← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Valley Forge
Thread ID: 12276 | Posts: 26 | Started: 2004-02-12
2004-02-12 04:51 | User Profile
I am thinking seriously about enrolling in law school this fall (just received an acceptance letter from my first choice school today).
Right now, I work in the IT sector, and it's hard to feel secure when you know your job could go to India on a moment's notice. Every time the budget cycle passes and I'm not laid off, I breath a sigh of relief.
So, because the realities of globalization are starting to hit a little too close to home, I am looking to transition into something where I can control my own destiny. Plus, I don't find IT work as interesting as I used to.
These questions are for the OD legal community (or anyone who wants to chime in).
1) Based on your experience, do you think law school is worth money? Do you like what you do?
2) What's your sense of the job market for new lawyers not coming out of one of the elite top 14 schools (my situation)?
3) Is there any potential to do satisfying and interesting work in the law, or is it mostly drudgery (or a combination)?
4) I've heard that when you get out of law school, you come away with very little practical knowledge, and that it takes a good five years of hands on experience to aqcuire the skills needed to be effective, regardless of your speciality. Is that true?
5) Is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew before you went to law school?
Many thanks in advance for whatever insight you can offer.
PS. Obviously, if I go, I will be keeping my political views to myself ;-) -- in my personal statement, I passed myself off as a politically correct Leftist. I can only imagine what the admissions committee would think if they knew they offered an admissions slot to a militant pro-White activist like myself... :smartass:
2004-02-12 05:13 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Valley Forge]I am thinking seriously about enrolling in law school this fall (just received an acceptance letter from my first choice school today).
Right now, I work in the IT sector, and it's hard to feel secure when you know your job could go to India on a moment's notice. Every time the budget cycle passes and I'm not laid off, I breath a sigh of relief.
2) What's your sense of the job market for new lawyers not coming out of one of the elite top 14 schools (my situation)?
3) Is there any potential to do satisfying and interesting work in the law, or is it mostly drudgery (or a combination)? [/QUOTE] VF, I sympathize with your situation in IT. I can't believe though that any ordinary lawyer finds work these days. Haven't you read the stats? There is a lawyer for every 150 people I've heard in this country. In Oklahoma County there are 5000 lawyers.
Unemployment in the tech industries is a serious situation I think, much more in the soft sciences. Your tech knowledge doesn't transfer to other areas the way a lot of the people skills jobs do. If there's a shortage of anything in this country, its people who can get this across.
Maybe what you should really be is an IT labor organizer. Or at least a high school guidance counselor, with practical knowledge of the job market. That's something in short demand.
2004-02-12 06:07 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Or at least a high school guidance counselor with practical knowledge of the job market.[/QUOTE]
Better a high school counselor with practical knowledge of small arms.
VF: go for it and best of luck to you. The legal profession needs all the self-aware white men it can get.
2004-02-12 06:46 | User Profile
Well, since I know damn well il ragno is no lawyer, I guess this question is open to all of us trousered apes.
Yep, be a lawyer. It's the right thing to do. Edgar Steel needs back-up and plenty of it.
As dippy as it sounds even my own formerly shiny-but-non-U business experience has been tapped. Here's the deal: A globalist whose name you might now, but for legal reasons I won't repeat, told a few of us that there will be a fairly large market in resisting globalism over the next few years.
He said will be. This guy is an insider. They expect resistance to all this joy (feminism-multiculturalism-dumbdownism) to become a viable commodity... which to my ears means that the number of lawyers Okie decries can only go [B]UP[/B].
It makes sense. Allowing fairly well-intelligent dissenters to blow off steam, organize hopeless protests and defend regime-fingered non-criminals (think Des Moines) will be a growth industry for the near term. With a Bush re-election, the very near term.
This goes triple if the lunatics in DC reinstitute the draft. You'll have business even before you pass the bar.
Come to think of it, the Lawyer for the Damned might have to open branches in all 50 states.
2004-02-12 06:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Well, since I know [I]damn well [/I] il ragno is no lawyer, I guess this question is open to all of us trousered apes.[/QUOTE]
I [I]was [/I] going to ask "how do you know that", but maybe that italicized 'damn well' ought to concern me more...!
2004-02-12 06:54 | User Profile
In our legal system now, it is about MONEY. Becoming a Lawyer to fight for justice, is akin to screwing for virginity... Liars/Lawyers support all our county court houses.. Get real...... The white race is 8.5% of the worlds population, and we are helping Savage's breed in Africa, even after they STOPPED and murdered the white farmer's of Rhodesia. This a racialist board, isn't it? If it is let's get in the spirit.. Deportation's of non-white's for U.S. is the answer not RACE WAR.. It won't be like a alien made movie.. Think Deportation, and getting our own media.. War's have only made an alien central govt., strong. The Alien's understood Lincoln........ Hence look at all our military actions.. Perhap's most folks even on this forum would be hard pressed to name all our military WHITE TAX paid adventures since 1965. If you want to go to school take Horticulture, or medical anything.......
2004-02-12 07:04 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]I [I]was [/I] going to ask "how do you know that", but maybe that italicized 'damn well' ought to concern me more...![/QUOTE]
Not that I wouldn't like to see you working a jury anyway. Damn well!
I just figured this would be an esquires-only thread, but it wouldn't be OD if we let that happen.
2004-02-12 09:57 | User Profile
First of all, congratulations on your acceptance, VF!
I'm not involved in the legal profession, but here's my two cents. For starters -- and forgive me if this seems like common sense or a cliche -- I would recommend that you go only if you're interested in law for its own sake. Do you use any of your spare time to read about the subject? That's a good litmus test. Don't just go to law school for the job opportunities (assuming they're good) or for the money. You will probably graduate with a LOT of debt, and rumor has it that even if you land a job with a good firm soon after graduation, you'll be putting in 80-hour weeks.
In fact, here's a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook entry on lawyers: [url]http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm[/url]
It might be worth investigating whether there's a demand for lawyers who specialize in cases relating to your prior field of IT. If you can combine any specialized technical knowledge you've acquired in your past work with your future legal practice, that might be very rewarding both in terms of money and your enjoyment of your job. An example of such a niche area might be cases pertaining to online privacy. This is just something I've yanked out of my butt, though; whether or not such niche areas present unique opportunities is something you'll probably want to investigate on your own.
Regardless of what you decide, good luck!
2004-02-12 12:26 | User Profile
I was a teacher for a while - nearly went broke.
Then I wised up and went to law school, and I never looked back.
Good for you!!!
Do it. Make the scratch, man. All the rest is just conversation.
You might consider becoming a patent attorney. Those filthy animals make obscene amounts of jack. Why? Because not nearly all of us have the required smarts and technical education to handle engineering problems, and because Intellectual Property is where it's at. It's the future, like it or not, and if you can help a company build its patent wall to keep out competition, then you're worth your weight in gold. And they'll pay you what you're worth. Partners cam make $1 million/year, even more. Of course, if you go the law firm route they'll take it out of your hide the first ten years.
I'm a business lawyer. Do deals. It's been cool, but it's dull as hell sometimes. Planes, trains and automobiles. My life is a parade of egomaniacal a$$holes marching through my office. Burns, busts, bummers and rip-offs, as they used to say in the 1970's.
But I've never regreted the investment in law school, never one second. And even though I loved teaching, I know that I never would have felt that I supported my family properly had I continued mucking about teaching for peanuts.
All of us have, IMHO, and obligation to rise as "high and inside" as our talents will take us.
Go for it, young brother!
Warmest regards,
Walter
2004-02-12 21:25 | User Profile
Walter,
Yeah, right. But it still stinks that a mediocre lawyer can make lots more than a good teacher. Which do we need more?
2004-02-13 11:53 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ragnar]Walter,
Yeah, right. But it still stinks that a mediocre lawyer can make lots more than a good teacher. Which do we need more?[/QUOTE]
No doubt, but that's the way the world is. Let it stink, I say.
My decision to make the terrible investment of time and money (and nerves and moral capital) that is required to get that little ol' bar card came directly from a conversation I had with another teacher.
I taught all day (junior college setting, I'll leave out the details). I taught a lot of hours, had a huge load. Busted my a$$ and didn't make nearly enough to support my wife and first born child. So I moonlighted, teaching ESL classes to illegal immigrants. I also delivered pizzas on the weekends (it was really humiliating to deliver pizzas to my students). I slept very little, and still I was earning just enough to afford a one room apartment in a white area and diapers for the kid. That was it. Lousy medical insurance, zero savings. I was going nowhere financially speaking.
Anyway, I got to be friends with a guy who was also a teacher moonlighting, teaching these ESL classes. Once after a long evening of "hello, my name is Pedro" I got talking to this fellow. He was in his early fifties, I was in my late twenties. We were both just ragged, dogged tired. It turns out that he was not only a teacher but also a principle at a large elementary school in the area but, he said, he just didn't make enough at one job to discharge his family responsibilities.
He told me that he regretted becoming a teacher, and felt that he'd wasted his career. He was a Stanford grad in mathematics, and he said that his friends from his undergraduate days who went on to law school or B-school or into IT stayed friends with him and his wife only for a couple of years, and then they moved into higher social-income classes and there just was no way he and his wife could afford the increasingly expensive social life contact with them required. No skiing weekends in Tahoe for them. No private schools for the kids. No super-duper MacMansion is white Suburbia. He said that he really regretted losing those friends, and felt like he let his youthful idealism blind him to the simple economic facts of life, to his great loss.
I remember he looked at me and said "kid, don't do this. Get out. Whatever you have to do, get out of this. Don't do what I did. Make whatever sacrifice you have to make, but get out of this dead-end career track. You're a smart guy, and you owe it to your family to give them more than this." He suggested law school or B-school (I chose law, with a lot of "B" in it). That was the clincher for me. It was the thing that made me sign up for the LSAT and apply to about 20 law schools. I wound up gong at night, teaching during the day. It was hell, and I wouldn't wish those sleepless years on my worse enemy, but I robbed Peter, paid Paul, and did it.
And he was right. I lost touch with that guy, but I've been grateful to him for that pep talk ever since.
While I'm at it, I'll tell you another one.
I first began thinking about law school when I had dropped out of graduate school because I realized I didn't care enough about the subject to make it my life. I was living in Chicago with an old friend, and supporting myself hanging dry wall. I was 26 years old. This friend I was living with had a bunch of friends in Chicago, and he took me to a Halloween party. I met an affable redhaired Irish American there (dressed as a tomato) we'll call Sean. Sean was in his early thirties, and told me that he'd just been laid off from the company where he'd worked since getting his MBA a few years prior to that as part of a corporate takeover. Assuming that this was a bad thing, and imaging the trouble I'd be in if my dry wall gig were to end, I said "wow, Sean. That's terrible. I really feel for you. What are you going to do." Heck, I was ready to help the poor guy out with a couple of bucks.
Sean answered, "well, I'm going skiing in Aspen for a couple of months to think it over." Tilt! Turns out that as part of the takeover agreement Sean got a huge severance package - $150,000 in cash if memory serves. And he was junior management. I was stunned. He added that it wasn't only management, that many, many blue collar workers got the axe, too. I asked (again foolishly) what sort of compensation package the workers got, and he looked at me like I was nuts.
I realized that this guy in the tomato suit must have thought he was talking to some yokel from Palookaville, and the truth be told, in terms of understanding how the business world worked he was absolutely right. I really had no idea. I thought that making $8/hour cash was great. I once heard a guy call in to Rush Limbaugh saying something about rich people who made $40,000/year. I used to be like that guy. I hadn't a clue.
Anyhoo, I was really upset about this little conversation, but I couldn't really put my finger on why. I remember the whole next week busting my a$$ hanging dry wall that there's just another life out there and having this sick feeling that I was missing something important. You see, it's not just the money, it's about social position. It's about class. Sean was in a different class from me, even though like me he'd come from working class folk. And I was in the class that sweated hanging dry wall and got laid off without so much as a fare-thee-well, while the bosses got long skiing vacations in Aspen.
That was the event that got me thinking about law school, but I still had some youthful foolishness to shed.
Sometime after that, I was free-lancing as a translator and as an interpreter for doctors and lawyers meeting with their Soviet counterparts (I'm a pretty fair Russian-English interpretor, and a crack legal translator). This was my final confrontation with the reality of how much chosen professions make. Remember, I'm barely scratching out a living here (work was sporadic). I sat around listening to these American doctors hobnob. It turns out that they never talk medicine when they're together. Shoptalk for American doctors is all about money, money, money. How to increase billings, where to invest it, their favourite tax shelters, and so forth. I remember a general surgeon from Oklahoma City said that he'd paid "$400,000 last year in personal income taxes." And his fellow doctors sadly shook their heads in understanding.
I was shocked. That means that he must have made over $1 million in a year, and probably much more because these guys are tax minimization freaks. I had NO BLOODY IDEA that people made that much jack. I mean, not even the first clue. I realized that I needed to drop all this foolishness, and become one of them. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
It was brought home to me - nearly too late - by that conversation with that school principal who was still moonlighting to put food on the table and live in a decent neighborhood while his college chums had completely different lives.
It's like that Robert Frost poem - the decisions you make as a young man affect you all your life, and the terribly unfair thing about it is that young men are least equipped to make the decisions.
In this old world, a man needs a curl in his lip and spit in his eye. One can never be too cynical, I'm afraid.
I always tell young men to rise as "high and inside" as their talents and luck will take them. It's the way the world is, and it does no good to complain about it. Deal with life on its own terms, and SUCCEED at all costs.
Like I said, the rest is all just conversation.
Walter
2004-02-13 23:39 | User Profile
Walter, Thanks for sharing your story with us. I think you made the right descision even though I hate lawyers (nothing personal) and that you may be more helpful to "our cause" as a wealthy, powerful attorney than a struggling teacher. The higher positions racially conscious Whites have in society, the better. The best of luck with your tax minimisation.
2004-02-14 00:12 | User Profile
Good story indeed. I like this:
[QUOTE]I thought that making $8/hour cash was great. I once heard a guy call in to Rush Limbaugh saying something about rich people who made $40,000/year. I used to be like that guy. I hadn't a clue.[/QUOTE]
But then it's Limbaugh's job to help the clueless stay that way. Megods, when I got my first real job after the Navy I thought $7.50/hour was a dream. In another world, it was.
2004-02-14 07:13 | User Profile
[QUOTE=wintermute]A beautiful story with a sound moral. I approve. Now even I will have to consider law school.
Also, I very much like the phrase 'tax minimization freak'.
You should use it as your title, replacing 'senior dissident'.
It will look great under the turkey.
Wintermute[/QUOTE]
I like your idea about adding the phrase to my turkey logo. I'm thinking of changing my logo to Gay Spiderman and repalcing my current signature with a passage about the rectal and other health problems sodomites suffer, just to make a statement about gay "marriage" (vulcanous hurl!). But maybe I should stay with the turkey as I really think it suits me.
What did you see as the moral of the story, oh wise Aesop?
I think the moral is that young men need to take care of business before "following their bliss" as Joseph Campbell put it. Pursue bliss only after you've avoided misery. And then don't quit your job to do it.
Travis: I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea. I'm not really a major player. I make a nice living, thank Heaven, and I skate around the edges of the real big shots, but I'm definitely hired help, if you know what I mean.
But I agree with you that the main thing is to get as many of us racially aware whites as high and as inside as possible. Our Jewish brothers took power by infiltrating corporate board rooms, academia.
The great WN classic film Andrei Rublev (if you haven't seen it, please rent it today) has a scene where a Russian peasant is being crucified on a snowy Russian hill, and the narrator (Rublev) intones "the Pharisees rose to power through study . . ." Of course, Tarkovsky was talking about the Jewish Bolsheviks, but it's true for us as well.
I say to my young brothers that we must do the same. Rise to power through soberiety and study. If you drink or smoke weed, quit it. Quit it now. Get sober, then get married and stay that way. And get that degree. Do whatever you have to do, but get it, and move up and inside. For yourself, for your family, and for us.
Walter
2004-02-14 11:20 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Perhaps with marriage the sex acts will stop? [/QUOTE]
You're a genius. That hadn't occurred to me.
Have them get "married" and then all the hot humping stops? Hmmm . . .
No, it won't work. At least for fags. You see, the major cause of the married humping deficit that you rightly observe is the very product of all that initial humping - children.
Yes, children. Children who get sick in the middle of the night just when things start to warm up, children who crawl in bed with you at 3:00 A.M. Children who reduced the goregeous Parthenon of the young Mrs. Yannis to a beloved ruin. Children that leave unsightly hysterecomy scares and stretch marks. The little rugrats really put a crimp in my style, if you know whadda mean.
Now, fags don't have many kids, and if they do it's very probably for all the wrong reasons, so no I think that even marriage won't slow them down. Besides, they'll just be visiting the bathhouses with the 20 gallon drums of mouthwash together.
Lesbians, I'm given to understand, very rarely do it anyway, even less than married heterosexuals, so marriage will be pretty much of a wash for them. Plus, lesbian sex by its nature is not nearly as destructive and dangerous as homosexual sodomy. Lesbians don't lose continence after years of being ass-raped - well, at least not most of them (I know one dyke I wouldn't put anything past - if that chick gets bored then all sorts of terrible things can happen). Their lovemaking doesn't usually entail the consumption of medically significant amounts of feces and the entry of fecal matter and sperm cells into the bloodstream, wreaking havoc on the immune system. Lesbians generally don't suffer from the complex of maladies that fags are prone to called "gay bowel syndrome", that results for a combination of microscopic rectal parasites, gonnoerhea infections, herpes scars, and ruptured anal sphicters.
Ready to vomit yet? I am! And that's what gay "marriage" is all about - equating something as objectively nauseating as fudge-packing between perverts with the fecund and holy marriage bed. Talk about re-defining something out of existence.
The next thing you know they'll be calling Trotskyites "conservatives." Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot . . .
Anyway, I think that the terrible threat to the public health posed by fags underlies the OT's command to stone male sodomites to death at the town's gates, while basically leaving lesbianism unregulated. Of course, St. Paul made it clear that Christianity must condemn it as a violation of the Natural Law (Romans).
As to my Avatar, despite the foregoing I've determined to keep the turkey, which is both a beatiful and noble bird. And an American original. Don't you agree?
Walter
P.S. - what would you take up in graduate school? Your many intellectual gifts would make you a success at most anything you put your hand to, I'm sure, but our time together makes me think that the law is for you. She's a jealous mistress, but a fitting profession for a man with such broad interests as yourself.
2004-02-14 11:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ragnar]Good story indeed. I like this:
But then it's Limbaugh's job to help the clueless stay that way. Megods, when I got my first real job after the Navy I thought $7.50/hour was a dream. In another world, it was.[/QUOTE]
It really is bizarre when you think about it. Here you have all these poor whites calling Rush because they think he speaks to their anger (while lacking any ability to grasp its etiology) and not realizing that Rush is working for the folks who are engineering their problems while making - what? - $100 million/year?
That's a rough guess, and if anybody has information on how much Rush makes it would be most instructive, and the kind of thing that should be posted far and wide on places like Free Republic.
Walter
2004-02-18 02:12 | User Profile
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, comments, & suggestions everybody. I don't know if I will go or not based on the cost/benefit analysis -- I'll have to think about it some more -- it's the 85K price tag that is giving me pause more than anything else right now. For someone from a modest background like me, that's a lot of money. Also, I have talked to a few lawyers in my area who went to the school I will be attending if I go, and so far I'm getting mixed reviews. They say the job market for lawyers is incredibly oversaturated right now.
2004-02-18 02:16 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]It really is bizarre when you think about it. Here you have all these poor whites calling Rush because they think he speaks to their anger (while lacking any ability to grasp its etiology) and not realizing that Rush is working for the folks who are engineering their problems while making - what? - $100 million/year?
That's a rough guess, and if anybody has information on how much Rush makes it would be most instructive, and the kind of thing that should be posted far and wide on places like Free Republic.
Walter[/QUOTE]
Were you listening to Rush the day he blurted out that $10,000,000 was not a lot of money? I don't remember exactly when he said it, but it was within the last year.
He must have been doped up that day, because he almost let the mask come off.
2004-02-18 20:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Valley Forge]Were you listening to Rush the day he blurted out that $10,000,000 was not a lot of money? I don't remember exactly when he said it, but it was within the last year.
He must have been doped up that day, because he almost let the mask come off.[/QUOTE]
Actually, I had heard that.
Rush is married into the Tribe, no?
Walter
2004-02-18 20:20 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Valley Forge]Thanks for sharing your thoughts, comments, & suggestions everybody. I don't know if I will go or not based on the cost/benefit analysis -- I'll have to think about it some more -- it's the 85K price tag that is giving me pause more than anything else right now. For someone from a modest background like me, that's a lot of money. Also, I have talked to a few lawyers in my area who went to the school I will be attending if I go, and so far I'm getting mixed reviews. They say the job market for lawyers is incredibly oversaturated right now.[/QUOTE]
Top lawyers in corporate firms routinely bill out at $500/hour - and they bill 2,000 hours/year, sometimes more. And then there are commissions, success fees, contingency fees, etc. Of course, they also commoditize the time of all the associate thralls.
Like I said, partners in some of the top law firms routinely make $1 million/year.
$85k ain't doodly-squat in comparison to that, babe. Not for a smart guy who has unique skills and is willing to pay the price (and the price is steep).
Walter
2004-02-18 21:47 | User Profile
Isn't it a little irresponsible to paint such a rosy picture? Granted, I don't know the job market among the shysters, and I'll gladly admit that the majority of those who don't succeed there are just rubble and therefore a bright guy should have little problem. But is that true? Also, a certain personality is required for the job -- good memory, a quick mind and good verbal skills are more important than being able to dig deep and be an analytical type.
2004-02-19 00:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE] it's the 85K price tag that is giving me pause more than anything else right now[/QUOTE] Do NOT waste your money on a private school. The legal education at Harvard, for instance, is a joke -- one semester of torts? You will learn more at a state school, though certain private schools look good on the resume, of course. Where are you, and which schools are you looking at?
Walter paints a rosey picture, but I'm not as satisfied with the practice of law as he is. I have great difficulty with the lack of intellectual stimulation. I do it for the money, and that's it. Do not allow the incurrence of debt to lock you in to the profession after law school; I would encourage you to maintain a level of debt that will allow you to remain flexible.
If you choose to go into the law, I would recommend a real estate practice. It's very easy, and real estate guys are a hell of a lot more fun to hang out with than are bankers.
2004-02-19 01:28 | User Profile
I live in a state that has a very good public law school. The problem is that the school doesn't have a part time program, and I don't want to go full time because that would mean giving up three years of IT management income. I really can't afford to do that.
2004-02-19 13:08 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Walter paints a rosey picture, but I'm not as satisfied with the practice of law as he is. I have great difficulty with the lack of intellectual stimulation. I do it for the money, and that's it. Do not allow the incurrence of debt to lock you in to the profession after law school; I would encourage you to maintain a level of debt that will allow you to remain flexible. [/QUOTE]
I agree with you and Madrussian that its not for everybody. You need a certain kind of mind, and if you don't have that then definitely it's not worth it.
Believe me, I don't find any of this commercial stuff particularly interesting. I mean, what could possibly be more mind numbingly dull than the Internal Revenue Code? Dry. Very dry.
I just do it for the money. But see, that's the point. It used to be that I put up drywall for the money - I certainly didn't do it for the intellectual challenge. The only differences is that I make many, many times more money doing boring and repetitive stuff.
It's all about money. Make the money, forget the bliss. My slogans:
Life is a sh*t sandwich, and every day is just another bite. :dung: :yucky:
Life sucks, and then you die. :crybaby:
Life is not to be lived and enjoyed, it is to be gotten on with, so shut up and get that diploma. :smartass:
You can never be too rich, to thin, or too cynical. :smoke:
The law isn't fun. It isn't the path to self-fulfillment, at least it certainly hasn't been that for me. It is a way for a young guy with a certain type of smarts to claw his way out of poverty.
All I'm saying is that it's about as much fun as hanging drywall, but it pays a helluva lot more. So if the choice is between highly compensated ennui and grinding poverty, give me ennui any day!
Walter
2004-02-19 13:16 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Valley Forge]I live in a state that has a very good public law school. The problem is that the school doesn't have a part time program, and I don't want to go full time because that would mean giving up three years of IT management income. I really can't afford to do that.[/QUOTE]
Mwdallas: isn't there an ABA approved online program? What was it called? I think that this program did quite well on the CA Bar Exam. The ABA doesn't like this, but I suspect that there's little that can be done. I don't know if I'd recommend it - most law firms would turn up their noses at an online law degree. Believe me, I know. Many feel leary about hiring me, a night school student.
VF: law school at night SUCKS, but if you can get into the patent bar, it's totally worth it. You'll make huge stacks of cash.
Walter
2004-02-20 01:13 | User Profile
1) Based on your experience, do you think law school is worth money? Do you like what you do?
Answer to first part of question will be forthcoming from me several years down the road. I'm newly admitted to the bar and I do litigation. Mostly, it's boring as hell, with a few moments of satisfaction for a job thoroughly done or the rare burst of creativity. But I never, ever thought I'd enjoy being a lawyer. Truth is, I thought I might actually hate it. But that's not why I went to law school. I went to law school because I saw that lawyers are the masters of the universe. In another life, I was a reporter, and I loved that job. Way more of an opportunity to be creative (and obviously, to write, my first love). But it didn't escape me that the lawyers are running our country. Reporters have power, sure, but lawyers can move stuff immediately in ways reporters can't. Also, the body of knowledge is incalculably valuable. I also wanted to make some money. 'Taint happenin' right now, but maybe some day. I figured worst-case scenario, I end up doing something else, but with a law degree. Now that is damn expensive proposition. But years down the road, who knows. Nowadays I dream of, with proper financing secured and years hence, becoming a little more active for our cause, and for those purposes, knowing the law would be a damn, damn good idea. For anything --- lobbying, publishing, legal activism, you name it. Jews have done well because they know the limits of the law and how to push it and manipulate it. We should have as many on our side who can see what they're doing and fight back.
2) What's your sense of the job market for new lawyers not coming out of one of the elite top 14 schools (my situation)?
Tough. If you land in the top percentage of your class, that makes it easier. Also, if you leave "Federalist Society" off the resume, that helps, depending on where you live.
3) Is there any potential to do satisfying and interesting work in the law, or is it mostly drudgery (or a combination)?
Trials offer some opportunity for creativity, but the vast majority of lawyers never see a trial. Most do paperwork or "deals," as they say, that require attention to detail. Lots and lots of detail. I'm not a detail-lover, unless we're talking about literary details.
4) I've heard that when you get out of law school, you come away with very little practical knowledge, and that it takes a good five years of hands on experience to aqcuire the skills needed to be effective, regardless of your speciality. Is that true?
Yeah.
5) Is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew before you went to law school?
No. All the warnings about how tough it is are true.
VF, I say do it. Kingsfield was right. Law school, thick with Jews and liberals as it is, will turn your mind into a deadly, Socratic trap-laying weapon.