Thinking of leaving professional career for law school

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>Hello everyone,</p>

<p>Over the past few years I've become interested in attending law school. I've been working in the computer industry for the past 12 years as a systems administrator, network architect, and software developer at different times (currently I'm the technical lead on a software development project for a company in the top 15 of the Fortune 500 list). I'm pretty sure I'd have to completely leave this career to pursue law school full time.</p>

<p>Out of high school I took advantage of the dot-com boom and skipped college to work for a startup. It was worth it and eventually I returned to my promise of attending college and getting a degree. My work agreed to pay for me to attend classes toward a BS in Computer Science, so that's what I've been doing for the past 4 years. I've been working full time and going to school full time. It has been pretty difficult, but I should be graduating in spring of 2007 with a 3.89 GPA.</p>

<p>I was originally intending to apply for Stanford for the MS in Computer Science (Systems) program because they do their Honors Co-op Program entirely through distance learning. It looked like a good way to stay employed while going through graduate school; my work would pay for (part of) tuition at Stanford as well.</p>

<p>However, I was looking at Stanford Law School's page about cyberlaw and Harvard Law School's page about the Berkman Center and I got the itch again. I am studying for the GRE right now and plan to study for the LSAT during my bachelor program's winter break.</p>

<p>I welcome any comments about my current path and how it will affect, negatively or positively, my chances in attending law school. My questions for everyone here are:
* Will it be a hard fight for admission to one of the top 5 schools considering I haven’t done any research or publication?
* Does my experience on my resume help with the selection process?
* Is there a sea of people like me wanting to switch my career that I’ll be competing against?
* If I complete my 1L at a local law school (University of Kansas), will it be easier to transfer into a top 5 school?
* What do you guys do for health insurance while in law school? This is the major hurdle for my wife since we have an 8 month-old son and she owns her own business (i.e., insuring one family by yourself is expensive).</p>

<p>Thanks in advance,
kR</p>

2

<p>1) No, Law School admissions is mainly about GPA and LSAT. Soft factors do matter at top schools but you have more than your share of work experience and a pretty good non-generic reason to attend law school.</p>

<p>You will be helped out by your major which is known to be universally difficult and schools are always looking for good engineering-type students for their patent law programs (much rarer than the typical liberal arts major that apply).</p>

<p>2) Yes.</p>

<p>3) Not sure, but I doubt it. The most popular majors in law school are economics and philosophy. A lot of people know they want to do law coming out of college or after a few years in the work force.</p>

<p>4) It depends, If you had the lsat/gpa for a top law school and are near the top of your local law school, than your chances might be ok but Law School transfers are not that common, and its far easier to lateral from a higher tier school. Berkeley to Harvard for Example is more common. Top law schools also teach differently from lower tier law schools. Top law schools teach theory and weed out students (except for Yale) so that top corporate firms know they're getting the best. </p>

<p>5) Don't know, you will be a full time student and have to take on over 100k in loans for most top law school and will be unemployed for the most part. However, if you gain admissions to a top tier school, the expected value of the degree will make the cost worth it, especially for patent lawyers which make about 50% more than average lawyers.</p>

<p>Best of luck to you.</p>

3

<ol>
<li><p>No. Most people who go to the top 5 law schools haven't had research or publication. Your GPA is in line with those schools. If your LSAT breaks 170, you have an excellent shot. Your age will help you a lot, more so at some schools (i.e. Northwestern) than others.</p></li>
<li><p>Yes, more so at some schools than others. If your stats are in line with what the school usually takes, then it comes down to "soft factors." Also, being from Kansas may make you very attractive to schools that don't get a lot of good applicants from that region. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>3.. Eh. Mostly, you're competing against 22-year-olds who are seniors in college. Even among "older" students (25ish), most did not really have "careers," but got sick of waitressing or selling insurance.</p>

<ol>
<li> Doing well your 1L year will help you IF you would not have gotten in normally. Schools take students on transfer whom they would have liked to take normally, but doing so would hurt their US News rankings. (Transfers aren't averaged into the GPA/LSAT percentiles.) The thing is, and this is just a guess, if you could have gotten into, say, Columbia (and with a 3.89 and a strong LSAT, you probably would), then doing well at a second-tier law school doesn't prove anything. I mean, if you end up at the top of your class, they might want you; however, a top 25% showing wouldn't impress them.</li>
</ol>

<p>Also, consider that transferring doesn't help you too much in the job hunt. You find out if you got in sometime in the spring or summer. Recruiting for 2L summer, which ultimately leads to a job, starts during July after 1L year. Sure, you'll have something like:
University of Kansas, 2007-2008
University of Chicago, JD expected, 2010
on your resume, but that's not necessarily going to put you on the same footing as other UChicago students who have UChicago grades, found out about Law Review, etc. </p>

<ol>
<li> I was able to get back on my parent's plan for a while (until I got too old). I also paid for private insurance; in my area of the country, it's $75/month for men, $100/month for women, including dental. Maternity riders are an extra $50/month (if you're considering having more kids). Most schools offer health insurance that your family can get on; expect to pay about $1,000/year or so for it. The quality of the health insurance may leave something to be desired, but it's better than nothing.</li>
</ol>

4

<p>Assuming that you do well on your LSAT, I think that you would certainly have a good shot at admission to a T14 law school. Your extensive work experience and experience having gone back to get your undergraduate degree while working full time (not to mention having excellent grades) will certainly be plusses for you. You will undoubtedly not be the only person going to law school for a second career in law (I had quite a few in my class at law school), and you will be competing against the applicant pool as a whole for admissions. However, given the information that you have provided, I think that with your experience and maturity (and assuming that you do well on the LSAT) you should compare favorably with the others who will be applying. </p>

<p>Since you mentioned the University of Kansas, I assume that you live nearby. If so, and if you plan to return to Kansas after you would graduate from law school to practice, my best advice would be to consider attending and graduating from the local school, particularly if there is an in state tuition differential. If you do extremely well during your first year, you can certainly apply to transfer. Consider, though, that you would then either have to move your family or leave them behind while you go to attend law school. Additionally, since you asked about health insurance, most student health insurance policies cover only local doctors, hospitals, etc. except on an emergency basis, so if your family was to stay behind, they might not be able to find doctors, hospitals near them that would be covered by your health insurance. Additionally, most student health insurance policies require that the primary care physician is the student health facility on campus. I doubt if any of these arrangements would be anything like what your family is accustomed to. I also believe that family health coverage through the student plan is more expensive than the $1,000 per year that ariesathena cited. That may differ greatly, though, from school to school, program to program. Your best bet will be to contact the schools you are interested in directly to find out more about family health insurance coverage. </p>

<p>Please note, too, that you should look into the geographic areas in which cyberlaw is practiced before you decide to go to law school to pursue a career in that area. It may be that you would have to make a permanent move to San Francisco, for example, in order to pursue a cyberlaw practice (my quick research online shows that there seems to be a concentration of firms that practice in this area in San Francisco, New York and Washington DC). I just don't know for sure. Also, to the extent that this practice area is maintained mainly by large law firms. you will likely have to work some very long hours. At the end of the day, you may have no choice but to work in a well paying big law firm anyway just to get those pesky huge student loans paid off.</p>

<p>The one other thing to consider is that certain potential employers will not seriously consider hiring an older law school graduate because there is a perception that the older graduate will not be willing to put in the hours, take direction and do some of the grunt work generally required of junior lawyers. This is certainly not universal, but you may encounter this issue in the hiring process. Just a heads up. </p>

<p>Best of luck to you!</p>

5

<p>Sally mentions an interesting point. Cyberlaw is practiced in many areas; however, the biggest concentrations are in the big cities. Furthermore, a trend in patent law is away from smaller, boutique firms. Large firms used to farm out their patent work to boutique firms, but then saw how lucrative the work is, so they would merge with a smaller firm (or just swallow it up) and do it all in-house. What this means is that you're going to have to look good to big firms, which means top schools, top grades.</p>

6

<p>Thank you for your replies. It's good to hear these things from people that know the ins and outs of the process. I'm especially relieved about the research not being a big factor. I haven't even read any books on the "law school experience;" I'm definitely going to be entering into it tabula rasa.</p>

<p>Yes, the University of Kansas is near me. I spoke to the professor that handles intellectual property law at University of Kansas about my plans in seeking entry into law school and possibly an advanced degree in computer science. He told me that the combination of those two degrees would be very powerful if I were to pursue patent law or cyberlaw. However, he said the University of Kansas has nothing like Harvard's Berkman Center; a place which he enjoyed when he went to Harvard Law School for his JD (!!). It looks like he graduated from their JD program recently.</p>

<p>Reading the replies about locality reminded me of some things that I want to mention that might throw a curve ball into my plans of studying cyberlaw or patent law. I will most likely move to Hong Kong either immediately after graduation or soon thereafter. I'm white but my wife is from Hong Kong and I've learned to speak Cantonese Chinese after being with her for so long. I also plan on learning Mandarin Chinese and Japanese once I have some time to attend classes outside of my current area of study; it appears that might be years from now, though.</p>

<p>The discussion here has me worried as to whether this area of law will be valuable internationally. I've read entries in the Harvard JD Admissions blog about students that have graduated from HLS and gone directly to Hong Kong and Singapore to work for a firm there.</p>

<p>I'm probably going to just be in the "older" category of students; I'm just 26 years-old right now. I say my career is 12 years long because I started work as a network and systems administrator at a local BBS where I was hired to start the first (local) Internet service provider in the Kansas City area in 1994. When I turned 16, I worked out a class schedule where I had lunch from 11am to 11:45am. The class after that was termed "Job Shadowing" which allowed me to leave high school grounds although I wasn't in reality shadowing anyone. At that point I started working from 1pm until 9pm and have been working full time in the various jobs I discussed before ever since.</p>

<p>Should I be concerned about working for a big law firm? Is it a different experience from the big corporation I'm currently in? As a technical resource that supports infrastructure pieces I'm used to being called in the middle of the night for emergencies or working long hours to meet deadlines.</p>

7

<p>"Furthermore, a trend in patent law is away from smaller, boutique firms. Large firms used to farm out their patent work to boutique firms, but then saw how lucrative the work is, so they would merge with a smaller firm (or just swallow it up) and do it all in-house."</p>

<p>That may be the trend, but there is still a great deal of patent work being done by the boutiques. (When I think "boutique firms," it's "patent boutiques" that immediately come to mind.) I'm not sure why a firm that specializes in the most lucrative work would want to be swallowed up by a bigger firm with lower per-partner profits.</p>

8

<p>The American Bar Association offers health insurance for law students. <a href="http://www.abanet.org/lsd/insurance.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.abanet.org/lsd/insurance.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Also, some states, through their Board of Regents, offer health insurance for graduate/law students. I don't know anything about the cost or benefits of either of these, but I'd guess they're cheaper than any other policy you could get if you're not employed.</p>

9

<p>Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the ABA insurance for students is really catastrophic coverage/hospital coverage, and your primary care physician must be student health.</p>