<p>“If you graduate from HLS and don’t have a JD job, HLS won’t repay your loans.”</p>
<p>Virtually everyone at HLS who doesn’t have a JD job made/is making some kind of mistake that led to that result. Some people refuse to take available jobs in the “wrong” market or specialty. Others wrecked their reputations with bad choices. You need to be a little more flexible and keep your nose cleaner than you had to back in the day. In other words, YHS still make the JD job yours to lose; it just isn’t necessarily the job of your choice.</p>
<p>17% of UVA Law grads ended up with 1-year school funded fellowships that pay like 30k a year. </p>
<p>Outside of Biglaw/ clerkships, T14 JD carries no extra value than your average run of the mill JD from diploma factories. In other words, if you strike out at OCI, you are screwed.</p>
<p>People don’t seem to fully comprehend the state of legal job market nowadays. The folks I know at firms such as Skadden, DPW, STB, Cravath, etc are slammed with work and busy billing crazy hours. That is because these prestigious firms have strong businesses and bring in consistent line of revenues even in bad economic times. If you end up at these firms, not only do you build marketable skills quicker, but you also have substantial more job security than other lawyers since these firms require large quantity of labor at all times. </p>
<p>On the other hand, many folks I know who are at lower V100 firms are fearing for their life and have nightmares about being laid off in near future, since many times they are begging for more work and can’t find enough work to bill hours to justify their 160k/yr paycheck. One girl I know was laid off from her Biglaw firm last year as a first year associate and hasn’t been able to find a job ever since, although she is willing to work for as little as 70-80k a year. </p>
<p>The job market is so competitive that Biglaw firms nowadays won’t tolerate low billable hours/ low quality work from their attorneys, and firms will happily show you the door out if you don’t meet their expectations. However, what if you can’t bill enough hours not because you are lazy but because the firm isn’t doing well and doesn’t have enough work? This is out of your control. Being a junior attorney, with 1-2 years of Biglaw experience, gets you very little exit opportunities, and if you were laid off at that point of your career, you may never recover. </p>
<p>Landing at an elite firm as your first job out of school is absolutely crucial in shaping your overall long-term career trajectory, especially in a hyper-competitive field such as law. Accomplishing that agenda out of HLS is about three times more likely to happen, compared to GULC.</p>
<p>“Outside of Biglaw/ clerkships, T14 JD carries no extra value than your average run of the mill JD from diploma factories. In other words, if you strike out at OCI, you are screwed.”
Sorry, just don’t agree. I’m part of the hiring process at a large government agency(over 250 attorneys in the building); the names Georgetown and Duke still carry a lot of clout here, and get noticed over the “diploma factories”. Not debating their worth for big law, but if you want to be a lawyer, and get a full ride(that was the initial premise), finishing law school with no debt and the name Virginia/Duke/Georgetown(pick the 4-14 school) on your diploma is well worth it. Will you get $160k to start? No, but you’ll get a job as a lawyer. And if you’ve got zero debt(again, the initial premise) you don’t have to be a slave to BigLaw. Usually I tell people to avoid law school-but a T14 school for free-if you want to practice law, go for it.</p>
<p>Yup. Like Wall Street, the government, particularly the feds, is full of prestige-hounds. (Not picking on you personally, cranky, but just agreeing with your post that prestige can be a big boost in some industries.)</p>
<p>From my experience, going to a top law school doesn’t help much at all with employment outside Biglaw/ clerkships.</p>
<p>For small/ mid-law firm jobs or many of government jobs, connection is probably #1 factor, followed by your fit/ experience to that employer’s specialty, followed by grades, and followed by your demonstrated interest/ interviewing skills. School rank may factor in, but it’s not a dominant factor in hiring for such employers.</p>
<p>Or else, we wouldn’t see any T14 JD’s who end up unemployed, or ending up at 1-year school funded fellowships. </p>
<p>For the record, from talking to some of 3L’s at my school are struck out at OCI and are still looking for jobs, this seems to be the consensus nowadays. Even if non-biglaw employers give hiring preferences to T14 JD’s, that small edge probably doesn’t justify the fact that much more debt was incurred by going to a T14 JD over lower ranked schools.</p>