Why Debt Matters even if you "want PI" Forum

[09042014]

The point is you can't count on getting a PI job even with great credentials, so taking on debt and saying LOL I'm PI it doesn't matter is not a good move for a lot of people. Whether this one guy had debt or not is irrelevant.

How this is controversial, I don't understand.

Yeah I completely agree here. I was about to make this mistake by attending a private tier 2 at sticker and saying "haha I'm PI, can't touch this!" But then you realize just how little you're making when you first start out as a local prosecutor. Thankfully I'm taking my talents elsewhere

You should be taking your talents to an LSAT retake.

No, he should take his talents to a real profession. Not law.

[CoffeeIsLife]

The point is you can't count on getting a PI job even with great credentials, so taking on debt and saying LOL I'm PI it doesn't matter is not a good move for a lot of people. Whether this one guy had debt or not is irrelevant.

How this is controversial, I don't understand.

Yeah I completely agree here. I was about to make this mistake by attending a private tier 2 at sticker and saying "haha I'm PI, can't touch this!" But then you realize just how little you're making when you first start out as a local prosecutor. Thankfully I'm taking my talents elsewhere

You should be taking your talents to an LSAT retake.

[moneybagsphd]

The point is you can't count on getting a PI job even with great credentials, so taking on debt and saying LOL I'm PI it doesn't matter is not a good move for a lot of people. Whether this one guy had debt or not is irrelevant.

How this is controversial, I don't understand.

Yeah I completely agree here. I was about to make this mistake by attending a private tier 2 at sticker and saying "haha I'm PI, can't touch this!" But then you realize just how little you're making when you first start out as a local prosecutor. Thankfully I'm taking my talents elsewhere

You should be taking your talents to an LSAT retake.

No, he should take his talents to a real profession. Not law.

Credited.

[Pneumonia]

In fairness, not having an LRAP that will cover your clerkship does kind of suck, since they're typically not especially well compensated and not having to make PAYE payments as a low income earner is pretty great.

LRAP is retarded in the PAYE era period. Doubly so for people who are going to overwhelming just go to big law and get a 50k bonus.

Can you expand on this point dessert faux?

[09042014]

In fairness, not having an LRAP that will cover your clerkship does kind of suck, since they're typically not especially well compensated and not having to make PAYE payments as a low income earner is pretty great.

LRAP is retarded in the PAYE era period. Doubly so for people who are going to overwhelming just go to big law and get a 50k bonus.

Can you expand on this point dessert faux?

LRAP isn't necessary when you only have to pay 10% of your (income - 150% of poverty level). For people in true public interest, that works out to be less than 5%. LRAP's aren't really needed.

LRAP for a clerkship is stupid since it pays enough to service your loans and most end up in biglaw.

[twenty]

when all's said and done (for a PI kid that went for sticker), PAYE/PSLF will take care of about 550k of debt, while your LRAP will take care of an additional 30k-70k. You really don't "need" LRAP in a PAYE/PSLF era.

more or less scooped

[Gooner91]

Whenever an 0L especially one w no experience says they want to do any PI other than be a public defender I basically just assume they're not gonna do it

Is public defender easier to get than other forms of PI? Say direct services at nonprofit for example.

Just curious.

[JCougar]

The point is you can't count on getting a PI job even with great credentials, so taking on debt and saying LOL I'm PI it doesn't matter is not a good move for a lot of people. Whether this one guy had debt or not is irrelevant.

How this is controversial, I don't understand.

Yeah I completely agree here. I was about to make this mistake by attending a private tier 2 at sticker and saying "haha I'm PI, can't touch this!" But then you realize just how little you're making when you first start out as a local prosecutor. Thankfully I'm taking my talents elsewhere

You should be taking your talents to an LSAT retake.

No, he should take his talents to a real profession. Not law.

LOL.

[rad lulz]

Whenever an 0L especially one w no experience says they want to do any PI other than be a public defender I basically just assume they're not gonna do it

Is public defender easier to get than other forms of PI? Say direct services at nonprofit for example.

Just curious.

Yeah pd is way easier to get

Not easy, but easiest entry level PI for sure

Plus they're accessible to new grads

[JCougar]

Yeah, this thread is important. It seems like there's been a glut of 0Ls thinking they want to do PI this cycle because PSLF is such an easy fall-back plan--a "catch-all" if you will. There are less PI jobs out there than there are 0Ls on TLS saying they want to do PI and take advantage of PSLF...and that's just counting the people on TLS. The "bootstraps" and "networking" arguments are decent personal advice, but neither create more jobs than there are, and it's simple math that many law grads are going to get royally screwed because there's just not enough jobs period.

The thing is, the legal market has always been like this...but it's only been the last 15 years or so where graduates had life-crippling debt hanging over their heads that can't be serviced by most non-legal jobs, so we have no idea how this will all pan out.

Like I said before in another thread, legal education is a giant pyramid scheme. There simply are not enough jobs out there with a salary high enough (or PSLF-qualifying) to pay back all the loans taken out to pay for law school. I'd bet that for c/o 2013 (the largest class), there is more total loan debt due (including interest) than there is in total legal salaries above the poverty level. The drop-out rates in this profession are very high in the first 5 years, SO Legal job availability only declines from that 55% "9-months after graduation" mark. This means that while competition is less if you can last in this profession for 5 years, a lot of people end up finding long-term means other than the legal profession to service their loans. The only way that this system does not turn into mass-rioting is the fact that through PAYE/PSLF, Uncle Sam will be bailing probably hundreds of thousands of people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt 10-20 years from now. The only thing this is doing is allowing the FedGov to make the budget look a lot better today through all the interest that this is pulling in--while leaving a time-bomb for tomorrow. Kind of a passive-aggressive method of steeply raising taxes on the middle-class in the short-term.

Your only hope is to climb to the top of the pyramid somehow (and more luck is involved than any 0L realizes), because in the big picture, the entire thing is a giant scam.

[spleenworship]

Whenever an 0L especially one w no experience says they want to do any PI other than be a public defender I basically just assume they're not gonna do it

Is public defender easier to get than other forms of PI? Say direct services at nonprofit for example.

Just curious.

Yeah pd is way easier to get

Not easy, but easiest entry level PI for sure

Plus they're accessible to new grads

To be even more clear: people on TLS in the top 25% of their class with relevant internships, externships, and clinics who applied to ten or more public defender's offices throughout the country were lucky to get one offer, and many got none. So I wouldn't rely on that either, personally.

[rad lulz]

Whenever an 0L especially one w no experience says they want to do any PI other than be a public defender I basically just assume they're not gonna do it

Is public defender easier to get than other forms of PI? Say direct services at nonprofit for example.

Just curious.

Yeah pd is way easier to get

Not easy, but easiest entry level PI for sure

Plus they're accessible to new grads

To be even more clear: people on TLS in the top 25% of their class with relevant internships, externships, and clinics who applied to ten or more public defender's offices throughout the country were lucky to get one offer, and many got none. So I wouldn't rely on that either, personally.

It's not easy but at least it's real

[spleenworship]

It's not easy but at least it's real

True. And fair 'nuff.

I just wanted the poaster who asked to be real clear on what your statement "it's not easy" meant. No affront to you intended.

[rad lulz]

It's not easy but at least it's real

True. And fair 'nuff.

I just wanted the poaster who asked to be real clear on what your statement "it's not easy" meant. No affront to you intended.

Yeah bro def agree w you; I know people who that was their whole deal and couldn't pull it off

[worldtraveler]

Burnout is high in PI jobs too. You can't count on lasting 10 years. Some people love it but there are also a lot who burn out from the emotional stress, the hours, the low pay, and all kinds of other things combined.

[A. Nony Mouse]

To be even more clear: people on TLS in the top 25% of their class with relevant internships, externships, and clinics who applied to ten or more public defender's offices throughout the country were lucky to get one offer, and many got none. So I wouldn't rely on that either, personally.

It's not easy but at least it's real

Agree with all of this. Also, for whatever reason I found more people who came to LS saying "I want to be a PD" had relevant experience, enough to have a reasonable idea of what the job entailed and why they wanted to do it. Whereas people saying "I want to do public rights" often didn't really have a specific idea of what kind of job that even meant. (Or maybe that was just at my school.) In any case, I think that's why a lot end up shifting to firms - it's a lot easier to figure out what those jobs are and how to get them, if you don't come in with that kind of knowledge.

[chris0805]

There's a lot of truth to the stuff in this thread, but I think it's more complicated than saying Debt Matters. I mean, of course it does. Anyone who says it doesn't matter whether or not you have 150K (or more) in debt is crazy. But I think it also makes you think about HOW debt matters. In the IBR/PAYE world, if you struggle to get a PI job with 100k-200K, you're pretty much about as fucked as you are without a job at 200k-300k. If you can get decent work in another field, I think the debt numbers start to make a bigger difference. But that's a pretty big assumption.

What I flat out disagree with is that LRAPs are no longer relevant. LRAPs actually pay down your debt and are not dependent on the federal government keeping a policy of forgiving 100K+ in loans after 10 YEARS in government or non-profit work. Maybe shitty LRAPs are no longer relevant, but a strong LRAP that (1) covers international orgs and select private firms and (2) doesn't require you to be in your job for ten years offers students a greater flexibility and support in a much more straightforward way than the maze of the (still untested) PSLF... gee I hope 5 years from now the government will still agree to forgive this 175K that's not going through amortization.

PI jobs are hard to get. Debt definitely still matters. But given how hard PI jobs are to get, it might make sense in SOME SITUATIONS to take on more debt (if the other options are still substantial amounts of debt) to go to a school that will give you better opportunities to land the kind of job you want and maybe has a better LRAP. That's not because a desire for PI means debt doesn't matter, but that maybe it changes your calculus. It's what I did, and it worked out really well for me, though I recognize that the whole process is far riskier than any of us had previously thought it would be back in the mid 2000s.

[Gooner91]

To be even more clear: people on TLS in the top 25% of their class with relevant internships, externships, and clinics who applied to ten or more public defender's offices throughout the country were lucky to get one offer, and many got none. So I wouldn't rely on that either, personally.

It's not easy but at least it's real

Agree with all of this. Also, for whatever reason I found more people who came to LS saying "I want to be a PD" had relevant experience, enough to have a reasonable idea of what the job entailed and why they wanted to do it. Whereas people saying "I want to do public rights" often didn't really have a specific idea of what kind of job that even meant. (Or maybe that was just at my school.) In any case, I think that's why a lot end up shifting to firms - it's a lot easier to figure out what those jobs are and how to get them, if you don't come in with that kind of knowledge.

This makes a bit of sense, thanks.