<p>Bar Association Sharpens Questions for Law Schools About How Their Graduates Fare <a href=“Bar Association Sharpens Questions for Law Schools About How Their Graduates Fare”>http://chronicle.com/article/Bar-Association-Sharpens/130039/</a></p>
<p>My personal case may be unique but I would still recommend law school, even in this environment, to graduating students. I would especially recommend public state flagships as they have over and over shown the best value: low debt combined with good placement.</p>
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What’s new. There are way more PhDs than positions in academia or research. They are currently even too many engineers as nobody is hiring. The legal profession is nothing different.</p>
<p>I graduated from law school at the depth of the recession and nearly all grads from UConn I know now have jobs in the legal profession. Some started as contract workers doing research at $50/hr, others worked for the public defender’s office waiting for government jobs to open. </p>
<p>Year in, year out, MOST grads from UConn get good legal jobs.</p>
<p>-15% get hired by firms with more than 100 attorneys
-25% get hired by smaller firms
-10% get jobs in state or federal government
-10% get judicial clerkships
-16% get hired in-house by businesses</p>
<p>That’s more than 3/4 of the class right there. And that’s in a bad year (2010). So you don’t need to be anywhere close to the top 10% to get a job or even a good job. </p>
<p>When I look at the economics, public law schools are a bargain. UConn grads average $60K in student loans which translates into around $650/month for ten years at current rates or around $10,000/year pretax. It is obvious that most students will get more than a $10K bump in income from a law degree. </p>
<p>I have two daughters. </p>
<p>D1 is now in medical school and wants to be a neurosurgeon. She will probably accumulate north of $250,000 in debt by the time she is done. Even with type of debt burden she should be fine. </p>
<p>D2 is a sophomore in college who has no interest in the STEM fields. She is now studying economics which at least has some utility in the corporate world. What career could I possibly suggest to her where she would have a good chance at finding a job and with a higher return on investment than law? Investment banking? That opportunity has been decimated far more than the legal business. Unless she really wants to work at a big law firm, I would not advise her to borrow $150,000 for law school, even if she can get into a top law school. If she wants a clerkship, a job as in-house counsel or work for a regional firm she will do just as well at UConn with far less debt. With her economics major, if she can get some corporate experience before going to law school, even better. She will be that much more marketable. I am suggesting she learns Mandarin so she could take advantage of the fast growing legal business with China. She is already doing internships during the summer in college to get some corporate experience. I have zero concerns about her ability to do well with a law degree.</p>
<p>Despite all the naysayers, I believe that a legal education remains one of the best career options for many graduating college students, especially for the masses graduating with liberal arts degrees. It remains by far the first choice destination of Ivy League graduates, even in this economy. They can’t be all stupid. I also believe the advantages of a T-14 or even T-10 law school are vastly oversold. What matters after a few years is your experience and competence, not what law school you attended. The job market for graduates with law degrees may be tough, but the market for those without one is far, far, worse.</p>
<p>The attorneys in our state start at MUCH lower starting salaries than the ones quoted in this thread, for those who are lucky/connected enough to snag a legal job. Many long time attorneys are switching to virtual firms and practicing out of their homes while just having a conference room. It is VERY tough making it in the current market.</p>
<p>I have known a young attorney who was a prosecutor or public defender for her day job (I believe she earned about what starting teachers do) and had to be a waitress at nights & weekends to help pay her loans! Would definitely investigate the starting salaries & demand in the area where the law school hopeful plans/hopes to practice before deciding to take on debt to go to law school. Know MANY burned out, unemployed and underemployed attorneys.</p>
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<p>I just don’t believe those numbers. Maybe they are stretching by including contract/temp positions, positions with lower level courts that are often dead ends, etc.</p>
<p>The prestige of your law school can actually be very helpful down the road, surprisingly. It is NOT just about what you have done, especially in the in-house world. I have gotten interviews and offers largely based on the law school I attended 35 years ago. Doesn’t make sense to me, but it’s a fact. I guess they think I must be smart…</p>
<p>I think maybe CT might be less than representative of the rest of the country as far as getting a legal job. What Cellardweller reports is just not the reality in the majority of the US.</p>
<p>Sometimes you can never outrun your transcript either. Most of my clients require law school transcripts, no matter how senior you are. Several of them are now requesting undergrad transcripts. I’m working with an attorney now who graduated magna undergrad and from an “Ivy” law school. He has been with a household name firm for several years. My client, a corporation, declined an interview because he has two C’s on his law school transcript.</p>
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<p>These are the actual reported numbers for 2010. The high/low/median salaries are also reported so you can’t fudge the jobs.</p>
<p>'It remains by far the first choice destination of Ivy League graduates, even in this economy. They can’t be all stupid."</p>
<p>No, Ivy grads are not stupid…but they don’t look anything like the majority of law school hopefuls. Not only are they mostly going to the T14, most have them have minimal to zero undergrad debt, and many of them have parents covering some or all of their LS tuition. Then they are significantly advantaged in the 1L job hunt vis-a-vis their classmates due to their prestigious undergrad brand. They have a high-end alumni network that reaches into every desirable employer even if they go to a lower-ranked law school, which can make a real difference down the road. As a group, they’re heavily advantaged relative to other LS applicants with the same GPA and LSAT, and their choices reflect that.</p>
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<p>Either the client is an idiot or the Ivy grad is totally incompetent.</p>
<p>In a note, the 2010 statistics state “The employed category includes any known employment (including permanent, temporary, full time, part time, legal and/or nonlegal.)”</p>
<p>More lies, damn lies and statistics.</p>
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<p>Totally false. My class at UConn (2009) was loaded with Ivy grads from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown and grads from Duke, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, MIT… Even at Harvard the average LSAT score of pre-laws is only 163, hardly enough to get into a top-14 law school.</p>
<p>EMM1, I thought you were done already from a prior post. You seem to want to persevere in providing misinformation. Every one of your arguments regarding UConn has been refuted and you have absolutely no first hand knowledge to contribute.</p>
<p>The salaries are actual salaries whatever the position classification. A temp doesn’t make $100K.</p>
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<p>The client may be an idiot but the grad is definitely not incompetent. The client will never find out because they won’t even interview him because of the transcript.</p>
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Actually, sometimes they do for the period of time they are temping.</p>
<p>Folks, the legal employment market is nowhere near as rosy in CT as Cellar makes it seem. Every hedge fund in Greenwich- every REIT- even stalwart corporate users of outside counsel like Xerox and Pitney Bowes and UBS and RBS in Fairfield County has cut back dramatically, and many of the medium sized firms that served them have to retrench in response. There are many young lawyers doing contract/temp work- even paralegal work- trying to wait out the bad economy. </p>
<p>But government/public interest law? Fugedaboutit as they say over the bridge…</p>
<p>This time I am done. Believe what you want.</p>
<p>“Even at Harvard the average LSAT score of pre-laws is only 163”</p>
<p>It’s been 165 or 166 in each of the last 10 years. Regardless, the fact that someone took the LSAT doesn’t make him a future 1L. Due to both snobbery and excellent advice, my classmates who didn’t get in to the T14 largely chose not to go to law school at all or decided to reapply after a couple of years (when their work experience would make them more employable relative to their law classmates). The average LSAT of H undergrads who actually enroll in law school is a lot higher than the class-wide average. The modal law school for H undergrads in my class was Columbia, followed closely by HLS.</p>
<p>Blossom:</p>
<p>Do you live in Fairfield County? I do. </p>
<p>Bridgewater Ass, is down the street from my house and they are the largest and the most successful hedge fund managers in the world in both 2010 and 2011 with record profits. No retrenching here. Many other hedge fund and PE groups in the area have had record results this year.</p>
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<p>How many more college grads out there with not even the prospect of contract/temp work flipping burgers and who most likely won’t find good jobs even when the economy returns?</p>
<p>I’m a graduate of Columbia Law, practiced in one of the major NYC firms for several years, then at three different NYSE-listed corporations in Fairfield County, ending my career as general counsel. I can assure you that the only UConn Law grads whose resumes would have been considered by any of those employers would have been those on law review–even in the headiest days of hiring. Average graduates of UConn law have zero chance at one of the “glamorous” jobs law students enter law school hoping for. They will have a hell of a time finding work that will be both fulfilling and remunerative. None of them start law school aiming to do real estate closings on a per diem basis, or to temp for crappy pay and no benefits, but that will be the best legal job they will get. And yes, if they want to pay off their debt, they will indeed be living in their parents’ basements. Cellardwellar is doing a grave disservice by advising students to attend law school. It has been a recently disclosed scandal that many law schools manipulate their employment data to sucker applicants–I’m sure UConn is no different.</p>