rabbitrun wrote:in response to the lawschoolreality in general:
i dont know if you have noticed this, but everything is shit, not just the law profession. forgive us for wanting to try to get tools (i.e. a law school education) that might help our chances of not being homeless/a 40 yr old living at home like you or, worst case senario, delaying our terrible fate by staying in school for a couple of years while doing something we are interested in.
we know we aren't special. thats why we want to go to law school and why we aren't pursuing a career as an astronaut or an actor or a writer or something.
chances of succeeding as a lawyer are still better than a lot of the other options available to libarts majors (like myself). I doubt i would be able to make it professionally pursuing either one of my ridiculous majors or anything tangentially related (at one time in my life, english and psych appeared to be a good idea...)
Finally, not everyone just jumps into law school because they can't think of any other options other than housewife. Some of us want to be lawyers because of interest as well as pragmatic reasons. And some of us, go out into the real world, get scared and realize that they should go to law school.
stop peeing in people's cheerios. let me be overly optimistic. we all know its a crapshoot but EVERYTHING right now is.
Not to be too grim, I think this thread is disturbing enough, but theres a lot of talk that once this economy rebounds (whenever the hell that may be) that the legal field is not going to recover in the same manner. The weak employment prospects for most lawyers at the moment isn't as much a reflection of the economy as it is the recession accelerating an already growing trend in the legal field. As others have mentioned, a lot of work is being outsourced and there already was a glut of lawyers before the recession hit.
You'd also be surprised at how many fresh JD's are living at home. The debt is atrocious for many of them. Good rule of thumb, dont borrow more than you'd expect to make in your first year's salary. I don't know if you just wrote that as a rant in response to the OP or not, but some things did stand out. Don't use law school as a way to dodge the recession. And only go to law school if you ARE SURE you want to be a lawyer.
It was stated earlier in the thread by a few posters, while the OP is clearly insane if he is serious in what he is saying as solutions to the legal field's problems, there are clearly a lot of red flags. Law school is a bad decision for a majority of people entering it (>50%), and right now is just an overall bad time to be entering the field for most. Tuition is over-inflated at about 3/4 of law schools, and the payback just isn't there. People hate how elitist the field is, but thats just the way it is. Its having a trickle-down effect as well. Lots of T14 grads who aren't getting the offers they are hoping (namely biglaw) for are taking the jobs that those in the lower T1/T2 schools are gunning for. I'm talking about the public interest work, state government, and mid-size law firm gigs. People aren't saying don't go to ______ because its a bad choice to be mean. It may seem mean and that they may actually be assholes, but the overall message is still good advice, tough love at worst.
