Top Law Schools

sandwhich wrote:Do they actually check ids before letting you on the 171? Asking for my wife who won't be a student.

Yes.

E: They also take money.

PariSiamo wrote:The new thread title is great.

+1. Great work Emma.

TheUnicornHunter wrote:

sandwhich wrote:Do they actually check ids before letting you on the 171? Asking for my wife who won't be a student.

Yes.

E: They also take money.

Thanks, I realize now that it's just a city bus that lets students ride for free. We'll just get her a pass then.

Hey, just a question for anyone who can answer: what kinds of jobs do students around median end up with?

KMart wrote:Hey, just a question for anyone who can answer: what kinds of jobs do students around median end up with?

Really good ones. If you're asking about biglaw then I know people around median with Chicago and NYC biglaw jobs-NYC is even easier especially if you're willing to try out transactional. If you mean government and public interest your odds of landing a good job are still probably really good, subject to the caveat that it's hard to get those type of jobs no matter how highly ranked you are in the class.

That's not to say that Chicago or NYC biglaw is a guarantee from median but you are certainly not out of the running in a great number of job opportunities.

KMart wrote:Hey, just a question for anyone who can answer: what kinds of jobs do students around median end up with?

Good ones. I mean, they're not going to be supreme court clerks and probably not going to work at the tippy-top vault firms, but they have relatively no problem pulling biglaw from at or below median, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure on the PI side, but I get the feeling the PI people at median have done just fine for themselves, as well. Are there any specific types of jobs you are interested in?

elterrible78 wrote:

KMart wrote:Hey, just a question for anyone who can answer: what kinds of jobs do students around median end up with?

Good ones. I mean, they're not going to be supreme court clerks and probably not going to work at the tippy-top vault firms, but they have relatively no problem pulling biglaw from at or below median, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure on the PI side, but I get the feeling the PI people at median have done just fine for themselves, as well. Are there any specific types of jobs you are interested in?

Thank you to the above poster as well. Ideally I'd like to be transactional in Chicago (I'm from here), but I left the question vague to try and draw out if students have to sacrifice biglaw and go into PI or if they're limited. It sounds like they aren't, which is great.

Chicago biglaw is a tough nut to crack. I would be scared bidding all Chicago at median. There are probably more people without Chicago offers than there are people with offers at that grade level. I would prepare yourself to bid NYC heavily from median, which is of course one of the least popular destinations for people at OCI here. But the fact remains that it's the most likely outcome and you can still do very well for yourself there if your GPA is somewhere around 177.

Aaaanyway

Can anyone give me information / gossip on the clinics? Which ones are widely considered to be the "best"? The "worst"? Or are all of them pretty good? Would you recommend doing a clinic?

I specifically am interested in the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, as well as the Federal Defense Clinic, but so many of them sound fascinating.

landshoes wrote:Aaaanyway

Can anyone give me information / gossip on the clinics? Which ones are widely considered to be the "best"? The "worst"? Or are all of them pretty good? Would you recommend doing a clinic?

I specifically am interested in the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, as well as the Federal Defense Clinic, but so many of them sound fascinating.

I liked Corporate Lab but I know some people didn't so I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless your really set on wanting some sort of transactional experience.

Just anecdotely, I've heard Federal Defense Clinic is a lot of work, but also a pretty incredible opportunity if you don't mind putting in the time/effort.

landshoes wrote:Aaaanyway

Can anyone give me information / gossip on the clinics? Which ones are widely considered to be the "best"? The "worst"? Or are all of them pretty good? Would you recommend doing a clinic?

I specifically am interested in the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, as well as the Federal Defense Clinic, but so many of them sound fascinating.

I've heard a couple of them are a lot of work. I think corporate lab is the only good one in terms of having an easy time.

landshoes wrote:Aaaanyway

Can anyone give me information / gossip on the clinics? Which ones are widely considered to be the "best"? The "worst"? Or are all of them pretty good? Would you recommend doing a clinic?

I specifically am interested in the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, as well as the Federal Defense Clinic, but so many of them sound fascinating.

Federal Defense is exceptional, but a lot of work. Siegler is hardcore.

Thanks, this is helpful. Obviously I don't want to ruin my life by taking a clinic, but I'm not scared of working hard as long as the work is substantive and interesting. If anything, I'd strongly prefer a difficult clinic where I learn and do a lot to an easy clinic where I don't learn much.

Let me know if there's any reason I'm looking at this the wrong way--I know my insight as an 0L into the actual experience of law school is very limited.

landshoes wrote:Thanks, this is helpful. Obviously I don't want to ruin my life by taking a clinic, but I'm not scared of working hard as long as the work is substantive and interesting. If anything, I'd strongly prefer a difficult clinic where I learn and do a lot to an easy clinic where I don't learn much.

Let me know if there's any reason I'm looking at this the wrong way--I know my insight as an 0L into the actual experience of law school is very limited.

You are definitely not. There is a good portion of the student body that devote(d) the majority of their time to their respective clinics. Law school is a slog, so take classes/clinics you enjoy.

The only issue is that there are only so many hours in a day. For example, balancing LR and Siegler's clinic was a real challenge. Just be cognizant of stuff like that. Be smart with your time.

FWIW, I don't think it's cool to attack me personally.

---

I want to be even handed, so here are some of the complaints ITT about the lab that I think 1Ls should take seriously.

- It's easy. Teams generally have one project per quarter. Even as a summer associate (where the bar is set extremely low), you have multiple projects and one due at least every two weeks. You now have a team of 2-8(ish) working on one quarter-long memorandum. I don't think this is true for team leads and SDs - substantive work can be light - especially toward the beginning of the quarter when there's nothing to edit-, but answering emails for an hour or two each day isn't uncommon.

- Work can be boring. You sometimes get stuck with 50-state surveys, and this is generally the fault of your team lead or your team member accepting a bad project on the spot rather than waiting for faculty to push them toward a less shitty assignment, but sometimes it's because the team before you screwed up for this client and faculty is doing whatever they ask to make them happy. Even otherwise, there's a decent amount of memos (it sounds like the number has increased in recent years) that are usually transactionally related, but sometimes it's a stretch (potential damages for breaching a contract, for example).

-DZ offends some people. The man means well but if you have cultural sensitivities, it might bother you (to be clear, I don't say sensitivities to imply that they are not justified in being bothered).

I'll even add my own:

- Professors can take forever to get back from you or miss your emails entirely. I don't think this is their fault: DZ gets hundreds of emails each day from students, especially toward the end of the quarter. In my opinion, they are understaffed for the number of students that take the lab, and that can hurt the student experience. For what it's worth, adding "Important:" or "Needs response:" to your emails helps.

- Three quarters is a long commitment. I didn't mind because I knew my practice area and didn't want to take tons of classes outside of it, but, for some, taking one less class for three quarters is hard to deal with.

- The assistant. This may have gotten better since I've left, but DZ's assistant was very difficult to work with. Scheduling was tough, calls were often missed by faculty because they were double-booked, and many of my requests were often ignored.

With all of this, I'll finish with saying that the pros were well worth the cons for me. But for some people they aren't. And that's completely fine. I didn't come in here to tell people that they were wrong for having negative opinions, and I'm sorry if it came off that way. I hope that I've put some information on the table for future 2Ls/3Ls.

Just some points of clarification:

corplab123 wrote:It's easy. Teams generally have one project per quarter. Even as a summer associate (where the bar is set extremely low), you have multiple projects and one due at least every two weeks. You now have a team of 2-8(ish) working on one quarter-long memorandum. I don't think this is true for team leads and SDs - substantive work can be light - especially toward the beginning of the quarter when there's nothing to edit-, but answering emails for an hour or two each day isn't uncommon.

My team had at least 3 large projects every quarter, which was extremely time consuming (especially with all of the client calls and meetings with the faculty we had to participate in). It wasn't "hard" by any means, but it was a major time sink. Add this to Law Review (or other journals or moot courts) and 3 other classes, and 2L can easily be worse than 1L in terms of busyness. I think this will be amplified next year because the Corporate Lab is going to start implementing stricter time requirements.

corplab123 wrote:Work can be boring. You sometimes get stuck with 50-state surveys, and this is generally the fault of your team lead or your team member accepting a bad project on the spot rather than waiting for faculty to push them toward a less shitty assignment, but sometimes it's because the team before you screwed up for this client and faculty is doing whatever they ask to make them happy. Even otherwise, there's a decent amount of memos (it sounds like the number has increased in recent years) that are usually transactionally related, but sometimes it's a stretch (potential damages for breaching a contract, for example).

As you mentioned, the faculty doesn't want us to do this kind of stuff, but if the client asks for it, the students (including the team leads) are not in a position to tell the client "no," and I have never seen the faculty step in and tell the client "sorry, that kind of work is below us" for this sort of thing even though they're usually on the teleconferences with us. Several of my friends who were on other teams and I all had to do at least one 50-state survey during the past year in the Corporate Lab. Even the "transactional" stuff wasn't work like helping a company fill out an F-1 for an IPO or doing due diligence for an M&A transaction; rather, it was generally writing obscure memos about random topics that the GC of the company was somewhat interested in. This is honestly my biggest complaint with the "corporate lab: transactional clinic"; although we were working with "corporations," I felt like the assignments were more often than not the kind of things that a litigator would do.

corplab123 wrote:DZ offends some people. The man means well but if you have cultural sensitivities, it might bother you (to be clear, I don't say sensitivities to imply that they are not justified in being bothered).

Even though he can say some really off-color stuff, his sense of humor was one of the things I enjoyed most about the class.

corplab123 wrote:Three quarters is a long commitment. I didn't mind because I knew my practice area and didn't want to take tons of classes outside of it, but, for some, taking one less class for three quarters is hard to deal with.

Unless things have changed, you can drop the Corporate Lab after a quarter (although it is not recommended) or two, and at least from what I can tell your grade won't be punished for doing so.

corplab123 wrote:The assistant. This may have gotten better since I've left, but DZ's assistant was very difficult to work with. Scheduling was tough, calls were often missed by faculty because they were double-booked, and many of my requests were often ignored.

The current assistant is a super nice guy who is mostly on top of things.

CorporateLab wrote:Just some points of clarification:

Re: Projects. How large was your team? Did they put every member on every project? Seems poorly managed to me. My team had three projects but I separated it out into three groups of 2-4 (this also cut down on conference call time for everyone because they only had to show up for the calls they were working on). I think we're on the same page about it not being a blowoff, but, in general, projects can be knocked out in one or two nights of hard work. Even six nights a quarter isn't too shabby.

Re: Bad Projects. When I was there I know that faculty had to tell a few team leads not to accept projects live because the client had a history of giving bad projects. DZ is way more graceful than to say it's beneath us, but trust me, he's rejected projects and pushed projects in a more-reasonable direction--sometimes privately before a call is scheduled. Turning a 50-state survey into a 5-state survey isn't very rare--but it's hard to do when the team lead says "yeah that should be no problem" before faculty can jump in. I agree with the lit complaint (my example of damages is a good example of this), but it's the closest we've got to corporate work (though I've heard good things about IJ, don't we do similar NVC work?). At least when you're researching recent laws regarding indemnification you're learning what an indemnification section looks like, what should go in it, etc. It'd sure be nice if we only accepted transactional work, though. But there's a lot of student mouths to feed with work, and there's a lot of (somewhat entitled) corporate clients to make happy. At the end of the day, I still thought it was pretty cool that we were working with in-house departments at companies whose products we use on a daily basis. I know that most everyone goes to firms where this is the case, but this was my first real taste of what things were like in-house or what went on inside the minds of major companies (work-experience didn't translate into law at all). I think the trade-off is worth it, I always felt like I was fortunate to even be listening to conference calls with these people, much less leading them.

Re: DZ. Completely agree. I looked forward to class for that reason.

Didn't know timing changed. That's pretty big. You used to be able to drop with "constructor consent" and DZ often didn't put up a fight about it, but that was a pretty big barrier to exit.

Agree with your other points.

WheninLaw wrote:

landshoes wrote:Thanks, this is helpful. Obviously I don't want to ruin my life by taking a clinic, but I'm not scared of working hard as long as the work is substantive and interesting. If anything, I'd strongly prefer a difficult clinic where I learn and do a lot to an easy clinic where I don't learn much.

Let me know if there's any reason I'm looking at this the wrong way--I know my insight as an 0L into the actual experience of law school is very limited.

You are definitely not. There is a good portion of the student body that devote(d) the majority of their time to their respective clinics. Law school is a slog, so take classes/clinics you enjoy.

The only issue is that there are only so many hours in a day. For example, balancing LR and Siegler's clinic was a real challenge. Just be cognizant of stuff like that. Be smart with your time.

Thank you. I appreciate this!

corplab123 wrote: - Work can be boring. You sometimes get stuck with 50-state surveys, and this is generally the fault of your team lead or your team member accepting a bad project on the spot rather than waiting for faculty to push them toward a less shitty assignment, but sometimes it's because the team before you screwed up for this client and faculty is doing whatever they ask to make them happy. Even otherwise, there's a decent amount of memos (it sounds like the number has increased in recent years) that are usually transactionally related, but sometimes it's a stretch (potential damages for breaching a contract, for example).

I never got a fifty state survey during my three quarters and all my projects were dull and boring. Do not do corp lab if you want interestin work. The main benefit is learning how to work in teams, deal with your colleagues, talk to clients, behavior in emails and calls. A lot of people at law school like the k-jds and others need help with this. The actual assignments are worthless.

Ironically if people actually had to do "real" transactional work (ie junior associate work) that might be a rude wake up call

Anyone have any useful tips for a winter wardrobe? I've lived in the south my entire life. Is a Canada Goose jacket really necessary for someone like me, or is that overkill?

sandwhich wrote:Anyone have any useful tips for a winter wardrobe? I've lived in the south my entire life. Is a Canada Goose jacket really necessary for someone like me, or is that overkill?

It depends on the winter. We were lucky during the years I was there, we only had one really cold winter out of the three. Even in a cold winter, a big down parka isn't an absolute necessity; it's just really nice to have. Since once you get to school you don't have to venture outside again until you leave, it's nice to be able to dress in whatever normal clothes you're comfortable in at school, and then throw a huge jacket over those to get to and from school. I had a jacket that was complete overkill. It probably would have been adequate for the arctic. But it sure was nice to never be cold, and to never even have to think about whether I was dressed warmly enough.

Parka or not, you'll definitely need some kind of a warm jacket. You'll also want warm gloves, scarf, and a wool hat. And its nice to have some kind of boots you can wear in the snow -- the city salts the roads really heavily in the winter, and the combination of snow and salt will be rough on normal shoes.

corplab123 wrote:Re: Projects.

I was on a fairly large team, and we were broken up into several sub-teams about the size of what you were describing. Each sub-group had to work on 3 (or more) projects each quarter. If, for example, you opted to do the NVC challenge part time during the spring quarter, you could potentially be working on 5 different projects at once. Of course, the time commitment for each project may not be huge (although some of the projects were 20~30 page memos), but it adds up quickly. I do not think my experience in this regard was rare, although I know some other teams got away with a pretty minimal amount of work. This is why I say that it is largely client dependent.

You can see a list of some of the projects we did over the past year here. If you click on the memorandum linked in the first item, it will give you a pretty good idea of the kind of work that a lot of teams have to do (and the kind of stuff that the faculty really likes). I would call this kind of work "transaction-related" because if you really want to do something like M&A, for example, you will very likely run into antitrust issues and other risks that must be addressed. However, you will typically consult with someone in your firm's antitrust group (or consult with outside counsel if your firm doesn't handle competition issues) on such matters. The Corporate Lab therefore rarely teaches you what it is actually like to work on a transaction because almost everything you do is preemptive risk-prevention or market-probing, and not an actual transaction between two corporate parties. The new name of the lab ("Kirkland & Ellis Corporate Lab") is much more accurate than the previous name ("Corporate Lab: Transactional Clinic") because you're merely working with corporations and not on transactions.

corplab123 wrote:Re: Bad Projects.

In my experience it wasn't an issue of the team lead accepting shitty projects on the spot. We'd hear the list of projects, write them down, and then tell the client that we'd get back to them about what our team would take on that quarter. Unfortunately, the clients would often state that the shitty projects here a higher priority for them, and so on the debrief calls the faculty would tell us to accept them. Although I didn't assist a NVC (New Venture Challenge, for those who don't know what this is) team, most of my friends did and I heard many complaints that the faculty wouldn't let them take on most of the clients' interesting-sounding work because of potential liability problems. Instead, it seemed like the faculty wanted the students to help the NVC teams with things like entity selection, when in reality the NVC teams probably should have been focusing on more basic legal issues. Generally speaking, it wouldn't make sense to incorporate an idea that may never take off that has no assets because they'll never even need the liability protection a corporation offers when compared with a general partnership. Additionally, the NVC also seemed to be feast-or-famine depending on the quality and organization of the NVC team you were randomly assigned. Looking back on it, I wish I had taken more black-letter law classes because I didn't really learn anything substantive in the Corporate Lab.

Rahviveh wrote:I never got a fifty state survey during my three quarters and all my projects were dull and boring. Do not do corp lab if you want interestin work. The main benefit is learning how to work in teams, deal with your colleagues, talk to clients, behavior in emails and calls. A lot of people at law school like the k-jds and others need help with this. The actual assignments are worthless.

Ironically if people actually had to do "real" transactional work (ie junior associate work) that might be a rude wake up call

This is all 100% spot on. As much as it would suck, I wish that the Corporate Lab actually taught what it is like to work on substantive transactions instead of the litigation-y fluff they currently have students do.

Any possibility we could move on from Corporate Lab? I think the merits have been debated out pretty well at this point.

WheninLaw wrote:Any possibility we could move on from Corporate Lab? I think the merits have been debated out pretty well at this point.

Seconded. And then maybe we can get out from under the shameful (but hilarious) thread title.

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