Critical advice about the in the tank employment situation
With the economy in the tank, it is more vital than ever for prospective law students to meet the requirements for admission to a top-quality law school. Because of the failure of the overall job market, law schools are seeing a profusion of applications.
Law schools can be (and are) more fastidious about their comprehensive law school requirements than they have ever been in recent memory.
At the same time, the economy for lawyers is devastated. Law firms are exhibiting higher degrees of selectivity in the hiring process than they have exhibited in recent memory.
When I graduated, during the late 1990s Internet boom, which was a incredible day, the median starting salary for members of my class in electronic engineering was $50,000.00. The average lawyer in Texas was, at the time, bringing home $45,000.00, and this median of lawyer salaries was taken across all ages and levels of qualification. So, there was some real risk that I was about to spend 3 years of my life and a small fortune for a graduate diploma that was less valuable than the first degree that I already had. Fully a third of the licensed attorneys in Texas do something other than practice law. There just isn’t enough legal employment to go around.
For every kid making $165,000.00 a year straight out of school, there are 10 fresh lawyers making $40,000.00 per year. Now, if you have an English degree, you may here $40,000 per year and think, “Wow, that’s a huge step up!” But wait, that $40,000 per year is after you sink $100k in loans and lose the opportunity to make a respectable wage during the years that you are in law school. Going $100k into debt for a $40k/year job is not a good plan. You don’t need a business degree to see that this one is backward.
The law is two worlds. If you’re not well-prepared, you will end up coming out of school to a $40k/year job (or none at all) with $100k in debt.
The difference between being lucky and turning your life into a living Hell is going to a good law school. The difference between getting into a good law school and having to accept a bad law school is your performance relative to the law school admission requirements. They are:
* Your LSAT score
* Your Undergraduate GPA
* Your Race
* Your Admissions Essays
* Your Letters of Recommendation
* Your Resume (this means everything else)
* Your string pulls
Now, there are some of these factors that you can, in fact, manipulate. And there are some that you can’t adjust. Your goal needs to be to concentrate on the factors that you can adjust in a way that changes the outcome.
For advice on how to do just that, you’re welcome to visit: http://www.lawschoolrequiements.org.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 4:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.