Why is a Person's Life Fate Decided by 1 Year of Schooling? Forum

[scifiguy]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

[togepi]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

China would like to have a word with you.

[kwais]

One reason may be that it is good to give students the chance to branch out in the 2nd and 3rd years of law school, to pursue their academic interests. But once they do that, the value and accuracy or comparison is greatly diminished. So, put them in the same classes for two semesters, let them battle it out, and then let them go off and study whatever interests them. Employers get the separation they need without forcing students to take the same shit for 3 years. Not sure if that is why it started, but it could speak to why its good idea to keep it.

[scifiguy]

One reason may be that it is good to give students the chance to branch out in the 2nd and 3rd years of law school, to pursue their academic interests. But once they do that, the value and accuracy or comparison is greatly diminished. So, put them in the same classes for two semesters, let them battle it out, and then let them go off and study whatever interests them. Employers get the separation they need without forcing students to take the same shit for 3 years. Not sure if that is why it started, but it could speak to why its good idea to keep it.

But can two mere semesters of work completely and accurately tell who will be a great biglawyer? I can see if maybe you had like everyone do a UG degree in law/pre-law and track them over a longer period of time...but just seems kind of short to me. One year. Then bam! Judgement is made. YOU deserve this and YOU don't. Seems kind of dubious to me.

I'm not saying there's a perfect system. This is just an open-ended thought/argument.

Is it not like taking people from all kinds of high school varsity sports and then having them play a brand new sport that's not like any of the other sports they played for years in high school. And then after one year (two semesters), they are drafted to play as a professional in that sport? So after freshmen year of college, these high school basketball players...soccer players...volleyball players, etc. who all had to learn a new sport (let's call that new sport "wal-ball" - law backwards ) and compete against each other in wal-ball are evaluated on who was the best. Wal-ball combines elements of a lot of different sports (maybe there is a ball that can be both thrown and kicked...and there are different ways to score it, etc.), but is not exactly like any of the traditional sports in existence in high school.

The professional teams' decisions are then made off of one year of these people playing in college. Would that be enough?

[NYstate]

You know the answer to this question. Law firms hire off a summer evaluation of your work. To do that, they hire in the 2L fall for the upcoming summer. They are only looking at those who have shown they can do well on exams. The mandatory curve makes this much harder for students. But that is why the you get 2 semesters to prove yourself.

The benefit for law students with this system is that they can drop out if they aren't making the cut and save themselves tens of thousands in tuition.

Also, firms don't need the absolute best lawyers. Law isn't like that. They need people who are just smart, hardworking and thorough enough to do the job.

[BeenDidThat]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your whole life isn't determined by your 1L grades. Try not producing decent work when you have your SA, then get back to me on that "fate" thing.

Is it hugely influential, maybe too much so? Yeah. But is it true that "the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills is 1L year?" Not even close.

Furthermore, even if you miss the biglaw boat, you can become a successful lawyer. Will you be a successful biglaw lawyer? No. Can you make 6 or 7 figures after a couple decades of hard work? Probably.

[dingbat]

How about the fact that if you fuck around in college you won't get into a top school? The kid who busts straight As and studies hard for the LSAT might be able to get away with being median at CCN, while the slacker could end up needing top 5% at a T2

[FeelTheHeat]

lol @ "great biglawyer"

a nutless monkey could do that job

[cinephile]

They're not looking for the best lawyer, they're looking for the most prestigious one.

[dixiecupdrinking]

Well, what else would they base 2L summer hiring on?

Biglaw hiring is ridiculously inefficient, but it isn't really unfair. Everyone is on an even playing field; it's not as if some people have been through law school before and others haven't. Having your 1L grades matter more than later years is just the way the system works and it isn't intrinsically any less fair or more arbitrary than any other system would be.

It'd be nice for everyone if there were more 3L and post-graduation jobs available at big firms, and if that is your point here, then, yeah. But a firm that tried to move to a 3L hiring model would immediately start finding the best candidates hired by its peers who can offer the stability of the 2L summer --> permanent offer model, so we're kind of stuck.

[manofjustice]

TCR-it does not.

[timbs4339]

Your "life fate" does not depend on one year of grades. Your ability to do certain specialized legal work for certain kinds of clients and get jobs that hire from biglaw does. If that's the sum total of your life's ambition I don't know what else to say.

[Icculus]

What you are really getting at is that a person's ability to secure BigLaw is heavily influenced by 1L grades, but there are other legal jobs out there, and not everyone wants biglaw. The other piece to this really is GPA+LSAT impact which school you can get into/scholarship money, which has an even more significant impact on where you will be working. For example, median or slightly below can land you a biglaw job from most of the T14 whereas once you leave that group you're talking top 30%-10% for T1 schools, and so on for lower. Your OP is seriously over simplified.

Not to mention many firms have GPA cutoffs where as long as you are above a minimum GPA you can snag an interview and it becomes more about whether you're a good fit, good interviewer, etc. Again, those cutoffs are going to be lower at a T14 or higher ranked school. This is one of the reasonse there is such a debate as to whether it is better to take a lower ranked school with $$$ or a higher ranked school and more debt.

[homestyle28]

Don't worry you will have many more chances after 1L to fuck up your life.

[Icculus]

Don't worry you will have many more chances after 1L to fuck up your life.

This is oh so credited, and something those of us old guys understand too well.

[homestyle28]

Don't worry you will have many more chances after 1L to fuck up your life.

This is oh so credited, and something those of us old guys understand too well.

Penicillin only cures so much

[stillwater]

LOL at the shitboomer myths ITT. OP sounds like a boomer

[Mick Haller]

Just the way it is... life has never been fair. Look at all those baby antelopes getting eaten by lions. Nasty brutish and short bro

[ookoshi]

But can two mere semesters of work completely and accurately tell who will be a great biglawyer? I can see if maybe you had like everyone do a UG degree in law/pre-law and track them over a longer period of time...but just seems kind of short to me. One year. Then bam! Judgement is made. YOU deserve this and YOU don't. Seems kind of dubious to me.

I disagree. Your chances of getting into BigLaw are similarly affected by your UnderGrad GPA / LSAT, which determines which school you can attend. The LSAT is a reasonably accurate test of your analytic and reasoning skills, and your 1L performance is a reasonable indicator of your ability to adapt to a new environment involving a lot of reading, documenting, and applying concepts to fact patterns. And while your LSAT and 1L performance may not tell them how good of a lawyer you'll be 10 years from now, and while there is a big difference between 1L course material and the actual practice of law, that snapshot is a reasonable indicator of how good you are at the time they have to make a decision. It's certainly far better than any other indicators available to them between your 1L and 2L year.

[utlaw2007]

But can two mere semesters of work completely and accurately tell who will be a great biglawyer? I can see if maybe you had like everyone do a UG degree in law/pre-law and track them over a longer period of time...but just seems kind of short to me. One year. Then bam! Judgement is made. YOU deserve this and YOU don't. Seems kind of dubious to me.

I disagree. Your chances of getting into BigLaw are similarly affected by your UnderGrad GPA / LSAT, which determines which school you can attend. The LSAT is a reasonably accurate test of your analytic and reasoning skills, and your 1L performance is a reasonable indicator of your ability to adapt to a new environment involving a lot of reading, documenting, and applying concepts to fact patterns. And while your LSAT and 1L performance may not tell them how good of a lawyer you'll be 10 years from now, and while there is a big difference between 1L course material and the actual practice of law, that snapshot is a reasonable indicator of how good you are at the time they have to make a decision. It's certainly far better than any other indicators available to them between your 1L and 2L year.

I agree with everything you said except for one thing. The LSAT is a reasonable predictor at how you perform in your 1st year of law school. The LSAT also measures processing speed of new information. Once you are a lawyer, the amount of new information that you have to process is minimal. So in this regard, the LSAT misses the boat with what it is trying to predict.

I had missed part of what you said about 1L year. So I agree with everything you said.

[utlaw2007]

Seriously.

Given that law school accepts people from all sorts of backgrounds/UG majors and that the work is not directly tied to any one major, and that the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills (at least the one time period/length where it counts most) is 1L year, how can a person's whole life be determined in that way? Do we really know enough about someone after one year?

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your whole life isn't determined by your 1L grades. Try not producing decent work when you have your SA, then get back to me on that "fate" thing.

Is it hugely influential, maybe too much so? Yeah. But is it true that "the only time you'll be tested/evaluated on your supposed lawyer skills is 1L year?" Not even close.

Furthermore, even if you miss the biglaw boat, you can become a successful lawyer. Will you be a successful biglaw lawyer? No. Can you make 6 or 7 figures after a couple decades of hard work? Probably.

If you are able to make 6 or 7 figures outside of biglaw, it won't take nearly two decades to do so. If it is not happening 3-10 years out, and probably won't happen.

[utlaw2007]

They're not looking for the best lawyer, they're looking for the most prestigious one.

This.

[KidStuddi]

Is there any other graduate program in the world or in existence that does this? Is law the only one?

Your ability to go into the most selective medical specialities such as dermatology, plastic surgery, radiology, etc. is highly correlated to your early academic course grades as well. Your career ceiling as a doctor is pretty well set before your third year (you can only ruin your chances, you won't improve them). Probably even more so than getting into BigLaw. I think ambitious medical students would argue that the chances of getting into BigLaw after fucking up your 1L year through Art. III clerkships or 3L OCI, though slim, are substantially higher than your chances of becoming a dermatologist or plastic surgeon after fucking up your first year of medical school. Granted, the fallback for medical students is substantially better than shitlaw, but doesn't mean they don't have pressure on them.

High-stakes evaluations are part of life in high-stakes occupations. Get over it.

[jwinaz]

The bigger issue to me is that even IF you're identified as being a good big law candidate that you might not get a job as one.

Let's say (for ease) your class is 100 people. And let's say that your grades are above the lowest 25%-tile mark. There's no school other than maybe the HYS ...Columbia? ...that gives you that high of a "guaranteed" shot at biglaw. Most schools, including T14 just don't place that huge a % of people into biglaw. Even if you argue that many didn't shoot for biglaw, I'm not sure other than HYS...Columbia? that you could have gotten it even if you shot for it.

To me, it seems reasonable that if you're above the bottom 25% of your T14 school that you would seem like a good candidate to be a biglaw success. ....But to me to does seem hard and maybe slightly arbitrary to say at which point you start cutting people off and identifying them as not good matches/talented enough/etc. for biglaw. Is it bottom 10%...bottom 20%...Kind of a hard line to figure out.

But the bigger issue, again, is that even if you avoid being bottom 25% of your T14, there's no guarantee you'd get biglaw.

[20130312]

wut