taxguy wrote:Response: The close minded, opinionated attitudes of folks here is really disconcerting. First, many people, myself included, feel that having a law school background can be very beneficial...period.
The question isn't whether it's beneficial, it's whether it's beneficial enough to be worth $180K in debt and three years of your life. Those are two different questions. Just about any form of education will be "beneficial", but when doing cost/benefit analysis, you have to look at more than just whether there's a benefit.
taxguy wrote:Secondly, there are many jobs, other than Big law that require a law school background or at least highly suggest it. If folks choose to go to law school for these reasons, it might not matter which law school that they attend. The key here is that you have to have the right reason to attend law school.
I don't disagree with the underlined at all.
taxguy wrote:I did NOT go to a top 10 or even top 20 law school, yet I never had a problem getting a job or practicing law. In fact, I don't think I ever had a rejection for a legal job. Maybe I was just lucky or chose jobs very selectively.
You've been in the profession a while now. It's changed, a lot. There's been an increase in the number of law schools, an increase in the number of people applying to law schools, an increase in the number of people graduating from law schools, and recently a pretty severe contraction in the amount of hiring of fresh law grads. Even before that contraction, law hiring had stagnated; the numbers I saw said something along the lines of: In 2007,
before the economy tanked, there were only 8,000 legitimate new job openings in the legal industry every year, and 40,000 people graduating from law schools.
The BigLaw model actually conceals a lot of that attrition. Why? Because they don't create "legitimate new job openings", they just keep kicking out older associates and replacing them with greener associates. They're not creating new permanent jobs at a very high rate, but the turnover means they can keep absorbing a lot of graduating students and making it look like they're finding work. It creates an impression of a lot more actual high-paying jobs in the legal industry than actually exist. Yes, they're there, but you don't get to keep them. You'll be there 9 months after graduation, but probably not 10 years later, or even 5 years later. By then you'll be replaced by someone else, which increases that year's 9-months-after-graduation numbers.
taxguy wrote:I don't look at a glass half empy. I look at these lower tier schools as giving a chance for those that normally wouldn't have the opportunity to become lawyers. I can absolutely assure you as can most other lawyers that I know that there are successful practicing lawyers who didn't attend the top 50 law schools.
They can be such a chance, but realistically, you have to look at the odds of actually finding a job from one of these schools. It's important that people don't just have "a chance", it's that they carefully consider that chance against the costs of taking it. Three years of your life and six figures in debt is a high cost to just be taking "a chance" at becoming a lawyer.
That's what people here generally are railing about. It's not that they don't think there's anything beneficial to a legal education, it's that it's not worth the costs for many people. And because your odds of finding a job when you graduate drop dramatically as you move down from the first tier into the lower tiers, people rail against going to the lower tier schools even more loudly and strongly. It's not some irrational hate of lower-tier schools, it's because
the cost/benefit ratio is worse at those schools.
There are definitely practicing lawyers today who are very successful and who graduated from a T4 law school. But what if, for every one of those successful people you know, there's 99 classmates who never made it anywhere in the legal industry? Is it worth a 1 in 100 chance to go to law school, given the cost? A one in fifty chance? Where do you draw the line?
Eat that, SUCKA.
). Beyond serving as a tie breaker, softs are what admissions officers use to build a diverse and well-rounded class. This does not mean they look for a well-rounded applicant. One or two outstanding achievements trump a laundry list of ECs. This explains 
