiries is that it’s the nature of the game for a forum dedicated to undergraduate admissions: By necessity, overachieving people will come to other parts of the forum, seeking to add some predictability to their lives once the college aspect has been fixed and settled.</p>

<p>Moreover, I don’t think “aspiring” for law school is bad: It makes you get a great GPA, and one of the reasons I had the goal of law school in my mind as an undergraduate was, hey, if anything, I keep all my doors open.</p>

<p>But those aren’t really reasons for going to law school; they’re just reasons for justifying the goal of going to law school when you don’t really know what you want to do with your life. You should use the time in fulfilling your aspirations as an undergraduate by reflecting deeply on the legal system, what it means to be a lawyer, the more practical aspects of getting a legal education (i.e., finances, etc.), and the more onerous aspects of the job. People who enter college (or leave high school) dead set on Harvard Law School or Yale are really doing themselves a disservice, because it definitely leads to tunnel vision: You might be neglecting other career paths in which you might be happier, and in which you might lead a more fulfilling life.</p>

<p>About midway through college, I realized that maybe aspiring for Harvard Law School wasn’t the right thing for me; I loved my major so much, and I wanted to devote my life to it. I wanted to earn a Ph.D and to become a professor. In the same vein, I took graduate courses, and decided to test this path out. I despised law because it seemed like a superficial, materialistic discipline. I desired something more substantive.</p>

<p>The reality was that, once I was in those graduate courses and I began to participate in discussions, I realized that I couldn’t be that graduate student, arguing the most nuanced point about an argument concerning a theory that’s a criticism of another theory; in the end, I knew it wouldn’t be fulfilling for me.</p>

<p>So I went back to the legal track, and investigated how I could combine the positive aspects of being academically-oriented with the positive aspects of being a professional, an attorney. I realized that, in law, there are many ways to beat your own path and find your niche, ways that are intellectually fulfilling and provide me with some pragmatic satisfaction. Granted, I’ll probably be slaving away at a big firm before I get to do any big stuff with a lot of responsibility, but that’s the way it is for anything in life: It’s a rite of passage. You can’t start running; you have to take baby steps. While I might despise the fact that I might be doing document review for a while, I’ll be working under the (perhaps naive) belief that it’s all leading to something better (though not necessarily as a partner at a big firm).</p>

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<p>I think that’s good advice, but you need to keep in mind that when most practicing attorneys went to law school, it was far less expensive than now, even taking inflation into account. Further, if those attorneys took out private loans, those loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy.</p>

<p>Thus, most practicing attorneys had options which you will never have. </p>

<p>Here is an excellent post on this subject:</p>

<p>[The</a> Legal Dollar: The Changing Cost Of Law School And The Impact On New Lawyers](<a href=“http://thelegaldollar.blogspot.com/2009/10/changing-cost-of-law-school-and-impact.html]The”>The Legal Dollar: The Changing Cost Of Law School And The Impact On New Lawyers)</p>

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<p>I think the difference is that when you work at a law firm, you are working at somebody else’s convenience. Psychologically, it makes a huge difference if you can leave when you feel tired; stay late when you feel you need to work late; stop researching an issue when you feel no more research needs to be done; plan in advance on spending a day with your children without having to worry about being tagged at the last minute; and so on.</p>

<p>College students and law students generally work at their own convenience without anyone micromanaging them. So even if they work hard, they are not experiencing anything like what it is to work in a big law firm as a junior associate.</p>

<p>JMHO</p>