Best practice area for a Stat major Forum

[Anonymous User]

T-14, want to do biglaw in NYC but are open to other options.
I love crunching numbers and looking at spreadsheets, and I'd like for my practice area to have elements of those. Ideally I'd like a practice area with some programming involved - such as R or machine learning - but I understand that might not be feasible. What would be an ideal practice area for me? Also - if anyone has any experience with data law, can you tell me what that is like?

Thanks!

[Anonymous User]

You should get a statistics or economics PHD and become a damages expert instead of going to law school. Serious answer.

[corporate_regret]

You should get a statistics or economics PHD and become a damages expert instead of going to law school. Serious answer.

Agree with this. I have an accounting background and love spreadsheets. Thought that corporate would be a good group to get into, quickly learned that anything interesting is a "business point" and you get 0 input.

Don't do law.

[Anonymous User]

I worked at a big4 post JD/LLM. We had to calculate a ton of numbers for mergers and other stuff (mostly present value, amortization, etc.). One of my coworkers liked stats stuff and moved over to the quantitative solutions team of the specialty group.

Obviously it isn’t the practice of law, but going to law school allows you to at least join a specialty group at an accounting firm.

May be ok if you’re going to school for free and don’t want to do boring accounting stuff.

I’m at biglaw now, doing tax, and we don’t do any numbers. Just due diligence.

[tyroneslothrop1]

Attorney work does not involve number crunching, at least in the overwhelming majority of positions. If you go to lawschool, and ultimately end up in a numbers based job, it is likely you will no longer be working as a lawyer, but will have instead transitioned into something else. Probably skip the whole interim going to law school thing for 3 years. Get a masters or something if you want.

[Anonymous User]

OP here. Alas, but I have already finished 1L, so not doing law is out of the question. I understand that attorney work will rarely involve number crunching. Even so, is there no practice area that is somewhat related to statistics (such as analyzing or interpreting data)?
Somewhat related, my favorite class in law school was an elective on empirical analysis. Is there no real role for empirical analysis for lawyers other than academia?

Thanks for your valuable input so far!

[Anonymous User]

OP here. Alas, but I have already finished 1L, so not doing law is out of the question. I understand that attorney work will rarely involve number crunching. Even so, is there no practice area that is somewhat related to statistics (such as analyzing or interpreting data)?
Somewhat related, my favorite class in law school was an elective on empirical analysis. Is there no real role for empirical analysis for lawyers other than academia?

Thanks for your valuable input so far!

https://www.littler.com/service-solutio ... initiative

Staying anon, but e-mail some of these contacts saying you're interested in stats + in law school. Firm is making algorithms for labor/employment issues.

[Traynor Brah]

OP here. Alas, but I have already finished 1L, so not doing law is out of the question. I understand that attorney work will rarely involve number crunching. Even so, is there no practice area that is somewhat related to statistics (such as analyzing or interpreting data)?
Somewhat related, my favorite class in law school was an elective on empirical analysis. Is there no real role for empirical analysis for lawyers other than academia?

Thanks for your valuable input so far!

Honestly--no. It concerns me you used the phrase "data law," as it makes me think you have a poor conception of what paths are available. If these are the things that excite you (and you want do the NYC professional thing), you should cut your losses now and get into finance. I've met a decent number of people who never practiced following law school and did such paths, but you're pretty much wasting your time in the interim.

[Anonymous User]

There are some places in law where it's a legit value-add (e.g., if you do class action defense, virtually every proposed class-wide damages calculation is going to involve some sort of statistical modeling, and it can be very helpful if you understand what your experts are doing). But I don't see how you can make it the center of your practice.

[Anonymous User]

Consider food and drug regulatory law. That’s my field, and I advised on legal issues related to the statistics of clinical trials all the time. My colleagues always say they wish they knew more about chemistry and stats. Knowing stats well would be a real asset. This work is really only in DC. Check out Covington, Hogan, and Sidley. And Keller-Heckman of you’re interested in food law. Other firms will pretend to do food and drug law, but approach them skeptically.

[Npret]

Why did you go to law school in the first place? It’s not too late to leave, it’s better than wasting two more years. There is no practice of law that focuses primarily on statistics and your undergrad degree not help you get hired as a lawyer.
It’s wasting your time.
If you love empirical analysis find something where that matters and do that. I guarantee there are fewer people doing that job well than there are new T14 grads every year.

[Anonymous User]

There are some places in law where it's a legit value-add (e.g., if you do class action defense, virtually every proposed class-wide damages calculation is going to involve some sort of statistical modeling, and it can be very helpful if you understand what your experts are doing). But I don't see how you can make it the center of your practice.

The person suggesting food and regulatory law offers some hope, but the above gets at the issues I see with a lot of people who want to combine law with something else substantive (stats, music, whatever): lawyers don’t do this kind of stuff, experts do. Lawyers can’t get on the stand and testify to empirical analysis; experts do that. You can argue about the legal significance of content but you can’t provide it. There may be some kind of transactional/corporate stuff where you do this kind of substantive work, but generally, you are going to be dealing with the substance that’s created by other people.

[Traynor Brah]

Consider food and drug regulatory law. That’s my field, and I advised on legal issues related to the statistics of clinical trials all the time. My colleagues always say they wish they knew more about chemistry and stats. Knowing stats well would be a real asset. This work is really only in DC. Check out Covington, Hogan, and Sidley. And Keller-Heckman of you’re interested in food law. Other firms will pretend to do food and drug law, but approach them skeptically.

Yes but "advising on legal issues related to statistics" is not "doing statistics," which is what OP is asking about. As the most recent poster says, OP will be unqualified and unable to do said underlying work as it actually relates to his or her practice.

[12481632]

Aside from traditional practice of law, your OP post screams that you should be involved in Legal Tech & Innovation (similar to Littler post above). There are many firms out there starting to develop fellowships (Reed Smith and Bryan Cave are doing this I think) and attorney positions dedicated strictly to in-house development of legal tech tools (akerman llp and Chapman & Cutler), many of which focus on data use and rules driven expert systems.

Although you might opt for traditional career path out of law school (e.g., BigLaw), this is a field that is rapidly growing and lawyers who have the ability to use data and technology will be at the top of the list for unique opportunities in the legal tech field. There are also loads of legal tech startups that would love to hire a person like you (T14 pedigree with tech interests and abilities).

[Anonymous User]

Like the above poster said, one thing you might want to look into is some sort of finance, ops or business development role with a law firm (rather than practicing lawyer) - that way you might be able to use your skills to improve operations, although I’d hate to be someone on the inside who is not a partner trying to improve processes on a ship driven by 100+ egotistical fleet admirals. The other area I would look into is startups. If you want to do this, I’d start networking now - just reach out to startups and ask if they need help over the summer.

Unfortunately, there is not much of a need for these skills in the day-to-day practice of law. “Data law” really isn’t a thing - there are lawyers who litigate the big data breach class action cases, but they use experts for their damages modeling. And as a lawyer appearing before the FCC or the FTC or a patents lawyer what will matter a lot more is your substantive knowledge of the regs, not your technical knowledge, for which your client will use in-house personnel or hire a consultant. There is a ton of interesting stats related work done in securities, antitrust, insurance, M+A, patent, and products liability litigation, but firms hire experts for that work. The experts are usually Phds with pretty robust resumes as both professors and litigation experts and supported by staff of experienced stats/econ/finance professionals. From what I can tell the big expert consultancies don’t hire lawyers (beyond their GC’s) and in fact actively avoid hiring lawyers since they know how much of a PITA they are to work with.

There’s not much of a value add just from being more conversant in the material that your average K-JD. Everyone always has a great laugh at how dumb the lawyers are because they don’t know what a chi squared test or a monte carlo sim is, but most experienced lawyers in those areas know just enough to translate the work of the experts into something digestable for the court.

[SFSpartan]

Aside from traditional practice of law, your OP post screams that you should be involved in Legal Tech & Innovation (similar to Littler post above). There are many firms out there starting to develop fellowships (Reed Smith and Bryan Cave are doing this I think) and attorney positions dedicated strictly to in-house development of legal tech tools (Akerman LLP and Chapman & Cutler), many of which focus on data use and rules driven expert systems.

Although you might opt for traditional career path out of law school (e.g., BigLaw), this is a field that is rapidly growing and lawyers who have the ability to use data and technology will be at the top of the list for unique opportunities in the legal tech field. There are also loads of legal tech startups that would love to hire a person like you (T14 pedigree with tech interests and abilities).

To piggy back on/add to what the quoted poster said - OP might consider a number of SF/SV based firms that have developed separate machine learning/predictive coding entities to automate various parts of transaction law. I see a bunch of dual stats/CS PhD's founding machine learning companies, so there's bound to be some overlap. As far as firms go here, Atrium comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others.