<p>Yes. Yet the grads of Yale or Stanford JD won’t enjoy the luxuries such as long-term career stability that many of doctors will enjoy.</p>
<p>The problem - as I suggested earlier - is that even many who get good law jobs out of top law schools don’t end up doing well long-term.</p>
<p>To be a successful lawyer in today’s market - you need certain qualities. These qualities include schmoozing skills, keen salesmanship, ability to play politics, and sharp networking skills. Being a lawyer is a service profession; meaning you need to bring in clients if you wish to move up within law firms.</p>
<p>If you lack strong social skills, lack natural ‘business networking’ acumen, and just plain sense of how corporate politics are played, I’d suggest against a career in law.</p>
<p>I understand. What other careers need skills with public speaking and writing? I’m still trying to stick out my science classes, but that battle is proving a bit futile…</p>
<p>If you aren’t good at sciences and can’t do engineering or can’t potentially get into a med school or something similar, I’d look into a career in finance or consulting.</p>
<p>Go attend a top college, get top grades, get good corporate internships, and with strong speaking skills (interviewing skills) you could potentially snag one of these corporate jobs. These jobs don’t really care what you major in college, as long as you go to a top school and have a top gpa. </p>
<p>If all else fails, consider law school at your own peril. Don’t consider attending law schools below top 14 or so schools.</p>
<p>Complete nonsense. The richest lawyers are doing personal injury and mass torts and not at BigLaw/Midlaw. Similarly plenty of extremely well off lawyers work in small boutiques. For example, [url=<a href=“http://www.bancroftpllc.com/]Bancroft[/url”>http://www.bancroftpllc.com/]Bancroft[/url</a>]. Biglaw partners do well, certainly, but the job is prized because it is (relatively, compared to the other jobs) easy to get. Similarly doctors [url=<a href=“http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/27/doctors-salaries-who-earns-the-most-and-the-least/]can[/url”>Surgeon Salary: How Much Doctors Make | TIME]can[/url</a>] make a very decent living, but far from all of them do. You also have to remember that the opportunity costs of medical school far exceed that of law school (because it’s 3 times as long). Doctors still probably do better than lawyers, overall (because the AMA keeps a lid on supply and the ABA is a sock puppet), but your statement is ridiculous.</p>
<p>Well, you’d still agree with the general spirit of my original statement.</p>
<p>Yes, there are very rich lawyers who are solos in small towns doing divorce settlement and traffic violations, and there are very rich trial lawyers doing personal injury. Yet, these folks comprise very small minority of all lawyer population. </p>
<p>My friend’s dad owns an insurance retail business and makes 900k a year selling insurance to people in his neighborhood. This man didn’t even go to college. So, now with your logic we can argue that people who run small businesses make more money than even many of the doctors and people should just skip out on college and start a business if making large sum of money is of primary objective.</p>
<p>Listen, the truth is that doctors are better off than lawyers 99% of the time.</p>
If the economy is better, the legal field will be better as well. However, a lot of legal jobs are going away and never coming back: everything from predictive coding to LegalZoom are automating legal jobs.</p>
<p>BigLaw is undergoing a few radical changes as well: entering job classes are smaller, and they are hiring a lot of people on non-associate tracks (if that makes sense): outsourced document review, associates who live in a cheap, rural area and do a lot of the grunt work; and more lateral hiring. Clients don’t want to pay for brand-new associates, and the law firms are finding cheaper ways of doing a lot of that work. Also, many clients are getting price-conscious and are moving towards mid-sized law firms to do their work.</p>
<p>You also may find an entry level job market with an entirely different focus than it has now. I would not be surprised to see the end of the era of the generalist law student, ie one who has gone into law school with no particular skill set or focus. Clients may want lawyers who understand their business, have a particular knowledge base, or are otherwise equipped to understand the business implications of what they are doing. (For example, employment law might be full of people who used to be in HR; health care law could have a lot of people who did compliance in hospitals; or corporate law might have former i-bankers.)</p>
First, you often don’t need great grades in sciences to get a job: you need decent grades. But if you have no aptitude for it, or if you are struggling through intro courses that science majors usually breeze through, then ignore this.</p>
<p>Second, if you want to know which jobs would require good writing and public speaking skills, try working for a couple of years. Get an internship over the summer. (I am a good public speaker; I channeled that into a job as a spokeswoman. But that is a very, very tough way to earn a steady income; it is more useful as a way to gain exposure and have a really stand-out section on a resume.)</p>
<p>Thank you for your reply. I’m currently pre-med, but not only are my science classes below the par (not failing the classes, but not excelling at them either), but also it’s starting to affect the other classes (the classes that I actually like) a little bit (low moral / studying for science / academic burnout).</p>
<p>I’m just wondering whether I should jump toward pre-law. I am currently in Communications Public-Relations because I enjoy speaking and writing - two skills that I have used with high proficiency in high school. </p>
<p>However, my family of medical people (doctors and otherwise) prefer me to go to medical school for stability. Though I wish to respect their wishes (my dad worked hard to become a doctor and is making great money today), but I’m not sure that law is viable due to the fact that it is (apparently) unstable and doesn’t reach the financial heights of medicine (I don’t care for the super rich lifestyle, but I would prefer upper middle class if possible). </p>
<p>I’m just at wit’s end. I don’t want to be some sort of unemployed bum searching Monster.com every single day or be some supposed professional that is not making end’s meet after going to professional school.</p>
<p>Just to tag onto my previous post, I have a question to the experts of law on this website. How do you become a lawyer that practices medical law? </p>
<p>Though my science skills are lacking, I do understand some of the processes of a hospital because of shadowing various doctors. I also heard that that facet of law will become very big due to many healthcare reforms, such as Obamacare. </p>
<p>To be blunt, I do like the hospital. However, my science skills are clearly not up to par against my fellow classmates who are either more passionate about medicine than me or just all-around more skilled at science than I am. I was thinking that this career may not only put me back in the hospital - a world that I am somewhat familiar with, but also enables me to fully utilize my skills at writing and speaking.</p>
<p>What do you sage contributors of the law think?</p>
<p>SC: there is nothing - nothing! - mandating that you must figure this out now. Neither either law or medicine, you can go to graduate school at any point after undergrad. Many pre-med students will do a post-bac for their required pre-med courses, or will take them over the summer. </p>
<p>My best advice is to not rush to figure it out. Both law school and medical school are a lifetime commitment: they cost so much that you will be in that field for your entire career. (Yes, there are some exceptions with lawyers, but it’s often not their first choice.) It is far better to spend a few years as an unemployed bum than to rush to either law or medical school and have made a mistake that you can never undo.</p>
<p>Also consider business school. </p>
<p>As to health law: one of my friends works in that field; she was in compliance for about five years before law school, and she now works with the hospital that she was at prior to law school. I know a lawyer on Wall Street who does health care law and financing, but I do not recall his exact career track. If you are interested in health care law, which is a lot of administrative and regulatory law, then work in hospital administration and then go to a law school that offers course work in it.</p>
<p>Thank you once again for a constructive response. The reason why I am so concerned about getting an end goal immediately (I’m a sophomore) is because I not only am worried about my grades (I don’t want them to slip…I had about a 3.7 average in high school), but also I work better when I have an end goal (good grades also help as well).</p>
<p>The reason why I was considering medical law is because the area I live in is centered around a giant medical school / hospital. I’m sure they need some sort of legal help sometime. I’m looking into interning within hospital administration for that.</p>
<p>EDIT: Also, would Communications - Public Relations help for law school? I chose it for its flexibility in many career fields, but I personally think that PR helps because it builds up skill in both writing and speaking.</p>
<p>My concern, and the concern that you are seeing from others on this thread, is that you are deciding between two professions that both have massive structural problems and very high costs of entry. The latter is the exorbitant tuition to obtain a JD or a MD. Law is a very over-saturated field with little job stability, declining wages for everyone except those at the highest echelons, and more competition from technology. Medicine is currently at the peak of its bubble and will likely undergo substantial structural reform in the next decade.</p>
<p>I always ask potential law students “Knowing what you know now, would you buy a house in 2006?” What you are in danger of doing is entering into those two professions when the job security and salaries are no longer what they had been, but the costs of entry are still priced for a bygone era. </p>
<p>This matters because attending medical school and law school are decisions that will affect you for the rest of your life, potentially in very deleterious ways. Your fifty-year-old self with freakin hate you if you run headlong into either one because your twenty-year-old self was happier having a concrete goal. </p>
<p>You’re not going to go wrong studying things you enjoy, building up a skill set (whatever it happens to be), and working to get high grades. No matter what you do, a “magna cum laude” will follow you for the rest of your life. Aim for that, and carefully watch the medical and legal professions.</p>