<p>Being a corporate attorney≠being a high school student. I never thought I’d have to say that…</p>
<p>B0okshelf-- sorry but you are just showing that you have no idea what it means to work as a biglaw attorney – much much more is involved than the shear number of hours in a day.</p>
<p>under your current schedule –
- i bet you know well ahead of time when school holidays and vacations are and you can plan leisure activities accordingly,
- i bet you get outside during your long day,
- i bet your various activities involve many different types of mental and physical activity on your part,
- i bet you don’t have to keep track to a tenth of an hour how much time within that long day is actually spend on productive work and separately categorize every separate thing you do,
- i bet when you have a research assignment for school, for the most part, you decide when you feel you’ve done enough research,
- i bet you don’t ever have to worry about a teacher or principal coming up to you in the spring and telling you that despite all your hard work, you’re simply one of the X number of students who have been selected not to return for the next school year,
- i bet when you are sitting in history class, your math teacher never runs in and tells you to drop that right now, there’s a major math problem that needs your immediate attention whether or not there’s a history assignment or test due soon,
- i bet the “practice” you mention is for a sport/sports you have voluntarily chosen to participate in – and honestly, the physical activity is probably a nice break after the academic day,
- i bet when you do a school assignment, you worry only about how correct or thorough a job you’ve done – not whether some outside “client” will tell the teacher to have you redo it to see if you can come up with a different answer,
- i bet you don’t have to worry about an “upper classman” telling you what assignments to do, reviewing them before they go to the teacher, and possibly taking a good deal of the credit for them,
- i bet for the most part you know your school work load well enough ahead of time to plan your schedule for what to get done when, without too many “surprise” assignments destroying those plans.</p>
<p>i’m sorry – if you think 70 hours a week as a hard working hs student is the same as working 70 hours a week as a biglaw lawyer, you are just very seriously mistaken. please do not consider law as a career unless you spend the next few years learning a lot more about what it means to be a lawyer (biglaw or otherwise). you have a lot to learn – don’t take that as an insult – as a hs student there is no reason you would know more about life as a biglaw attorney – just please recognize how much you don’t understand yet.</p>
<p>Lest anyone forget, a biglaw attorney actually works a lot more than 70 hours in a week in order to bill 70 hours.</p>
<p>I should also point out that bookshelf’s hours add up to 65, and that getting ready in the morning and commuting don’t count, so it appears closer to 55. Just for the record.</p>
<p>I agree with unbelievablem. I too had a busy schedule in high school. Between part-time work; class; “practice,” and homework, it was a lot of hours . . . . but nothing at all like BIGLAW.</p>
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<p>12) He doesn’t have to worry about being expelled from school just because he gets less than an A- on a few papers;</p>
<p>13) He gets to do entire assignments - both the interesting parts and the unpleasant parts. So he isn’t at the bottom of a food chain where each person delegates the most unpleasant tasks down the chain.</p>
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<p>Bookshelf, imagine it’s the first day of track practice and the coach tells you that you won’t be running in any races for the next year or two. Instead, your job will be to set up hurdles and retrieve javelins for 2 or 3 hours a day while the senior athletes are practicing and competing. What’s more, if you don’t do a great job and show a good attitude while you do it, you will be cut from the team and expelled from school.</p>
<p>Funny, most times I see Biglaw compared to high school rather than the other way around…</p>
<p>More seriously, though, it’s interesting that a lot of what people seem to believe distinguishes high school obligations from biglaw obligations is that the former is voluntary.</p>
<p>To bring the conversation full circle, in some sense, the **** you shovel as a biglaw junior IS voluntary … if you don’t have debt. One way to reduce the pressure one feels as an attorney is to make one’s job less a matter of life and death and more one of many ways to earn money.</p>
<p>That’s why, even accepting flowerhead’s apprasial of opportunity cost for the sake of argument, I so strongly advocate taking big scholarships on quality of life grounds.</p>
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<p>Or, as I mentioned in post #79, to earn your law degree from Harvard Law or especially Yale Law and rely upon their (absurdly) generous LRAP programs as necessary. Surely any Harvard or Yale Law grad can find a cushy, low-stress law job at some low-end “Small-law” firm that involves very little work, or heck, may not even require being in the office very often at all. The job obviously won’t pay much, say, $35-40k, but the LRAP umbrella covers your debt payments. I suspect that many Americans wouldn’t mind being paid only $40k a year for a laid-back job.</p>
<p>We’ve been talking about this a lot around here. Basically the LRAP is devastating because it (essentially) prohibits you from getting married to anybody who earns any significant income. Most of my classmates aren’t willing to make that kind of a leap – so, from what I can tell, most of us seem to be operating as if these programs didn’t exist.</p>
<p>Even for those of us who actually plan on taking such jobs.</p>
<p>^So don’t get married? Seems like a simple enough answer. And don’t live in a state that allows for automatic common-law marriage. The tax benefits from filing jointly would be far outweighed by the loss of LRAP. This assumes that you don’t mind “living in sin.”</p>
<p>The biggest problem with LRAP is the fact that it appears to apply to graduates of exactly two law schools.</p>
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<p>This seems implausible, since, as others have mentioned, admissions decisions are made before any financial info is submitted, and since schools don’t make need-based grants, anyway (or make very, very few of them). If Stafford loans aren’t enough (and they usually aren’t), students take out private loans. And the Stafford lifetime limits for undergrad and graduate loans are separate, so I’m pretty sure the amount you borrow for undergrad doesn’t impact the amount you can borrow for law school.</p>
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<p>Or they could just do doc review, which doesn’t pay as much, but is probably the best option if you’re looking for a job with flexibility. Starting your own practice seems like a lot of work (especially if you want to generate ~$40K in profit right off the bat) and firms that pay so little don’t tend to be really flexible, or particularly impressed by an HLS degree. </p>
<p>Of course, this assumes that anybody goes to Harvard with the hope that they’ll be able to make just enough to get by while “gaming the system” to collect a benefit that amounts to probably less than $20K a year. Generally speaking, I think most people would rather take a higher income (which nets more money even losing the loan repayment) than spend an entire summer backpacking through Europe.</p>
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<p>And yet, even knowing this, thousands of students every year choose to enroll at schools other than Harvard or Yale. Incredible.</p>
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<p>Well, let me put it to you this way. I know software developers and IT workers who never even graduated from college at all - and a few barely out of high school - who make close to $40k a year in profit as independent contractors. Nor are their skills particularly difficult to obtain. It’s not that hard to learn how to configure a Cisco router or an Oracle database. One guy, who started out knowing nothing, simply spent a summer of dedicated study right after graduating from high school, earning a slew of IT certifications. He’s still not old enough to yet legally drink, yet he’s now making clearly making more than $40k of profit a year as an IT contractor. </p>
<p>If those guys can do that without even a college degree at all, I find it hard to believe that a Harvard or Yale Law graduate couldn’t start a practice making merely $40k of profit a year. Is IT really that much more lucrative than law? {If that’s really true, then maybe we should all become IT workers. Since when has installing and administering a bunch of routers and computer servers paid better than legal work?} </p>
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<p>Oh, I strongly disagree. Those firms would likely pay you well just to be able to leverage the Harvard name for use in marketing materials.</p>
<p>Consider this law firm, that uses the deliberately provocative marketing slogan: “Wouldn’t you rather hire a Harvard-educated lawyer who won a record $5.3 million verdict?” Interestingly, of the 3 lawyers of the firm, only one of them actually went to Harvard. </p>
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<p>That then surely means that plenty of other unprestigious, low-tier law firms would surely pay you a nominal fee just for the right to leverage the Harvard or Yale brand. Let’s face it. Regular people who are the potential clientele for the low-tier law firms don’t really know what the top law schools are. They’re swayed by marketing. </p>
<p>Consider this story. I know a girl whose grandmother involved in an accident for which she eventually found it necessary to sue somebody for hundreds of thousands of dollars. When that girl proposed that a colleague of hers, who graduated from Stanford Law, be hired, her grandmother complained, saying that she wanted a lawyer who graduated from “a good law school”. </p>
<p>To be clear, the girl was able to convince her grandmother that Stanford Law was indeed a ‘good law school’. But how many other times does a similar scenario play across the country where nobody is around to convince a potential client of the merits of law schools that lack laymen’s recognition? Let’s face it: for most regular people, the only 2 law schools that are truly recognizable as “good law schools” are Harvard and Yale. </p>
<p>So I return to my basic thesis: somebody with a Harvard or Yale Law degree can surely find some low-end law firm that would surely pay them simply for the right to leverage the Harvard/Yale brand with respect to their own clientele. And if that lawyer was actually willing to work for that law firm - although perhaps not work particularly hard - then that’s all gravy. I suspect that many law firms would easily pay $40k a year just to be able to convince grandmothers across the country that they employ lawyers who went to “good law schools”. </p>
<p>Lest we all forget, law is an entrepreneurial, client-driven business, where many of the clients are just regular people. The most successful lawyers are not necessarily those who know the most about the law, but rather those who can generate business by attracting and retaining a large clientele. Whether we agree with it or not, the truth is that Harvard and Yale are magnetic brand names for regular people in a way that other law schools - even Stanford - are not. </p>
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<p>I’m sure most would. But that’s not the point. The point is that they know they could step back. The Yale/Harvard LRAP umbrella is available to provide safe harbor from debt repayment if you need it. Contrast that with the debt incurred at other schools that do not offer comparable LRAP programs, in which now you truly can’t step back, as your debt repayment schedule will still be in force. </p>
<p>There’s a world of difference between taking a high-stress job knowing that you always have the option to parachute away and sequester yourself under the LRAP aegis at any time, and taking that same high-stress job with no escape hatch at all. Even if you never intend to pull the ripcord, the fact that it is available provides invaluable option value simply from a psychological standpoint alone. </p>
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<p>Which speaks to GopherGrad’s point, which is that perhaps students should not be so willing to dive into debt to attend those other schools.</p>
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<p>I too had the same response: don’t get married. Or at least, don’t get married until either your entire debt has been retired via the LRAP program, which probably takes around 10-15 years after graduation from law school, or until you are ready to take a high-paying law job and hence dispense with the protection of LRAP. I suspect that most LRAP participants do not use the program for the entire possible duration, but rather just for a few years during which they’re starting their own law practice or are burned out from biglaw and just want to relax by taking a low-paying but low-stress law job as I’ve been describing.</p>
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<p>I agree, but that only emphasizes how important it is to gain admission to those two schools. A big dropoff, in terms of future psychological stress, occurs beyond those two schools. Like I said, sure, perhaps you probably won’t ever use the Yale/Harvard LRAP, but the mere fact that you could is a source of great relief. </p>
<p>Yale’s LRAP is clearly the most generous LRAP of all - in fact, ridiculously so - for not does it offer the highest maximum eligible salary bracket ($60k), but, as far as I can tell, you don’t even need to take a job in the legal profession. So if you’ve been run completely ragged by biglaw, you can simply quit to tend bar at some tropical resort or some other enjoyable, albeit low-paying, job without having to worry about educational debt repayments.</p>
<p>sakky – so you are recommending that someone work their butt off in college and on the lsat so that they can get into hls or yls and become a lawyer and there after hang out their shingle or allow some small firm to parade their ivy degree around so that they can limit themselves to $40,000 a year for, what is it 10 years(?), during which time they will have to tell any significant other not to plan on marriage? wow, that really does sound attractive.</p>
<p>to game the system as you propose, the lawyer has to earn enough to live, but not enough to exceed the school’s salary threshold – mighty fine tightrope for a solo practitioner to plan on – will he/she be able to control costs sufficiently to make the money they plan on? or will an unforeseen expense have them eating ramen noodles for months? </p>
<p>your comparison to your IT friends has several flaws – lawyers come out of hls or yls knowing absolutely nothing about the practice of law. the types of clients that a solo practitioner is likely to get don’t usually like paying for hours spent learning on the job. your solo practioner will also have a lot more overhead than those IT guys. will he do all his own clerical work or hire someone? either way there are additional costs – either to pay someone for clerical work or because the lawyer can’t bill out all the time he’s spending doing non-lawyer work. and that solo practitioner straight out of school had better have pretty good legal malpractice insurance.</p>
<p>as for finding a law firm that will pay him to do minimal work just to say they have a hls or yls grad – first of all - realize that for a smaller firm, paying someone $40,000 isn’t chump change – the lawyer is going to have to earn his keep – but again, he doesn’t know much yet and a smaller firms clients are going to be less willing to pay for his learning time. those lawyers in the small firm who are really working hard are going to resent that hls or yls grad pretty quickly if all he/she has to offer is the name on their diploma. do you really think the firm will get clients by saying, meet John Smith, he went to HLS, and then not have John Smith do anything for the client? </p>
<p>that example you cited of a firm that advertised based on the harvard law degree – i think the size of the record verdict he won was probably at least as important a factor in that ad. advertising “we have a brand new hls grad who knows nothing about practicing law” just won’t carry the same pull. as for large judgements – if a lawyer takes contingency cases (something many solo and small firms do because clients like it), it can be hard to predict what year he/she will hit the jackpot and what year will have the work without any payoffs-- that type of fluctuation isn’t good for gaming the loan repayment system, is it?</p>
<p>smaller firms and solo practitioners often get their clients by other people referring clients to them – a happy client leads to more client. you don’t make happy clients if you don’t know what you are doing or if you are determined to leave by 5 pm and not work weekends or disappear for months at a time. its a big part of the reason why lawyer have such rotten hours to begin with – its a service industry. and to the extent you deal with the courts, it also has real deadlines. under your scenario, do you really expect the hls or yls grad to be able to say, sorry i can’t get that done because otherwise i may earn too much money? </p>
<p>in your example of the grandma questioning if the standford grad was a good lawyer – she may have been convinced his school was good enough – but if he didn’t in fact have the experience or the willingness to put in the necessary time to do the job right, i doubt grandma would have told her friends to use him -and her granddaughter probably would have regretted the referral and never made another.</p>
<p>maybe they can work doing legal research only or document review – simple hourly work with no client responsibility or time commitment. do you really think that people who go to hls or yls have as their career goal to do such work for 10 years? and then do what after the loan is retired? suddenly be competent to do more? suddenly be willing to work the longer hours it takes to retain their own client base?</p>
<p>solo practitioners can have more control over their lifestyle. smaller firms can offer saner lifestyles. but lets not forget they are businesses. they depend on getting and keeping clients. there are solo practitioners who’d probably be thrilled to make $40,000 a year – but could they really sustain a business model that has them turning away a client one year because it’d put them over the $40,000 threshold and then hope the client returns next year when their other business is slower?</p>
<p>[note i’ve used the $40,000 annual salary and the 10 year timeframe for the loan payment program because others used them – i don’t in fact know the details of those plans – if other numbers are correct, just plug those in instead.]</p>
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<p>Many independent contractors are effectively employees who don’t get any benefits. It’s not analogous to a sole practitioner who has to pay not-insignificant overhead expenses and generate all of their own business.</p>
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<p>I’m sure they could, just probably not in the first year and almost certainly not without putting in significantly more work than you mention. If your goal is to maximize leisure time while making $40K, starting your own practice is probably one of the worst ways to go about it.</p>
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<p>Many of the small firms that pay so little don’t even have websites, let alone “marketing materials” where they could brag about credentials that their clients largely don’t care about anyway.</p>
<p>Doesn’t LRAP require one to take certain types of work; non-profit or public defender type stuff?</p>
<p>I’m fully ignorant here, most of my friends from law school went to medium or large firms. (Two more quit in the last month, by the way; they had decent scholarships, paid off the debt and left).</p>
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<p>That could make for some tense moments. “Of course I love you honey; but Sally Mae won’t let me take the altar. She’s my REAL bride, after all.”</p>
<p>This goes right back to the foundation of the disagreement I had with flowerhead. You don’t want law school debt to decide when you get married (of all things). Shackling yourself to an LRAP job rather than a Biglaw gig solves some problems (and maybe creates others), but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue of freedom. </p>
<p>To change subjects a bit, it’s seriously as though some members of this board don’t believe there are challenging, lucrative legal jobs outside of Kirkland. I can understand the argument if we’re talking about Thomas Cooley or the University of New Hampshire or something. But freaking Georgetown?! Is billing your time for Skadden in Manhattan really better enough than billing it for Fish & Richardson in Boston that you’d put off your own wedding ten years to have a chance at doing it? </p>
<p>It’s ludicrous. It is totally amazing to watch a law student harp on some high school kid about how he doesn’t know what he wants yet, then turn around and act as though she knows what she’ll want five years out of law school without a hint of irony.</p>
<p>HLS restricts you to work that either requires a law degree or is in government or academia or non-profit.</p>
<p>YLS, I believe, has no restrictions so long as you’re working full-time.</p>
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<p>Well, with respect to your specific example, I’d much rather be at Skadden than Fish, given the shape Fish is in. But Skadden was never particularly selective, either.</p>
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<p>Why, I would have never in a million years expected you to dodge the point; and certainly not by maligning a randomly named firm as insufficiently prestigious!</p>
<p>I’m shocked. Shocked.</p>