law10

It's expensive and hard. Plus: I might not like it.

newmex

Don't go!
After having endured the torture known as law school I have told many a young person - don't go to law school! Run! Act as if Satan himself is chasing you! And no, I don't practice law anymore. Life is too short to stick it to that many people and still expect to have friends.

lawm

Yes.
Without being overly simple, many (perhaps most) people envision “law” to be a finite thing that can be learned. If one reads enough cases, statutes, administrative rules, executive orders, etc., one can learn the law. Some time in the first year of law school, however, students make a most disquieting discovery — law in this sense is rarely interesting and almost never the subject of their classes.
Further, law is rarely bounded, is often ambiguous, and sometimes is practiced in great variance from how it is written. Accordingly, faculty members are mostly uninterested in teaching “what law is.” Instead, they concentrate on researching and teaching “why” particular laws are created, the process by which they arise, and what laws ought to be. Scholarship and teaching rarely are descriptive; students are encouraged to think prescriptively and make normative judgments. In this model, law school is about how best to regulate the relationship of citizens to each other, their states, and their countries and how those countries can best relate to each other. To a large extent, the actual content of any set of laws is rarely an important matter in law school. The prevailing thought is that any current law is contingent on time, place, and ideology and therefore not worth intense study except to understand how time, place, and ideology help to shape law. More important is to focus on change, which is almost never bounded by current law and is the result of politics, economics, and sociology. In short, the study of “law” fades into a background of intensive study of other matters that are seemingly more important Further muddying the purpose of law school is that students come to legal studies after they have entered adulthood. Law school is their transition from being a mere student to becoming a “professional.” Thus, many schools also focus on teaching values, interpersonal relationship building, and ethics. Additionally, over the last twenty years, law schools have greatly increased their skills training in interviewing, counseling, negotiation, and mediation — subjects that are needed by lawyers, but can be used in multiple professions — to account for the diminished role of the legal profession in post-law school skills training and the substantial growth of law school skills clinics that have grown to fill the void. Whatever law school has become, it is only partially about studying law.

Students Have Myriad Reasons To Attend Law School
Contrary to conventional wisdom, law students have many reasons to attend law school other than the obvious one of becoming a lawyer. Some may thirst to be lawyers, to represent clients, to go to court, to do deals — whatever they perceive lawyers do. Others, however, come to achieve wildly different goals. Some see law school as a delaying tactic. They do not know what they want to do. They have graduated from undergraduate school with a major that has not led to employment. They have loans that are coming due (or parents that are ready to toss them out of their homes) and they find law school a relatively painless extension of their student days. Because law school has no prescribed undergraduate curriculum, they can qualify after completing almost any subject concentration (provided their grades and
LSAT scores are high enough). Many schools give them generous financial aid and scholarships if they have high standardized test scores — even if they have no burning desire to become a lawyer. Law schools are located in cities or in terrific college towns — great places to live — and by borrowing the maximum amounts available, students can live a good life. They can go out. They can make their car payments. And, they can defer making a final decision about what they want to do. After all, unlike other graduate education, at the end of law school, one can hang out a shingle and practice law (after passing that pesky bar exam!).
Others see law school as a means to an end. They do not particularly know what lawyers do, but suspect that some lawyers make a lot of money. To them, law school is a hazing ritual — a painful step on the way to making a living. Their goal is simple: take the easiest course load that leads to the highest grades and the quickest exit from school to the work world.
Other students want to go into business, but think a law degree provides more value than a business degree (because the J.D. itself confers access to a legalized monopoly — the practice of law). Other students, especially in part-time programs, need the law school credential to advance in their current jobs in finance, education, business, or government. Some students want to teach and have heard that law teachers make a better living (or have an easier route to tenure) than do liberal arts teachers. Finally, there was my favorite student at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, who told me that he was in law school “in order to maintain his football ticket priority.” Whatever the prevailing thought may be, students have myriad reasons to attend law school.
Source:2004 AMERICAN LEGAL EDUCATION; RICHARD A. MATASAR

gonow

yeah... think twice

If only the Internet had truly been in full bloom before I decided to go to law school. For those of you thinking of going, at the very least TALK TO A LAWYER BEFORE YOU GO. Chances are s/he is one of the 60-75% of lawyers who absolutely can't stand their chosen profession.

Source: AJ

2school

You better think twice

So you are out of school, or about to graduate, and it suddenly dawns on you: I have no real skills!; So you take what seems like the path of least resistance: you take the LSAT and apply to Law School. And by the way, for some reason, it is important for you to be rich." If it wasn't you probably wouldn't be thinking of law school.

Of course, some people really should be lawyers: these are the people who want to be politicians, judges, prosecutors, and litigators. They were born to do it. But many enter law school who are not sure they really want to be a lawyer, they just want some marketable skills. Don't do this!

Because here is the second big lie: "Don't worry about it -- you don't have to practice law. Lots of successful people are lawyers who don't practice law. It's a really useful skill no matter what you do".

It is true that there a lot of lawyers that don't practice law. Here's why: they couldn't stand it any longer. Lots of people know that being a lawyer is a grind. But what people don't tell you is: Law School is a trap, and you actually won't get any truly useful skills until you actually practicing.

Law School purports to teach you two basic things. The first is a lot of case law and precedent that has no relevance to the actual practice of law. You will learn absolutely nothing about how to negotiate a contract in Contracts, and very little about to read a real estate lease in Property. Instead you will learn a lot of mind numbing facts and law that you will likely forget. You are somehow supposed to remember the law and forget the facts, but long term memory doesn't work that way...it tends to be the facts that the brain remembers: it is far easy to remember the exploding packages on the train in Palsgraff, than the legal principles of causation. So in fact you will lose almost all of it, and only remember bits and pieces. Law school is literally like trying to drink from a fire hose. This is contrary, say, to Medical School where at least the facts and skills you learn are pretty important, and you graduate with some meaningful skills.

Source: Andrew Boer

pink_pedicure9

I regret going. If you go, go because you really and truly want to be a lawyer and you know exactly how you want to utilize your law degree. Don't go thinking that a law degree will simply open up opportunities for you because my experience has been that it doesn't. I live in Boston and the market is over-saturated with lawyers making employment extremely hard to find. Like an above poster said, think long and hard before you decide to go.