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Jobs After law school
Christina-5
Alum Member
Disclaimer: It doesn't matter if you are applying to a top law school or not and everyone opinion matter.
I had some free time yesterday so i had a conversation with a recent graduate from the school i am interested in going to for my law studies (UMiami) and she expressed to me that she and a few of her friends were having a hard time finding jobs or landing interviews (sports and entertainment law, corporate law etc) and they are all in the top 10% of their class.After the conversation i went onto BLS.gov to see what the job market for lawyers looked like and its a little discouraging to see that its only going to grow about 8% in the next few years. So i wanted to get everyone opinion on the whole "after law school" topic. maybe you all can even shed some light on this topic as i am a career changer and i would love to learn more about everyone plans as far as what you're planing on studying in law school and the job market on that particular filed.
Comments
U of Miami only has 36% employment rate after graduation. This isn’t a new phenomena having to do with the economy or legal market. Sounds like a pretty specific issue to that school. Research employment rates of the schools you’re interested in.
Yeah...unfortunately @"surfy surf" is right - a lot of employment stats are school-dependent, and those are also ranking-dependent
The primary goal of law school is to get a job after graduation. I'd be wary of any school with lower than 75% BAR employment at 6-months graduation. I think this is the main reason why the t14 and t25 are put on a pedestal. The further down the rankings you go, the more evident it is that law school (outside t25) is no longer a safe financial decision.
I also don't think that the t25 or t14 or bust mentality is a good one either. If you're truly dedicated to being a lawyer, you should be willing to persevere and fight for jobs. Just keep in mind that if you come from a lesser-qualified school, it is necessarily going to be harder to find work, let alone good work.
UoM's employment statistics notwithstanding, legal market has been and will be saturated. Each year about 230 accredited AND unaccredited law schools produce thousands of graduates. (Hopefully) each graduate would fill a specialized role which would be filled for (hopefully) several years at least, during which law schools would produce more graduates looking for jobs. This has been going on for decades now. At least you did some research before signing the dotted line. Buyer beware...
But I digress! I am considering litigation. I am not too confident about that though; I have seen and heard many cases where an aspiring law student's plans changed drastically. I am even less inclined to discuss the job market for a particular field, as it is controlled by unpredictable forces beyond a layman's immediate control.
Do allow me to make one conjecture: there will not be a huge demand for space law for at least a decade.
Speak for yourself. I'm going to law school to better understand, Law and Order.
I don't know... Are you sure forensic science or law enforcement isn't your calling?
I’ll concur with others on this post. If your primary concern is job placement after graduation you should definitely consider a school with a high job placement percentage. If your heart is set on U of M, it would be great to get in with as little debt as possible. At least if you run into any issues with job placement you won’t have to stress over a high loan payment.
what about those who come from top law schools and have yet to find a job, or has to settle for any job they get. For instance a year ago one of my family friend daughter graduated from yale at the top of her class and she is current doing volunteer work( to build more experience)because she cant get anything in a private law firm as an in house counsel. However For me i have to go to a school where my pockets can handle the price, plus the iffyness of getting a job after i go to a top law school scares me because if i come out and still no job im sure obama is not going to pay my loans and sallie mae dont play with her money.
Agree on the job statistics and knowing what they are for the schools you are targeting.
Another point I'll make is that Sports and Entertainment Law is notoriously hard to land a job in. You have to have the right connections and those are very far and few in between compared to more common types of practices.
The other thing for jobs in general I will note is the city/market you are in. I don't know much about Miami (so take my opinion with a grain of salt) but Miami/Florida I believe isn't an elite legal market compared to the NY/Chicago/CA/TX/DC markets so jobs will be more niche and a bit harder to find coming from a regional school. Not saying its impossible or anything, but you are more likely going to find jobs at smaller firms compared to big law.
Lastly, until this year I believe there has been a decline in people attending law school so hopefully in the next few years that will help the job market a bit via supply and demand. I could be totally off there but that's just me being glass half full.
Just my two cents. Good Luck!
Choose a school you are interested and do your best to leave with as little debt as possible. It's my opinion that it'll be a lot less stressful to look for a job when loans aren't breathing down your neck (i.e. less pressure, more patience etc).
Additionally, it'll sound a lot better at Happy Hour when you tell the group you hardly have debt and they're on a two drink limit lol.
But seriously, so many factors go into getting a job in all walks of life. I personally think some people could just be bad at interviews. Law degree or not, it's humans hiring humans.
Either way, you'll be fine if you have a positive mental attitude.
Agreed with a lot of the above. That's part of the reason that employment stats are so important to me in searching for a school, and why I want to go to the best ranked school possible while accruing the smallest amount of debt. That's part of the reason that I'm not personally very interested in Harvard, Yale and Stanford. While the odds are good of getting a good job, the debt you have to take on is more risk than I am personally wanting to bear. I also still owe some money from my undergrad, so need to keep things under control for law school.
I don't personally subscribe to the T13 or bust or even T25 or bust mentality. But, the lower in rankings a school is, the lower the employment statistics for the most part. So if you are going to attend a lower ranked school, it's extremely important to pay as little as possible so you don't get too far underwater if you end up not making a decent salary. And that's why we're all here for help with the LSAT - the higher the score, the better the scholarship opportunities!
@akeegs92 I am actually from I’m NYC and so was my friend who went to Yale but it’s was hard for her. I moved to Miami for the cheaper price in schools because I knew I didn’t want to apply to a top law school. But I do plan to move back to NYC and do the bar there as well. And I do how that with the decline there will be more jobs for everyone. It’s so hard when you want something so bad and you work super hard for it just not to get it because there’s no opportunity.
Are you talking about a friend who went to Yale law or Yale undergrad? Can't really draw a conclusion about law school based on undergrad/grad schools. There are always outliers, even in top law schools.
@"surfy surf" she went Yale law and wants to get into corporate.
I think the significance of the employment gap between top schools and more middle tier schools is overstated.
The reason for this is that it is not like we are seeing identical students go to Yale and Miami. If this were the case, then we could conclude that it is primarily the power of a Yale degree that yields much greater benefits in the job market.
But in reality, the higher employment stats of higher schools are at least partially driven by he fact that the most academically gifted, motivated, and well-networked students go there. I would venture to say that Yale admits that choose a more modest school still do pretty well in the job market.
Of course school ranking makes a difference, but is hard to disaggregate this from the self-selection bias I have described, and it seems like everyone seems to ignore the latter and focus on the former
Let's face it: job markets everywhere kind of suck. There are indications that we're going into yet another recession. Very few will be safe from a recession as it is.
What a law degree does, though, is opens some doors. You may have to be creative in finding doors that you want to go through that will make you some money and make you happy, though, especially if the market is bad.
Echoing what everyone else has said, but.. no debt, no real problem with whatever job you wind up taking. No debt also allows you to take enjoyable jobs that may not pay as well.
As for t14 or bust when it comes to employment numbers, look at the numbers of schools in your area. ASU here in AZ is a T-25 finally. They have great employment numbers. U of A is at 44. They also have great employment numbers, within 3% of ASU's for the region. Go figure. But U of A costs less, and has so far been more generous with scholarship money. If you were to choose ASU, it would be because of entirely other reasons (they have a more modern building, bigger library, centralized location, etc).
I totally agree with you; which is why I pushed my timeline back to have more time to save money to help pay for law school. I really want to go a top tier school and I know with that comes a lesser chance of scholarships. My husband and I already have quite a bit of debt from undergrad so we don't want to add too much more on.
@Christina-5 your posts really illustrates how no law school is truly resistant to unemployment. It seems like schools like Columbia and Stanford fare better for corporate law than Yale. Perhaps your friend's career interests would've been better served at those schools. Job security is something you can truly find in the medical rather than legal field.
Said friend wants to be an in-house counsel, a position which I believe are typically meant for seasoned attorneys. If her friend graduated from Yale Law only a year ago, prospective employers may not be very impressed by her length of experience (though probably otherwise with pedigree).
Friend graduated from Thomas Jefferson law and spent two years post-law school working at Nordstrom rack
I’m curious though .. do students get hired from the internships they do during the summer?
Thank you! I've been saying this for years, I wish someone would do a blocked study comparing Yale admits who choose to go to Iowa, Texas or Fordham compared with Yale matriculants. this is not to say I think they would come out with equal employment numbers, but I think the two groups would be closer than we imagine.
To Yale Adcomms perusing this site: JK! Yale is the be all and end all of legal scholarship! You take lumps of wet clay and turn them into Supreme court justices and leaders of the free world! Please don't ding me!
A good friend of mine did so i know that is a possibility, but im not sure how often that happens. Impress them and it should happen more lol
Yes, that is very common. Your 1L summer internship is very important because it provides experience. Your 2L internship is important because it is your best single shot at a job.
Other than that, the main way to get Big Law jobs is OCI which varies by school. However, the gist is usually that you get a certain number of bids and you bid on different companies. The companies then choose from among the people who bid on them to interview. More companies tend to attend higher ranked schools' OCIs and interview more students. You can probably find more information about the hiring process on old OCI Reddit posts, TLS depending on how much the new management has messed it up, or lawschool.life.
I both agree and disagree with this sentiment.
First of all, I definitely agree that the quality of the student who turns down Yale or perhaps Harvard(since very few people end up turning down Yale) is equal if not better than the quality of student who attends. I also agree that the quality of the education at a lower Top 14 school and the Top 3 or Top 6 schools is probably equivalent.
However, what the very top schools provide is a certain signalling power. You signal that you are one of these tippy top quality students by going to the best school. If you don't, then you have to get the best grades at your slightly less great school to signal that you are among the very most elite students. A named scholarship on a resume might help a little, but not as much as the name brand of Harvard. Now some might argue that a Harvard admit attending UT should have a better chance at getting tip top grades than the usual UT student, but even if this is true, it is only a slightly better chance since LSAT and GPA which likely got the student into Harvard are not great predictors of law school performance.
Of course there is a very good reason to take the likely slightly worse employment outcome. The lower ranked school almost always draws away the student with a sizable scholarship and if we are talking about UT drawing a Harvard student it is likely a full scholarship.
This does make a study like the one proposed by @tylerdschreur10 nearly impossible though. What if the students who choose the full tuition scholarship to lower ranked schools are different than the students who choose to go to Harvard or Yale? I propose that they are different. Many are likely avoiding debt because they do not want to go into Big Law and won't have a Big Law salary to quickly pay back the debt. They also are likely more debt adverse, from less wealthy families, and may be more drawn to the region of the school that they picked(since their school has a less national reach). How do you control for those factors?
I agree with most of the comments made so far.
Just want to add that, along with the power of name-recognition, there's something to be said about alumni networks that higher-ranked schools have established.
A strong alumni connection can be a gateway into positions that you may not yet be qualified for, or would otherwise have been rejected from if applying independently. Beyond being a strong candidate, knowing people that can help you get your foot in the door, or push your resume higher up the chain more quickly, which can be game-changing. Especially for niche industries like sports and entertainment, I've only heard cases of recent graduates finding jobs through family and/or other connections they've made through law school.
Similarly, if we assume that the majority of students from T14 schools land in relatively "good" career positions (compared to other law school graduates), you have a larger range of contacts (i.e. former classmates) that can help you make a career/industry change later on in your life, if you choose to do so.
Not to say that you would make your decision regarding law schools on alumni and name recognition alone, but it is a factor that I believe is important to consider when looking at job prospects.
It is also important to consider that on top of the prestige, schools like Yale, Stanford and Harvard have an untraditional grading curve which ends up favoring the students. These schools largely employ some variation of the pass/fail grading system which allows median and even slightly below median students to have excellent job outcomes. Even in T1 schools, being median simply won't cut it for BigLaw. The untraditional grading system ends up creating less cutthroat competition and fosters more collegialiaty the top schools.
That's tough. I hope they managed to find something!
Eventually something panned out. She is now working as a personal injury attorney in Sacramento! Lovely shoes, not so lovely debt.