Originally Posted by
Shaudius
For someone who wants to be an attorney, and who did so well on the LSAT, you've done a pretty poor job of refuting the substance of any of my argument. But lets go line by line of what you've said.
The LSAT is an aptitude test, it measures just that, your aptitude. Do I think that your LSAT score reflects your aptitude to be an attorney, most probably. Is that the majority of what law school is about, absolutely not. Being able to make a logical argument is only part of the law school battle(the people who study for the LSAT are just trying to train their brain to think logically to predictable questions). If the LSAT was the only thing that mattered for law school, why would law schools even bother looking at someone's GPA, they'd just take the students with the highest LSAT scores and call it a day. The fact of the matter is your GPA shows a deficiency in some category of your ability, work ethic, or intelligence that can only somewhat be made up for with a good LSAT score. Maybe it will be, maybe you'll get top 20% at U of I, but maybe you won't and then what? You'll be in the same boat you are in right now, except three years older. But perhaps, I've actually figured it out. Your undergraduate GPA is average at best(and, frankly, mediocre for a liberal arts major), so your job prospects are pretty bad, so you've figured why not kill three years in law school and if I don't get BigLaw, at least I'll have a versatile degree(more on this later), we call this phenomenon law school by default. You probably don't know much about what the actual practice of law entails, but you like to argue, and people have always told you you'd make a good lawyer, so here you are.
It doesn't bother me, it does bother me that you think the LSAT is dispositive. Some studies have suggested that there is a correlation between LSAT score and law school success, but not so strong a correlation that one can go so far as to say success on the LSAT guarantees success in law school. It's not that I don't think you can be successful in law school, its that I don't think you actual realize what it means to fail at law school. Furthermore, I don't think you realize what BigLaw actually entails, both points that you don't acknowledge, or refute, in your response.
Your penalty for failure is low, because you aren't footing the bill, but you're still making your parents pay for what amounts to a gamble. You have better odds taking that 160k to Vegas and betting it all on black.
Oh, and also, failure at law school, as I alluded to above is not a zero sum game. Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting said it well, "You don't hear much about guys who take their shot and miss, but I'll tell you what happens to 'em. They end up humping crappy jobs on graveyard shifts, trying to figure out how they came up short." That is law to the majority of law school graduates. It's BigLaw, Shitlaw, or even worse. Because despite what they tell you, the law degree is not a versatile degree, no one wants to hire a JD to be anything but an attorney, it might as well be a scarlet JD. The truth is that most people hate lawyers, and those that don't wonder if you're just going to leave the second a real law job comes open(oh how little they know). While it might not happen to Northwestern grads, it sure as shit happens to U of I grads, if only 20% are making BigLaw, only another 20% tops are making even shitlaw, because every firm in the world thinks they can get top credentials from top law schools with law review and other shit. And you know what the sad truth is, they can. That's how much the legal job market has contracted. Don't believe me? Here's a statistic. There were 760k persons in the United States employed as attorneys in 2008. By contrast, how many attorneys do you think were barred total in that same year? The answer is 1.12 million. That means there are over 400k attorneys in the US doing something other than being an attorney, do you think its because they didn't want to be an attorney? Maybe for some of them, but for a large number of them its because they can't find employment as an attorney, because guess what, everyone wants experience or top credentials, they can get what they need through burned out BigLaw associates. They don't need to bother with your kind if BigLaw doesn't want you. So you'll be stuck with a JD that will actually be a hindrance to your probably non-legal job search or you'll be working in something like insurance defense, personal injury, or family law, I hope you enjoy seeing the dredge of society on a daily basis, if you don't make the soul crushing job that is BigLaw. Or worse, you'll join the ranks of the scores upon scores of unemployed JDs who can't get hits from non-law jobs or law jobs(hint: most of those barred attorneys who aren't practicing law were barred and got out of law well before the current situation existed, we call them out of touch boomers), sounds fun doesn't it?
My best advice would honestly be this, try it for a year, if you don't make BigLaw after 1L, drop, you're done. Since you're not going into debt for it, you can come out clean, and you don't have the scarlet letters after your name.
Don't believe me about this? Look at a legal job board, you'll see that what I say is true.
What of what I say is dependent on the forum in which I say it? I mentioned studies of actual BigLaw associate job satisfaction and attrition rates. Those associates are taking anonymous surveys and telling survey-takers, that while they enjoy the money and relative security of BigLaw, they are not happy with their lives, and almost half of 5th year associates do not see themselves making partner or being at the firm in five more years(their perception, not the firms). You do not adequately answer the charge about why you are different, why do you think you will enjoy BigLaw(even if you could get it). What in your slacking background makes you think you will enjoy and thrive in an environment where even if you believe people are satisfied they do indeed work 80/hr weeks almost every single week. And from this post I have opened up a new line of reasoning regarding the bleak prospects of non-BigLaw JDs, which you can self confirm through legal job postings, none of this is based on what I think but the reality of what it is actually like out there.
Again, this has nothing to do with the actual arguments that I am making, you are attacking my logical arguments with a straw man. For someone who got such a high score on the LSAT one would think that you'd be able to refute the substance of an argument without saying, oh you're just whining on the internet. I am not basing my assertions off what people say off the internet, I am basing them off of what they tell surveys(which their firm undoubtedly makes them take), real statistics about billable hours, and your assertions about yourself.
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Plus573 gave Shaudius 20 SBR Point(s) for this post.
You seen that show?
