STUDY: People don't regret going to law schools outside the top 10. Forum

[BoobGoddess]

I took the money at a top 20 because I saw firsthand where T14 gets you. I knew two people who went to UPenn and they started out working at a firm (one in biglaw, another mid). Both of them ended up as solo practicioners (one doing immigration work and the other doing asbestos).

I also know a several people who went the LLM route at GULC. None of them ended up with biglaw jobs, and they are either solo practitioners (2 of them are) and the third person is a loser who spends his life outsourcing businesses overseas or something like that.

I am where I want to be, and no one can change my mind. People need to consider that there is a possibility even at a law school like UPenn that you'd end up getting all B- grades with a discretionary C thrown in just for kicks. UPenn doesn't have a strong financial aid program at all (when I got in, I got nothing from them, even with 75th percentile numbers). If that's the case you're borrowing $250K, but you're being srewed over for OCI.

[Bildungsroman]

You can look at the actual studies on which this legal-journal paper is based. Here's the 2007 study: http://www.law.du.edu/documents/directo ... g/AJD2.pdf

And yes, it looks like they include people who are not practicing law. "When we first surveyed AJD lawyers in 2003, they were just beginning their careers. At that point in time, we found that almost all (97%) of AJD lawyers were employed, and that 91% were practicing law in their primary jobs. Five years later, the pattern looks quite different. Now only 87% report that they are working full-time, while 83.5% are practicing law in their primary positions." Page 24.

[cavalier1138]

You can look at the actual studies on which this legal-journal paper is based. Here's the 2007 study: http://www.law.du.edu/documents/directo ... g/AJD2.pdf

And yes, it looks like they include people who are not practicing law. "When we first surveyed AJD lawyers in 2003, they were just beginning their careers. At that point in time, we found that almost all (97%) of AJD lawyers were employed, and that 91% were practicing law in their primary jobs. Five years later, the pattern looks quite different. Now only 87% report that they are working full-time, while 83.5% are practicing law in their primary positions." Page 24.

But that's the problem. They claim that 97% of those surveyed were employed as lawyers, when we know that doesn't match the actual trend, especially with regards to T3/T4 schools. They skewed the sample by only interviewing success stories and don't appear to have been clear in their criteria for.what constituted a "top" school. Northwestern and Cornell, for example, wouldn't have been included as top schools in the survey, because they aren't top 10 (which is a strange cut-off in and of itself).

[cron1834]

I took the money at a top 20 because I saw firsthand where T14 gets you. I knew two people who went to UPenn and they started out working at a firm (one in biglaw, another mid). Both of them ended up as solo practicioners (one doing immigration work and the other doing asbestos).

I also know a several people who went the LLM route at GULC. None of them ended up with biglaw jobs, and they are either solo practitioners (2 of them are) and the third person is a loser who spends his life outsourcing businesses overseas or something like that.

I am where I want to be, and no one can change my mind. People need to consider that there is a possibility even at a law school like UPenn that you'd end up getting all B- grades with a discretionary C thrown in just for kicks. UPenn doesn't have a strong financial aid program at all (when I got in, I got nothing from them, even with 75th percentile numbers). If that's the case you're borrowing $250K, but you're being srewed over for OCI.

I'm glad things worked out for you, and certainly you can have bad outcomes anywhere, but solos are extremely rare from Penn. Why are you this bitter about it years later, if you're where you want to be? Also, you have to actually TRY to get grades that bad in the T14. Also also, LLMs from GULC have literally nothing to do with 0L decision making on the T14 v. TTT question. What a bizarre post.

Edit - do you actually know what "firsthand" means? For such a short post, there's an embarrassing number of silly things you wrote.

[BoobGoddess]

I'm not saying that people graduate from Penn and start out as solo practicioners. It's true that Penn will get your foot in the door at BigLaw with lower grades and whatnot. But for how long? That's a question people need to consider. The two solos out of Penn I talked to told me they didn't get along with the firm partners so they got fired. They were really discouraged and ended up starting their own solo practice.

My question though is whether it's worth it to pay $250K if you're going to have to end up starting your own firm because that BigLaw job doesn't work out. If that''s the end game, doesn't it make sense to take the money?

[A. Nony Mouse]

You can look at the actual studies on which this legal-journal paper is based. Here's the 2007 study: http://www.law.du.edu/documents/directo ... g/AJD2.pdf

And yes, it looks like they include people who are not practicing law. "When we first surveyed AJD lawyers in 2003, they were just beginning their careers. At that point in time, we found that almost all (97%) of AJD lawyers were employed, and that 91% were practicing law in their primary jobs. Five years later, the pattern looks quite different. Now only 87% report that they are working full-time, while 83.5% are practicing law in their primary positions." Page 24.

Yeah, I mentioned the possibility that people changed jobs/fields from one wave of data collection to the next. I think that's actually much smaller attrition rate than most people assume happens.

(I also agree that top 10 is a really weird cutoff.)

[BoobGoddess]

Edit - do you actually know what "firsthand" means? For such a short post, there's an embarrassing number of silly things you wrote.

Firsthand means I saw what the two UPenn grads were doing... I was sitting right there in their offices watching them being solo practicioners. Also, freedom of speech man... I can say whatever silly things I want. Don't interrupt, RUDE!

[A. Nony Mouse]

Edit - do you actually know what "firsthand" means? For such a short post, there's an embarrassing number of silly things you wrote.

Firsthand means I saw what the two UPenn grads were doing... I was sitting right there in their offices watching them being solo practicioners. Also, freedom of speech man... I can say whatever silly things I want. Don't interrupt, RUDE!

How is responding to what you wrote interrupting?? (Freedom of speech also means people can call your post silly.)

[BoobGoddess]

Edit - do you actually know what "firsthand" means? For such a short post, there's an embarrassing number of silly things you wrote.

Firsthand means I saw what the two UPenn grads were doing... I was sitting right there in their offices watching them being solo practicioners. Also, freedom of speech man... I can say whatever silly things I want. Don't interrupt, RUDE!

How is responding to what you wrote interrupting?? (Freedom of speech also means people can call your post silly.)

Of course he can. But, don't you think Mr. Sourpuss was being condescending? Not even a little bit? Be nice guys. It will help you get with hot girls.

[cron1834]

Edit - do you actually know what "firsthand" means? For such a short post, there's an embarrassing number of silly things you wrote.

Firsthand means I saw what the two UPenn grads were doing... I was sitting right there in their offices watching them being solo practicioners. Also, freedom of speech man... I can say whatever silly things I want. Don't interrupt, RUDE!

How is responding to what you wrote interrupting?? (Freedom of speech also means people can call your post silly.)

Of course he can. But, don't you think Mr. Sourpuss was being condescending? Not even a little bit? Be nice guys. It will help you get with hot girls.

Do you have firsthand experience of getting with hot girls? Or are you actually a hot girl? V skeptical of most of your posting ITT, haha.

[Kinky John]

Wait are we talking USNWR Top 10 or ATL Top 10? My happiness might hang in the balance

[Johann]

You can look at the actual studies on which this legal-journal paper is based. Here's the 2007 study: http://www.law.du.edu/documents/directo ... g/AJD2.pdf

And yes, it looks like they include people who are not practicing law. "When we first surveyed AJD lawyers in 2003, they were just beginning their careers. At that point in time, we found that almost all (97%) of AJD lawyers were employed, and that 91% were practicing law in their primary jobs. Five years later, the pattern looks quite different. Now only 87% report that they are working full-time, while 83.5% are practicing law in their primary positions." Page 24.

of course the data includes people who dont practice law. the sample size was thousands of people from ALL types of schools on one and only one condition: admitted to the bar in the year 2000. it then tracks the same people. the data is no more skewed than any other type of data we have around law schools - that is, if you want to question this data and not believe, you can't also believe LST's data.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Tracking people who are admitted to the bar omits people who graduated but couldn't pass the bar (and consequently probably had a hard time getting a legal job) as well as people who decided not to take the bar. I would imagine people in those groups are more likely to regret going to law school than the sample surveyed.

[cavalier1138]

You can look at the actual studies on which this legal-journal paper is based. Here's the 2007 study: http://www.law.du.edu/documents/directo ... g/AJD2.pdf

And yes, it looks like they include people who are not practicing law. "When we first surveyed AJD lawyers in 2003, they were just beginning their careers. At that point in time, we found that almost all (97%) of AJD lawyers were employed, and that 91% were practicing law in their primary jobs. Five years later, the pattern looks quite different. Now only 87% report that they are working full-time, while 83.5% are practicing law in their primary positions." Page 24.

of course the data includes people who dont practice law. the sample size was thousands of people from ALL types of schools on one and only one condition: admitted to the bar in the year 2000. it then tracks the same people. the data is no more skewed than any other type of data we have around law schools - that is, if you want to question this data and not believe, you can't also believe LST's data.

Except LST doesn't just ignore the significant portion of students who don't pass the bar. I bet their regret level is higher than those surveyed...

Edit: Nony beat me to it.

[A. Nony Mouse]

jinx!

[Johann]

Tracking people who are admitted to the bar omits people who graduated but couldn't pass the bar (and consequently probably had a hard time getting a legal job) as well as people who decided not to take the bar. I would imagine people in those groups are more likely to regret going to law school than the sample surveyed.

sure but even TTTs boast 90% bar passage rates similar to T14s and theirs no way of knowing who will or will not take the bar and regret going to law school. thats a problem at the T14 just like at a TTT. you cant really factor that into your going to law school analysis.

will i pass the bar? hmm almost assuredly yes.
will i not want to take the bar? hmmm maybe.

both are after the fact judgments that can't be made when going to law school and affect people the same at T14s and TTTs.

[A. Nony Mouse]

Tracking people who are admitted to the bar omits people who graduated but couldn't pass the bar (and consequently probably had a hard time getting a legal job) as well as people who decided not to take the bar. I would imagine people in those groups are more likely to regret going to law school than the sample surveyed.

sure but even TTTs boast 90% bar passage rates similar to T14s and theirs no way of knowing who will or will not take the bar and regret going to law school. thats a problem at the T14 just like at a TTT. you cant really factor that into your going to law school analysis.

will i pass the bar? hmm almost assuredly yes.
will i not want to take the bar? hmmm maybe.

both are after the fact judgments that can't be made when going to law school and affect people the same at T14s and TTTs.

Some TTTs - there are plenty with terrible bar passage rates. And there are much higher attrition rates at TTTTs where they actually fail people.

Also, part of the point is that we can't know if more people at TTTs don't take the bar than at higher-ranked schools, since that's not captured in this study. (Or it could be the other way around, but we don't know that either.)

[Johann]

TTT grads who took and passed the bar dont regret going to law school (fact, proven by study)
TTT grads who chose not to take the bar are _________. if they made a rational choice, theyll be happier than they would have been if they did take the bar which means TTT grads who dont take the bar also dont regret going to law school (fact if humans are rational decision makers, confirms with my experience of hundreds of TTT grads)

the only group that MIGHT statistically regret law school are those that failed the bar. and thats not a given - still an assumption youre making. (no data; i'm not sure because i dont know anyone that tried to pass the bar and failed).

[lymenheimer]

The two solos out of Penn I talked to told me they didn't get along with the firm partners so they got fired. They were really discouraged and ended up starting their own solo practice.

So what youre saying is, "penn causes its graduates to not get along with biglaw partners?"

[cavalier1138]

TTT grads who took and passed the bar dont regret going to law school (fact, proven by study)
TTT grads who chose not to take the bar are _________. if they made a rational choice, theyll be happier than they would have been if they did take the bar which means TTT grads who dont take the bar also dont regret going to law school (fact if humans are rational decision makers, confirms with my experience of hundreds of TTT grads)

the only group that MIGHT statistically regret law school are those that failed the bar. and thats not a given - still an assumption youre making. (no data; i'm not sure because i dont know anyone that tried to pass the bar and failed).

Actually, even if we ignore all that, the study still doesn't say that TTT grads are all just as happy as their T14 counterparts. The study looked at two groups: T10 (again, who knows why) and everyone else. I didn't see anything to indicate that they bothered to subdivide their results further than that, and that's a huge problem.

What if 70% of their "non-elite" group were still in T1 schools? The criteria this study used to separate elite schools from the rest of the pack seem extremely inadequate.

That said, I don't think we should ignore the fact that many TTT or TTTT schools don't have stellar bar passage rates, and that it could mean a quarter or more of their graduating class was excluded from the study.

[Paul Campos]

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[Paul Campos]

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[Paul Campos]

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[Paul Campos]

This is a well-designed and important study, but studies of this type are always subject to a serious limitation, which is response rate. The original pool of 4500 or so bar passers was itself the product of a 71% response rate among those people in the sample who could be located, which itself was a smaller percentage than the entire sample. Then about 30% of that original responding group didn't respond to the 2007 wave. So only around half of the original sample actually responded to the survey seven years out of law school. The problem of course is that non-response is not random: people who don't respond are going to have very different characteristics, on average, from people who do, but just how different is impossible to say (because they aren't responding).

It would be more accurate to say that a high percentage of people who graduated from law school in the late 1990s and passed the bar and were willing to respond subsequently to an in-depth survey about how they felt about their careers had largely positive feelings about those careers.

[Paul Campos]

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