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Has anyone thought about working as a lawyer but also working as a adjunct professor? I've been considering it and I'm wondering if I'll have a leg up with either the PHD or LLM to become a professor. If it helps, I plan on working in intellectual property.

Would you be teaching at a law school or at an undergraduate facility in this hypothetical?

Either way, no. If you want to pursue legal academia, it requires a top institution and a whole lot of luck. If you just want to teach random undergraduate classes while practicing, you'd be looking for a non-existent job as a lawyer where you have enough free time to do that. Also, LLMs are largely useless for academic jobs.

If you want to work as an adjunct, practice experience is probably more helpful than getting an additional advanced degree - adjuncts are generally practitioners in their fields. (The PhD is getting more and more helpful for getting a job as a full-time law school professor, but the hiring criteria for permanent profs are different than for adjuncts. Also getting a PhD so you can adjunct is serious overkill.)

paul999 wrote:Has anyone thought about working as a lawyer but also working as a adjunct professor? I've been considering it and I'm wondering if I'll have a leg up with either the PHD or LLM to become a professor. If it helps, I plan on working in intellectual property.

There was a study done that found 40% of law professors at T30 have a PhD -- but this is for full-time faculty, not sure about adjuncts.

it's allgood wrote:

paul999 wrote:Has anyone thought about working as a lawyer but also working as a adjunct professor? I've been considering it and I'm wondering if I'll have a leg up with either the PHD or LLM to become a professor. If it helps, I plan on working in intellectual property.

There was a study done that found 40% of law professors at T30 have a PhD -- but this is for full-time faculty, not sure about adjuncts. I am going the JD/PhD route but not to be an adjunct!!!

Are you trying to become a full time professor? May I ask, which school you're doing that program with?

paul999 wrote:

it's allgood wrote:

paul999 wrote:Has anyone thought about working as a lawyer but also working as a adjunct professor? I've been considering it and I'm wondering if I'll have a leg up with either the PHD or LLM to become a professor. If it helps, I plan on working in intellectual property.

There was a study done that found 40% of law professors at T30 have a PhD -- but this is for full-time faculty, not sure about adjuncts. I am going the JD/PhD route but not to be an adjunct!!!

Are you trying to become a full time professor? May I ask, which school you're doing that program with?

I'll PM you.

As the other posters have suggested, what you want to do is figure out if your interest in teaching is incidental ("It sounds kind of fun and I might want to do it on the side some day") or definitive ("I really want to do this and anything else is just a means to this end"). A different way to consider it might be if you just like the idea of classroom instruction or if you also really want to do the other things--researching and writing law review articles, going to conferences, advising students, etc--that constitute being a tenure-track professor.

If you want the first option in either of these scenarios, you really don't need another degree: practitioner-adjuncts bring a special set of skills that you will develop anyway as an attorney. All you'll really want to do is develop contacts with law schools in the location you practice (and with attorneys in your firm who also adjunct) so that you can broach the idea of teaching once you've got some experience under your belt. If you want the second option, that's a bet-the-farm type commitment that requires immense strategizing (which, as a JD/PhD in a fellowship I'm unfortunately very familiar with) and I'm happy to say more over PM.

Snuffles1 wrote:As the other posters have suggested, what you want to do is figure out if your interest in teaching is incidental ("It sounds kind of fun and I might want to do it on the side some day") or definitive ("I really want to do this and anything else is just a means to this end"). A different way to consider it might be if you just like the idea of classroom instruction or if you also really want to do the other things--researching and writing law review articles, going to conferences, advising students, etc--that constitute being a tenure-track professor.

If you want the first option in either of these scenarios, you really don't need another degree: practitioner-adjuncts bring a special set of skills that you will develop anyway as an attorney. All you'll really want to do is develop contacts with law schools in the location you practice (and with attorneys in your firm who also adjunct) so that you can broach the idea of teaching once you've got some experience under your belt. If you want the second option, that's a bet-the-farm type commitment that requires immense strategizing (which, as a JD/PhD in a fellowship I'm unfortunately very familiar with) and I'm happy to say more over PM.

100% cosign. I'd add that the LLM probably isn't going to really help in either scenario.