Law School Concentrations: Business/Financial or Int'l Law Forum

[the assassin]

deleting

[rad lulz]

What jobs are you trying to end up with

[the assassin]

deleting

[A. Nony Mouse]

My sense is that for the purposes of employment, 95-98% of the time a concentration is entirely unnecessary and you'll do just as well studying a wide range of things. If someone comes to law schools with a burning passion for family/tax/juvenile law and knows that's the only thing they want to do, ever, and spends their entire time in school networking/interning/hustling in their chosen field, a concentration can make sense. If you're not sure what you want to do, a concentration is more likely to lock you into something you may not actually want to do in the end, or in which you can't find a job, and make you a little less convincing as a candidate for something else (e.g. you do a concentration in business law but end up applying to family law firms, who wonder why on earth you're applying if you're so heavily into business law).

I also think business law is one of the least useful concentrations ever (unless you want to go all out and do a joint MBA, and the usefulness of that is debated), because so many of the basic law school classes out there are relevant to basic corporate stuff (Contracts, Corporations, Agency/Partnership, Antitrust, all the other stuff I can't name because I didn't take it). But that may just be me.

[TheHarveySpecter]

Well put. Can still take a lot of those electives without locking into a certain track.

[northwood]

concentrate on getting work experience in these fields and take whatever classes sound to be the least boring/ difficult. Work experience is much more informative and helpful when deciding what area of law you like the best than the theory/ policy that you learn in class for each subject.