<p>If I don't want to be a top corporate lawyer or in a big firm or making loads of money right out of law school, but am more interested in doing law for nonprofit or social justice type things, how much would it impact my career to not go to a top law school?</p>
<p>general rule: the better the law school, the more doors are open for you.</p>
<p>Better law schools often have better loan repayment, which will help you if you want to go into low-paying jobs. You would have to get some pretty substantial merit aid or go to a state school if you wanted to do public service after law school without that. </p>
<p>I'm going to beat Jonri to the punch on this one: some public service jobs are very, very competitive, even though they pay very little. The federal DA's office is the perfect example of this. Often, only good students from top schools can get those jobs. Finally, judicial clerkships can open a lot of doors - it looks fantastic on your resume and can introduce you to people who can really help you out. Top schools can help out a lot with that route.</p>
<p>Unless you're independently wealthy, you need the best possible law degree to have a shot at making a living in the nonprofit/social justice world (unless your goal is to be a local public defender). Getting a job with the ACLU or Lambda or that type of group is outrageously competitive, much more so than getting a job at a top corporate law firm or making tons of money right away.</p>
<p>I agree that getting into the ACLU or the other top non-profits is highly competitive.</p>
<p>However, there are also many "no-name" nonprofits as well. Getting into one of these is fairly easy. For example, just in my hometown, I can think of a bunch of non-profits that would love to hire a lawyer, just any lawyer. The problem is not only do they not pay well (as do all non-profits), but also because these groups are not prestigious to work for.</p>
<p>That's why I made the point about "making a living" in the nonprofit legal world when you're not independently wealthy. The ACLU, if you can get the job, will actually give you 45 grand and health insurance. That's making a living. You are fortunate indeed if you can find anything like that with a small local organization. They usually want you to bring your own funding (like a fellowship). At best, they'll pay you what they'd pay someone without a law degree, which is likely to be grad-student starvation wages.</p>
<p>Hey, you can 'make a living' on grad-student starvation wages. What does a grad-student make nowadays, say 21k? There's a lot of regular working people who don't even make 21k. For example, there are plenty of people who work full-time at Walmart who don't make 21k a year, and yet they're evidently still alive. </p>
<p>As far as how much money these nonprofits would pay lawyers, I admit that I don't know. But what I do know is that, at one of the nonprofits, the IT guy (the guy who maintained all of the PC's and the servers) was making about 40k. I don't even think that guy had even graduated from college, and didn't exactly have a whole lot of experience either when he started. So if the nonprofit is paying him 40k, I have to imagine that the lawyers there are making more than that. </p>
<p>From what I have seen, there are some nonprofits that have no-name but are nonetheless funded by some extremely rich people with the express purpose of pursuing one of their pet nonprofit projects, and thus can actually afford to pay pretty decently (as far as nonprofits go).</p>
<p>See my thread in another post. It's largely REGIONAL. The doors that you seek to open to a career are likewise REGIONAL. A good friend got her job at one of the largest west coast firms (in Seattle) coming out of a small law school in Virginia. That same firm sent alumi onto not-for-profit organizations in the mountains of Virginia as welll as downtown Atlanta. The Atlanta group won a multi-year, multimillion dollar grant from a got-bucks donor a couple of years ago.</p>
<p>You can't make a living on 21K when you're 100K in debt and your school's LRAP sucks. Grad students very rarely have that kind of debt. Again, this is why it's helpful to go to a top school even if you want to work for a non-profit.</p>
<p>Well, the presumption is that every law student goes into massive debt. I think it should be emphasized that plenty of law students are going to law school part-time while holding full-time jobs, and thus never really have to go into truly heavy debt. While most of the part-time law schools are no-name schools, some of them, notably Georgetown, are quite prestigious. Which is why I advise for those students who can't get into one of the very top law schools, they should just go to a part-time law school while holding down fulltime job to keep their debt low. </p>
<p>Another way to keep your debt low is to obviously go to a law school that will give you a free ride. Most people who are good enough to get into a top program are also good enough to qualify for a ride at a lower-ranked school. So if you know that you want to do nonprofit work, then taking that ride may be the way to go.</p>
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<p>there are plenty of people who work full-time at Walmart who don't make 21k a year, and yet they're evidently still alive. </p>
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<p>Sure. And there are people raising six kids on $15k. Hell, there are people begging on the street outside my law firm alive and well who make a lot less than that. Yet I wouldn't recommend those economic paths to a future lawyer seeking advice. I go on the assumption that people on this board -- including those who plan to devote their lives to public service -- have slightly higher lifestyle aspirations than simply remaining alive. For one thing, apparently most of them are used to owning computers and subscribing to internet providers. If you know future lawyers who will be happy at the age of 45 renting a shared apartment like a grad student, I stand corrected. The public-interest attorneys I know, such as my sister, generally have modest middle-class aspirations like home ownership, and Wal-Mart wages are not going to get you there even if you have zero debt. (Unless, of course, you marry a future Skadden partner, which is a pretty common path for the world-saving lawyers at top schools.)</p>
<p>Yeah, well, see, that's the thing. We're talking about just how devoted you realy are to nonprofit work. It is clearly true that most lawyers can make nice middle-class lifestyles for themselves, but not necessarily do the kind of work they want to do. </p>
<p>You don't always get to have your cake and eat it too. Not everybody gets to do what they really like to do, and also have a comfortable life doing it. That's why you have to ask yourself what it is that you really want? If you really are that committed to doing nonprofit work, then you may have to make sacrifices. That's life. Now, if you're not willing to make those sacrifices, then that's fine too, you don't have to work for a nonprofit. But I think we all have to agree that if you really want to do nonprofit work, you probably will have to give up some income potential to do it.</p>
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<p>If you really are that committed to doing nonprofit work, then you may have to make sacrifices.</p>
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<p>Right. If you are LUCKY, like my sister the Yale Law grad, you get to sacrifice a starting salary of (currently) $145,000 plus bonus in favor of starting at $35,000 with zero bonus. That's a middle-class starting salary that allows middle-class aspirations for the future. My sister is now beginning her eighth year out, and is a superstar in her field, and recently won a raise to the middle-class salary of $50k/year (in Manhattan). 100% of her law school classmates who chose, as I did, to go to a big firm and stay there are making $250,000 or more. So that's an 80% pay cut she's taking in order to bust her butt all hours of the day and night for foster kids. I call that a HUGE sacrifice. And you think that if young lawyers feel they need to match my sister's income track, where they can reach for a car and a home someday, they aren't really that committed to doing non-profit work? I guess if they actually cared, they'd be willing to live in thatched huts without electricity and draw $2500 a year for food, like they do in the Peace Corps. There is no reasonable middle ground, after all, between Mother Theresa in the slums of Calcutta and Wall Street corporate raiders.</p>
<p>"There is no reasonable middle ground, after all, between Mother Theresa in the slums of Calcutta and Wall Street corporate raiders."</p>
<p>Hanna, of course, did not intend the above sentence to be read literally. Nevertheless, I'm going to talk a bit about the middle ground.</p>
<p>When I graduated from a top-14 law school, I was very active as a professional musician. That meant (20+ years ago) that I was making $50 for four hours work; that was very good by law student standards, but not so good by young lawyer standards. I could have found a job with a law firm that paid me $60K or $70K as an attorney that would have left me no time for my musical career. Instead, I took a job with a small firm in the metropolitan area where I lived that paid maybe half as much as the top firms, but left me with enough free time to continue moonlighting as a musician. </p>
<p>Fast forward a couple of decades: I married and had children at a more advanced age than most, and work in-house for a decent-sized corporation.</p>
<p>"Regrets? I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention." It's easier to get an in-house job if you've worked for a blue-chip law firm. But I believe that my early law firm experience (which required me to get sufficiently up-to-speed on a number of areas of law to try cases as first-chair (ok, there wasn't a second chair)) in my first several years of practice was as good a foundation for what I'm doing now as anything I would have been doing at a big firm. Moreover, my experiences as a professional musician (I peaked as an opening act for has-beens) gives me a certain cache in my professional life that would not have been easy to obtain in any other way. </p>
<p>Back to the OP's question: "How important is a top law school?" Going to a top-14 school makes it easier to attract the notice of prospective employers. The name of my law school may have been a significant factor in the decision of several of my employers to offer me a job. (I am also convinced that it once prevented me from getting a job for which I was applying; the key decision-maker made a point of mentioning that I had gone to more "impressive" schools than anyone else in the department.) Notwithstanding the foregoing, I have worked for graduates of the following law schools: Stanford, Harvard (twice), Georgetown, Hastings, Santa Clara, and Suffolk. I learned the most from graduates of Santa Clara, Suffolk, and Hastings. The smartest guy I have ever worked for was a Santa Clara graduate. Experience has taught me to give little weight to where job candidates I interview went to school.</p>
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There is no reasonable middle ground, after all, between Mother Theresa in the slums of Calcutta and Wall Street corporate raiders.
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<p>Sure there is. For example, you can work for a no-name, unfamous nonprofit, of which there are many. Like again, some of those nonprofits back home. I only know about them because they are near my home. Granted, I don't know how much the lawyers are making there (but I will inquire), but if the computer guy in the firm who never even graduated from college and has only limited experience can make 40k at that firm, I have to imagine that the attorneys there are making a lot more than that.</p>
<p>The real issue, it seems to me, is that people not only want to work for a nonprofit, but want to work for a nonprofit that is famous AND that won't require them to make a huge financial success. To that I would say, look, you can't always get everything that you want. Sometimes you have to put up with things that you don't like in order to get the things that you do like. That's life. If you insist on working for a famous non-profit, you are probably going to have to give something up. That's the deal. </p>
<p>Look, we would all like to get everything that we want. I would like to be worth a trillion dollars, be 6-foot-5, look like Brad Pitt, and be dating both Halle Berry and Scarlett Johansson at the same time. But you can't always get everything that you want. Heck, in my case, I didn't get anything that I want, darn it.</p>
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Heck, in my case, I didn't get anything that I want, darn it.
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<p>I still like you.</p>
<p>How competitive is it to become a public defender?</p>
<p>It's generally not difficult at all. It might be a little bit tougher in major cities, but a lot of public defenders were in the bottom of their classes at third-tier schools.</p>
<p>"but am more interested in doing law for nonprofit or social justice type things, how much would it impact my career to not go to a top law school?"</p>
<p>Significantly. The majority of public interest firms recruit from a very short list of law schools. If you don't go to a school with a good LRAP then you may not be able to pursue your dream in the first place.</p>
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It's generally not difficult at all. It might be a little bit tougher in major cities, but a lot of public defenders were in the bottom of their classes at third-tier schools.
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<p>So theoretically, if I went to a solid LS in NYC like Cardoza or BLS and preformed well I wouldn't have much trouble getting a job as a public defender in NYC?</p>
<p>of course not. No one wants to be a public defender. You'd be hard pressed to get a job at Justice or the US Attorney's office or even as an ADA in NYC.</p>