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Omerta posted:You listed being paid well first; off to a bad start. Per hour, attorneys make about 14-17 dollars an hour assuming you land biglaw. e: Or did you omit a "don't." Also, high school mock trial has no relation to the practice of law. e:2 And seriously, how can you like lawyers/law students? Though law students seem worse than lawyers for some reason. gvibes fucked around with this message at 21:05 on May 6, 2011 |
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May 6, 2011 21:03
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Omerta posted:I've hated everyone that identified themselves as "prelaw" and law school students are pretty obnoxious. Since when have law students had similar interests besides an exaggerated view of their own self-importance and rich parents?
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May 6, 2011 21:06
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IANAL posted:You will not be able to do any of these things in a legal career. You will be judged by your peers for how long you are at the office. You will have more work than you can complete in a 60-hour work week. Please note OP that to get this job, which I may not have after June 30 because of budget issues, I had to work for free for a month. And my pay isn't terrible, but it ain't 6 figures. That said i went to t20 for very cheap. (Don't go to law school)
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May 6, 2011 21:12
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:The things I want out of my career include: This is adorable.
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May 6, 2011 21:12
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Well I definitely appreciate the comments and your guys' opinions. I understand I'm not some special unique snowflake. To generally respond to the last three posts: I thought associates at biglaw firms started out at 100k? As I mentionted earlier, I am willing to put off law school for a few years and save up. But with the new loan repayment plan set out by the Obama Administration doesn't it cap your loan repayment at some percentage of what your income is? Of all the prelaw kids I know, they generally like sports and politics- so we always have something to talk about. I didn't get that with premed or predoctorate students. As for some of them being douches, I'd say that's true as well. Now that I think about it, there's more douches that are prelaw than compared with other fields. I don't mind that- maybe I'm an rear end in a top hat? Or a future one? Lastly, there are no teaching jobs in English or HIstory (which I bounced around in). Outside of the LSAT (Which I will take in the summer and take a class and study my rear end for) I dont know what else would show my potential in the legal field. I got 90%+ on my SAT's in English, and SAT II's for History. I also got 4's and 5's in these subjects on the AP test. But I imagine someone will tell me they mean jackshit. WIth the way you guys are making things sound- People at T1's are having trouble finding jobs?
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May 6, 2011 21:12
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:Well I definitely appreciate the comments and your guys' opinions. I understand I'm not some special unique snowflake. drawkcab si eman ym posted:WIth the way you guys are making things sound- People at T1's are having trouble finding jobs?
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May 6, 2011 21:13
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:I thought associates at biglaw firms started out at 100k? As I mentionted earlier, I am willing to put off law school for a few years and save up. But with the new loan repayment plan set out by the Obama Administration doesn't it cap your loan repayment at some percentage of what your income is? 1) But you are probably not going to get a biglaw job. 2) If you do, you will probably hate life and leave/get laid off pretty quickly, and be up a poo poo creek. 3) If you somehow both get a biglaw job, and can tolerate the work (like myself, I guess), yeah, I mean, life is great, though the 70 hours a week gets old. quote:Outside of the LSAT (Which I will take in the summer and take a class and study my rear end for) I dont know what else would show my potential in the legal field. I got 90%+ on my SAT's in English, and SAT II's for History. I also got 4's and 5's in these subjects on the AP test. But I imagine someone will tell me they mean jackshit. quote:WIth the way you guys are making things sound- People at T1's are having trouble finding jobs?
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May 6, 2011 21:15
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:WIth the way you guys are making things sound- People at T1's are having trouble finding jobs? I'm T14 (  ) and I don't have a permanent job. I graduate in 2 weeks and probably get fired from my current job the next time I go in because I have no more cases.There's one thing about law school you need to know. If you bust your balls, rack up accolades, a high LSAT score, and everything else and get into the best school you possibly can, all your accomplishments mean gently caress-all. Because everyone else did the same goddamn thing. gvibes posted:e:2 And seriously, how can you like lawyers/law students? Though law students seem worse than lawyers for some reason. I LOVE old warhorse plaintiff's attorneys. They're huge loving assholes. I've met a Red Dog, a Black Dog and a Racehorse.
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May 6, 2011 21:17
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Tetrix posted:So after months of looking, I still don't have a place in DC for the summer. he;lp. I need something starting May 20. Anyone know anyone or something? Have you tried the NALP apartment listings? It is one the useful thing career services suggested to me. I'll be in NYC, though.
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May 6, 2011 21:21
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CaptainScraps posted:I LOVE old warhorse plaintiff's attorneys. They're huge loving assholes. I've met a Red Dog, a Black Dog and a Racehorse.
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May 6, 2011 21:23
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CaptainScraps posted:I'm T14 ( That sucks man, I'm sorry to hear it. What's your backup plan? I will go with Omerta's advice. I will save up or get a scholarship for a T20 unless I can get into a T6.
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May 6, 2011 21:24
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:That sucks man, I'm sorry to hear it. What's your backup plan? Ponzi scheme/white collar crime. I've got a list of contacts to call, I'm just going to see if I can get my current boss to call them for me. Or go live with my mom, whatever. G-Mawwwwwww fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 6, 2011 |
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May 6, 2011 21:24
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CaptainScraps posted:Ponzi scheme/white collar crime. If you were more geographically mobile would that help or does it not matter?
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May 6, 2011 21:31
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:If you were more geographically mobile would that help or does it not matter?
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May 6, 2011 21:46
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Stop fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jan 30, 2013 |
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May 6, 2011 21:55
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nm posted:About that geographic mobility, every time you move you have to take a test. It takes 3 days, requires a lot of prep work and you have to sign up for it 6 months (ok 3-4) in advance. There is no geographic mobility. I thought reciprocity would take care of that.
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May 6, 2011 22:01
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Stop posted:Did you guys find that people benefited from reading prep material or whatever in the summer before their 1L year? No. What is in this material might be different from what your professor teaches and what they expect you to put on the exam. But feel free to waste part of the last happy, regret-free summer of your life.
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May 6, 2011 22:05
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nm posted:About that geographic mobility, every time you move you have to take a test. It takes 3 days, requires a lot of prep work and you have to sign up for it 6 months (ok 3-4) in advance. There is no geographic mobility. Also, good luck getting hired by a firm without any local relationship to the area. If you aren't local, one of the first things you'll get asked during the screening interview is why you're applying for a job in their geographic location. Any answer other than "I have family in the area/I grew up nearby/My signficant other lives nearby" will brand you as a flight risk who is just desperate for a job anywhere they can get one. With that said, I like my job and my coworkers, I don't feel tremendously overworked, and I make good money. I went to a poo poo school and had good-but-not-great grades. results not typical
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May 6, 2011 22:06
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CaptainScraps posted:I've got a list of contacts to call, I'm just going to see if I can get my current boss to call them for me. Or go live with my mom, whatever. Your always welcome to pitch a tent in our back yard (fair warning the dog poops out there). I've got an interview Monday, any tips on not loving this up?
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May 6, 2011 22:08
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quote:About that geographic mobility, every time you move you have to take a test. It takes 3 days, requires a lot of prep work and you have to sign up for it 6 months (ok 3-4) in advance. There is no geographic mobility. I know exaggeration is a key tactic of this thread, but this is really dumb. Bar exams are a gigantic pain the rear end but probably not a reason to avoid the profession. You can often take multiple bar exams concurrently after leaving law school (some states, incidentally, are rather large and have multiple metropolitan areas/legal markets). If you've taken the bar exam recently, sometimes your MBE score will transfer if you choose to get admitted to another state (so you might only have to take 1/2 of another bar exam). For experienced attorneys, there is the practice of Reciprocity. With that said it is probably a good idea for would-be law students to get acquainted early with how bar admissions work in the states they may be interested in practicing in.
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May 6, 2011 22:13
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Just finished up a 4 day conference in wine country in Cali that my office sent me to, in which I was repeatedly asked by attorneys whether I could get them a job on Guam. Flew into Milwaukee, headed to Rocky Rococo's today to grab some of their tasty pizza sauce to take back with me, the manager overheard where I was from and gifted me a 5 lb. bag of it. Also I flew Business class, and am earning a poo poo-ton of miles. In two weeks I go to Kuala Lumpur for a frisbee tournament. It's been a good month. 
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May 6, 2011 22:27
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Reciprocity doesn't mean poo poo when you can't find a job at the start of your career. If you've been practicing for 5-10 years yeah you can go wherever you want, but that's not the case for anyone who has graduated recently/will graduate soon and are facing the worst employment prospects. Stop: the only prep material I can recommended is read through the 1L subjects from the BarBri Conviser mini-review if you can possibly get your hands on it, everything you do in class will make sense right away instead of only figuring out the structure of things weeks later. But that's like one or two afternoons of work, no point in anything past that.
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May 6, 2011 22:32
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Stop posted:Did you guys find that people benefited from reading prep material or whatever in the summer before their 1L year? You might get some benefit, but you're going to have to work way harder than you need to because no professor charges through every aspect of the black-letter lawl (which is what you'll get from the supplements). The most important thing is to stay on top of your reading and studying throughout the semester and study/practice past exams and model answers like crazy. Oh, and outline weekly so that poo poo doesn't pile up and set your deadlines for legal writing assignments early. People start burning out at the end because they have all this other poo poo *besides* exam prep taking up their time. Another tip: first semester is the easier semester. Don't slack off and pick up all the low-hanging As you can. Once the shininess of law school wears off for the majority of kids and they get beat down by a curve for the first time in their collective liberal arts lives, they will work harder. In my first semester, I worked about 50-60% as hard as the top kids but was fortunate enough that everyone else was too busy drinking and socializing. My efforts translated to a rank around ~7%. Now, I would give anything to go back in time and get that A for Crim Law as the B I got might be the flaw in my transcript that locks me out of someplace like Harvard. I've also started having nightmares about not getting all As this semester several times a week. Remember, if you get top 10% at NYU, you'll be competitive for transfer to Yale or Stanford if that's your fancy (although it's probably not since you're going to NYU tuition-free) and an extremely strong candidate for a clerkship / any job you could ever want. tl, dr: No, don't study over the summer. Just work hard during the semester, read all the cases, go to all your classes and take good notes, keep a schedule that finishes any writing assignments early, and get in the habit of practicing exams and studying model answers as if it were the LSAT, where your future essentially boiled down to one big test. Because that is also the case with your finals, just repeated several times over. And you will get many As for first semester, assuming you are of at least average intelligence relative to your student pool. Damn Phantom fucked around with this message at 22:38 on May 6, 2011 |
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May 6, 2011 22:34
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drat Phantom posted:You might get some benefit, but you're going to have to work way harder than you need to because no professor charges through every aspect of the black-letter lawl (which is what you'll get from the supplements). The most important thing is to stay on top of your reading and studying throughout the semester and study/practice past exams and model answers like crazy. Oh, and outline weekly so that poo poo doesn't pile up and set your deadlines for legal writing assignments early. People start burning out at the end because they have all this other poo poo *besides* exam prep taking up their time. Out of curiosity I tend to always see Yale/Stanford brought up for transferring, is HLS in a different transfer bracket? I would guess easier due to its size, but I don't know anything about transferring in law school.
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May 6, 2011 22:38
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Stop posted:Did you guys find that people benefited from reading prep material or whatever in the summer before their 1L year? The summer before law school, I read through and took notes on a thick tome of collected essays by critical race theorists. That was so loving stupid.
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May 6, 2011 22:39
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MEET ME BY DUCKS posted:Out of curiosity I tend to always see Yale/Stanford brought up for transferring, is HLS in a different transfer bracket? I would guess easier due to its size, but I don't know anything about transferring in law school. Harvard accepts about 30 kids, which is triple what Yale and Stanford do. Plus Harvard is the "safety" for kids who are competitive to transfer to Yale and Stanford. So I'd say they ultimately end up accepting about 40-50 kids overall to account for a non-%100 yield. Also, IIRC Harvard doesn't place its students into clerkships as well as Yale and Stanford, per capita. Since clerkships tend to be the ruler for dicksize in the HYS stratosphere, that makes Harvard the worst out of the three in the legal world. I believe this trend may also hold for biglaw placement as well (for those who want it). The TLS forums seem to have the occasional Harvard kid moaning about not being able to get a big law job. I don't think I've ever seen a Yale or Stanford kid make the same complaint.
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May 6, 2011 22:43
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NJ Deac posted:Also, good luck getting hired by a firm without any local relationship to the area. If you aren't local, one of the first things you'll get asked during the screening interview is why you're applying for a job in their geographic location. Any answer other than "I have family in the area/I grew up nearby/My signficant other lives nearby" will brand you as a flight risk who is just desperate for a job anywhere they can get one. Lesson: be an enginerd, go to law school, maybe end up not hating life.
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May 6, 2011 22:46
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Stop posted:Did you guys find that people benefited from reading prep material or whatever in the summer before their 1L year? I wish I had read a Conviser Mini Review (it's a BarBri MBE prep short outline) before 1L. I had no loving clue what to expect going in, and I learned all the wrong things for like five months before figuring out what the hell I needed to learn. Just learning that were elements to various things was a revelation that took several weeks to dawn on me.
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May 6, 2011 22:53
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CaptainScraps posted:Ponzi scheme/white collar crime. Excellent plaintiff's bar and environment out here.
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May 6, 2011 22:59
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drat Phantom posted:Harvard accepts about 30 kids, which is triple what Yale and Stanford do. Plus Harvard is the "safety" for kids who are competitive to transfer to Yale and Stanford. So I'd say they ultimately end up accepting about 40-50 kids overall to account for a non-%100 yield. interesting. I certainly met a lot of people who chose HLS over SLS (or so they claimed) and at least a handful claiming to have chosen HLS over YLS. But yeah, due to size HLS doesn't place as well into clerkships, though I think they still place the best in biglaw, or at least firms claim they prefer HLS students over SLS/YLS. I guess it's the Stanford thing that confuses me, they seem to have odd reputation and I don't tend to see people picking SLS over the other two.
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May 6, 2011 23:00
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:But with the new loan repayment plan set out by the Obama Administration doesn't it cap your loan repayment at some percentage of what your income is? College Cost Reduction Act was the Bush Administration. Obama didn't even vote for the bill when it was in the Senate.
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May 6, 2011 23:01
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gvibes posted:You're another patent guy, right? I am eligible for the patent bar with my science credits from college and was planning on going into that field. Im majoring in poli sci but I have the requisite 40 hours of science classes required. Do you have any specific advice? Does this change anything for me in deciding on law school? Also, thanks HiddenReplaced for correcting my error.
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May 6, 2011 23:04
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:I am eligible for the patent bar with my science credits from college and was planning on going into that field. Im majoring in poli sci but I have the requisite 40 hours of science classes required. Do you have any specific advice? Does this change anything for me in deciding on law school? sitting for the patent bar means you can do a lot of work that the rest of the legal field can't, and there are some jobs there, so yeah, as long as you want to do patent work, going to law school might not be a terrible idea for you, in sheer terms of getting employment but given the list of what you want out of your career, law school is a bad idea. in terms of specific advice I think it's the same, get the best GPA/LSAT possible, go to the best law school possible, get a patent law job and hate your life as much as any other employed lawyer topheryan fucked around with this message at 23:10 on May 6, 2011 |
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May 6, 2011 23:07
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gvibes posted:I think your math is a little off there. Stop posted:Did you guys find that people benefited from reading prep material or whatever in the summer before their 1L year? MEET ME BY DUCKS posted:patent law
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May 6, 2011 23:13
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:I am eligible for the patent bar with my science credits from college and was planning on going into that field. Im majoring in poli sci but I have the requisite 40 hours of science classes required. Do you have any specific advice? Does this change anything for me in deciding on law school? It would be pretty difficult for you to get a patent prosecution position with a political science degree.
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May 6, 2011 23:20
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Omerta posted:Yeah, there's a don't missing. on the issue of substantive prep, is there a reason why so many people seem to be against it? Some of the "general" 0L books recommend a ton of summer prep, some recommend none. I understand that every professor wants something different, but is there really no advantage to reading through some of the primers? I hear a lot of people say not to do it, but I've never heard someone say they did it and regret it. It mostly seems like 0Ls throw around this "don't prep" sort of mentality, but then anyone who does prep with primers/LEEWS/GTM claims they were all extremely helpful. I just bring this up because I'm about to start GTM and also deciding if I should prep more than that. I'm likely taking the summer off so free time isn't scarce for me, and I know people claim prepping will burn you out before even getting there, but I figure if I stop prepping by August it won't be a problem.
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May 6, 2011 23:21
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rsvandy posted:It would be pretty difficult for you to get a patent prosecution position with a political science degree.
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May 6, 2011 23:24
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gvibes posted:Agreed, Are there fields outside of patent prosecution in the patent field where being able to sit for the patent bar helps and not having an undergrad science degree doesn't matter as much?
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May 6, 2011 23:26
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drawkcab si eman ym posted:Are there fields outside of patent prosecution in the patent field where being able to sit for the patent bar helps and not having an undergrad science degree doesn't matter as much? No. (Real answer: probably not. You should not go to law school.)
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May 6, 2011 23:34
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Phil Moscowitz posted:Excellent plaintiff's bar and environment out here. Fresh.  If I have nothing by January I'll either be taking the LA or NM bar.
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May 6, 2011 23:38
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