Which for business and corporate law? Forum

[Alex-Trof]

They will be accompanied by gorgeous women waiting to sniff coke directly from your cock as you shower them in crystal in a firm-provided limo. Something classy like an escalade stretch, no doubt. This is a "no-lose" scenario.

I am getting excited...
DELETED

[MrPapagiorgio]

They will be accompanied by gorgeous women waiting to sniff coke directly from your cock as you shower them in crystal in a firm-provided limo. Something classy like an escalade stretch, no doubt. This is a "no-lose" scenario.

Count me in.

[AreJay711]

I'm done crushing dreams and being the jerk-off that spews reality err negativity. Op. Each of these schools is a fine choice and will yield equally strong opportunities at the end of school (particularly in "corporate law"). All you really have to do is just show up, be in the top 3.2% of the class and there will literally be recruiters waiting for you at the back of the room on graduation day. Each of these finely manicured, well-spoken gentlemen will have in hand offers to work in legal and non-legal capacities at all manners of law firms with all sorts of interesting and unique practice areas and specialties. They will be accompanied by gorgeous women waiting to sniff coke directly from your cock as you shower them in crystal in a firm-provided limo. Something classy like an escalade stretch, no doubt. This is a "no-lose" scenario.

Congratulations on figuring out the law school secret early in life and taking the required steps (going to college and obtaining enough credits to graduate), to jump on board early. Not everyone can do that. As for the 60k figure at Penn State, pay no attention to that. Its a silly lie. Lies like that are perpetrated by the same assholes who believe in the bi-modal distribution of starting attorney salaries. These nay-sayers are just losers than don't graduate in the top 3.2% of their graduating classes of their respective law schools. They aren't like you. They didn't have a "plan" from the get go. They had no intention of "working their butt off," "networking" and "being on law review." They simply didn't think of these brilliant and fool proof plans. They had no plan to overcome arbitrary and meaningless grading standards. They didn't plan on spending weeks on end studying for finals. This 96.8% group of losers never had what it took to succede in life anyway (law school or not), and that's why you should simply ignore their negativity and march forward, unimpeded by the "warnings" of these losers, trolls and future JDU posters.

So go forth young scholar. Be the best special snow-flake you can be!!!!!!

Very uninventive trolling, despite the amount of time you spent on it.

Yeah, that is my issue with this post.

[Big Shrimpin]

OP, I dare you to ask this question in the Legal Employment Forum.

The dichotomy between these "choosing a law school/LSAT prep/etc..." forums and the legal employment forum is quite striking. Heed RM's advice, OP. Disillusionment hurts. Should you temper your expectations and be content working as a solo or in a 1-2 person firm, then proceed to any of the schools you mentioned.

"The road to a successful career after law school is paved with the souls of the unwitting and tolled by by the liars that built it." (quoting myself from another thread, )

[arvcondor]

OP did not ask for how to best get into corporate/business law. OP asked how best, out of the schools he has at hand, to get into corporate/business law. I'm sick of seeing threads in which people post a list of four schools, ask for advice on them, and get flooded with 0L responses of "LOL NONE OF THEM YOU TTT YOU'RE GOING TO DIE." This in no way helps the poster, who we can assume has already decided to attend school and is choosing between the listed schools. Responding to someone asking for help deciding between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry with "Dude, a Ferrari is better" is not beneficial.

Second, the notion that no one outside the T14 gets corporate law is ridiculous 0L idiocy. Yes, there is a significantly smaller chance of landing these jobs from regional schools. OP is asking which has the larger chance. As a Philly resident, Temple and Nova place significant numbers of graduates into the large firms here. Pitt places large numbers of its graduates into Pittsburgh firms. Look at any large law firm outside NY/DC/CA and you'll see that the regional schools, while not placing as many into these firms as better schools, place enough that statements like "you've got to be the valedictorian or you're fucked" are utterly absurd.

And saying that a school places X% of its grads into the NLJ 250 =/= you have to be in the top X%. I'm not sure where this idea came from.

[Aberzombie1892]

The OP could likely get local firms that handle corporate law from the schools he listed. Many of these firms will have less than 50 attorneys, but that doesn't mean that they don't do corporate law.

Corporate law does not equal NLJ 250. It never has.

"Big law" = NLJ 250
"Corporate law" = firms that service companies

Granted, smaller corporate law firms are still relatively difficult to get. But you don't have to be in the top 10% to get them either.

[Big Shrimpin]

OP did not ask for how to best get into corporate/business law. OP asked how best, out of the schools he has at hand, to get into corporate/business law. I'm sick of seeing threads in which people post a list of four schools, ask for advice on them, and get flooded with 0L responses of "LOL NONE OF THEM YOU TTT YOU'RE GOING TO DIE." This in no way helps the poster, who we can assume has already decided to attend school and is choosing between the listed schools. Responding to someone asking for help deciding between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry with "Dude, a Ferrari is better" is not beneficial.

Second, the notion that no one outside the T14 gets corporate law is ridiculous 0L idiocy. Yes, there is a significantly smaller chance of landing these jobs from regional schools. OP is asking which has the larger chance. As a Philly resident, Temple and Nova place significant numbers of graduates into the large firms here. Pitt places large numbers of its graduates into Pittsburgh firms. Look at any large law firm outside NY/DC/CA and you'll see that the regional schools, while not placing as many into these firms as better schools, place enough that statements like "you've got to be the valedictorian or you're fucked" are utterly absurd.

And saying that a school places X% of its grads into the NLJ 250 =/= you have to be in the top X%. I'm not sure where this idea came from.

LOL. Dude, I'm a 2L who transferred from a Philly-area TT, so it's not like I don't know what I'm talking about. Are you a 2L with experience? Do you know people at both Temple and Villanova who went through OCI? Do you personally know of people on LR that did exceptionally well during 1L, only to get shut-out at OCI? Have you spoken with people in law school who've had to foreclose on their dreams? Do you want to tell OP that everything is going to be great and that he/she will SURELY get a position doing corporate transactional practice in Wilmington, Philadelphia, or Pittsburgh? Are you going to be the one to coddle OP, telling him/her that an ~11% NLJ250 hiring rate is "significant" enough that he/she should go ahead and take-on a massive amount of debt? (As an aside, if I might add, that ~11% number includes BOTH litigation and corporate transactional practice, the former representing the vast majority of those positions, so I bet I'm not too far off in guessing that of the ~11% going into NLJ250 firms, probably 4-5% of them are doing corporate work.)

I'm guessing your responses to most, if not all, of these questions would be a hollow "no." Don't tell me that I don't know anything. That's offensive. Did you even look through my posting history? Listen, I'm going to give both you and OP a little nugget of advice: temper your expectations about law school.

I went to a TT with $0 scholarship. I researched my decision, and I knew what I was getting into. I knew that I'd have around a 10-15% chance at an NJL250 firm, which was what I wanted to do. In retrospect, was my decision to matriculate a rational one? Maybe. I got really lucky during 1L, ended up near the top of my class, transferred, and got a biglaw job. Before I matriculated, however, I tempered my expectations about what types of jobs I might be able to find. Betting you're going to end up around the top 15-20% (LOL, contrary to the above posters last line, you don't get interviews at OCI unless you're AT LEAST in the top 20%...I have TONS of anecdotal examples of this from my TT, in case you're wondering) is a poor bet. Yet, if you resign yourself to a job less lustrous, like a small firm (not hating on small firms, they provide great training opportunities and some great lawyers are in small firms), then you increase your chances of finding fulfilling employment after graduation...this is tempering expectations. Moreover, contrary to what the above poster discussed about saying only people going to top schools are going to be happy, I think the advice to temper expectations runs to just about every student who matriculates at a law school, regardless of his/her school. Students at Harvard end up jobless. Maybe not nearly as many as those from Philly-area TT schools, but some do.

Listen, this is all a numbers game. Law school grading is a sprinkle hard work, a dash of raw intelligence, and a boatload of luck. Telling someone they'll perform well in law school is like betting on the world series before the baseball season has even started. These fallacies are why we have like 150 law schools, blogs like thirdtierreality, and armies of angry graduates who feel defrauded by their universities when they move home after graduation. For me or any other upperclassman to tell OP he/she will have a better shot at A/B/C school without adding the caveat about tempering expectations would be just like the same fraudulent advice and guidance that leads the unwitting to law school in the first place. Sure, OP has a marginal, outside shot, but it's not a good shot. Should I recommend otherwise?

OP, please, make sure you do your homework before matriculating. If you do, and you temper your expectations, then enjoy school.

Oh, and contrary to what the above poster thinks of my expertise, I'm not so misinformed or idiotic.

[arvcondor]

For me or any other upperclassman to tell OP he/she will have a better shot at A/B/C school without adding the caveat about tempering expectations would be just like the same fraudulent advice and guidance that leads the unwitting to law school in the first place. .

Yes, that's fine, and that's fair, and I think posts like that have helped me to, as you put it, "temper expectations." But you did not say, "OP, X gives you the best shot, but I must warn you..." No caveat was added, just admonishment without any assistance to OP in his choice of these schools. It doesn't matter if he's deciding between School A with a .1% chance and School B with a .05% chance. School A is the correct answer, and a caveat is then warranted.

Also, you got weirdly defensive for a post directed to the thread at large. Calm down, bud.

[Zabini]

Responding to someone asking for help deciding between a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry with "Dude, a Ferrari is better" is not beneficial.

Caveats:
-I'm a 0L idiot
-I think that a lot of the doom and gloom on here sometimes goes over the top

That said, I'm pretty sure ^^ analogy fails pretty hard. Accords and Camrys, though they won't go quite as fast as a Ferrari or attract gold diggers, will nonetheless definitely, absolutely perform the basic functions of a car as well as the Ferrari (and in some respects are better cars than Ferraris). The Accord and the Camry are also approximately 10-20x cheaper than a Ferrari. The same cannot be said of law schools though. If the basic function of a law degree is to get the holder a legal job after graduation, certain schools (including the ones OP is talking about) will not perform that function for a significant proportion of their graduates and these schools are often just as expensive as the good ones. If OP didn't know before (and judging by his posts ITT, he probably didn't) he needs to be made aware that a significant percentage of graduates from the schools he's working at will be doing temporary doc review jobs for $30/hour, or finding nonlaw positions, or working shitlaw jobs that don't qualify for whatever LRAP the schools have and are therefore suffocating under the weight of their debt. According to the Princeton Review, 96% of Miami graduates are employed 9 months after graduation with an average starting salary of $87.6k. Given the the overall state of the economy and the legal market in Florida is it really reasonable for OP to assume that he can go there and be in good shape for a ~90k job with only a 4% risk of ruin? Absolutely not. But that's what the schools want the OP to believe and thats what analogies like your "Camry/Accord vs Ferrari" one encourage him to keep believing. A better analogy would be that OP is asking for help to choose between a couple clunkers that may or may not explode at any given time and the forum is advising him to save up for something more reliable.

Maybe I'm being overly sensitive, but if it weren't for TLS I wouldn't understand anything about ITE or the highly regional nature of law schools or bimodal salary distribution or anything related to the reality of actually finding a job in the legal market. I might be about to send in a deposit to UNC right now on the reasoning that "it might be fun to live in North Carolina for three years" and "I'll just come back to CA and make 100k anyway, that's a pretty sweet starting salary!" Now, I'm semi-seriously considering retaking my 170 and reapplying next cycle because my best option is likely gonna be something like Duke or GULC at sticker or UCLA/USC with a little money and I don't know if I want to take that big of a risk. I think its imperative for those of us who do know these things ensure that others who do not are disabused of the false notions that law schools and other interested parties try to perpetuate. 150-200k is a lifechanging amount of debt and people should be made aware of the very real risks that go along with it.

[arvcondor]

Fair point and well put. Still, I think a lot of the "advice" that comes from TLSers, while a good reality check at times, comes more from a place of derision than of assistance. I don't think that point needs to be argued. Too many responses are posters transparently using a thread for a chance to shit on someone, and, as I said earlier, the notion that you can't enter business law from any of these schools is absurd. Again, I refer you to the roster of any Philly NLJ 250. In fact, I was just looking at their venture capital departments; almost entirely Villanova/Temple grads.

[Big Shrimpin]

Also, you got weirdly defensive for a post directed to the thread at large. Calm down, bud.

To be fair, your first post in response to mine referenced 0L idiocy a few times. I could see it was mixed with a healthy dose of hyperbole, but reasonable minds could differ over interpretation and whether those comments were directed at my post. None of this is of any importance, however, since the point of the thread is still to assist OP with his/her situation. Maybe I didn't make the comparison in my first post, and that's a fair point. My overall message, however, does not change. It's impossible to discern someone's level of understanding about the law school game on an internet forum, but unfortunately today, some people remain grossly misinformed about what they're getting themselves into with law school. Law school is fcking hard, dude. 75% of people that go don't end up in the top 25%, thereby putting themselves at a disadvantage for corporate/business law positions. In case anybody didn't get the message when it game to GPA/LSAT in law school admissions, the profession is largely a numbers game. Law school grading is so damn unpredictable too.

As a side note, I hope that the 11% drop in LS applications this year is an indication that people are getting the message.

[arvcondor]

Fair enough. I agree with you that 99% of people going to school have no idea what they're getting themselves into and think that a JD from a TT is going to pull its own weight. That said, let's not throw OP's options in with Cooley et al.

And you're right, this thread is about helping OP. OP, I'd say ditch Penn State for business law and pick between Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Miami (although I have little knowledge of that area) and choose the region.