HYS grads all pretty much feed straight into corporate law firms?

Graduate School Law School
1

Hello all. I am still a very young high school student, and am not truly weighing pros and cons of law school or anything yet, but I wanted to ask a question because I was genuinely curious.

All HYS, CCN and pretty much all T14 grads seem to be feeding straight into the corporate, M+A, patent, finance-related-type law firms. I am aware that these types of law firms offer the most generous salaries. I also always hear people complaining that the law job market is oversaturated and unless you are a T14 grad you will have a hard time finding a job as a lawyer.

I aspire to one day attend law school, but the aforementioned finance-intertwined areas of specialty seem, at least to me, very boring, tedious, pretentious, and they all emit a really big affected “country-club-esque” vibe. This is just my personal opinion and I do not mean to offend anybody. My interest in law stems from my desire to maybe maybe one day in the long future argue constitutional, civil, or human rights law.

However, it appears that very few top law firms even deal with this type of law. It also appears that despite most top law schools having constitutional-human rights study programs, the majority of T14 and esp. HYS grads all feed into corporate law firms anyways.

Are my aspirations in constitutional and civil rights law unrealistic? Do top law firms even handling this type of law even exist? Can anybody even point out any examples? If there are none, should I even consider going to law school in the future at all? Is there some information that I am missing at this point?

The reason I ask is because I got into an argument with one of my friends who are in college the other day. I also am curious and want to know the answers for myself.

I recognize that I am very young and that the answers to these questions hardly matter at this point, but I would really appreciate if people could offer sincere responses. Thanks in advance!

2

There’s a glib answer and there’s a more serious one. The glib answer is that constitutional rights and human rights aren’t paying clients, so that’s why there aren’t law firms that practice that. If you really want to practice in these areas, you need to work for public interest organizations like the ACLU, Amnesty International or, on the Right, the Christian Legal Foundation and the ACLJ. Or in government jobs, for example the US Dept of Justice has a civil rights division, and the State Department employs international human rights lawyers. These jobs for lawyers are fairly difficult to get because there are a lot of lawyers who want to do this kind of work, just as you are interested in them, and there are very few slots to fill every year.

The more serious answer is that law firms do have these specialties if you look hard enough, and you have to scratch the surface of what you think of as corporate law firms and corporate lawyers to get an idea of what civil rights practices actually are. For example, a lot of prominent law firms practice First Amendment law, by representing newspapers, magazines, TV and movie studios and internet companies. These practices have paying clients, so it is a very lucrative area, and top law graduates gravitate to those firms. Some examples are Cravath Swaine & Moore, Williams & Connolly and O’Melveny & Myers. Some other firms are very well known for Supreme Court practices, mostly in Washington DC, for example, Sidley, Bancroft, Jenner, et al. They are the firms or practices that brief and argue cases that go up to the Supreme Court. Not all the cases they take for appeals are on constitutional issues, but some are, and they influence policymaking through litigation. Another example of civil rights law in law firms are the firms that have employment practices. Most employment law suits arise out of the federal civil rights laws. Similarly, Immigration law firms, health care law firms, and housing law firms are protecting what many people would call human rights. And finally, criminal defense lawyers, of which there are many, are really just civil rights lawyers vindicating or protecting the constitutional rights of criminal defendants. None of these types of lawyers would list themselves as civil rights or constitutional lawyers, but in effect that’s exactly what they are.

3

I love the idealism but when the reality of paying back massive student loans hits you, those high paying corporate jobs look mighty attractive. Without BigLaw, many of us could not have entered the profession.

4

@imajinHarvard: Constitutional/civil rights law can be found relatively easily if you do criminal work. You’ll get to bask in the glory that is the modern 4th amendment (not to mention habeas). Similarly personal injury/small civil lawyers get to file plenty of 1983 claims (claims for violation of a constitutional right).

@Spayurpets is right that the type of public interest work he mentions is hard to get. To add to that, those jobs often have preference for those students who went to work at big firms. Law school doesn’t train you to be a lawyer, and public interest firms do not have the resources to train up their own associates, so they tend to poach from places they’re confident will do the training for them. That’s generally the government or big firms.

5

Also, consider that HYS law students have HYS law school loans to repay, so they often can’t afford to go straight into public interest law. A lot of students may do BigLaw for a few years to earn the money to repay their loans as well as get some experience, and then take that experience into public interest firms.

Every law school has to maintain employment statistics for ABA accreditation, and this information is publicly available - so visit the websites of law schools to find this information. For instance, [url=<a href=“http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/careers/ocs/employment-statistics/index.html%5Dhere’s%5B/url”>http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/careers/ocs/employment-statistics/index.html]here’s[/url] Harvard’s page. You’ll see that 41 graduates (about 7% of the total class of 578) went into public interest law upon graduation. A further 28 (~5%) went into government, and 120 (~21%) took judicial clerkships. So fully 33%, or one-third, of Harvard’s graduating class went into public interest or government positions. HLS also being super flush with money, they have Public Service Fellowships that they award to select graduating students to help them work at public service positions for a year or more while still repaying their loans (these are detailed on the webpage).

Yale sends 57% of its graduates to public interest, government, or judicial clerkships; at Stanford it’s 42.5%; at Columbia it’s 19% (likely because of the proximity to the New York financial market); at Chicago it’s 25%; and at NYU about 32%. All of these top schools also say that they have public service grants for students who wish to do public service law after graduation.

6

@julliet, Harvard has a very generous LIPP (low income protection plan) policy that repays debts of grads who go into public interest law.

@imajinHarvard, yes, there are plenty of high-powered firms where HYP graduates go and that do constitutional work. Spayurpets is exactly right. One more example is Cahill Gordon & Reindel; Floyd Abrams does high-profile First Amendment work.

Keep in mind that a firm does whatever its clients want (in terms of legal services), and a firm has clients that are at the level of what it charges. Cahill and the other firms that Spayurpets mentioned are expensive, and their clients are companies that can pay a lot. When those companies have constitutional issues, they call those firms for help.

Civil rights and human rights work is more public interest; companies that can pay a lot in legal fees usually don’t have plaintiff-side civil rights and human rights issues so they don’t call those large firms for those things.

Also, before going to law school, I recall reading the “Legal Beat” section of the Wall Street Journal and nearly falling asleep. Now that I do corporate law, though, that section is interesting since it impacts what I do every day. What may seem dull now may seem fascinating in the future (and vice-versa; the stuff I studied in undergrad now seems pointless).

Finally, pretentious? Country-club? Not at all, and I’ve worked in plenty of large law firms in Manhattan. And if you want a job that pays $30,000 a year or whatever a typical public interest job pays, why kill yourself studying in order to get into HYS; why not just have fun in college and go to your local state school, with that goal?

7

Depending on how you define “public interest” it appears that attending HYS(ok, with NYU, etc thrown in) is almost required-take a look at the bios for the ACLU leadership.

8

Law school doesn’t offer much in terms of practical or clinical experience; law firms usually take up professional development in that regard. Thus I would wager that many HYS graduates funnel into firms focused on a large corporate practice because those are the best firms, and the law graduates seek the best clinical training. Many of those grads will go on to other fields – so note that the skillset of the corporate lawyer isn’t all that different from the skillset of the constitutional/human rights lawyer, and you may find the latter boring too.

That said, I know that Harvard offers excellent and very well-funded public interest opportunities for its law students, e.g. I understand they provided airfare and lodging for students who wanted to provide legal assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina (this is what I recall when I was in law school).

9

Also, to add:

HYS students do feed into large law firms (particularly big ones in NYC) because, oddly enough, those jobs are the easiest to get. Large law firms need lots of junior associates, and they all flock to HYS to recruit on-campus, and it’s so easy to just go with the flow, interview on campus and end up with multiple job offers for large law firms.

Public interest work is harder to get because (1) there are fewer opportunities available and (2) finding a job in public interest takes some initiative; you have to contact the public interest employers yourself (sometimes with school help) and be proactive about it.

Plus to go public interest, you have to turn down the large law firm jobs that pay $160k/year.

10

Because it’s harder to get the public interest jobs that pay a living wage than it is to get a law firm job. And because if you want to do public interest law, you want to go to a law school that has a loan forgiveness program, like LIPP mentioned above. http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/sfs/low-income-protection-plan-lipp/ Most of these are at T14 law schools. Juillet’s post #4 is just plain wrong–it’s easier to take the public interest job if you went to HYS than it is coming out of most other law schools.

A lot of students at HYS do clerkships first. Some of these students then take public interest jobs. Of course, some go to firms. Others do clerkships, then go to firms to get some $, and then do public interest. (Most low income programs do NOT apply to federal clerkships.)

11

Read Jerome Auerbach’s Unequal Justice. It does an interesting job of examining the culture of law firms and law schools in America.