Top Law Schools

I posted this in the law school subreddit and it didn't have a lot of responses so I am posting here. Hopefully, I can get more advice here.

Thank you for taking your time while I am trying to sort out my next career path. If I move forward, this would be a huge risk and investment I am making. First a little background about me:

I am a Hardware Design Engineer at a semiconductor company in Southern California. I have a BSEE (Graduated 3.9 Summa Cum Laude) and MSEE (3. both at UCLA. I have 3.5 years of experience in electromagnetic in aerospace systems and 3 years of experience in hardware design. I love technical work but I don't want to pigeon hole myself into a specialty like my senior colleagues. I love to have a variety of technical knowledge. I also worried about my job security after Moore's Law hit a wall in the near future. Furthermore, there aren't a lot of semiconductor jobs in Southern California. I have filed for nine patents during my time at this company. I really enjoyed my time working with Patent Attorneys In-House and externally who represented my inventions. I gained a lot of satisfaction explaining my knowledge to them. I think I have pretty good reading, communication, and writing skills for an engineer (Comparing myself to other engineers I have worked with, but definitely not humanities major level). The idea of going into Patent Law just clicked a few weeks ago and it has been on my mind since then. Right now, I am studying for the LSAT to see if I have a chance of getting into a good law school.

1.From my background, do you think I am a good fit for this profession?
2. If I go to Law School, I am deciding between evening and full time programs. In So. Cal, it looks like LMU and U of San Diego are the only "known" schools that offer such a program. However, from what I understand, those are not "top" Law Schools. Would this hurt my chances of advancing into Patent Law?
3. How is Law School like compare to Engineering School?
4. How is the workload for evening programs like the one I described above?
5. What is life like from day-to-day for a Patent Attorney?
6. I read some started as a Patent Agent or an IP Engineer and work their way to being an Attorney. Would some company offer tuition assistance for Law School?
7. How is the job market for Patent Attorneys in Southern California?

PMs are most certainly welcome if you would like to discuss with me more in-depth

This is going to get complicated, so let me start with the simplest of responses:

Spend at least 30 minutes googling legal employment market. After doing that, ask yourself again why you want to go to law school.

If you still have an answer that satisfies you, we can proceed.

have you taken a practice LSAT?

your floor should probably be USC/UCLA with full scholarship

fliptrip wrote:This is going to get complicated, so let me start with the simplest of responses:

Spend at least 30 minutes googling legal employment market. After doing that, ask yourself again why you want to go to law school.

If you still have an answer that satisfies you, we can proceed.

Thanks for the advice! I understand legal employment market is not exactly hot nowadays. However, it's hard for me to find conclusive data for patent law due to its small sample size (or I am looking at the wrong places). Let me look a little harder.

duck wrote:have you taken a practice LSAT?

your floor should probably be USC/UCLA with full scholarship

So you are saying there's a chance I will get a scholarship at law school?? The lawyers I spoke with told me if I have a kick ass LSAT score, I will definitely have some aid. I didn't expect to have a good chunk of tuition covered by the school.

I was also really active in extra-curricular as an undergrad and won some scholarships and awards from the school as a result. Would this strengthen my application and financial aid package?

One of my biggest risk I am taking is with my finances. I am currently paying mortgage for my house. I have saved enough money so I can pay mortgage during the 3 years I would be in law school. However, this left me with little to no money for everyday expenses and law school tuition.

the most important things by far are your gpa and lsat score. you have a very good undergrad gpa. so just depends on your lsat score.

3.9 in an engineering degree is very very impressive. You don't need to worry about your undergrad record.

Take a practice LSAT, see how you do, come back. Then we can give you actual info.

The two main inputs into your law school chances are your GPA and your LSAT.

As a preliminary matter, you may want to do some research re: what being an attorney is actually like. That notwithstanding, I'll jump in on the questions I can answer:

1. It's really tough to determine whether someone will be a good fit for the profession, mostly due to the wide array of personalities and employment circumstances people can end up dealing with. That said, your grades suggest you are an excellent candidate for law school, and you would likely be a highly coveted candidate for biglaw or a high end patent boutique (see #2, below).

2. You would really be selling yourself short by going to LMU or USD. You have excellent grades and solid work experience. This should make you a highly coveted candidate when OCI comes around. However, the reality is that the best/most interesting jobs will go to students at top schools. That is just how legal hiring works. Accordingly, you should study hard for the LSAT and go to a T14 or UCLA/USC with a substantial scholarship to maximize your chances of getting in front of an employer that will jump to hire you.

6. A bunch of my patent-focused classmates work in-house with tech companies or at big firms. Their firms/companies don't provide tuition assistance, but they do pay them a lot of money, which itself acts as a form of tuition assistance.

Unfortunately, I can't really speak to the rest of your questions. Feel free to PM me with questions.

Post Removed.

1.From my background, do you think I am a good fit for this profession?

Possibly... your credentials certainly will get a ton of firms looking at you.

2. If I go to Law School, I am deciding between evening and full time programs. In So. Cal, it looks like LMU and U of San Diego are the only "known" schools that offer such a program. However, from what I understand, those are not "top" Law Schools. Would this hurt my chances of advancing into Patent Law?

Don't do part time unless you have to. (I'm saying that as an evening student) Part time law school isn't like taking MBA courses at night. It's much more time intensive. Mentally and emotionally, part time school plus a full time "real" job is really taxing. You can PM me if you want more details, but I would do everything I could to avoid evening school if I were you. Also, if your LSAT is even remotely reasonable, you're going to be competing for a lot of money at some of the top schools in the country, so going to a lower tier school just for the evening program may not make sense.

3. How is Law School like compare to Engineering School?

It is extremely subjective and stylistic. It is not technically hard. Most people know the answer to the question asked, but it's about being able to write the best and most stylistically pretty argument in a time-pressure situation. It's not time-pressure situation like some of the engineering courses where nobody gets close to done, but I have had an exam or two that was impossible to finish in the time allotted.

4. How is the workload for evening programs like the one I described above?

Instead of taking 6 or 7 classes, you're taking 4 or 5. You spend all day at work, commute to school, take classes from 6pm to 9pm (give or take), go home, collapse into bed, wake up the next morning feeling awful and having slept through your alarm, and start it all over again. The weekends consist of taking care of any work related stuff that got neglected during the week, spending 4-12 hours preparing for the next week's classes, and trying to relax as much as possible so that you don't burn out. Sometimes you skip the prep for the next week's classes just so that you can have a day where school isn't top of mind, but that just makes the next week suck worse.

If you plan on doing the evening program, plan on finding a part-time job. Evening program + full-time job (with responsibilities) is not worth the stress.

My most important advice in this entire comment is to start cutting back on expenses now. You need to get yourself and your family as financially streamlined as possible before law school so that you can decide what path is best for you without your expenses holding you hostage.

5. What is life like from day-to-day for a Patent Attorney?

Depends... there are a lot of roles that you can fill. On a 10,000ft view, there are patent prosecution attorneys (spend their day writing patent applications and defending those applications' patentability in front of the USPTO), patent litigation attorneys (spend their day helping do pre-trial work for patent trials), patent licensing attorneys (spend their day drafting licensing grants and negotiating deals between companies), and patent PTAB attorneys (spend their day preparing for and arguing administrative patent trials/appeals/reviews in front of the USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board).

Most patent attorneys do more than one of those roles.

6. I read some started as a Patent Agent or an IP Engineer and work their way to being an Attorney. Would some company offer tuition assistance for Law School?

Some do... I'd recommend against doing a tuition assistance program. Leave your options open when you graduate. If it's your dream company or firm offering you the tuition assistance, take it. Otherwise, don't.

Take the Patent Bar ASAP, maybe even before the LSAT. You can spend a few hundred bucks to enroll in a study program, and having your USPTO reg number before law school opens you up to working as a patent agent during law school and gives you a leg up on people like me who have been putting it off.

7. How is the job market for Patent Attorneys in Southern California?

Not nearly as good as the Bay Area. I'm not particularly attuned to the IP market in SoCal, but I do know that the Bay Area is probably the #2 biggest IP market behind DC.

There are a few patent focused people on this board, and they're all receptive to any questions you may have. Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions about my experience.

I love technical work but I don't want to pigeon hole myself into a specialty like my senior colleagues. I love to have a variety of technical knowledge. I also worried about my job security after Moore's Law hit a wall in the near future. Furthermore, there aren't a lot of semiconductor jobs in Southern California.

I was the same way. I loved having a broad understanding of technology rather than being forced to be the SME on some small corner of some small protocol. Patent law is a much more surface level broad understanding field.

Job security isn't that great in law when compared to the tech field. Patent law is a bit different from law in general, but it's still a quite volatile industry compared to tech. This is especially true in biglaw, where the "up or out" mentality pervades.

Hi all!!

Thank you very much for all your help. I took the free practice test this morning. I got a 149 under close-to-exam conditions with minimal background and no studying. My biggest struggle was being too slow. I finished only half of the questions in the logic games and about 2/3 of the questions in the other sections. One good sign is that of the questions I did answer, I got a good % of them right (esp. Reading Comprehension, I thought I would bomb that section but I ended up only getting 2 or 3 questions wrong). I think with lots and lots of practice. I can reach my desired score.

I don't have big aspirations. I am hoping I can score 165+ on the Sept. LSAT. I have 200 days to do it. Wish me luck!!!

Lessons are too expensive so I want to start with buying books. Which books do you guys recommend? I am looking at the top sellers from Amazon I am not sure which one to start with.

I'm not up on what the best books for self-study are (I liked the Powerscore books, but there are a bunch more options than when I took the exam). But there's a lot of advice on this already in the LSAT part of this site - so while people are welcome to answer you here and I hope they do, you will probably find a lot of info about self-study there already. There is also probably already a thread in that part of the site for people taking the Sept 2016 exam.

You certainly do have a good chance of getting into a top school if you have a decent LSAT score. However:

6. I read some started as a Patent Agent or an IP Engineer and work their way to being an Attorney. Would some company offer tuition assistance for Law School?

Probably not unless it's yours. It seems doubtful to me that a company would hire you and then pay you to go to school with the hope that you stayed on past graduation.

Hi guys,

I just read something called "CAS GPA" and it counts A+ favorably. I had 5 or 6 A+'s in my classes before (because engineering class curves ). Will this make my GPA even more appealing for law school? How do schools weight CAS GPA vs. regular GPA in admissions?

Thanks!!

Your adjusted GPA counts for 99.999999%. The GPA on your transcript is only taken into consideration if there's a huge discrepancy between the two and they want to know where it came from. I added in my addendum to factor in my transcript GPA because my school has no A+'s, A-'s, or AB's and that absolutely crushed my adjusted GPA

lawyeringenginerd wrote:Hi guys,

I just read something called "CAS GPA" and it counts A+ favorably. I had 5 or 6 A+'s in my classes before (because engineering class curves ). Will this make my GPA even more appealing for law school? How do schools weight CAS GPA vs. regular GPA in admissions?

Thanks!!

If you mean that your school gave out A+s but only counted them as a 4.0, this means that the official LSAC-reported GPA that goes to schools will be higher than the GPA issued by your college, because LSAC counts them as a 4.3. So yes, this will help you, but frankly your GPA was already excellent (I think above all medians?), so it won't make a drastic difference. You still need to focus on the LSAT.

OP - I'm a patent agent that's in law school part-time while working for a law firm. Made the switch about a few years ago and have been practicing for about 2 years. Feel free to PM about specific questions relating to firms paying for law school while attending part-time and working in patent prosecution.

3L with engineering and patent law experience here.

If you attend a good school, you will be highly employable. Hardware EE is very hot, and not many lawyers can handle it.

That said, I'd strongly encourage you to set a higher LSAT goal. You're just dipping your toe in to the legal world, but if you choose to go down this path, you will quickly realize that law is an extremely prestige- and credential-focused field. In countless interactions (some small and some large), people will look at your school and use it as a proxy to decide how smart you are. If you go to a top school, you'll have an advantage in job interviews (first job and beyond), interactions with clients, interactions with your bosses and at networking events. If you go to a lower ranked school, you may have to prove yourself more, and you'll probably have fewer options. It's dumb, but it happens.

You'll probably get a job wherever you go because your UG and work experience are so impressive. But when choosing your school (and setting your LSAT goal), you should be aware that prestige matters a lot more in law than it does in engineering.

A number of engineers are being fully sponsored by ropes & gray. I have to say I'm a bit jealous: guaranteed biglaw job and free Harvard degree is such a good deal.

dnptan wrote:A number of engineers are being fully sponsored by ropes & gray. I have to say I'm a bit jealous: guaranteed biglaw job and free Harvard degree is such a good deal.

how exactly does someone get this deal?

R. Jeeves wrote:

dnptan wrote:A number of engineers are being fully sponsored by ropes & gray. I have to say I'm a bit jealous: guaranteed biglaw job and free Harvard degree is such a good deal.

how exactly does someone get this deal?

https://www.ropesgray.com/legalhiring/C ... isors.aspx

I personally know someone who worked only 1 year, and anecdotally heard of people not working there at all prior to LS

.