T10 3L Discusses The Job Market ITE (Qs Welcome) Forum

[CE2JD]

I posted this in another thread, but I will repeat it here for the OP: Go Fuck yourself

The mods on this site are retarded. Someone comes to help people and give them a real perspective and the mods tolerate this ^ kind of shit.

Amazing.

[98234872348]

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[Anonymous User]

Would you go to a t10 with no grants, or a t30 (say GWU) on a full ride in this economy?

I'm a 3L at a T10 with a V10 offer and no deferral as far as I know, but my friends' situations scare me enough that I would advise people to go to a school like GW with a full-ride (or a strong state school with cheap in-state tuition and good regional placement) over a T14 at sticker or with a small scholarship. I have many more friends who have no-offers or still don't know if they'll get offers than friends who have offers in hand. The pressure for them to find jobs wouldn't be nearly as intense if they didn't have the massive debt.

Then again, it's possible 2010 and 2011 have gotten the worst of it. I don't think things are suddenly going to be rosy for 2012, though. It will likely be a gradual recovery.

[XxSpyKEx]

Would you go to a t10 with no grants, or a t30 (say GWU) on a full ride in this economy?

I'm a 3L at a T10 with a V10 offer and no deferral as far as I know, but my friends' situations scare me enough that I would advise people to go to a school like GW with a full-ride (or a strong state school with cheap in-state tuition and good regional placement) over a T14 at sticker or with a small scholarship. I have many more friends who have no-offers or still don't know if they'll get offers than friends who have offers in hand. The pressure for them to find jobs wouldn't be nearly as intense if they didn't have the massive debt.

Then again, it's possible 2010 and 2011 have gotten the worst of it. I don't think things are suddenly going to be rosy for 2012, though. It will likely be a gradual recovery.

The problem is that the in-state lower rank school's regional placement is going to drop to nothing as t14s start to eat up these jobs that they wouldn't typically take (i.e. midlaw & smaller firms (50-200) at regional firms). So I guess the question then becomes how badly do you want to be a lawyer? The free-ride definitely would reduce the pressure to have to make a large salary, but what if that means making $40K a year coming out of this school you got a free ride from because the $75K-$100K a year regional jobs were taken up by t14 grads (who are still screwed because their debt is shocking). But that's just my prediction, which can be summed up to simply, in the end, we're all fucked (at least until things change with the cost of tuition to attend law school).

[A'nold]

Yeah......well, I like a lot of you guys and you seem like pretty intelligent people. I guess it just goes to show that a 170+ LSAT /=/ common sense, haha. If you actually think op was not a flame, well, I really can't help you.

[greyarea]

Would you go to a t10 with no grants, or a t30 (say GWU) on a full ride in this economy?

I'm a 3L at a T10 with a V10 offer and no deferral as far as I know, but my friends' situations scare me enough that I would advise people to go to a school like GW with a full-ride (or a strong state school with cheap in-state tuition and good regional placement) over a T14 at sticker or with a small scholarship. I have many more friends who have no-offers or still don't know if they'll get offers than friends who have offers in hand. The pressure for them to find jobs wouldn't be nearly as intense if they didn't have the massive debt.

Then again, it's possible 2010 and 2011 have gotten the worst of it. I don't think things are suddenly going to be rosy for 2012, though. It will likely be a gradual recovery.

The problem is that the in-state lower rank school's regional placement is going to drop to nothing as t14s start to eat up these jobs that they wouldn't typically take (i.e. midlaw & smaller firms (50-200) at regional firms). So I guess the question then becomes how badly do you want to be a lawyer? The free-ride definitely would reduce the pressure to have to make a large salary, but what if that means making $40K a year coming out of this school you got a free ride from because the $75K-$100K a year regional jobs were taken up by t14 grads (who are still screwed because their debt is shocking). But that's just my prediction, which can be summed up to simply, in the end, we're all fucked (at least until things change with the cost of tuition to attend law school).

I'm not completely sold on this notion. You'd be surprised how loyalty to an alumni network can trump law school prestige/ranking. Sure, it's anybody's guess how it will play out, but I'm just going from the research I've done in my region and speaking to lawyers.

[A'nold]

Would you go to a t10 with no grants, or a t30 (say GWU) on a full ride in this economy?

I'm a 3L at a T10 with a V10 offer and no deferral as far as I know, but my friends' situations scare me enough that I would advise people to go to a school like GW with a full-ride (or a strong state school with cheap in-state tuition and good regional placement) over a T14 at sticker or with a small scholarship. I have many more friends who have no-offers or still don't know if they'll get offers than friends who have offers in hand. The pressure for them to find jobs wouldn't be nearly as intense if they didn't have the massive debt.

Then again, it's possible 2010 and 2011 have gotten the worst of it. I don't think things are suddenly going to be rosy for 2012, though. It will likely be a gradual recovery.

The problem is that the in-state lower rank school's regional placement is going to drop to nothing as t14s start to eat up these jobs that they wouldn't typically take (i.e. midlaw & smaller firms (50-200) at regional firms). So I guess the question then becomes how badly do you want to be a lawyer? The free-ride definitely would reduce the pressure to have to make a large salary, but what if that means making $40K a year coming out of this school you got a free ride from because the $75K-$100K a year regional jobs were taken up by t14 grads (who are still screwed because their debt is shocking). But that's just my prediction, which can be summed up to simply, in the end, we're all fucked (at least until things change with the cost of tuition to attend law school).

I'm not completely sold on this notion. You'd be surprised how loyalty to an alumni network can trump law school prestige/ranking. Sure, it's anybody's guess how it will play out, but I'm just going from the research I've done in my region and speaking to lawyers.

Haha, yeah, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of maybe the top 6 schools or so having any kind of advantage in the state where my school is located. Almost every lawyer in the state went to the state school I'm attending. I'm serious, I mean, probably like 90% plus. Also, it is not really a very sought after area it seems with people from big name schools. It's funny, all of this ranking obsession and these podunk state schools might end up outplacing certain top 50 schools over the next 5 years or so...haha. Who woulda thunk it?

[Anonymous User]

I'm not completely sold on this notion. You'd be surprised how loyalty to an alumni network can trump law school prestige/ranking. Sure, it's anybody's guess how it will play out, but I'm just going from the research I've done in my region and speaking to lawyers.

Haha, yeah, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside of maybe the top 6 schools or so having any kind of advantage in the state where my school is located. Almost every lawyer in the state went to the state school I'm attending. I'm serious, I mean, probably like 90% plus. Also, it is not really a very sought after area it seems with people from big name schools. It's funny, all of this ranking obsession and these podunk state schools might end up outplacing certain top 50 schools over the next 5 years or so...haha. Who woulda thunk it?

The rankings system is stupid in that it is possible for there to be a lawyer coming out of a low ranked school to be really good, and even better then a lawyer out of Harvard. Additionally, the core curriculum at lower ranked schools is much more substantive then at a school like Yale (with a whole semester of 1L classes, which are all pass/fail). However, as the interviewer from Kirkland told me, the Harvard grad will always do better in terms on employment (no matter how much better the TTTT grad is) because when you tell a client "X will be working on your case and he went to this TTT school, the client will say, "WTF school did he go to?" Whereas, if you can say "X is working on your case, who went to Harvard" the client will always say, "Harvard, that's a good school" and feel reassured he is getting the best legal service possible for his dollar (even though that may be untrue). So for that reason I would say ranking/prestige will trump alumni loyalty.

A'nold- The above is obviously not true if you talking about taking someone from a top 50 school over a lower ranked school (not that a top 50 school has much prestige to begin with), but is probably more true if you are talking about taking someone from a t14 or better. Also, keep in mind, while the interest in shittier locations wasn't there in the past. But a job is better then no job. So the interest will be there when a t14 grad's options are to be unemployed or make $80-100K in a undesirable location. Additionally, many t14s are extremely national, where it would be hard to find that there is no alumni relations in many areas (even if there isn't many grads in a certain state, there likely are some, which will try to bring more in if the interest grows to be there).

[TTT-LS]

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[bwv812]

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[XxSpyKEx]

Actually it's substantially less then half the jobs from last year, which is scary because last year wasn't exactly a booming year (unlike 2007). I did the math for Chicago firms and about half the firms that had a summer program don't this year, and the other half that continued there program seem to have about an average of around 50-75% of their previous year class sizes (based on NALP previous and expected, who knows how accurate that is though because 5 firms I bid on, who expected a summer class, pulled out of OCI before interviews were scheduled). NY is probably a better market then Chicago right now, but still.

I think NALP only has numbers for the summer class of 2009, and doesn't have numbers for the summer of 2010, which is what you're presumably talking about.

I don't understand NALP fully, but it doesn't make a lot of sense because if you look at it, it says "expected" right above 2009. Then if you look at actual firm websites they usually say they are expecting the exact same number of 2010 SAs as what NALP's 2009 expected number is. The only way I could make sense out of any of this was to assume that NALP calculates "began work in" based on the date the offer was made (which would be the previous year -- i.e. 2009 for a 2010 SA). Additionally, I don't see why there would be "expected numbers on NALP for a class that already happened this last summer. Firms could easily update that and I think they had to have.

Also the other thing I was looking at when I threw all the info for every firm doing OCI in my target market this year is that the drop from 2008 summer 2Ls to 2009 "expected" summer 2Ls was just way too large to have been the expected drop from last year (I mean there definitely wasn't a 30-50% drop or more of SAs at most firms last year).

[ScaredWorkedBored]

I don't understand NALP fully, but it doesn't make a lot of sense because if you look at it, it says "expected" right above 2009.

That's because NALP does not update frequently. "Expected 2009" is the summer of 2009, not 2009 OCI for 2010. They're always several months behind in compiling what actual summer classes looked like or will look like. An easy way to check is look at Skadden (NY) or Morgan Lewis and Quarles & Brady - firms that publically announced they were halving their summer classes or not having them at all in 2010.

Skadden shows its normal summer class size. Morgan Lewis and Quarles have a summer class. You are looking at this year's numbers, not 2010 projections.

I mean there definitely wasn't a 30-50% drop or more of SAs at most firms last year

Yes, there was. There was an enormous difference between doing OCI in 2007 and doing OCI in 2008.

[XxSpyKEx]

I mean there definitely wasn't a 30-50% drop or more of SAs at most firms last year

Yes, there was. There was an enormous difference between doing OCI in 2007 and doing OCI in 2008.

So what % of SA positions do you predict are available in comparison to summer 2008 and summer 2009? 30-50% is a huge drop from 2008 to 2009 and I don't recall people freaking out last year as much as they are this year, which makes me wonder how much of a decline there actually is this year.

[ScaredWorkedBored]

Say that you have 1000 summer positions.

40% decline from 2007 to 2008 after Lehman week.

600 summer positions.

Now say that you have another 60% decline in summer positions this year between firms not having summer classes and having nominal classes. May be better, may be worse. No one really knows at this point. Based on the ugly OCI returns, it sounds worse.

That's 240 spots, or over a 75% total decline from what people were thinking of as "normal" in 2007.

It's part slow boiling a frog and part that somewhere in that second decline, it really hit home in the T14 schools and stopped being just a T1 problem a.ka. an argument for "T14 or bust!" Basically it changed from "We will hire more selectively, you do not go to a good enough school for your rank" to "We're not hiring at all, it doesn't matter what school you go to."

[rayiner]

According to a report compiled by NU, SA offers for 2009 summer were down 36%, though it was felt almost wholly by non-T14 folks. I remember GW and W&M folks talking about how bad OCI was in 2008 though.

The more I think about it, the more the current state of affairs makes sense. Think about the pipeline model. Firms want a certain number of people starting in 2009, 2010, 2011, etc. When faced with a drop in demand, they want to cut the flow of the pipeline, but not to zero because a bubble in the pipeline would mean a lack of experienced mid-levels down the road. So what did they do when they realized their C/O 2009 - C/O 2011 needed to be much smaller, but only after they'd already hired too many people at 2007 and 2008 OCI? They could've no-offered a bunch of 2008 and 2009 summer associates, but would that have made economic sense? Aside from the hit to their reputation, there is the fact that those SAs are are a sunk cost --- you've already spent money recruiting them and training them, why no-offer them and have to repeat the process with a bunch of folks in the next class? Unless you're just *really* hemorrhaging money and can't even afford a deferral...

So what they did instead was to use deferrals to spread 2 classes worth of associates over three years. As a result, C/O 2011 are the one that gets the short end of the stick. It literally costs the firms nothing to not hire them, and indeed they save a bunch of money by limiting their recruiting efforts. They have no prior relationship with them to preserve. Likely, they're only hiring at all so they can poach some top talent they would not otherwise get, which incidentally suggests that firms feel that they are economically stable enough to make such inherently forward-looking investments.

So what does this mean for the class of 2012? If the economy has definitely stabilized by this time next year (not necessarily improved dramatically, but rather it is clear that it won't get worse), then 2010 OCI could be decent. Not boom-year wonderful, but likely no worse than OCI in 2001 and 2002, where associate growth was negative overall but T14's still did reasonably well. Again, it's just the pipeline at work --- firms need a certain number of folks at various stages within the firm and it makes economic sense for them to continue hiring even if they have to force attrition at the other end of the pipeline.

* For those who wonder why hiring might be better for 2010 OCI even if the economy doesn't dramatically improve, and who are somewhat mathematically inclined, it is useful to think of hiring as being proportional not to the level of legal demand, but rather to the derivative thereof, plus some constant representing the amount of forced attrition firms are willing to use to maintain their demographic profile. The derivative of legal demand was sharply negative through 2008-2009, but unless there is further collapse will somewhat (even if marginally-so) positive through 2009-2010.

[Anonymous User]

Does being a URM help at all in terms of OCI and recruiting?

[Anonymous User]

Does being a URM help at all in terms of OCI and recruiting?

Sure as shit didn't help me. Guess it depends on the type of URM you are though. If you're black, then yes, it definitely will help you.

[wiseowl]

Yeah......well, I like a lot of you guys and you seem like pretty intelligent people. I guess it just goes to show that a 170+ LSAT /=/ common sense, haha. If you actually think op was not a flame, well, I really can't help you.

Here's an idea. If you want to jump in on threads with your buds and toss "FLAME!" and expletives at posters who are trying to offer advice, take it to fucking XO.

Just because you've chosen a path that renders this advice useless to you personally does not entitle you to fuck it up for the rest of us.

[dresden doll]

Yeah......well, I like a lot of you guys and you seem like pretty intelligent people. I guess it just goes to show that a 170+ LSAT /=/ common sense, haha. If you actually think op was not a flame, well, I really can't help you.

Here's an idea. If you want to jump in on threads with your buds and toss "FLAME!" and expletives at posters who are trying to offer advice, take it to fucking XO.

Just because you've chosen a path that renders this advice useless to you personally does not entitle you to fuck it up for the rest of us.

I do not believe his case is such at all, actually.

[riave]

The rankings system is stupid in that it is possible for there to be a lawyer coming out of a low ranked school to be really good, and even better then a lawyer out of Harvard. Additionally, the core curriculum at lower ranked schools is much more substantive then at a school like Yale (with a whole semester of 1L classes, which are all pass/fail). However, as the interviewer from Kirkland told me, the Harvard grad will always do better in terms on employment (no matter how much better the TTTT grad is) because when you tell a client "X will be working on your case and he went to this TTT school, the client will say, "WTF school did he go to?" Whereas, if you can say "X is working on your case, who went to Harvard" the client will always say, "Harvard, that's a good school" and feel reassured he is getting the best legal service possible for his dollar (even though that may be untrue). So for that reason I would say ranking/prestige will trump alumni loyalty.

If the client is a regional or local company they may be very familiar and impressed with the state's flagship law school. For instance UNC law is broadly respect across north carolina (not a TTT, i know, but no harvard either). I could see a NC client trusting a unc law grad over a harvard law grad to provide quality service.

[Anonymous User]

I'm currently a 1L who is attending a T10 and paying a ton of money. I am seriously thinking of deferring a couple of years right now and coming back later. Is this a good idea or not?

[etwake]

I'm currently a 1L who is attending a T10 and paying a ton of money. I am seriously thinking of deferring a couple of years right now and coming back later. Is this a good idea or not?

I thought about this for a while, but I pretty much was forced to go to school because of a lack of work for me in my job. I would have to go out and find another job, probably paying 40-45k a year. If I had a good, consistent job and the option to defer, then I would have likely taken it. The class of 2013 will likely fare better than the class of 2012. In one word, yes. Defer.

[Anonymous User]

I'm currently a 1L who is attending a T10 and paying a ton of money. I am seriously thinking of deferring a couple of years right now and coming back later. Is this a good idea or not?

I thought about this for a while, but I pretty much was forced to go to school because of a lack of work for me in my job. I would have to go out and find another job, probably paying 40-45k a year. If I had a good, consistent job and the option to defer, then I would have likely taken it. The class of 2013 will likely fare better than the class of 2012. In one word, yes. Defer.

What if I am straight out of undergrad? Not sure how good job prospects are for someone who has no real WE, but I am scared of getting into so much debt with possibly no job prospects next year.

[teaadntoast]

The problem with these posts, particularly when coupled with the Anonymous username, is that we really don't have any way to verfiy that these individuals have the credentials they claim. I'm not calling OP dishonest, but it's difficult to credit this sort of information when the poster in question won't even cop to where he's going to school or where he placed in his class.

Constant trolling on the subject has also, for better or worse, made most of us highly suspicious of people bearing "news" about the state of the economy and legal market.

Then there's the fact that each person's experience of OCI is going to be different, and there could be any number of factors affecting why someone did or didn't get a particular callback. We can't tell, from the internet, whether someone with a top GPA at a great school lacks some of the social smarts to wow an interviewer, or if s/he didn't do due dilligence and make realistic bids. There are just so many random factors that don't come up in posts about individual job searches that generalizing from part to whole isn't hugely useful.

[etwake]

I'm currently a 1L who is attending a T10 and paying a ton of money. I am seriously thinking of deferring a couple of years right now and coming back later. Is this a good idea or not?

I thought about this for a while, but I pretty much was forced to go to school because of a lack of work for me in my job. I would have to go out and find another job, probably paying 40-45k a year. If I had a good, consistent job and the option to defer, then I would have likely taken it. The class of 2013 will likely fare better than the class of 2012. In one word, yes. Defer.

What if I am straight out of undergrad? Not sure how good job prospects are for someone who has no real WE, but I am scared of getting into so much debt with possibly no job prospects next year.

Good luck finding a job. Go out and bust your ass looking for one. I'm extremely confident that taking a year or two off is a great idea. I'm happy that I did, it gave me a bit of maturity that I would not have received had I gone straight through to law school after undergrad. You get a few benefits from deferring right now:

1) Getting some savings in the bank and paying off some debt from UG.

2) You get the maturity factor; law school will be easier because you know what the 'real world' is like.

3) Likely going to be in a better situation in the class of 2013 over class of 2012

However, if you're starting your 1L year and are committed, then it might be a tougher choice for you. If you could back out right now and not take a hit financially, and are confident that you'll find a job, then by all means go for it. However, I doubt you're in that situation, so, no I would not reccomend dropping out. Just study your ass off and shoot for top 10%, and you'll be alright.