DePaul Law? Forum

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michelleamania

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DePaul Law?

Post by michelleamania » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:01 pm

My goal is to become a lawyer in Chicago focusing on health law. I visited DePaul recently and really enjoyed the school and the programs. However, I do know that their employment/bar-passage statistics are on the low-end. Also, their U.S. News ranking is much lower than I would like in a school. Could anyone give me any insight into the school? I have gotten into objectively better schools in other locations but Chicago is my dream location. It is close to home and offers the atmosphere that I would like. Since I want to end up in Chicago, I don't really want to go to a law school in another location and hope that I can find my way to Chicago eventually. I do not want to work in big-law. I also have no aspirations to work as a judge, professor, etc. I just want to earn a modest living in a city that I love. Does it make sense for me to go here?

snowball2

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by snowball2 » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:09 pm

Regardless of goal your plan should always be to attend the best school that will accept you. In Chicago that's UofC or Northwestern. Failing that UIUC. Your goal today may not necessarily be your goal in 1, 2 or 3 years. Aiming low is never a good plan.

Ravenclaw23

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by Ravenclaw23 » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:49 pm

To me, the fact that the employment rate & bar exam passage rates are notably low is a red flag. You're going to law school to become a practicing lawyer - in order to do that you need three things (1) a JD (2) a job (3) & to pass the bar. The fact that you can't be confident you'll get two out of those three requirements is a problem.

Keep in mind that nearly ALL legal jobs will be competitive in Chicago because it's a "cool" city & there are not enough jobs to go around. For any job you'll need to compete with (1) two local powerhouses (UofC & NW), (2) students from other elite schools (ex. Harvard, UMich), (3) high ranking students from midwestern top30s (UIUC, Iowa, Notre Dame, Minnesota, etc.), (4) the other lower ranked Chicago schools (Kent, John Marshall, Loyola), and (5) your own DePaul classmates. The fact that you want a fairly niche practice area like Health Law will also make things difficult because there will be fewer options in general.

I absolutely agree that you're better off going to a school in Illinois than going to a random higher ranked school & trying to get back to Chicago. However, unless you have a strong network in Chicago's legal community, specifically in your desired practice area (i.e. your mom is the general counsel of Northwestern Memorial or runs a health law practice), going to a school like DePaul seems too risky to me. If you're competitive for UIUC I would choose that over DePaul.

Also, for what it's worth, I wouldn't worry too much about atmosphere when choosing a law school. You're going to spend most of your time sitting in the library, coffee shops, or your apartment studying & that will be incredibly stressful regardless of how much you like the atmosphere.

Good Luck!

kmanskey

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by kmanskey » Wed Sep 25, 2019 11:05 am

Ravenclaw23 wrote:To me, the fact that the employment rate & bar exam passage rates are notably low is a red flag. You're going to law school to become a practicing lawyer - in order to do that you need three things (1) a JD (2) a job (3) & to pass the bar. The fact that you can't be confident you'll get two out of those three requirements is a problem.

Keep in mind that nearly ALL legal jobs will be competitive in Chicago because it's a "cool" city & there are not enough jobs to go around. For any job you'll need to compete with (1) two local powerhouses (UofC & NW), (2) students from other elite schools (ex. Harvard, UMich), (3) high ranking students from midwestern top30s (UIUC, Iowa, Notre Dame, Minnesota, etc.), (4) the other lower ranked Chicago schools (Kent, John Marshall, Loyola), and (5) your own DePaul classmates. The fact that you want a fairly niche practice area like Health Law will also make things difficult because there will be fewer options in general.

I absolutely agree that you're better off going to a school in Illinois than going to a random higher ranked school & trying to get back to Chicago. However, unless you have a strong network in Chicago's legal community, specifically in your desired practice area (i.e. your mom is the general counsel of Northwestern Memorial or runs a health law practice), going to a school like DePaul seems too risky to me. If you're competitive for UIUC I would choose that over DePaul.

Also, for what it's worth, I wouldn't worry too much about atmosphere when choosing a law school. You're going to spend most of your time sitting in the library, coffee shops, or your apartment studying & that will be incredibly stressful regardless of how much you like the atmosphere.

Good Luck!

UIUC only just took over John Marshall, which has not been a ranked school in recent years. Reputation wise, I would advise against UIUC/John Marshall unless you plan to attend in around 8-10 years when the reputation picks up. DePaul is good choice if you're not in the NW or U of C category of applicants, particularly for health law. If you're planning on staying in Chicago the name is known and you'll encounter alum almost everywhere you go. A handful of the top of the class will end up in biglaw and a good chunk end up in public interest/non-profits. It's not a bad option if you're someone who is going to work hard and actually wants to be in law school. There are many people who go here not knowing what they want to do with their lives and choose law school because they think it'll make them rich. As long as you're not one of those people, you'll do well here and will get a job.

The Lsat Airbender

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Wed Sep 25, 2019 11:18 am

kmanskey wrote:UIUC only just took over John Marshall, which has not been a ranked school in recent years. Reputation wise, I would advise against UIUC/John Marshall unless you plan to attend in around 8-10 years when the reputation picks up. DePaul is good choice if you're not in the NW or U of C category of applicants, particularly for health law. If you're planning on staying in Chicago the name is known and you'll encounter alum almost everywhere you go. A handful of the top of the class will end up in biglaw and a good chunk end up in public interest/non-profits. It's not a bad option if you're someone who is going to work hard and actually wants to be in law school. There are many people who go here not knowing what they want to do with their lives and choose law school because they think it'll make them rich. As long as you're not one of those people, you'll do well here and will get a job.
I think you mean UIC (U. Illinois - Chicago). UIUC is the state flagship downstate and is a decent T1 law school like most of its Midwestern counterparts.

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Johnnybgoode92

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by Johnnybgoode92 » Wed Sep 25, 2019 2:51 pm

snowball2 wrote:Regardless of goal your plan should always be to attend the best school that will accept you. In Chicago that's UofC or Northwestern. Failing that UIUC. Your goal today may not necessarily be your goal in 1, 2 or 3 years. Aiming low is never a good plan.
This is not a categorical rule. When deciding which school to attend, merit aid and debt load are always significant considerations (even if an applicant can finance the entire education through savings). There are innumerable other threads with guidance on what an appropriate amount of debt for a school of this caliber is. For example, for most people attending Columbia at full cost is inadvisable if a lower T14 is offering a full ride.

omar1

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by omar1 » Wed Sep 25, 2019 3:22 pm

Numbers and total cost of attendance OP?

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LSATWiz.com

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Re: DePaul Law?

Post by LSATWiz.com » Sat Sep 28, 2019 12:52 pm

In my opinion, bar passage is not a meaningful statistic to use when assessing the quality of a law school. The top schools who do not prepare their students for the bar exam have the best passage rates while the lower schools who teach to the bar from day one have the lowest rates despite failing out the 10-20% least likely to pass it to artificially boost their passage rates above 50%. Consequently, unless training students for the bar exam for 3 years makes them worse at taking the bar exam than not training them for the bar exam at all, which is a dubious assumption, educational quality is probably not the culprit for low bar passage rates.

The culprit for low bar passage rates is that students with certain numbers are either very likely or unlikely to pass the bar regardless of where they go to law school. Unless personality factors come into play - if say, someone studies less hard at school A than they would have at school B, I'd argue the choice of Depaul or Harvard is irrelevant to anyone's likelihood of passing the bar. They are going to pass the bar from either, and would in all likelihood pass if they skipped law school altogether and studied for 3 months.

The only thing that matters is job placement, and that's why Depaul is bad. You can argue it's unethical for them to accept students they know will never pass the bar exam, but you can also argue it's unethical for a liquor store to take money from a homeless alcoholic or a male/female stripper to service someone wearing a wedding band/ring, and courts have consistently stated that law schools do not have to subject themselves to the same ethical standards as these other types of establishments.

According to the courts, it would be unfair to expect law school deans to have the same moral compass as the typical bartender or stripper. They are simply held to a lower ethical standard, which is kind of funny given how serious the ABA takes ethics in every other spectrum of the legal industry.

Of course, this is all unrelated to OP's situation which is: if School A has a 98% bar passage rate and School B has a 58% passage rate and you got into both, you're probably about 98% likely to pass the bar from either school. The difference is that School A is going to have a much higher job placement rate, and employers aren't going to care that you could have gotten into School A. That's entirely irrelevant.

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