wtfff? wtf is it with this thread and hypersensitive nits?

how is my above question in any way douchey? i know very little to nothing about clerkships, which is why i asked for support for a statement that strikes me (with my very limited knowledge) as extremely strong/doubtful

Cool. Does being black help me get hired to Biglaw too(I'm guessing yea)?

OK I guess now I'm focused on the LSAT and gonna try to ace it. My GPA sucks so doubt I get into Yale though, I said I was black not American Indian.

No activity for a week, looks like I revived the law school thread.

If you were a big law partner, you would have spent 10 years billing 2400 hours. You are now part of a "partnership" that runs "business", not a "charity."

Would you really be happy to cut 100k out of your own pocket and then walk around your office and see associates playing minesweeper all day for $200,000?

Most large firms are giving associates 3 months w/ health, etc for severance. That is like $75,000 or something on average. Obviously it sucks and I assume staff get a fraction of this, but its not exactly getting tossed out Jazzy Jeff style.

If I were a partner, I wouldn't keep people around just for the hell of it, but I def. would be more open to solutions that didn't inolve big cuts (I'd prefer across the board pay cuts w/ more variable bonuses for high billers/achievers). I would bust my ass to help my associates that were laid off find other positions, but I wouldn't feel guilty that they're getting laid off and I still have a Hamptons house. They'd do the same in my position.




Re: URM

I know that my firm had some sick good diversity thing and some people that came for the summer got like an extra 25k. Also, 1L big firm hiring is almost exclusively URM if you're not at a top school (not sure firms even bother with 1Ls now). go to lawschoolnumbers.com and do a couple searches using the same numbers but do it once with only URM and once w/o URM. You'll be pleased with the results.

I was overstating it a bit on the URM thing, but not by much:

"In 2004, 10,370 blacks took the LSAT examination. Only 29 blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above. In contrast, more than 1,900 white test takers scored 170 or above on the LSAT. They made up 3.1 percent of all white test takers. Thus whites were more than 10 times as likely as blacks to score 170 or above on the LSAT. There were 66 times as many whites as blacks who scored 170 or above on the test.

Even if we drop the scoring level to 165, a level equal to the mean score of students enrolling at law schools ranked in the top 10 nationwide but not at the very top, we still find very few blacks. There were 108 blacks scoring 165 or better on the LSAT in 2004. They made up 1 percent of all black test takers. For whites, there were 6,689 test takers who scored 165 or above. They made up 10.6 percent of all white students who took the LSAT examination. "

http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/51_gr...ions_test.html

everyone knows those tests are culturally biased






ps- and im pretty sure they are biased towards native americans. seemed like 1 out of 5 reading sections on the LSAT had to do with something indian related.

wow. just wow.

i had no idea this was the case, that there was such a dramatic achievement gap (actually i think i heard somewhere that "achievement gap" has become a dirty word, but i don't know what the PC substitute is)

that's so ****ed up though. i think that says so much about how far america still is from real equality in education

i am pro-URM boosting in principle, but i was a little surprised/skeptical at how substantial the boost is (until now)

I don't think you understand.

Wow so if I can get above a 170 I'd be in the top .3% of blacks.

"The nation's top law schools could fill their classes exclusively with students who scored 165 or above on the LSAT. But if they were to do so, these law schools would have almost no black students."

Thanks for that link Riverman. Never been to that site, might have some other good info.

what don't i understand?

Dang, didn't know this forum was here. I applied to L schools in Jan-March. 161. Still waiting on a most of them. I am going to visit Tulane next week.

Starting putting so numbers into hourumd.com.... With a gpa under 2.5 what would you need to score on the lsat to get into a school worth going to?

Also not sure if being out of school for appox 5 years makes any difference.

180?

I've been doing URM research and that GPA isn't getting you into any school "worth going to." Without even URM to help you're gonna need a super high score I'm sure.

BTW "Worth going to" is super subjective. In this economic climate, with lawyers getting laid off and 3Ls having offers rescinded, taking on $100k+ in debt at any school that's not T14 is pretty dumb.

Of course if you did something super spectacular while out of school that would help a ton but still it would be an uphill battle.

If I was entering law school in the Fall, I still would go to law school, but I would have strongly considered going to one of the schools that gave me the most free money. Sure, chances are I might not get a biglaw job in tougher economic times from a lower ranked school, but if law school would be free (just loans for living expenses) then it wouldn't matter as much.

FYP

if you want to make tons of money and that is your only goal from law school, then yeah, sure, don't go to a lower T1 or lower

if you want to be a lawyer, go to law school. go to a regional state school, take on as little debt as possible and follow your passions. 100k of debt really isn't that unreasonable, even on the "paltry salaries" everyone seems to think anything but T14 gets.

as for me, im currently in the process of trying to haggle more $$ out of scholarships ive been offered. anyone have any experience with this?

If you can get into law school for free or much lower debt then yeah go, by all means. I agree with you guys.

I just keep reading all these articles about people who went to lower ranked schools, with 100k+ debt and can't find steady jobs and say they made huge mistakes and are super broke/stressed, say they were lied to by the career office, etc. Maybe they're the exception, and most people that come out of lower ranked schools with lots of debt do well. Media/people that speak out on forums are usually skewed towards those who are more upset about something.

I generally agree with the article posted here before "Being a Happy Lawyer," where he mentions salaries for lawyers outside BigLaw, even with the debt, are much more than lots of people make and should be enough to pay off loans, but I just see a lot of other articles that speak to the contrary.

I assume you are referring to the Seton Hall article among others. IMO a lot of those articles are about people that went to T3s or T4s or graduated bottom of their class from a lower ranked T2.

However, in today's economy it is tough to get jobs, there's no doubt about it. But that's true for every industry, not just law. Sure taking on that debt over the next 3 years and hoping the economy betters itself is a gamble, but as long as you are willing to work extremely hard and separate yourself from the pack, it's probably a gamble worth taking if law is what you want to do.

That puts me in a quandry. I can get a full ride to a T4 school but if I slip into a school like Maryland, 42 in US News, I'll have to guess at my debt level vs job prospects.

Honestly, I could get full rides to T3s and T4s too, and I didn't even consider it.

I had full rides from a few schools ranked in the 20s and didn't really consider it.

Cool man! I hope you enjoy your time at Harvard.

fwiw i think he said somewhere in this thread that he went to upenn, not harvard.

regardless though he makes a good point (imo)

Um, lolasthma, those guys were being dicks to each other. "Made a good point"? Jesus Christ.

autoadmit ITT.

Also, those articles you read about insurmountable debts and inability to find work are from exactly the kind of person who would write that kind of complaint. Can you imagine the attitude of these people in interviews? It's a self-selecting failure pool.

You don't see articles from people (like me) who left law school, entered the public sector, grind out a modest salary with full benefits which is enough to pay loans + extra principal every month if I want, and enjoy my 40hour weeks + flex time and generous PTO policies.

I go to a TTT in a state that got rapified hard by the financial crisis, and everybody still gets a job.

Unless you managed to borrow like $250K and end up making <$50K in the private sector, loans should be managable, and not every person sees that scene with the business cards in American Psycho and thinks "Oh man one day that'll be ME!!!"

This guy is a clown. I think he claimed to have gotten a 182 on the LSAT earlier in the thread. At least he didn't mention how little he studies in his post.