I Want to Go to Law School Because I Was On the Debate Team. Sound Familiar?

We've all come across that person who goes straight from college to law school because they think four years in College Toastmasters and winning the best debater award on the high school debate team is sufficient experience to do well in law school. As you all know, good grades and success in law school has very little to do with oratory skills. Other than optional extra-curricular activities such as moot court and clinical programs, law school has nearly nothing to do with debating and public speaking ability.

A former high school debater asked Law.com whether he should start law school immediately after college:

Q: I'm a college senior and wonder what you think about my going to law school right away, after I graduate next year. I've been interested in becoming a lawyer since high school, when I was in the debate club. My friends who are planning to get their MBA are going to work for a couple of years first. Is that something I should do, or should I stick to my plan of starting next fall, assuming I'm accepted?

Also, any thoughts of where I should apply?

And here is a portion of the B.S. response from Law.com:

A: Dear Sooner or Later,

Some individuals find it beneficial to obtain work experience for a year or two, or more, before they attend law school. Others continue their education without a break. Their choice of whether to jump right in or wait, like yours, may be influenced by many different issues.

Ask yourself, first, whether you are ready for law school. Take into account not only your state of mind or eagerness to start on your career, but also your skills. Think about your abilities in all areas including research, writing, oral communication, analysis, judgment, leadership, negotiation, project management and organization. Assess whether they are at the level expected of law students. Consider, too, potential benefits of work experience that enables you to refine those skills.

Working may have other advantages. If you work and can save a portion of your earnings, you can defray some of the cost of law school or, at least, cut back on the amount of financial assistance that you may need. You may also start repaying any loans that you may have received for your undergraduate education. Leaving law school with less debt would be a plus.

Being shy certainly won't help you in the classroom when the professor uses the Socratic Method, but that doesn't mean you can't get the best grade in the class. A friend from law school was a poor public speaker and still graduated law review and cum laude while many of the slick, Billy Flynn wannabes had mediocre and poor grades.

Here is a word of advice. Don't worry about the loud mouths in class who try to intimidate everyone. It is usually the people who don't say anything and quietly go back to their rooms to study instead of running their mouths on campus who graduate at the top of their class. Law school does not prepare you to become a lawyer or argue in court. The only thing law school tests you on is your test taking ability on one exam at the end of the semester, not how well you can speak to an audience. Most lawyers will never argue in court, so the only reason I can come up with as to why law lemmings continue to believe that success in law school is strongly correlated to the debate team is due to the glamorization of the legal profession by shows like The Good Wife, Law & Order, and The Defenders.

Where to apply should be a no-brainer to anyone who reads BIDER. Simple answers to simple questions: Yale or Fail or full scholarship to a T14.

Why Your Career Services Sucks

bl1y explains why your career services office probably hasn't found you a job and never will, using the recent news of Emory Law School's career services' FAIL as an example:

Emory has seven people working as career services advisors, with one of them an assistant dean, and another a senior director. If we assume an average salary for the non-managers of $50,000, $65,000 for the senior director, and $80,000 for the assistant dean, we get a total of $395,000. There is also one administrative assistant, and let’s assume she works for $35,000, taking us up to $430,000, and I think I’m being pretty conservative here.

That’s just the salaries. You also have any sort of retirement plan the school has and health insurance. The office also takes up space and requires furniture, office equipment, software and office supplies (I bet they use a ton of paper; my own career services office sent me a 189 page book that was little more than a list of websites, which of course is least useful on paper, where I can’t just click on a link). And then there’s the added costs they bring to other departments, such as human resources, pay roll, IT, and maintenance.

The true cost for this 7 man operation is likely about one million dollars. Emory has about 700 students, so we’re talking roughly $1400 per student per year, or $4200 total per student. And what do they get for this fee? Advice such as “network” or “go on informational interviews.” It’s basically an admission that they can’t help you. The most they can do is suggest someone else who might be able to help you.

....

They’ll talk about how law degrees open all sorts of doors because they’ve heard a handful of anecdotal evidence. But, when they suggest working as a contracts specialist, do you think they’ve done the job before? Do you think they have any idea what the day to day work is like? Nope. All they can do is name the job title and assure you that someone with a JD has done it before.

I recently talked to my own career services office, and told them one of the things I was interested in is journalism, but it’s an extremely hard field to get in to if you don’t have prior journalism experience. She assured me I was qualified and there were lots of entry level positions in journalism. I guess she hasn’t heard that print media has taken a beating lately. Also, while there are entry level positions, they still require experience and a stack of clips (writing samples). Journalism majors get all this through summer internships and working on the school paper. A lawyer with an English degree could be qualified, but most places won’t look at you unless you have the specific credentials they’re looking for. And why should they? This is a buyer’s market? Why settle for something that’s not quite what you want when there are hundreds of highly qualified perfect matches?

Enough of that tangent though, my point is that the people working in career services know extremely little about the industries they’re placing people in and what it takes to get a job there. They don’t take your resume and peruse want ads looking for possible fits. They simply don’t know what a job search entails. They’ll tell you to network with alumni, but are extremely unhelpful at actually finding alumni for you to talk to.

Career services is just another example of your tuition dollars going to waste. The most career services do at the majority of law schools or graduate schools is to plan OCI or a similar form of job fair. One BIDER reader emailed me earlier in the year that her school's job fair was simply another publicity stunt to post on the school's website despite them knowing that most of the employers who came weren't interested in hiring entry-level candidates right out of school. A rough estimate of fewer than 10% of her class received any response from the employers who showed up at the career fair, and a lot of the responses came in the form of summer internship offers, not full-time job offers (the job fair was mainly for graduating students).

Once the yearly dog and pony show ends, career services pats themselves on the back and most of us are on our own when it comes to the real job search. As bl1y points out, career services does very little in helping students truly network by acting as an intermediary between the student and working alumni, introducing students with its connections, etc. Finding a job in today's economy takes much more effort on the part of both the students and career services. Unfortunately, I don't think most career services are up to the challenge or even want to go the extra mile for their students.

Tell us your experience with career services in the comments section. If anyone from Emory or another law school has followup news on career services they'd like us to share in a future post, please email me or Angel, and we will post what you have to say.

Some People Still Don't Get It

Links that were sent to me over the weekend indicate that America's youth continue to hold out hope that the economy will recover by the time they graduate and that internships still lead to full-time jobs when spending $120k and three years in law school isn't good enough anymore. Does anyone take news like this seriously anymore or do they think they will beat the odds?

An example of this is William & Mary. The school saw an increase in applications across the board at all of their schools this year. Looks like we'll be getting more visitors and followers to our blog in the next few years if this is the forecast for what is happening at most schools. There is no way in hell the economy will improve in three years to give the millions of us out of work now and the thousands planning to graduate in the next three years a full-time job. Not gonna happen.

The William & Mary Law School saw a 26-percent increase in applications to the J.D. program, receiving nearly 6,300 applications for slightly more than 200 seats in the Class of 2013. The Law School joins the Office of Undergraduate Admissions as well as other graduate and professional programs at the College in reporting significant increases in applications for next year's incoming classes.

The School of Education is reporting an increase of more than 20 percent in graduate applications. Admissions officials in graduate programs in Arts & Sciences also report an increase of eight percent compared to last year. At William & Mary's Mason School of Business, applications to the MBA program are up 12 percent compared to the same time frame from last year.

"Whether its graduate and professional programs or undergraduate studies, we're delighted that so many people want to join us at William & Mary," said President Taylor Reveley.

This news from the graduate programs comes a few months after admissions officials reported that undergraduate applications topped 12,500, a record number for the fifth year in a row.

I don't know where William & Mary is ranked in USNWR and I really don't care. I think it's a T1 institution and it looks like a lovely place to spend a few years, but that's besides the point. All anyone needs to know for the next ten years is that any institution outside of the T14 probably isn't worth the gamble. When T14 graduates are graduating without any job offers, one can make an educated guess that the majority of graduates outside of the T14 will not get a good return on their three year investment, meaning they will not find a biglaw or government job to pay off their six figure debt. The only exception to this are students who have connections to get a job or rich parents paying their tuition.

Then I came across this story at WalletPop about a 36-year-old husband, father, and business graduate who left his lucrative and intellectually stimulating investment banking job to attend Cardozo Law in 2007. Now he is graduating with no job offer other than an internship which he thinks will lead to a fulfilling long-term career in the law. Good luck with that.

When I got a job at an investment bank right out business school, I was brought in to analyze the impact of Napster on the music industry," recalls the 36-year-old. "That was a fascinating topic. The discourse going around this -- how is culture made, disseminated and controlled -- fascinated me."

By 2007, he started at Benjamin N. Cardoza School of Law in Manhattan at a cost of $40,000 a year. While he remains as enamored of the field as before, finding a balance between being a fulltime student, a husband of eight years and a dad of now three kids has been tough. From morning until night, "it's always a balance act that I usually fail but I try to hold up my end as much as possible," he said.

It's become even harder since 2009. To the surprise of many, the legal profession has been hit hard by the economic meltdown. Law school graduates have had to scramble to find jobs. To improve his chances, Abramowitz, president of the Intellectual Property Society from 2008-09, held an internship last fall and is working in another this spring.

"A lot of firms are not hiring straight out of school," he explains. "[With internships] they want to build a certain amount of trust in you and they want you to be more familiar with their operations and systems so if they do take you on full time, you're ready to hit the ground running. And they don't have to extend time paying you and training you at the same time."

Set to graduate in June, Abramowitz remains optimistic that all his planning will provide a solid foundation for his family. "The goal is to build something for the long haul, for 30, 40, 50 years -- something that is fulfilling for me and something that is sustainable and supportive of my family," he said. "If one or two years or three years are a little rocky, OK. Hopefully you end on the plus side of the ledger."

Great Advertising: A Supreme Court Case

UC Hastings School of Law is getting some "free" press from the Supreme Court, in a case where they are defending their anti-bias policy.  The Christian Legal Society is suing the law school for failing to recognize and fund their group, where they would not allow gays and lesbians membership in the Society.  Such a funny policy for the Christian Group to have considering the schools location in San Francisco, the homosexual mecca.  I can just imagine all of the bleeding heart liberal lemmings flocking to UC Hastings for their promotion of diversity.

All and all, it's a lame case. I can't tell if there is an actual gay or lesbian person that was denied entry into the group or if it clear that they wouldn't extend membership to the Gay Reasonable Person--should he exist.  And the analogies are atrocious:  "If Hastings is correct, a student who does not even believe in the Bible is entitled to demand to lead a Christian Bible study," the group's lawyer, Stanford law Professor Michael McConnell, told the justices in Washington. A campus NAACP chapter, he said, "would have to allow a racist skinhead to sit in on its planning meetings." I don't see the comparison.  Whereas being a racist skinhead and an active member of the NAACP are mutually exclusive--as in one cannot be both a skinhead and a believer in the mission of the NAACP--the same cannot be said of a gay person who identifies himself as Christian.  What does it really take to be a Christian?  A belief in Jesus, baptism?  Once you've overcome those hurdles, you are a Christian.  A think a more similar analogy would be one where a person who looks white, but identifies as black for whatever reason (either culturally, or based on a black grandparent or great grandparent) would be denied membership to NAACP.  I doubt that would happen. Would a transvestite be denied membership with NOW? No, s/he would be welcomed with open arms.

In short, this Christian Legal Society needs to focus on its bible studies and stop intruding in people's lives.  I bet they don't say anything to members who are promiscuous or use drugs.  Last I checked, "thou shall not commit adultery" and your body is a temple.

So, based on the ludicrous nature of the lawsuit--I can't help but think that this is some ploy to get press. In any event, fight the good fight UC Hastings!  The gay lemmings will respond with increased applications, and then you can raise tuition again.  And Christian Group, continue to pray... that you'll get a job when you graduate.