Law School Versus Other Career Paths? Forum

[half-legalese]

I've never posted here before, so I hope I'm not breaking any rules.

I am a senior at a state university double majoring in Math and Economics. Assuming that I don't massively fail my classes this term I should graduate with close to a 4.1 GPA. I have not taken the LSAT yet, but if I do go to law school, I will make sure to retake the LSAT as many times as necessary (it seems like that is the standard advice here on TLS).

I am trying to decide what I am going to do with my life, and I have been thinking over the past year about either law school or becoming an actuary. Over the last years I have become extremely burned out on Math. Despite being a math major, I have never really considered myself to be a "math person." I am concerned that if I become an actuary that I will eventually get burned out doing excel and data analysis.

I think that I might be able to get into a T14 law school with my GPA and a reasonable LSAT score. If I did go to law school I would really like to work for a boutique law firm doing something where I could use my Japanese language skills. My main concern is that the consensus seems to be that the legal job market is atrocious, that most lawyers wish they had never gone to law school, and that legal work is stressful and boring.

Do you think that it will be wise to spend the time and money preparing for law school with the hope of getting into a T14 and eventually working in a niche market? Or are the job prospects so terrible and the work so boring that I should just forget about it and do something else (like be an actuary).

I really appreciate any advice you can offer.

[Mack.Hambleton]

Start as an actuary or whatever for awhile and then if you really want to be a lawyer still talk to some in the area you want to work in

[kellyfrost]

I've always said that if I could last longer in bed that I would have tried to get a job as a male actor in adult films; however, here I am in the law.

[Londonbear]

Start as an actuary or whatever for awhile and then if you really want to be a lawyer still talk to some in the area you want to work in

Agreed, plus you can study and take the LSAT to see how you do while you work. If you do really well and can go on a full ride, it might be a more solid 2nd plan if you don't like being an actuary.

[dabigchina]

i've heard that people's main complaint about being an actuary is that they get paid way too much for how much work they do. That's a pretty sweet complaint. I would kill to have that complaint.

[eagle2a]

law school blow, being a lawyer sucks even more

[sayan]

Law school is a terrible gamble if you can pass enough of the actuary tests to make it to six figures salary. Four points:

Biglaw is a crapshoot from any non-HYS school: Unless you make it to HYS, law school is a terrible gamble. You are competing with similarly-talented individuals in a first-year gauntlet to determine who can make it to top 50% or better (and in many cases, even top half won't be sufficient). Unlike state schools where getting top grades is easy because of your class mates' apathy, everyone around you in law school (especially eager beaver 1Ls) is well aware that their life depends on them getting good grades so they will all work very hard to make that happen. When everyone works very hard, test results largely become a luck shot unless you're unusually talented at writing law school tests. Are you? Unless you are confident that you are, you may very well end up six figures in debt without a biglaw job (or even midlaw job) to pay it back, in which case you're SOL. Better off to be an actuary at that point for sure, but you won't know until it's too late. Alternatively, you could spend one year at a non-HYS school, see how successful you are at OCI and then drop out, but that's also a gamble which will leave you with one year of lost income and mid-to-high five figure debt (tuition is exceeding 50 even 60k at many schools). If you attend an HYS school, the other points below still stand and note that even H students sometimes fail to grab a biglaw job.

Upfront costs of becoming a lawyer, compared to being an actuary, are much higher: Also note that if you do pursue law that you sacrifice three years of your life (and income potential) to go to law school and come out with six figures in debt (which must be paid off with POST-TAX DOLLARS). Cost of attendance and tuition at law schools now hovers around 80-90k per year before grants and aid, which may top out at 30-40k at most, leaving you in the hole 50-60k per year at a minimum. The opportunity cost + actual costs are huge of becoming a lawyer -- likely in the mid six figures if you could have instead become an actuary earning six figures during that three-year period. I also understand that there is an opportunity cost + actual cost of becoming an actuary (given the tests you must study for and first pass before progressing up the salary scale), but they are significantly less than first pursuing law since you can study for the tests while working and they don't cost much to take. In other words, easier to shift from becoming an actuary to becoming a lawyer than vice versa from a sunk cost perspective.

Long-term prospects in law, compared to being an actuary, are worse: If you become a lawyer, what will most likely happen is that you burn out of law after three or four years due to the stress and crushing hours (you may not, but the statistics are strongly against you) and go in-house (at best -- these options are tough to come by) making 130-140k for the rest of your life (best outcome, some pay less) with reasonable hours (or maybe unreasonable, depending on which company) or lateraling to midlaw working better hours (but maybe not by much or at all) than biglaw and making less money (guaranteed, unless you somehow ascend to partner). Don't actuaries make six figures within 1 or 2 years of graduation and have reasonable QOL?

Switching costs from actuary to lawyer are much less than vice versa: You may get burned out as an actuary, but try it first to confirm (unless you know you'll hate it). You will likely have better odds of getting into a top law school with work experience anyways. That's the key here. Unless you're burning to be a lawyer ASAP and/or know you'll hate being an actuary, the optimal course is pursuing becoming an actuary. You sound indifferent and are simply thinking about law as a palatable alternative, but you're committing a mistake by doing so since once you're down that rabbit hole it will be hard to come back.

[kellyfrost]

law school blow, being a lawyer sucks even more

You don't typically see this complaint from good lawyers.

[sayan]

law school blow, being a lawyer sucks even more

You don't typically see this complaint from good lawyers.

If a normal person thought that the work they were doing is meaningless (perceived or not), stressful and destructive to their personal life, they would cease to put in effort necessary to be good at that particular work. I know many starry-eyed biglaw associates at my firm who burned out, not because they constantly received negative feedback (although this is a constant, whether or not you do good work), but because of the aforementioned factors. Some good lawyers are not normal people, though, and do not consider these factors the way that normal people might, or weigh them differently.

I can be a great garbage man, but still freely admit that the work itself is degrading to my dignity and the work environment less than optimal.

[Mikey]

Only go to law school if you're dead set on wanting to become a lawyer. If you have doubts about it, then take time off and decide later on if you think it's the right way to go.

[cavalier1138]

Biglaw is a crapshoot from any non-HYS school:

I appreciate tough love as much as the next guy, but this seems like just the tiniest bit of an exaggeration. HYS biglaw/federal clerk stats are all in the same range as other T14 schools (with the exception of Georgetown, because Georgetown). I'd say the main difference between a school like Harvard and a school like (for example) Columbia is that Harvard has more potential for unicorn jobs. But you certainly don't need to be in the "top 25%" of Columbia to get biglaw.

[jnwa]

Law school is a terrible gamble if you can pass enough of the actuary tests to make it to six figures salary. Four points:

Biglaw is a crapshoot from any non-HYS school: Unless you make it to HYS, law school is a terrible gamble. You are competing with similarly-talented individuals in a first-year gauntlet to determine who can make it to top 25% or better.

The bolded isnt true. The employment stats bear out a different conclusion. People stop taking TLS seriously because of hyperbole like this.

[sayan]

Happy to edit my post to reflect a top 50% threshold, just for the sake of argument since the underlying conclusion is the same, but that still leads to a coin flip chance with respect to obtaining biglaw at a cost ranging in the six figures, and therefore attending is still a terrible gamble.

If anyone disagrees with even this overly conservative threshold, please feel free to provide a list of non-HYS schools in which bottom half of the class has a reasonable shot at biglaw.

[cavalier1138]

Happy to edit my post to reflect a top 50% threshold, just for the sake of argument since the underlying conclusion is the same, but that still leads to a coin flip chance with respect to obtaining biglaw at a cost ranging in the six figures, and therefore attending is still a terrible gamble.

If anyone disagrees with even this overly conservative threshold, please feel free to provide a list of non-HYS schools in which bottom half of the class has a reasonable shot at biglaw.

Here's a comprehensive list of biglaw/fedclerk employment outcomes: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 1&t=262376

Chicago actually has better numbers than Harvard for that. But that's mostly self-selection, as is also the case with schools like NYU, Berkeley, etc., where students who could get biglaw jobs are choosing PI instead. So at most of the T14 (again, Georgetown being the notable exception), you actually have closer to a 70-75% chance at biglaw, and that's without accounting for the part of the class that simply doesn't want biglaw jobs in the first place.

I don't want to rain on the pessimism parade. You definitely want to go to a top-ranked school for a fair shot at biglaw. But HYS-or-bust is simply an inaccurate point of view to hold.

[Clearly]

Happy to edit my post to reflect a top 50% threshold, just for the sake of argument since the underlying conclusion is the same, but that still leads to a coin flip chance with respect to obtaining biglaw at a cost ranging in the six figures, and therefore attending is still a terrible gamble.

If anyone disagrees with even this overly conservative threshold, please feel free to provide a list of non-HYS schools in which bottom half of the class has a reasonable shot at biglaw.

Chicago, Columbia, nyu, Penn. Literally every one of them and by a wide margin. Also stop conflating biglaw hiring percentage with class rank percentage. At one of these schools I have friends with sub 3gpas and biglaw and kids with 3.5s that nearly struck out. Kids that strike out from these schools usually do so for being weird, not because of grades. Plus some portion of the top of the class transfers out before oci.

[Burlington4174]

Happy to edit my post to reflect a top 50% threshold, just for the sake of argument since the underlying conclusion is the same, but that still leads to a coin flip chance with respect to obtaining biglaw at a cost ranging in the six figures, and therefore attending is still a terrible gamble.

If anyone disagrees with even this overly conservative threshold, please feel free to provide a list of non-HYS schools in which bottom half of the class has a reasonable shot at biglaw.

I am not sure anyone, unless they failed a class somehow or received a B- in like 2+ classes (which is kind of hard to do because professors are not required to give out any B- grades and a lot don't), is totally out of the running for a BigLaw position at Columbia. Maybe someone who is a really awkward with no prior job experience will be, but my guess is less than 10% of those who want a BigLaw job graduate without one.

[BernieTrump]

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