Chances, questions about legal market.

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>A while ago I posted about taking time off after undergrad to work and now I'm doing just that. At the same time, I'm looking at law schools. I've decided that whatever program I enter it will be as a part time student. Whether or not I will apply to be full time is something I will decide when I get there. Regardless, I understand that because of this my options for law schools are limited. If you could be so kind as to chancing me for part time programs it'd be greatly appreciated. I've used law school predictor, but would like some other feed back on the matter.</p>

<p>*GPA: 3.23
LSAT: 168</p>

<p>*In a previous post I had my GPA at a 3.3, but this was incorrect because I did not take into account credits from college classes I took when I was in high school. </p>

<p>On a similar note, I've been reading this board a lot, especially, numerous negative posts about non-T14 schools. Exaggeration: "Don't attend!" or "The Debt <em>violins</em> The Debt." I've had a hard time finding any concrete data on the matter. However, I am able to find a lot of whining. I find that listening to personal experiences of law students, who are unemployed, under paid, or vice versa, is highly mixed, and as a result, are unreliable. Not to say they are not valuable, but I don't find them to be convincing. I'd really love to see some very recent numbers from a highly credible source about the matter. Not just some New York Times article. </p>

<p>In the event, that law school proves to be a bad idea given the current job market, when will it become a good idea again? In other words, when will attending a school that is ranked anywhere from 75-100 or any non-t14, be a good idea? Has it ever been a good idea to attend a school in that range? Or have job prospects always been dismal? In the current legal market, are the schools that I could attend worth attending? Mainly, in terms of quality of education and job prospect</p>

<p>Yeah, I know this is a real loaded question. On an obvious side note, I don't think I'd care so much about job prospects if law school didn't cost so much.</p>

2

<p>This is the graph of starting salaries from 2006, the peak of the most recent lawyer boom.
[Empirical</a> Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year](<a href=“Empirical Legal Studies”>Empirical Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year)</p>

<p>This is the proportion of law school grads who obtained jobs at the National Law Journal’s top 250 firms.
<a href=“http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/law%20schools_charts_page12.pdf[/url]”>http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/law%20schools_charts_page12.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Obviously the second graph needs to have a clerkship adjustment. You can use the BCG law report for this, but this only matters at the top few schools or so.
<a href=“http://www.bcgsearch.com/pdf/BCG_Law_School_Guide_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bcgsearch.com/pdf/BCG_Law_School_Guide_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;