
Ask HN: Law School? - personjerry
In what scenarios is it worth it for someone of the hacker type to consider attending law school?
======
smacktoward
Question One: DO YOU WANT TO BECOME A LAWYER?

Lots of people go to law school without any clear idea or ambition of actually
pursuing a career as a lawyer, because they think law just sounds interesting,
or it's what everyone tells them to do, or because they watch too many TV
lawyer shows. This is a Very Bad Idea. You will be taking on a huge amount of
debt in exchange for a credential that will not make you substantially more
employable in any other field than law.

Question Two: ARE YOU _SURE_ YOU WANT TO BECOME A LAWYER?

There is a glut of J.D.s out there currently, far more than there are real
legal jobs available (see [http://www.newrepublic.com/article/87251/law-
school-employme...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/87251/law-school-
employment-harvard-yale-georgetown)). This means competition is fierce for the
jobs that do open up, and that pay for young lawyers tends to suck more than
they generally expect. (Which exacerbates the "holy moley look at all that
debt I rang up to go to law school" problem, too.)

Question Three: ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO GET INTO A TOP-TIER LAW SCHOOL?

If answered "yes" to Questions One and Two, you need to take a hard look at
your admissions credentials (LSAT scores, references, etc.) and appraise
honestly whether they're good enough to get you into a really, really good law
school, because if you want to stand out in that sea of newly minted J.D.s,
the only 100% reliable method is to have a degree from a seriously impressive
school. Going into debt to get a J.D. from Harvard or Yale or Penn or Duke is
a reasonably sensible long-term financial proposition; going into debt to get
one from Bob's Chicken-Fried Steak Shack and School of Law, much less so.

~~~
cafard
Generally agreed, but I would make an exception for question three: if you
want to practice certain types of law, it can pay to go to a school where you
want to practice. If you want to do prosecution or defense of criminal cases,
this seems to be true, I suppose in part because a lot of people in that
business teach as adjuncts.

(I am not a lawyer, but I know a bunch of them.)

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Chevalier
There is almost no appropriate scenario for you to waste your life with law
school. I'm in a top school now (T6), and I've never regretted a decision
more. I will owe nearly $300,000 before I'm done, having sacrificed my youth
and health in pointless competition for brutal work conditions that very few
of us will be lucky to have.

If you win this BigLaw competition, you'll work impossible hours for as long
as you can. Typically that's two to five years before you burn out/get fired
and search desperately for any other line of work. Nobody makes partner
anymore unless you have connections to make it rain. The traditional escape
routes of government work (which is difficult and way underpaid, but at least
provides a more reasonable workweek) or public interest work simply don't
exist anymore. Between austerity and poverty and desperate competition by
established attorneys, we no longer have a chance at a decent living over the
course of a lifelong career.

If you "win" at law school, you get to join BigLaw firms that consume you,
body and soul, for a handful of years. Only the tiniest percentage of
graduates can earn these jobs, mostly the upper tier of the best schools. The
middle tier at these schools can try for second-tier firms which pay two-
thirds of the salary for exactly the same brutal hours and terrible conditions
of BigLaw. The bottom tier, or virtually anyone at lower schools, gets nothing
at all.

My local Starbucks has a staff of about eight people, two of whom are freshly
minted JDs. And the future is coming for us. I strongly endorse reading this
article ([http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_machines-vs-
lawyers.ht...](http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_machines-vs-
lawyers.html)) to understand the future of legal practice. Important quote:
"Discovering information, finding precedents, drafting documents and briefs,
and predicting the outcomes of lawsuits—these tasks encompass the bulk of
legal practice. The rise of machine intelligence will therefore disrupt and
transform the legal profession."

Don't do it. I wish I had pursued computer science instead. HN will eat law
alive, and it'll do a vastly better job of it than human lawyers have. If you
must get involved in the field, do it as a hacker in the fields of electronic
discovery, contract databases, or intelligent query research. As it stands,
most legal questions are assembled from disjointed queries into truly awful
Westlaw/Lexis databases by tech-illiterate lawyers, harried by their enormous
workloads and failing personal lives. The field is crying out for better data
sorting and search. Fix that problem and get rich, but don't join the hopeless
masses of law school graduates.

~~~
smacktoward
_> If you "win" at law school, you get to join BigLaw firms that consume you,
body and soul, for a handful of years. Only the tiniest percentage of
graduates can earn these jobs, mostly the upper tier of the best schools. The
middle tier at these schools can try for second-tier firms which pay two-
thirds of the salary for exactly the same brutal hours and terrible conditions
of BigLaw. The bottom tier, or virtually anyone at lower schools, gets nothing
at all._

It reminds me of that great Alec Baldwin monologue in the movie version of
_Glengarry Glen Ross_ : "First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna
see second prize? Second prize: a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're
fired."

------
vqc
Chevalier is right that the numbers are against you to reach a top tier firm.
And as someone in a top tier firm, Chevalier is also right that the work at a
top tier law firm can be miserable, despite insanely high pay.

I do have to point out that many of the people I know at these firms who
seriously enjoy their lawyering jobs are people who go to law school after
having a real job in Field A and then practicing law in Field A. For example,
someone with a PhD in Biochem and worked at Amgen as a research scientist then
becoming a licensing attorney in biotech. Or someone with an EECS degree who
becomes a patent litigator focusing on hardware or software disputes.

I don't think escaping to government is out of reach. I also don't think its
"underpaid" (although that's relative). Granted, you'll likely have to be at
the top of your class in order to find that sort of escape route, and if
you're at the top of your class, the world is your oyster anyways.

A lot of the cruft will go away with the rise of machine intelligence. But the
$xxxx/hr attorneys won't be replaced. Knowing the law and the facts is only
1/3 the battle. The rest of it is crafting your story if you're a litigator or
negotiation position if you're a transactional attorney, understanding your
clients business and needs, and putting all the pieces together. Good artists
and story tellers haven't been replaced even though everyone already knows
www.tvtropes.org. Rails engineers won't disappear because of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985162).
If your value proposition is dependent on doing menial, time-intensive tasks,
you will eventually replaced by a computer.

Feel free to contact me.

------
CyberFonic
If you are interested in law, but don't want to work in a law firm or as in-
house counsel, then why don't you just simply buy the text books and read
them? A well curated reading list will give you all the knowledge of law that
you could ask for without the massive debt. Attending law school still
requires you to read masses and masses of material.

I studied law for a year and dropped out. Went on to work in IT (already had
engineering degree) for several top end of town law firms. Earned more than
the associates and they envied my far nicer office. Even my working hours were
more humane.

------
Tomte
I suppose in the American context with high costs of attending law school it's
not very attractive.

But I'd like to argue _for_ going to law school in other countries where you
don't incur massive debt:

Engineers not only don't understand law at all, they actively avoid getting
clued in.

The sheer stupidness in knowing on the one hand that societal processes cannot
work like a dumb flowchart, and on the other hand still arguing for stupid
flowcharts and simple decisions in every societal context is mind-blowing.

That is pretty much all of us.

If you can get a solid foundation in law, you are on your best way to carve
out a very rewarding niche, both financially and personally.

Remember what 'tptacek always says: you're not making money knowing a tool.
You're making money knowing a client's context and needs.

------
Jemaclus
As a followup, what about a PhD in Computer Science? I've got a pretty solid
job right now that pays a nice amount of money, but I don't really have the
time or opportunity to learn some of the really cutting edge stuff out there
while working 50+ hours/week at my day job. Is there a reasonable ROI for a
PhD in the industry?

~~~
tptacek
The conventional wisdom is "no", usually accompanied by anecdotes about firms
that assigned negative hiring weights to candidates with PhDs, based on the
idea that the work processes you internalize in order to obtain a doctorate
are radically different than what's required by commercial software
development.

~~~
Jemaclus
Yeah, that's what I've heard as well. Bummer.

------
percept
[http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/07/05/law-school-
enrol...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/07/05/law-school-enrollment-
fails-rebound-after-recession-local-colleges-make-
cuts/fR7dYqwBsrOeXPbS9ibqtN/story.html)

------
chrisBob
You should probably research patent law and see if that is something you would
be interested in. I am sure that Chevalier's comment is true for many types of
law, but it is a big field, and some branches may be better than others
especially for a hacker type.

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JSeymourATL
A Point of Strategy-- it might be more instructive to survey practicing
attorneys with IT/CS/EE backgrounds.

There is ALWAYS room for a _good lawyer_ who gets truly gets the tech realm.
Conceivably, someone could build a great law practice specialty in that space.

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jwb119
Happy to talk to you about this if you'd like. Contact info is in my profile.

------
lily2014
No scenarios worth that

