Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble | Hacker News Reader

Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

reuters.com

178 pointsDLay285 comments

When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts:

- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law

- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers

- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]

For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.

This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.

I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.

[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106

My girlfriend was a lawyer for a few years. Shortly after we met she went to a bootcamp for coding, immediately got a new job, and now (a couple years later) makes something like 4x what she did as a lawyer. Of course she was doing contract work for a small local firm, but that was the best job she could find in the job market as it was.

I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding.

Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me.

So transitioning from law to coding is maybe "just" learning some programming language and technical details, but the mind is already somewhat prepared to the thinking?

You might say playing Minesweeper prepares you for law. Or vice versa. Or coding prepares you for law. It’s omnidirectional.

Sure, I did not study law, but I think I have a way easier time decoding laws and contracts, than my liberal arts peers.

Being mathematically inclined and having worked in software for a decade+ I'm also very good at understanding the complex laws and nuances for international travel in the age of COVID. I'm about to visit 3 countries and from my own research I feel like I'm the world's expert on the congressional bills and executive orders of these countries now (I'm only somewhat kidding)

By the way, I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math, comp sci and minoring in music)

Modern software stacks are tall enough that the ability to find answers is a key skill.

My favorite interview question is to take something the interviewee doesn't know, toss a laptop in front of them, and ask them to see if they can find an answer. You learn a lot about a person from the way they search.

"I'm a liberal arts graduate (but majoring in math and comp sci and minoring in music)" ... if you're majoring in math... you're not a liberal arts grad.

I personally minored in music composition (with a masters in CS) but I wouldn't describe myself as a liberal arts grad.

I went to a liberal arts college - I don't think most people on HN are familiar with US liberal arts colleges. I have a B.A. degree because no B.Sc. was offered. Lots of requirements for courses outside one discipline or major field of studies - much more so than at non-liberal arts college. Generally liberal arts colleges only offer undergraduate degrees. They also generally do not have research faculty - teaching is the core emphasis.

And the entire ethos of my school was about internationalism and utopian thinking, certainly not about doing real world practical things or even making money.

So liberal arts graduate is still accurate for me.

I'm sure it does, but which subset and is it big enough to be relevant?

Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.

Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.

> and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts

it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.

It's not always (or even usually) cluelessness or malice. Law is somewhat like code, except it's like the worst Aspect-Oriented Programming codebase you can imagine - the source in front of you is never the full story. They may need the extra time just to go through possible interactions with codes, precedents, official interpretations, etc.

I once had the lovely task of turning law into code. 3 lawyers, 4 different judges, 3 officers/officials, and dozens of people the code applied to. The amount of 'law' was maybe 10 sentences. But there were books written on how to apply that small bit of law. That set was pretty solid and had 40 years of 'know how that works case law'. Then it got thrown out in court. Total rewrite. Same set of people again. But many had no idea how to even begin to apply that new law. It took nearly 2 years of wrangling with different law organizations to find out how is this going to be applied. It got so bad I was finding bugs in the law and loopholes just because I threw my hands up and exhaustively searched the whole space of actions. Even the guy who had the fun task of writing the law had reservations. I think they fixed the 'bugs' in a new rewrite a few years ago after it got thrown out again in court. Luckily I was out by that point.

I've taught code-lite tools to a bunch of repurposed analysts, and your idea tracks with my experience too.

Students that had an analytical perspective (e.g. from supply chain debugging) typically excelled.

Students from more fuzzy, language-based perspectives (e.g. marketing) had a lot more difficulty.

Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant rate those who couldn't ended up failing at a significant rate.

The theory was that programming has many arbitrary rules that you need to be aware of work your way around to make things work, why is the language construct like this instead of this other way etc.

The law in many ways is logical but it is an arbitrary logic.

Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi?

It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0]

0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

hmm, ok. I think I might have heard that as well one time but I forgot, probably less interesting to me than the first idea.

I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either.

I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.

Sounds similar to this blog post by the founder of SO

https://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-f...

>Lots of complex preconditions, trying to find clauses that catch all side effects - sounds familiar to me.

I think there is another benefit - in that if you have some legal background (not much needed, some business law courses and basic familiarity) then when you are looking at code that you can't figure out why did they do this and think I will improve it! Sometimes the reason they did things in a weird way is because of regulatory requirements and you might be better able to notice those situations.

Also when you are planning features you might be able to determine this needs to be ran past legal more than other developers (at least I've had this experience a few times)

I was a lawyer for 15 years or so. Before law, I was a PHP programmer and a C/lisp dabbler. After law, I have been a university researcher doing tons of JS and Python for building experiments and running complex computational modeling analyses. However, I was a philosophy major who focused on logic, which is also a precursor to both law and coding, so it's hard to know what influenced what. Anyway, I would say that they can certainly be quite compatible, if ...

If you are a certain type of lawyer, then law and coding are a natural fit. There are several different types of lawyers. Some like the code aspect of law (literally, the legal code), some like the more social aspects of lawyering -- like negotiating deals and trying to bullshit the answer when you are about to lose your case and networking and just all around helping people out.

My wife is a lawyer. My brother was a lawyer. My wife's brother is a lawyer. Of those three, my brother would not have been a very good programmer, and my wife's brother would rather launch himself into the sun. My wife would be good at it (and she is; I have taught her a little to work on our own family web project), but she is also a good mathematician and good scientist, so it's hard to say how much of it might be from legal training.

>I always wondered if studying law, also prepares your mind for coding

Could work in reverse too. I met the author Ken Liu at a convention, and he mentioned he started out as a software engineer, and then went to law school. And then began writing on the side as well.

The impression I've gotten from talking with her is that law is like the worst codebase you could possibly imagine, running on a machine that doesn't even execute it consistently, where every ambiguity (which abound) is resolved via interpersonal conflict. It sounds like my worst nightmare, personally. She didn't like it either which is part of why she got out.

It's also a ton of rote memorization, which luckily isn't very important for programming because I'm terrible at it.

Even playing a lawyer on TV seems rough.

My father was a lawyer and genuinely enjoyed his career. He did fit into that “elite lawyer” category. In retirement now, he has been approached several times to return (for obscene money) and its always a firm no from him. He doesn’t want the headache. He loved the networking and people-relationships of lawyering but the actual work was tedious and exhausting even with an army of supporting staff and associates around him.

I have a sibling that is a lawyer and they want nothing to do with being a firm slave on the partner-track grind. They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization. I know many of there friends from law school tho are not in great positions several years after graduation…

I have a bunch of other friends that went to law school with various levels of success. It does seem to mint a respectable amount of middle-class jobs but none of them are getting rich doing it.

> They are happy just being internal corporate 9-5 counsel in there little area of specialization.

This has been my personal experience with most lawyers, and they all seem pretty regular, not working crazy 16 hour days for weeks leading up to a trial, etc.

We say software is eating the world, but the law only ever gets more complex, not simpler, with more regulations being introduced on a seemingly monthly basis. The law and GRC is eating the world, so I only see the demand for these roles increasing.

I used to work as an attorney, quit to join a coding boot camp, transitioned to web development, and now I'm employed as a software engineer.

When I was a lawyer, I bounced around a few different jobs--mostly in litigation. I started off as a public defender before moving on to private criminal defense, then doing some work as a legislative researcher, and finally ending my career in plaintiffs' civil rights litigation. That might all sound fun and exciting, but, frankly, the work is just plain boring. You interview your client, listen to their story, read some reports, filter out relevant evidence, do some legal research to support your arguments, read and write some briefs, cut a deal with opposing counsel, sit around waiting in court, suck up to some power-tripping judge, get a thankless goodbye from your client, rinse, wipe, repeat. Throw in a jury trial here and there and now you're having some fun, but get ready to basically be a used car salesman, because you've got to sell your client's story whether you believe it or not. Depending on the facts of your case (as known to you) and the strength of your conscience, that can be a tough and soul-sucking task. And if you stick with government work, you probably won't be making six figures until you're very high up the totem pole (10+ years into your career).

After about 6-7 years of it, I realized that I could separate most of the older lawyers into two groups: true believers and functional burnouts. The true believers are really gung-ho about what they do because they really do think their job is the most important job in the world, and they really shine. Those are the lawyers you want to hire. But the majority of them are just going through the motions and are too afraid to try something else because they've invested so much time and effort into their careers, they've got kids and a mortgage, they've got golden handcuffs, and "being a lawyer" is simply what defines their identity. I might have started off as a true believer, but over time, I started seeing a lot more gray in the work I did--to the point where it was a daily struggle to deal with the cognitive dissonance. You're on the fast-track to burnout at that point, so I figured it was a good time to bounce. I had always been a lot more technically adept than most lawyers (some can be borderline luddites, probably because technology represents a threat to their billable hours), so the transition to tech was a smooth and enjoyable one. I don't regret the decision.

Could I get burned out in tech, too? Sure, but it suits my overall disposition better, so I think there's a little more room to push myself before that happens. I'd rather fight with computers than people, so I feel pretty safe (until I wind up in management). Really just depends on what your personal values are. I wouldn't necessarily discourage someone from becoming a lawyer, but you might want to make sure you have a damn good reason for wanting it. If you're a committed ideologue, there's opportunity there in litigation. If you just want to be a glorified service industry professional having people fill out the right forms, there's opportunity in transactional work. But... eh, you're going to be doing a lot of babysitting either way, and it's not a particularly "creative" line of work. Whatever you do, don't take on an insane amount of debt. I went to a state school and got a lot of grant money, so I basically went to law school for the same cost as a brand new Camaro. If I took on a 6-figure debt load, I'd be up shit creek today.

This resonates with me. I also changed careers from law to tech. I went to law school because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and got a full scholarship at a state school, so it was really the easy path. Looking back, I'd say at least 50% of my law school class went to law school because of similar career uncertainty. I imagine many of them are in the stereotypical: trapped in a middling legal career with a pile of debt following them around. There were a tiny minority who were truly passionate about law.

Fortunately, I found time during law school to get into software and robotics and transitioned into a tech career within about 18 months after graduation. My short legal career as a corporate M&A attorney was more than enough to convince me to take a risk and try something new. I never did any litigation work, but corporate legal work involves plenty of going through the motions - often late at night or on weekends to meeting some arbitrary timing imposed by a client. I was extremely fortunate to have a supportive partner, no kids, etc., so making a somewhat radical career move didn't involve all that much risk.

I have a few other friends who also moved from law to software and have done quite well. It could be selection bias, but I do think some of the discipline and diligence required to do well in law school translated nicely into coding and related technical disciplines.

This is probably the best summary I've come across, particularly the true believers vs functional burnouts bit.

The only thing I'd add is that many (most?) lawyers are not only fundamentally uncreative and arrogant, but also weirdly insecure. They pick fights with each other over meaningless minutiae, simply in the pursuit of "winning". This not only means they're a massive pain in the ass to deal with, and it's also where a lot of the unnecessary expense comes from.

I come from a very similar background (practiced law for four years, now in my 10th year in software) and this is a very well expressed framing that tracks my own observations. Personally, when I realized that was not a "true believer" and would be competing with those happy few who were, it strengthened my resolve to move on.

Thank you so much for sharing. I quit after 1L because Covid hit and I really didn't think zoom law school was worth the $$. That and I fantasized about murdering my legal writing professor before and after every assignment... But you hit the nail on the head with attorneys either being true believers or functional burnouts. I look back on all the attorneys that I've met before and during law school and I can only think of about two who were true believers. The dozen or so others just seemed miserable at the end of the day. Considering I was much too cynical to be a truly passionate attorney I knew immediately which one I'd end up. Now I work in IT and I like it a lot. Similar values to law oddly enough - constant education, strategic problem solving, helping your client achieve certain goals, etc.

If you can get into a top school (all of the top-3 for sure, and probably some other top-10 as well), they have loan forgiveness programs for graduates who work in public interest law. Caveat: if you're married to a spouse who earns decent money, you might find yourself disqualified on the basis of his/her income.

This doesn't solve the problem about being overworked, but at least it makes being a PD more financially viable.

A few caveats to this, in addition to the spouse problem:

1) You are shackled to this for ten years. Dropping out early isn't just bad - it's a financial catastrophe.

2) It's based on qualified payments, not "time served" or the like, and there's lots of things that can disrupt those. Plan to fight with your loan servicer.

3) Republican administrations tend to do a will they/won't they thing with approving the actual loan forgiveness.

I wasn't referring to the governmental assistance programs (which have these risks/limitations), but rather the programs run by the elite law schools themselves. They will actually pay a portion of your loan payments if you work in a qualified job.

I don't know which schools currently offer this, but 15 years ago (when I was dating a HLS grad), they operated this way. I would guess that HYS and probably a handful of other top-10 schools would be able to afford a direct-payment program like this.

Most of the law students that go to HYS law schools are already wealthy, so the benefits are going to the wrong people. Furthermore, these graduates are mostly hired at elite law firms making huge salaries and are unlikely to take advantage of these programs. Easy to offer a generous program to people that don’t need it.

My spouse went to an elite law school, and their answer was "There's the public service loan forgiveness program. Good luck with that."

Although average wages are around 75k, wages of lawyers are two tiered, the majority settle around ~55k and then prominent lawyers who went to good schools and were groomed to become partners make over triple that [1]. So it is a lot like other professional white collar professions like accounting where there are huge amounts of extremely overworked people in entry level jobs who were suckered into the perceived security of the profession and few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries, the only difference is that they have to go through a professional degree and often incur huge amounts of debt just to get there.

[1] https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c...

> few that make partner and rake in decent cash, which is only like average FANG entry salaries

What entry level FAANG pays partner salary [1]? I need to apply.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Sidley-Austin-Partner-Attor...

Starting salaries are 200 to 300k at the best firms. Partners make much more.

Well-paid/experienced partners, yes.

Starting salary for partners is around 300k at a big four. That's true for FAANG starting salaries, too.

The only difference is it takes 15 years to make partner at a big four, whereas (especially with college-age side hustle experience) you can start with a few years of experience.

Oh, the other difference is you can spend a few hundred thousand to buy-in as a partner, as opposed to a 100k signing bonus at a faang.

The fact senior partners make millions doesn't change the fact about starting salaries. At that point you're comparing a 25yo to a 45yo.

Starting for partners is $300k at a big four but that does not include equity grants or profit sharing. It also rapidly climbs from $300k, especially if you can make it past the first 3 years. A senior partner with 10+ years as a partner can pull down $20M+ a year easily and would be a candidate for C-suite jobs basically anywhere if they decided to leave.

But making it into the partnership is more about playing politics than being good, so it’s definitely not for everyone.

How do these firms make so much money to pay these eye popping amounts?!

Are these the firms that do lawsuits against companies on behalf of a wronged client, client gets peanuts and “lawyer” fees eat up the sizable chunk of amount awarded in $xx,000,000+ cases?

20m is not normal. Look here, the top law firm makes 5m profit per partner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_law_firms_by...

I should clarify, there is a pretty large split between big law and an typical career in law. Those that go into top (200) firms are starting as associates at ~190k [1] with partners making ~1mm [2] with a long tail end. However most others will follow a career trajectory starting around 60k [3], maybe less if they are public attorneys, moving towards ~150k [4] if they make partner in a smaller firm. Prospective lawyers are sold the big law dream but outside of that the career trajectory is a lot less enticing considering the upfront costs.

[1] https://www.nalp.org/0521research [2] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how-much-do-partners... [3] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib [4] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/partner-attorney-salary-S...

Aren't programmer salaries equally bimodal?

I don’t think they are as bimodal like lawyer salaries. I have no quantitative data to back that assertion though.

This is old data, and not really conclusive, but it indicated that things were heading that way in 2016. I don't know of anything that would have changed that trend, FAANGs are even more of an outlier now I'd guess.

http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

Dan Luu wrote a blog investigating this exact comparison and also didn't have good enough data to draw a strong conclusion.

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

Yeah, you have this stereotype that you have partners at white shoe law firms who all went to Harvard or Yale and all the other lawyers doing real estate closings from an office in a strip mall.

In practice, there are plenty of lawyers who are in-house counsels for large companies, own successful law practices in smaller cities and large towns, etc. who make decent money often in moderate cost of living areas.

Tri modal in US (public sector and nontech companies, tech startups and midsize tech companies, big tech), except that any of the US citizen programmers can switch between any of the tiers

People are pushing harder to make programming more inclusive simply because it is lucrative (aside from more accurately addressing societal needs if it was more inclusive), but it already has some realities that are way more open than other lucrative professions

They're both trimodal if anything.

- People make the most in Big 4 law/tech firms, as well as a handful of boutique firms.

- Most people work elsewhere, making a respectable living but nothing extraordinary like the baove.

- Last but not least, there are folks working as IT/paralegal, who did not manage to break into developer/lawyer.

This last one is very brutal for law careers, if you did not manage to qualify or pass the bar the year you were supposed to, you've lost your chance for life, whereas in technology a formal engineering degree is not a hard requirement.

Law is a well paying profession in general, insofar as many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. You’re correct that only a relatively few people make the kind of money people think lawyers make, and the profession is highly segregated by education. Most people at my law school (northwestern) went on to a big firm job with a salary of $200k rising to $500k after 8 years. A few places lower on the ranking scales, at good public schools, it was more like 1 in 4.

I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.

For the kind of person who likes that sort of thing, however, it can be very rewarding. I’m a decade out of law school, and still enjoying the grind. So is my wife, snd most of the people I graduated with. I’ve got a STEM degree and was a programmer in a previous life, and enjoy the analytical aspect of law. It also combines an element of verbal advocacy and adversarial competition I found lacking in engineering.

I would certainly recommend my kids to go into the profession, at least my oldest who has the temperament for it. What personalities the younger two will have remains to be seen, but I would certainly counsel against them becoming lawyers out of inertia or because they got a useless undergraduate degree. (As an Asian parent, I have no compunction about insisting on STEM degrees for all of them!)

Did you get back to law school and pass the bar after pivoting from a CS career (and a CS diploma) ?

Yes, though my degree was aerospace not CS.

> can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life.

High five figures is not good money for a professional in the US.

That depends on the location, no?

'Can earn high figures' - so what are others earning? 'Mid five figures', so $50k, for a professional? In the US? That's not good anywhere.

Corporate graphic design pays exactly that amount in several Southeastern cities, and that's considered better than average. source: seen the paystubs.

> Corporate graphic design

Not sure that counts as a profession.

If graphic design doesn't count as a profession, what does?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Law, medicine, etc.

There's no professional body for corporate design is there?

Not for corporate design specifically - some graphic designers specialize in that. However, there are certainly professional bodies for graphic designers.[1]

From the Wikipedia link you provided, graphic design has achieved the first 4 milestones of being a profession:

"an occupation becomes a full-time occupation, the establishment of a training school, the establishment of a university school, the establishment of a local association".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_of_Graphic_...

For some reason you went off about 'what are others earning' and '50k for a professional'. You hallucinated an entirely different conversation. The person above actually talking about lawyers just said:

> many can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life.

With respect, this comment is wrong in so many places. “High five figures” is not a lot of money considering the opportunity cost (and actual cost of a law degree) (7 years and likely $200,000 all in). The 1 in 4 figure is not close to right either—it’s typically fewer than 1 in 10 get the actually high paying jobs outside of t-14 schools. And I’m glad commenter likes the grind, but most lawyers that I’ve worked with over the years are miserable and drink too much, regardless of school and rank. Sounds like a serious case of survivor bias. This article is closer to reality: https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...

I don't see how high 5 figures is not high salary. 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage. And a lot of people earning the median are also deep in student debt. If earning 3 times the median is not good money, maybe your view of what "good money" means something else.

The lawyer median wage is 125k, and the 75 percentile is 186k. I consider 186k to be a high wage, it's 6 times the national mean wage. And according to the sources below, 1 in 4 lawyers are above that.

Median wages https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm

Lawyer wages https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary

I am sorry, but I just don't see how the commenter above is wrong, the numbers say he is spot on. But anyway, I am not a lawyer, and I am not trying to be disrespectful, but I see a lot of high earners in many fields that complain having small wages and tough life, but when you compare it from the outside, it doesn't look so bad. For example, the guy in your article:

  said Dylan Boigris, a 2016 Miami Law graduate, who began his career making about $45,000 as a public defender

Making 50% more than the median right out of college, I would say that is pretty good, don't you think? And he is a low percentile, because in your article:

  Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year,

Then your article goes to show earning vs debt on a graph. I think it's quite an expectation to have your annual earning cover the cost of the entire law degree...and then bemoan when it doesn't. How many other professions have this luxury?

The vast majority of folks earning “high five figures” don’t have to waste three years on dubious education at a cost of $50k per year (not including debt for living expenses because you can’t work your first year at all). So you’re right, high five figures could be a great salary if you’re a manager of a target and didn’t go to law school, but it’s a bad salary if you had to go to law school to get it.

Source?

There are a lot of people with 4 year graduate degrees (with same cost) that earn less.

Right. And those are bad too.

Lumping your comparison to include people without high school degrees with lawyers is making a huge mistake. At a minimum the comparison should be between collage graduates and lawyers minus the opportunity cost of law school.

Consider, when comparing starting salary your accountant or whatever not only makes money in both years a lawyer is in law school they also likely have two raises before the lawyer gets his first paycheck and start paying back undergrad loans while a lawyer is still adding interest and new debt.

If your opportunity cost from loans, tuition, lost wages and delayed carrier advancement adds up to a conservative 10k/year after taxes for the rest of your life, then your 72k pre tax lawyer is actually making the equivalent of ~58k pre tax and 1/2 of starting Layers are doing worse than that.

not everyone who's a lawyer can be an accountant and vice versa.

Sure, but the job was irrelevant substitute librarian or anything other than unemployed and the opportunity cost still exists. IMO, the comparison is still quite generous as it ignores risks associated with trying to become a lawyer.

Also factor in cost of living and rent. That ~$72k is not going to fly in SF or NY after rent if you are trying to start a family and not have 3 roommates.

I don't see how this is relevant. Of course lawyers must make more in a HCOL to make ends meet, but how is this different than any other profession? Are there significantly more lawyers in HCOL areas?

The demographic you refer to are renters because their debt to income ratio is not sufficient for a mortgage. After going to law school, having to scrape by and pay back student loan debt + HCOL rent is how you are entering your adult life with a law degree. Your entry level salary is still depressed relatively speaking to an entry level software dev in HCOL area. If your spouse is not the breadwinner you are in trouble.

I still fail to see the reasoning here. Most other young professionals are in the same boat: debt out of college, smallish starting salaries, renting, HCOL areas.

Lawyers have higher salaries than most other professions, though. They are 10% better paid than software developers. We have a huge amount of really well paid developers in SF, Seattle and NYC, and lawyers still have a higher median salary.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/mobile/lawyers.htm

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Thanks I see where you are coming from. All things considered you can make a great life out of a law career if you are driven and motivated, like you said the ceiling is much higher for law than general population jobs

$45k is right on the median for a college graduate.

> 100k is literally double the average salary for the US, and 3 times the median wage.

I'm not sure what source you're using, but no, it isn't even double the median US salary ($56k): https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

It's good money, don't get me wrong, but it's not immediately worth it if you spend $200k paying for law school.

Edit: I misread the data above, but I'm finding similar numbers from other sources, so I guess it depends on where you look. Regardless, you're correct in your overall point, I just wanted to point out that a $100k salary does not necessarily make it worth going to law school.

With that said, you're right: if your goal is to go into law to make money, it shouldn't be very difficult earn well into the six figures a few years in. I imagine most competent lawyers earning less than that are working in public defense or a similarly underpaid aspect of law, knowing the tradeoff. For reference, the median salary for software engineers is only $110k, but that is clearly on the low end of what a competent engineer can make after even just 5 years in the industry.

That’s “Annual mean wage” not median wage.

Oops, you're right, I completely misread. Thanks! In any case, I'm finding a lot of conflicting data, so at best I think the actual number depends on where you look.

>> Graduates who finished law school in 2019 earned a median $72,500 the following year

The number I want to see his how much their salaries increased after law school, what they made over and above their pre-lawyer income. At law school I ran into many students who "earned" lots of family money prior to school. Some were on trust funds but other had token jobs in family firms. One of the top earners in our class was a guy hired immediately by his father's firm, but I think he was already some form of on-paper employee with them prior to law school too. Other people came from relatively stable jobs prior, only to struggle to find work afterwards.

There's a problem with your post: you linked to "median lawyer pay" but many graduates will not get lawyer jobs. Median lawyer pay doesn't include folks with a law degree who went back to whatever they were doing before law school.

For perspective: https://www.federalpay.org/military/army

Army Captain. Someone with a degree and a few years in the job. Someone in command of perhaps 50 people. A federal employee. The sort of person who most Americans would consider solidly middle class.

Base monthly pay = $6,023

There is a contingent in tech (and probably other areas like Wall Street) that is absolutely delusional about what most people consider comfortable middle class--or even upper middle class--salaries.

Those same people probably disagree about an army captain being middle class. Some would say that any public employee short of a presidential appointment is per se something below middle class. The average congressman or senator, the people on TV making all the decisions, are paid 175k/year. The president is paid 400k. Such people normally have other private income streams but that is the base pay. So anyone talking about "low six figures" as "middle class" really needs to take their head out of the sand.

It's either regional differences where people pretend that the exception is the rule [0] or rich people pretend to be "middle class" because that way the middle class will vote for the benefits of rich people.

[0] I can't afford a $2 million house, therefore I am not middle class if don't earn at least $200k.

I have not served, but my sense is that there are some additional factors at play:

* If you are deployed, I believe there may be some tax advantages?

* You may get combat pay

* Don't you still get a pension? And free/subsidized healthcare, even after you leave?

* Does a captain typically pay for housing?

All that said, your point is taken. However, I'm not sure anyone is joining the US Army to get rich.

Doesn't the army give housing and food allowances? Do you even pay anything if you live and eat on base?

Interesting thread.

GP's point and your own are not necessarily at odds. A lot has to do with which real lawyer is used as representative. Are we looking at average experience, median, 76th percentile... Taking into account those who never started practicing, etc.

The same can be said of other professions, but the details vary a lot. Relative merits depend on where we put the probe.

A well to do lawyer, 40+ lawyer can be in a more comfortable career place than a comparison programmer going forward. Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority. Competitive, yet prestige based career starts. A nice seniority ratchet as a winners reward.

OTOH, scrapy starts seem like a tough place for lawyers. In tech, skills, hustle and attitude can get you a start... when times are good. Tech is a good business to be in, but volatile... even when times are good. I wouldn't say only chops matter, but you can get by on mostly chops.

Play the game you stand to win, I suppose. If you are en route to line up prestigious degrees, internships and such... 1 in 4 doesn't necessarily mean 1 in 4 for you. There's a harsh distribution.

I suspect this explains attrition. More prestige oriented success factors and a harsher distribution. Beyond a certain threshold winners win a more prestige oriented prize. The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward. Seniority isn't even a value, it's only valued for implied experience.

If you have good odds at a prestigious internship or starting job, it makes a lot of sense to pursue law. If you aren't, it often won't. I reckon that reality sinks in during law school. Programming doesn't really have that. False starts, scrappy starts, and such are fine. Average results for working programmers are fine. An uncle who can advise and groom you before eventually recommending you for a great internship is great, but it's not the stuff most tech careers are made of.

> Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority

The equivalent of tech progressing into management is lawyers progressing into sales. The people who make the most aren’t the ones who know the law the best, they’re the “rainmakers,” the ones bringing in all the business. At a certain point your career and monetary progression will be limited if you’re not moving to a relationship-building/sales-style role. It’s like investment banking in that regard.

You can probably reduce it multiple ways. But ultimately, it's a different culture with different norms;)

Probably most professions with firms that have a senior partner/partner/associate sort of structure. The more senior you are, the less your job is about doing "work" and the more it is about bringing new business and retaining existing clients. Of course, it's true in IT consulting as well. You can be sure that most of the senior people at Accenture aren't doing much coding.

The sort of well-to-do 40+ lawyer you describe is really only something found at "biglaw" firms, and not only that, but people at biglaw firms who have managed to make partner. Getting hired into biglaw is like getting hired into big tech from CS school, but less predictable because it's almost universally based on law school rank after your first year. And law school rank is almost universally dependent upon exam grades. In law school, your grade for a class for the entire semester is dependent on one exam; mine often had somewhere around 4 questions. You can know the material back and front objectively, but if you have not managed to divine how the prof wants their questions answered, you will score poorly.

Everyone goes into law school thinking they will be the one to get high grades, but in my experience, working hard was not well correlated with good grades. Even if you work harder than anyone else, it still somewhat comes down to a coin flip. This can be so frustrating, I cannot even begin to describe it.

Even if you then make it into biglaw (a low percentage), you then need to make partner (an extremely low percentage). This is far more about a) office politics, b) connections, and c) your ability to "rain make" by bringing in big new clients; than about your skill as a practitioner of law.

I would also caution against looking at numbers like salary in isolation. Law is full of unhappy rich people. 36% of the profession suffer from alcohol use disorders, compared to ~12% of the general population. Nearly half experience depression at some point (compared to 15% in the general population, in the stat I was able to locate). It's not a happy field.

So... that path exists in tech too. As you say, a "big tech from CS school" trailhead. Politics, and tech versions of rainmaking play a role sorting into senior positions from there too.

Up to this point, a tech career has a lot more options and opportunities. Didn't get google? Work at a bank, a startup, a salesforce solutions techshop.... Didn't get MIT? There are other paths forward, including quirky ones that will work too.

Past this point, well-to-do lawyer at Biglaw has the cushier path. Law firms respect seniority. They give them nice offices, autonomy. Senior partners don't worry about wippersnappers running circles around them in some new law paradigm. They don't need to relearn contract law periodically.

The point about happiness is valid, but complex. That competitive prestige game is, empirically, often misery making. Programming has more realness, but there can be a lot of performance stress, especially if you're thinking in decades.

> Tech careers "naturally" progress into management, whereas lawyerly one progress into seniority. Competitive, yet prestige based career starts.

> The 44 year old senior programmer probably has a less cushy path forward

If he's still a "senior programmer" at 44 and not Staff level engineer, it's indeed a rough path ahead.

You can get “high five figures” with a GED and a factory job. Why would anyone go through the stress and expense of law school for that?

According to [1] full-time employed people with professional degrees earn a median of $117,679 while full time employed high school graduates earn a median of $38,102.

If it were easy to earn high five figures with a GED, wouldn't the earnings of GED holders be much higher?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

I didn't say full time high school graduates. I said factory jobs. The average starting pay here is roughly 25/hr which is >50k/yr. It's pretty easy to work up to 35+/hr in just a few years. If you get into a foreman position, you can be making upwards of 90 per year and supervisor roles are typically 6 figures.

I'd consider 75k/yr "high 5 figures" and this is extremely doable where I'm from. It's not a major metro, just an average industrial city near a port. Everyone in my family does factory work and has done so for 3 generations, I'm the only one in tech.

There are indeed plenty of folks out there making less than 40/yr. They are almost exclusively temp/contract labors with poor work ethic. The people who are dependable typically get hired on full time which comes with a significant pay increase and full benefits.

The factory job will destroy your body before your 50s. What good is high five figures if you can't do anything with it other that pay for insurance that barely covers the physical therapy you'll need?

Factory jobs, not construction. Running a pulp machine doesn't destroy your body.

And a sedentary life at a keyboard could leave one in poor health. Every job has its tradeoffs. I would argue that a job with physical activity is better overall - I'd take joint replacement over heart surgery or diabetes.

You can always exercise with an office job. You can not just sit down in a factory/amazon warehouse/coal mine

"You can always exercise with an office job."

Not in a way that counter acts the effects. Plus, it doesn't address other health issues like eye strain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/even-with-...

Why so many downvotes?

Because the vast majority of factory work is not backbreaking labor. It typically involves running machines, taking QC measurements, performing maintenance, manning estops, 5s etc. Yes, there are days that suck and they can be exhausting, but most factories don't have days like that very often. Everyone knows the ones that do and it's best to avoid those plants.

So why wouldn't people downvote the person who said the work will destroy your body, or the one who said you can't sit down?

I never said factory work is backbreaking. It can vary greatly by industry, but is generally more active than an software dev job but harder on knees and such. Yes, there are some manufacturing jobs that you just sit at a machine, but many of the machines still need someone to load them, reset them, etc.

>I will quibble with your first point a bit. Law is a profession that attracts large numbers of people who default into it because they can’t think of what to do with their liberal arts undergraduate degree. It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.

Underrated comment -- literally half of all lawyers I've worked with (financial regulation) admit they chose law because they didn't like math.

Doesn’t the LSAT have a significant logic portion which IIRC was fairly challenging? I guess you could figure out a way to do well on the LSAT with a distaste for math.

Never taken the LSAT, but have taken GMAT and (semi-obviously) SAT. Yes, there's a certain subset of "math" on these tests. But there are a lot of people who grind test prep and do well enough to get by. (And logic is something a bit different--which lawyers absolutely do need to some degree.)

I have no personal familiarity with law school but I know in (a good) business school, I had plenty of classmates who struggled with anything beyond very basic math--and sometimes even that. Read any of the "my first year in business school" literature and an essentially universal theme is that the math part was really hard.

Which it's not. And I say this as someone who even back then didn't consider themselves especially strong with mathematics in spite of having an engineering degree.

yes and most "failed" lawyers i know didn't even finish law school or just did a year of it.

it evidently wasn't for them and they usually had or were inclined to do an arts degree anyway.

For someone making an engineering salary, “high five figures” is around a 50% pay cut.

I have friends with no degree at all pulling down $250k in software. I have a lawyer friend with a law degree and 10 years experience in corporate litigation who makes $125k (but has student loans on top of it, so take-home is way less). Given the amount of stress and long hours, I would view it as a poor move for burned out engineers.

I don’t know if the value proposition is there anymore, but when I burned out from engineering I went the MBA / tech executive route and that absolutely has been worth it from a comp standpoint. I work a lot less, I can delegate the tasks I’m not good at, and feel like I have control over my career in a way I never did as an engineer.

> useless undergraduate degree

Pretty narrow thinking of a liberal arts degree.

As someone that works as a software engineer with a liberal arts degree I've found a lot of my STEM degree holding peers to be lacking considering my expectations and all the high and mighty talk about STEM degrees.

The proof is in the pudding, very rarely do people with STEM degrees have to vouch for the usefulness of their degree. We already know why mechanics, engineers and statisticians are useful as career fields, it's the Create Haiku majors that always seem to have to explain the "value unseen" in their degree.

Yes. Because STEM degrees have perceived economic value and liberal arts degrees don't. That does not mean liberal arts degrees are useless. It is, at the very least, short-sighted to think so.

I majored in comp sci but I'm not gonna sit around and pretend every aspect of culture and humanity can be solved by my engineering work...

Once again, your point hinges on "unseen value" of liberal arts. People in STEM, including the trades, don't have to do such shell game tactics.

Are you a robot or something? Finding value in the arts isn't a "shell game tactic". That's just weird to think.

The problem is that people take on debt. With debt you also get the financial shackles to get something out of your degree. You can argue that the liberal art degrees provide useful education but I don't think they are worth the price they charge.

The idea that you intentionally pay huge sums for something whose value shouldn't depend on how much it costs is ridiculous and only acceptable if paying those huge sums will also help you pay them back.

Note, though, that in most threads on HN about qualifications for programming or software engineering there are usually quite a few comments from people saying that they never actually use anything from the classes they had to take to earn their STEM degree.

As far as actually teaching them things they would use on the job the STEM degree was no better than any random humanities degree. The only value they say they get out of the STEM degree as opposed to any other degree or no degree is that many employers use a STEM degree as a filter when hiring.

You can also see this whenever any thread about software interviewing comes up. People complain about having to cram memorizing a bunch of algorithms and data structures that companies like to ask about.

Those questions would be right at home on a CS class homework assignment. If the class material was something that working programmers actually had to use they would not need to cram for it when it comes up on interviews.

So yeah, a STEM degree is more valuable for a typical programming job than a humanities degree--but not for any good reason.

My uni had an entire course devoted to data structures (from b-trees, to relational db) so I beg to differ. Anecdotal (much as your comments are as well) but I've often employed the knowledge i gained in my classes as a CS major in subsequent engineering jobs. In the course of my jobs I've used everything from genetic algorithms to least squares regression, and everything in between.

And yes, there is a good reason that it's more valuable, particularly for a recent grad. It shows that a prospective job candidate has already put forth some effort in the field (from working on class projects, to exams, to working with other students on larger programs)

Replying here since the other thread is archived.

Magento is not cloud based. It's a self-hosted e-commerce platform.

Adobe is really pushing for their cloud solution since they purchased them but the core is OpenSource and still maintained.

>> It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it.

Maybe for you. For me, when I was practicing, law was a very human-oriented thing. My job was about convincing people and companies to do things that they didn't want to do (mostly security). I felt like Charlie Sheen's therapist: If they don't make any changes the client will wind up in jail. But push too hard and they will walk away.

I will echo what sandworm says here. I went from a philosophy undergrad to law school to a law career to a coding bootcamp to a programming career.

The job is certainly demanding and detail oriented. Analytical, I guess it depends on what you mean by analytical. What I became disillusioned with was how brutally incoherent legal arguments can be. And to be honest, the Python code I encounter is often in better English than the legal code that I encountered. You can try reading the Illinois Compiled Statutes if you would like a taste.

I am of the school that all laws are perfectly coherent. I read any vagueness as tacit permission for the court to figure it out for itself. So I don't see "loophole". Rather, I see the legislature granting permission to do something. That mindset means I never feel frustrated by poorly-written code. But when judges don't make sense, that is another story.

"It’s a demanding, detail oriented, analytical job, and many of those people become quite disillusioned with it."

I would love the detailed and analytical aspect of it. Sadly, I hate the contradictions, mistakes, etc that I have experienced with the system. With the vast number of laws and opinions, it seems it's just as much about making the judge like you because they can pick and choose what laws apply (just look at stuff like split opinions). Even if you're not a litigation lawyer, any documents being worked on could lead to litigation. So it seems to me that luck and manipulation play a big part.

> With the vast number of laws and opinions, it seems it's just as much about making the judge like you because they can pick and choose what laws apply (just look at stuff like split opinions).

I tend to view this as analyzing the same problem under different rule sets. Like, making an argument to a “living constitution” judge can be different than making none to an origins list judge, but there’s an internal logic to each argument. It’s just different axioms and rules.

I kind of see that at the higher levels, but there can even be split opinions and contradictions in very simple cases.

For example a judge said that he wouldn't dismiss a case during a trial de novo because there was no record of the original trial (magisterial courts are considered courts not of record, but you are allowed to make a recording) showing that the objections were raised there. Then he later said he won't allow the use of prior statements at that magisterial trial to be used to discredit a witness. He also explained that the trial de novo is "a complete do-over". If it is in fact a complete do-over then why won't the petition to dismiss be considered? I understand that you can't introduce facts from the prior trial at a de novo trial, but any documented statement by a witness can be used to discredit them (ie you don't present it like facts in an appeal, but rather question the witness on why their answer is different from their prior statement). Too many details to list here to show the full legal argument.

Then take conflicts of interest and rules of statutory construction. If I have a precedential ruling saying that the letter of the law cannot be ignored to pursue its spirit, but the judge does just that... or how the judiciary has granted themselves special protections not found in the laws passed by congress, specifically that complaints against them are so secret that even if they contain exculpatory evidence it cannot be revealed. But this explanation would turn into a dissertation.

Perhaps the best example is that magistrates aren't even required to be lawyers. I had one think that I was calling him prejudiced for requesting that the case be dismissed with prejudice. How does one tailor their argument to a functional idiot while still adhering to legal procedures/ideas?

Does your inclination to recommend the legal field and law school stand if the person would have to finance the entire law degree, and couldn't get in to a T14 school? I assume $120k all-in, having been a party to shopping for law schools—albeit several years ago, so I hope it hasn't gone up much.

The average lawyer salary in the US is $144,230. That seems pretty low for the time and money it costs to get through law school.

The trouble in law is to get qualified (in the UK). If you can't finish the 5 years of study or you can't find an internship at the end (extremely competitive), you've wasted your entire time and money and you will never be able to give legal advice and charge £500 an hour.

But after that it's a walk in the park.

The competitiveness of lawyer and developer jobs is really not comparable. All companies have a legal department and hire lawyers, internal lawyer is a good office job with a decent pay but nothing extraordinary.

There's no comparable career path for developers because only tech companies hire developers, the comparison is unemployment if you couldn't make it to a tech company.

"only tech companies hire developers".

Not sure that's really 100% true, although it may have more to do with a company considering themselves a tech company or not. Companies do hire programmers/devs/tech folks, but may look on them more as a cost-center than a revenue generation opportunity.

All large companies hire plenty of developers. I suspect that, in total, there’s way more devs in non-tech than in tech, esp. outside of US.

Seconding this—every company has to have accountants, lawyers, and software developers. Sometimes they contract it out to external firms, sometimes they hire directly, and once they get to a certain size they almost always do both.

> because only tech companies hire developers

That is completely wrong? The FAR majority of developers do not work in tech companies. Most big corporations have internal developer teams, or they employ some contractors that do development for them. But MOST big companies employ developers in basicly all industries.

My mother's a secretary at a law firm. Growing up it sounded like lawyers spent a lot of time on planes away from family. My parents had plenty (father works in furniture repair), so it was pretty clear to me that with a bit of budgeting you don't need a lot of money for a good life

Median lawyer salary is higher than median software dev salary (about $105k v $120k).

>For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.

Since you knew what you didn't want to do, I feel you've made a right decision for yourself.

Not being aligned with the values of the work can indeed result in burnouts, Many can compartmentalize, Many can stay absolutely agnostic to the impact of their work on the society at large and yes they can make lot of money but then again you can't put a price upon doing what you really want to do.

>For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer

When it comes down to it, doesn't that describe the majority of well paying jobs? (I say that as someone who bailed on my well paying tech career to work in the non-profit space for that very reason)

I met a lawyer in a yoga studio changeroom once.

I own a corner lot around the corner from the studio, and we were going through a really rough winter in Canada. So much so that I was worried about somebody slipping on my sidewalk, even though I was doing my best to keep it safely walkable.

(It was so cold out, and we were getting pelted with so much snow for days that the salt was literally not melting anything.)

After talking calmly about the yoga class we just took, and learning that he was a lawyer, I decided to ask him what might happen if somebody slipped and hurt themselves on my sidewalk.

Seemed somewhat trivial to non-lawyer me, as the city I live in tries to do their best to clean the sidewalk of snow, and so do I.

The city actually owns the sidewalk. And I was curious who would be at fault.

His demeanor totally flipped. He started ranting about how he would sue the city, and sue the homeowner, just to cover all of his bases for the plaintiff.

His blood pressure skyrocketed, and I was only able to escape after listening to 15 minutes of his insanely over the top ranting.

Thank goodness we never crossed paths again!

What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time.

(Usually when you slip and fall on ice in Canada, you just shrug it off and keep walking. There's ice everywhere in the winter. It's Canada.)

> What a drag to think of treating your fellow man like that all the time.

You asked him to think about it. Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo, so I’m glad he knew how to advocate for his clients.

I asked him a simple question, not to rant for 15 minutes straight.

He got extremely worked up over a simple question is the point I was trying to make.

>Slipping and falling could cause a life-changing injury that no amount of money can undo,

Which is easily prevented in a number of ways in the middle of a Canadian winter.

Like preparing for a coming storm by buying what you need to survive it beforehand, or wearing ice grips on your shoes if you insist on venturing out into what is sure to be a slippy-step every 10 feet or so.

Further reading about slips and falling on ice in Canada if you're interested [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/legal-pointers-on-sl...

And this is why I hate law and politics. Rather than about learning and prevention of accidents it's about how much revenge you can get out of the intentionally vague text called law.

Just think about it. According to your logic the world would be better if 5 people slip on the sidewalk and the owner of the sidewalk burns in hell.

> something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law

I can't find the citation now, but I remember reading recently that children of programmers are 6x more likely to become programmers than other children, but children of lawyers are 13x more likely to become lawyers (and children of doctors 25x more likely to become doctors).

"I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York law firm, but it turned out to be a very strange place. From the outside, everybody wanted to get in, and from the inside, everybody wanted to get out."

— Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, on his “seven months, and three days” as a Sullivan & Cromwell associate, during his commencement address at Hamilton College on May 22, 2016.

- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law

Yes, but it must be like what IT has become to some extent. Many people go into it because it's a (seemingly) high paying job with lots of jobs available, but they aren't passionate about it. Then get disillusioned about it. So you have a high rate of dissatisfaction amongst professionals in the field. Personal experience you can go from 50k/yr to 250k/yr and still be depressed if you're not excited about what you are doing.

Wife's divorce lawyer.. Guy has a small office in small town. Has one paralegal working w him. Charges his $250/hr. Not much stress. If he works around full-time per week, pays his paralegal and small office - he's doing pretty good by most salary standards.

I used to be a Lawyer and transitioned to IT, though my Law experience is not in the US.

I agree that there is a big misconception about lawyers and wages in most places. In Brazil, where I started, some lawyers really do make a lot of money but the vast majority of them earn barely above the minimum wage (doesn't help that Brazil has more Law Schools than most places due to bad higher education policies).

One of the reasons I left Law was because I burnt out. In my case, the main reason was mostly a mismatch of personalities. In Law, specially Corporate Law that I practiced, you just need to be ready and on point for a fight at any given time. Be it in a contract negotiation, a government inspection that is not totally according to terms or sometimes even fighting your own client that really wants you to say it is ok to do something that clearly is not and he is going to regret it. I just didn't have the personality to do that day in, day out.

I haven't experienced burning out in Tech yet, but I imagine it would be completely different. In my case, even in stressful times I enjoy that most of the day to day is just me, trying to solve problems by myself.

So, to address your question of "do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law?", I'd say:

If you have the type of personality that gets energized by being and interacting with people, even in a combative manner, "burning out in Law" is probably more adequate since you can can still take a break and come back.

If, on the other hand, too many people interaction and specially contentious interactions drains your energy, "burning out in Tech" with computers is probably better.

When I try to summarize my case, I usually say:

If as a kid you would enjoy more being in a debates club, you will like being a Laywer. If, on the other hand, a robotics club seems more enticing, then tech is more likely.

In the end, burning out is burning out, in any profession. The question is more: can you go back to being energized after taking a break? And that has more to do if you what you do aligns with who you are.

Summary: entry-level jobs dried up, so people are going to law school instead. Also political motivations.

Editorial: More lawyers make the country more complicated and less competitive. We need more and better people going into industrial and medical skilled trades. Think CAD/CAM, not plumber. On the other hand, I think basic legal education would probably have been more relevant than almost anything I’ve ever learned in a classroom, and law school might have been worth it just for my own purposes. Minus the political activism of course, which I guess is center stage now.

> Think CAD/CAM, not plumber.

Have you tried to hire a skilled plumber, landscaper, carpenter, or mason in a major city lately? There's a massive tradesperson shortage.

You can thank the unlimited backstop of federal student loans for people to study at any subpar school in any number of useless degrees.

This has siphoned off the historical supply of labor in trade schools.

You can also blame society for undervaluing tradesmen. If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that even though we are able to recognize how essential a lot of jobs are, we will still refuse to respect or properly compensate the people who work them.

> If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that even though we are able to recognize how essential a lot of jobs are, we will still refuse to respect or properly compensate the people who work them.

Maybe for some types of frontline workers, but certainly not for skilled tradesman, who are making bank right now and have for at least the past 20 years since I've lived in my current city. And in terms of "refuse to respect", honestly I think it's the opposite: supply has been so high for skilled tradesmen in my area that it is customers who have consistently been disrespected. I can't tell you the number of times I've hired a plumber, AC guy or other worker, confirmed a time, and then that person just doesn't show up, or at best you get a call 15 minutes before saying they're canceling. It always baffled me how these businesses could give such poor service (I mean, a lot of this type of work is referral based), but it's because demand is just so high they can do that.

Of course it's not everyone, and once I found a good, reliable plumber I hung on for dear life, but the lesson I've learned is that workers follow same incentives of supply and demand as employers do.

Ask yourself this though: why aren't people going to trade schools more often? If it's such a high demand career, with such reasonable pay, then surely it should attract talent; especially when one considers the extreme affordability of trade school in comparison to university education.

But we don't see this, why? I posit that it is because people who work trades are looked down on socially. People point at the mechanic, or plumber, or HVAC technician and say to their kids "you have to go college so you don't end up like that guy".

One of the major advantages of being a small businessperson is rarely talked about: the ability to minimise taxes.

You can live in your workplace, have a company car, company utilities, company equipment. Some customers will pay you cash. You can easily allocate business income to your spouse or children (if you live in a country without combined income taxes). You can buy products at wholesale rates.

When you're just an employee, you usually have very few of these tax optimisation opportunities.

The other factor is that the education system is dominated by people with university degrees (ie. teachers), who consciously or not direct their students to pursue the same lifestyle and career values as them.

People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them."

I would never say that about mechanics, plumbers, and HVAC technicians. They have skills that I respect and value. I often ask them what was wrong and their analytic and problem solving skills often impress me.

I got a new HVAC system with a 2 stage compressor. Everything was working fine until the summer when it would shut off cooling just when it got hot even when the thermostat was saying it was cooling.

The technician determined that the system worked fine in "low" mode and when the thermostat went into "high" mode the enter system shut off.

He traced the thermostat wire through the crawl space and found a splice. 20 years earlier when the house was built someone spliced the cable and only spliced together a few wires that were needed for that simple system. He connected all of them and now the 2 stage compressor works great.

It took him an hour of debug going back and forth measuring stuff with a multimeter inside and outside.

I was impressed.

> People I know look at restaurant workers and retail store employees as the people you say "You go to college so you don't end up like them."

That certainly happens even more often, but within that statement is also an implication that one must go to college to avoid that kind of work. And why is that kind of work so bad? Mostly because they have to deal with people who treat them like garbage because they think so little of them.

Well I don't treat them like garbage. I treat them like human beings but sometimes I wonder about how a 40 year old person ended up working in a fast food place.

I know there are lots of reasons and many of them are outside of the control of the person.

I should really change my statement to "Learn some skills whether a 4 year university degree or technical / vocational / community college so you don't end up working fast food or retail."

Why is that work so bad? The low pay is the main reason. You can learn the skills required in a few hours or days. I feel like their managers and employers treat them worse than the customers.

I am absolutely in favor for more education and financial assistance for higher education. The low end jobs are the first to be automated away. Fast food and warehouse robots are going to get more popular and I already use the self checkout line 80% of the time.

Jobs for people without specialized skills are going to get rarer in the future.

My parents steered me away from the thought of going into the trades due to the idea of working with your body/hands vs working with your mind. More or less saying "how will you be able to find work when you're physically ill/injured", of course this can happen to the mind too. For a lot of people at least the body goes before the mind does. Plus for some time my parents were in unskilled trades so maybe that was also an angle.

I don't think people generally point to tradesmen as someone you don't want to be, but rather the trades are never considered because a four year college degree is seen as an absolute prerequisite for class standing.

The main reason is just because it's hard. For all the talk you see on HN about boring office jobs, the physicality of a job like plumbing can really put a ton of wear and tear on your body by the time you're in your 50s.

This one's massive, and probably the biggest culprit. I was fortunate enough to be in an area where you could choose the default high school (college prep), or be bussed to the regional vocational school where you alternate doing one week of academic work and one week of your trade. And of course, those that went to the vocational school were looked down on as being dumber. And once you're in the college prep high school, it's just always looming over you: what colleges you looking at? What major do you want to study? What are your safety schools and reach schools?? You are looking at colleges right now while you're only 15 and a freshman and have no idea what the fuck you want to do for the rest of your life right???

And then that's how you land up with the only 25% of kids that enter college actually graduating. So many kids who aren't sure what they want to do (or just straight up aren't cut out for that kind of work) are shoved into college, rack up debt, drop out with nothing to show for it, and don't know where to go next.

There was only one kid in my middle school that went to the regional tech school. His parents were both PhDs and he got into MIT. That’s probably an outlier, because many if not most of his classmates were only there because they got expelled from their local school. Regardless, he said it was awesome.

I hired a plumber who took a sledgehammer to my bathroom and the demanded 10x the money to fix it.

I’ve hired contractors that ripped out all the copper and left.

I lived in a house where the owner had hired a landscaper that got paid but didn’t show up for a year.

Nobody needs more than a month of training and a YouTube account to do these jobs. The problem is not skill; it’s trust. Low skill jobs unfortunately attract a lot of unsavory characters, and push out good people.

Where I live plumbers make more than an average software engineer. Owner operator plumbers make close to half a million a year. And don’t get me started on Plumbers operating a min of 5 trucks they make atleast a million and half. I know this because my brother law is a plumber.

What's a plumber do with 5 trucks?? You can't drive more than one, right?!

A plumber with five trucks isn't so much a plumber anymore as a business owner employing five other plumbers.

And the reality of that is almost certainly not as rosy as you are being led to believe.

I'm in California and I had a water leak on the property that cost me $500 on my water bill. My water provider offered a credit for the overage if I can prove that I fixed it. A local plumber charged me $400, provided me with the exact paperwork to send in, and I got a $500 credit.

What a wild economy. I have no complaints, I understand why it works that way. And all my plumber had to do was smile, provide a bit of customer service, and repair one pipe.

Plumbers produce real value, i.e. the total value of the world is higher after they finish their work. This cannot be said for lawyers.

Or most software developers.

Software developers make the world a better place.

Unfortunately, most of they ways in which they do so were already done in the 70s. It's just repeating that work in more modern languages / stacks.

Some software developers make the world a better place. Many produce software that ultimately not that useful, and in the worst case scenario, actively harmful to society. Is the world a better place because of Apple, Amazon, or Google? Eh, you can make an argument either way. Is it a better place because of Facebook or Twitter? Unambiguously no.

That may be true, but the same could also be said about plumbing.

That's an interesting question.

Some software is valuable according to this definition, e.g. Google search. Some is not, e.g. Google ad algorithms.

Software is an enabler. It depends what it's enabling.

Would be interesting to know the proportions.

To clarify a piece of what you've said, devs working on Google ad algorithms are valuable to companies who are advertising. Your point is a higher level one that what these companies are buying from Google isn't of net value to society overall, even if it is of value to them.

Google search may be useful in the present time it is used, but Google logs people’s searches and effectively spies on the most personal thoughts and ideas people have. This could prove to be dangerous to those that are considered to be outside of mainstream society, etc.

> Where I live plumbers make more than an average software engineer

But the plumbers all use Google and have iPhones... But they aren't getting any stock from the companies making these as part of their comp package.

A folksy saying to compliment your editorial: the only lawyer in town drives a Prius; once a competitor moves in, they both drive Bentleys.

You can import CAD/CAM people on the cheap, but lawyers is pretty hard.

I know a few companies that are outsourcing legal stuff. The internet makes it easy.

Man, so many people are going to be in for a world of hurt:

1. The increased applications and class sizes means there will be more competition for a smaller number of jobs when these folks graduate (tech is automating away a lot of legal work, too).

2. As others have commented, a huge percentage of lawyers regret going to law school. This is actually in direct contrast to many other professional degrees, e.g. MBAs score very high on the "I'd still do it again" question.

3. The regret sentiment is especially high among anything outside of a top 50 program.

1: I'm not sure how much larger class sizes will be, since law schools are somewhat constrained in the short term because of room sizes (especially during COVID) and faculty availability. Schools are undoubtedly hurting for revenues due to losses last year, but I think on average there will be less than 10% more students admitted at selective schools. Lower-tier schools may bring on adjuncts to teach more courses, but I wouldn't recommend going to those schools (especially if they're having core courses taught by non-faculty).

2/3: Yes, many regret going to law school. It is 50% more expensive than an MBA since it's an extra year (though summer internships pay very good money, which defrays this somewhat). My recommendation to law school prospects is to only go if:

(1) you get into a top-3 school

(2) you get a half-ride at a top 20 school, or

(3) you are absolutely dead set on being a lawyer and get into a top-30 school

disclosure: I went to a T14 school on a scholarship, worked in biglaw for 7 years, and now run a startup. I don't regret going to law school. (T14 is the designation for the top 14 law schools, which are relatively fixed in the USNews rankings.)

Fwiw I don't think that going to a non-top MBA is generally worth it either... It's very expensive and employer sponsorship isn't that common.

But I'm not surprised to learn that most MBAs don't regret going since it's basically 2 years of partying with an internship in between (during which you mainly party). My partner's 2 years in bschool were 2 of the best years of my life.

Isn't that stressful for a regular person who has sub-100k in savings? Racking up debt while not earning any income for two years in your mid-20s or 30s would be pretty tough for me. I wouldn't feel like partying in that context.

From my experience with my partner's bschool, most of the classmates were either wealthy, or very talented and had sponsorship (or both)

Is tech really automating away legal work? Maybe secertarial work related to lawyers, but i doubt its automating away actual legal work.

It’s automating the document review part, to be sure. Basically massive parallel grep against gigabytes or terabytes of preserved electronic documents. Paper document sleuthing (“doc review”) used to be the most common (and most reviled) work of first year associates. The first pass is now automated and so they’re doing much more valuable second-pass work now.

Tech is automating away a lot of the work being done by people currently called lawyers. Whether you think that work is "secretarial" or "actual legal work" is a matter of opinion.

you forget that lawyers can create work for themselves, no matter how easy it may be

I thought that's what paralegals were for?

There are too many lawyers and a lot of lawyers end up doing things that a paralegal would do.

I work in legal tech (AI). No, it's not automating away work, much more work is being done to increase ability to do _interesting_ and otherwise challenging work (say, more efficient research loops, so a lawyer can uncover more legal connections between documents).

Our spinoff company (https://tramatm.com/) automates a lot of work around trademark registration/protection and the research that comes with that.[0]

They are new in the game but doing pretty well.

[0] https://vacuumlabs.com/blog/lifevacuum/how-to-build-a-google...

The academic rigour of MBA programs vs law probably have a lot to do with the higher satisfaction scores.

MBA program usually requires several years of work experience. In some cases, your company may pay for it, so it's possible students in those programs don't share the same level of stress. I spoke to an investment banker about his experience when I was looking into doing one. For someone who was working 80 hours/week for years, an MBA was a vacation.

When I was growing up there was this idea that the best of the best became doctors (physicians) and lawyers; and that these were well paid careers. Today that’s broadly no longer the case.

Both professions certainly have a top tier that earns a lot (top firm partner, top specialist surgeon) that does very well but the vast majority in both professions aren’t particularly well paid and also are no longer attracting the “best and brightest” out of graduating classes. Your typical established doctor these days makes what would be considered an early career salary at FAANG—and that’s before considering the crazy amounts of debt that many law and medical students take on. Many lawyers (outside top firms) make very little considering the amount of training required.

A savvy tradesman these days (e.g. Plumber) can easily make more than most lawyers and even many physicians. I’ve cited that a lot when giving career advice to those being pressured into a college degree when it’s probably not the right fit for them.

Money isn't everything, there's a status component related to those professions (especially if you are coming from poorer background) and a lot of people like the idea of being a doctor or a lawyer. TBH you have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy sitting in front of a screen 8H a day to work on stuff most people would find meaningless (eg. getting paid to optimize ad revenue, speed up PHP execution to save data center energy usage...).

Likewise being a plumber isn't that respectable either.

And let's not even get into the dating/marriage aspect of it.

In my job, I get exposed to the owners of plumbing, construction, and other blue collar industries. From what I've seen, their houses are huge, their spouses are gorgeous, and they live in regions where they get to have an incredible quality of life.

The owner of a construction company told me once that he makes a 15% profit per year, and he charges far less than the competition because he would feel slimy taking more.

My impression as well.

Tradesmen that can run a business and aren’t in the auto mechanics space, the oil industry, or working (vs supervising) in construction seem to do so well.

Those three are caveats based on anecdotal evidence on industry trends and manual labor injury risks.

Occasionally the status thing will come up regarding jobs and I find it interesting. I suppose HN tends to view software developers as high-status, probably because of its roots in the bay sate startup scene, where to imagine, yeah.

But when I tell people what I do. A large number still don’t know what the fuck it actually is, outside “something with computers”.

My impression is lawyers, doctors, bankers and consultants are the highest status among the general public, closely followed by engineers. Tradesmen below all of those, not quite at the bottom but in the bottom 60-70 percent.

and that perception of status is largely dictated by the mass media and movie businesses. Portraying a job as high-status makes it high-status in the eye of the audience, that's why it's generally accepted as higher status to be an actor than to be a backend developer. You 'll rarely see a show that ridicules actors but computer nerds are regularly ridiculed

I mean that's part of it, but the media/movie industry doesn't operate in a vacuum. People would rather watch a medical or legal drama than a drama about plumbers. Dealing directly with other people in high stakes situations lends itself to an entertaining show.

And even if most doctors/lawyers don't have a job as interesting as the stories depicted in Hollywood, they still don't have to get their hands dirty in the way that plumbers do. I'm also not sure that being a pediatrician or a dude who writes wills is considered high status, higher than a plumber sure, but not the same thing as being a specialty surgeon or a defense attorney.

Further, the circles that "high status" workers run in are more likely to include extremely successful/wealthy people due to friends made in college and grad school. The top 20 medical schools churn out over a thousand students per year, and some of those will surely go on to do high profile work.

Engineers are a bit of weird middle ground in this - computer nerds that run in elite circles (top schools, successful in SV, etc.) or that work in high stakes environments (mainly security) don't seem to be considered low status or ridiculed by the media. There may be a few nerd stereotypes mixed in, but if you watch enough medical or legal dramas you will find stereotypes for those professions too. Same goes for finance bros, cops, teachers, etc.

However, I agree a random computer nerd is considered somewhat low status. People that work in IT or are developers at random companies are looked at a bit more like tradespeople. It's not too surprising though that how hard a job is to get relates to its status.

Would the world be a better place if people stopped paying so much attention to status? Probably, I'm not saying that this perception of status is the right way to go about things, or even that the status "rankings" are rational. I'm just saying it is not caused by the media. Perhaps reinforced, but there are plenty of underlying reasons. Going to college was a high status thing even back when movies were still silent. Conversely, the US military has tried very hard to glorify itself in the media, but joining the military is still considered a low status thing to do.

Ya people worried about status always seem to be the people not in the trade.

Excluding the trades really tied to the oil industry or tough construction work… every debt-free plumber/carpenter/electrician/HVAC seems to be A-ok happy. If they have small businesses acumen, these types seem to be financial rocketships by their 30’s.

The plumber who is making more than a doctor is likely also a business owner. There are two skills needed there, the actual plumbing and also running a business. To be particularly successful, you need to be good at both.

The key bit here is that good business sense is oftentimes more important than your degree or even profession. A successful plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc who builds a large enough business can make millions of dollars per year.

It is hard to do that, but it is possible.

> A savvy tradesman these days (e.g. Plumber) can easily make more than most lawyers and even many physicians. I’ve cited that a lot when giving career advice to those being pressured into a college degree when it’s probably not the right fit for them.

Sure. A savvy football player can make more than most lawyers and many physicians, too. It's risky to make life decisions like this hoping that you'll be at the very top of the range for a particular profession. The vast majority of plumbers make less than even the median starting salary of lawyers in private firms.

Amazing how these two articles were timed to land right on top of each other....it's almost like it was intentional.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Law School Loses Luster as Debts Mount and Salaries Stagnate"

The Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...

https://archive.is/3hGsA

Other side of the coin:

“Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt.

Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...

It’s basically “elite overproduction”. As someone with no dog in this fight I think it’s good in some ways that the amount of law school admissions aren’t being artificially restricted like they are for MD, bad that a lot of these loans are through the government and non-dischargeable, tying down people for a long time with debt and may still end up being forgiven, and interesting that oversupply of lawyers creates a bifurcated market rather than lowering prices across the board.

A lot of these problems probably stem from the government loans - if you’re not a school with a reputation to uphold, there’s pretty much no reason not to admit as many people as you reasonably can and charge them as much as possible. Of course with no loans, a lot of people from poorer backgrounds wouldn’t be able to go to school without some form of charity from universities or private donors which is also pretty bad.

Is U of Miami a target school? Meaning do law firms come to campus in order to recruit? Because that is what matters for law school. If you're paying that kind of tuition, you owe it to yourself to do due diligence on how its graduates perform.

Back in the day you only had the school's published stats to go on. Those are gently manipulated to show the best possible outcome, e.g. "95% of students found employment within 6 months of graduation".

Today you have LinkedIn. Type in a search for U Miami and do a quick count of how many recent grads come up, and where they're working.

It's not surprising that LSAT scores are higher due to the additional time to prep and the ability to control the testing environment. And in reality, it doesn't matter that much. Schools will sort students just like they always have, and students will end up roughly where they otherwise would have. The whole application process is on a curve.

It's also worth noting that over the last decade, it's been increasingly easy to get into prestigious law schools. Students got wise to the fact that law school costs a ton and many students don't get high-paying jobs. As a result, applications went down and lower-scoring students got into better schools. In some ways, this most recent stat may be mostly a reversion to the prior mean.

How much does the LSAT saturate though? The SAT, particularly the math section, is already very saturated at the top percentiles, which make up almost the entire application pool to the elite schools. That's why those schools basically just use the SAT as a quick screener now, if they use it at all. Raising scores even more would further diminish its utility and could increase the impact of a silly mistake.

The LSAT isn't nearly as saturated at the top. As the article mentions, in normal years there are only about 700 applicants in the 175-180 range (roughly the top .5%). Compare this with the SAT, where there are over 50,000 students annually in the 1500+ range.

Even at Harvard and Yale Law, the median score is outside this range (173), and all other schools have a lower median.

Many comments here assume that going to law school == becoming a lawyer. This is not always true. Many go to law school since it a degree that you can use in many other business fields even without practicing law.

Apparently med school applications were up 18% (in 2020). Which surprises me, I would think COVID might have scared more people off.

https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/preparing-medica...

People are actually inspired by it.

Their perception is actually being a doctor is so far away that things will be solved by then.

I would think COVID might have scared more people off

Or talking to doctors, or listening to what doctors write and say: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n...

Great article. Unfortunately medicine continues to attract endless applicants. Universities have worked out that people will eat broken glass and pay for the privelege if they think it will raise their status.

> if they think it will raise their status.

It's still true though - it's one of the highest status professions out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuP1_f8Z-xQ

That was a sobering read

just wait until they realize being a doctor at a hospital is more bureaucratic than actually practicing medicine.

Isn't that the case for any white collar job. Just look at the endless complaints on HN from developers about meetings.

Every medical resident in history has that experience, but the majority still do the work everyday. There is some level of disillusionment in every discipline.

One university in the UK is offering students a £10K bung to defer their studies for a year.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/22/exeter-uni...

Insane: https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-student-debt-low-sal...

From the thread link:

> Experts attribute the crush of applications to a number of factors, particularly the slowdown in the entry-level job market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Law school and other graduate programs historically become more popular when jobs are tougher to come by in slow economies. Law school applicants shot up nearly 18% in 2002, amid the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble. The number of people applying also climbed nearly 4% in 2009, amid the Great Recession.

> But current events separate from the economy also prompted more people to consider a law degree this cycle, said Susan Krinsky, the council’s executive vice president for operations. The death of George Floyd, the national reckoning over systemic racism and inequality, and the death of iconic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all focused attention on the rule of law and the role lawyers play in pushing for a more equitable society. Election years also tend to yield more law school applicants, she noted.

Has anyone ever done a study on the costs/benefits of funding public defenders? Better funded public defenders, I imagine, would result in fewer and shorter prison sentences (saving money), but I guess also have some potential for an increase in crime (costing money).

I don't know about studies, but San Francisco has had an elected public defender's office since 1921. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Public_Defender%... and http://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/hrlr-online/the-publics-defende... An elected office means they can more freely lobby for funding and changes in policy. OTOH, if the office is elected, there's a chance voters might elect a "tough on crime" public defender. https://www.kqed.org/news/11738958/only-sf-elects-its-public... (But see the previous HRLR article, which suggests that public defender office elections are rarely contested, even in moderate or relatively conservative states, which interestingly contain most of the few such offices.)

An elected Public Defender isn't valuable background for other elected positions (unlike an elected D.A.), especially in moderate-to-conservative polities, so the kind of people interested in running for election usually don't want the job, and the kind of people who would want the job won't want for election (unless the election is pro forma because it is uncontested.)

That’s just one variable

If public defenders get better, the canonical theory is that the prosecution will be forced to make stronger cases with better evidence, improving the criminal justice system overall.

However, if the number of falsely accused people weren’t high in the first place, there shouldn’t be a significant drop in convictions if the prosecution cab keep up. If they can’t , then presumably crime rates would increase and there would be public pressure to increase funding for police and prosecution and less funding for public defenders, and then you’d end up where you started

> but I guess also have some potential for an increase in crime

What? Why?

Public defender might help the innocent stay free. But if you actually did the crime and were caught you're probably still going to jail barring some impropriety being involved.

I don't think anyone with actual power over the issues wants shorter prison sentences. The public loses money on prisons, but there is an industry of basically sucking profits off all the different things that prisoners do throughout the day, and in also taking a cut for other things like how they broker relationships like which healthcare providers get paid, etc. They take orders-of-magnitude too high profits on moving money, making phone calls, video calls, ordering books and stuff, mailing packages, buying some ramen noodles, privileging someone with an ankle bracelet, or charging rent at a halfway house (they own those too), or just the slave or near-slave labor wages for doing a job, etc. And the states get stuff like free firefighters, as we all know. A privileged minority is gaining all the real estate for the new prisons, offices, halfway houses, too. They want to keep doing what they are doing. And it's not just the private prison industry or anything it's just the whole thing is this bloodsucking.

It is corrupt extraction of human ability and based on suffering, it is just not tracked closely. People do time for the worst things. Using drugs is not a real crime worthy of punishment, for example, but people just sit and sit and work and work for really dumb stuff like that. Justice system seems clearly not some rehabilitative thing where people involved are helping in good faith. That is maybe what they imply on tv crime shows or something.

In theory a cheaper reform is not hiring prosecutors who pursue cases with weak evidence, or who don't throw kids in jail for crazy things like taking pictures of each other, or who ask for lower sentences.

The prosecutor has a much bigger influence on outcomes than a public defender.

Every year from 2000-2011 had more applications.

https://report.lsac.org/View.aspx?Report=AdmissionTrendsAppl...

https://report.lsac.org/VolumeSummary.aspx

I see the increase in people wanting to become lawyers as a negative signal about society. It suggests to me that the law is becoming too complex, that people litigate too much, and this complexity and propensity to litigate becomes a cost.

It’s not an entirely thought out hunch on my end but I think it ties in with how complex the tax code is. To me the tax code is needlessly complex. Sure it’ll likely never fit on a single page but does it need to require tombs and be so complex that smart individuals spend time and brain cells finding ways around it to save corporations and the wealthy money instead of working on science or something else that would benefit society?

The UK has an office for tax simplification. I'm not sure I've seen any evidence of their work though.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-tax-si...

Wonder how much impact shows like Better Call Saul have on this

There are too many LS grads already. Why pile on debt wo a secure job?

There is no such thing as a secure job in my experience

Honestly if you look at the direction the US is going, federal politicians are getting wealthier and wealthier while the middle class erodes into a larger and larger dependent lower class. Most of our congressman are lawyers. You have about two paths to wealth in America. Start a tech company hope to get bought big tech, become a lawyer hope to become a high up well connected politician. Because those connections are proving to pay off.

Are CS applications surging too? What about other fields? It seems like more people are applying to college in general.

Both my current and previous university, year after year keep having record numbers of applicants. And IIRC the CS program is getting more and more competitive.

I'm not sure about liberal-arts though.

I wonder if it's people not taking a gap year, after all there isn't much point if you can't travel.

I think a lot of people took a gap year last year (who otherwise wouldn’t have). Why pay for college if you won’t get to actually go?

Many of those people are showing up now as applicants.

To graduate faster

That's perhaps the logical answer if the certificate is the outcome you care about. But I know a lot of students who decided that it made more sense just to take the year off and go back to school when things were hopefully more normal again.

I could have been clearer. I agree with you [in that I wouldn't have personally delayed], but I think a substantial fraction of the college-bound crowd made that tradeoff calculation.

Bringing an anecdotal evidence to your question. That's actually what I did. Currently taking a gap year (more like two) to go study a MSc in AI. I have a previous background and experience in finance.

At this point I assume every young, college aged male I speak with is majoring in software. I'm right more often than wrong. That doesn't account for changing majors, etc, and I'm certainly biased.

I always thought law would be beneficial as a business owner, but not as a profession by itself.

It would, you can take a community college course in business law and save yourself a lot of time.

There are many aspects of law that pertain to business outside of a general business law course

I was in law school for 2 semesters. I got a job at a top m&a and societary office, in one of the highest profile avenues in the tropical capital I lived in, as an intern. It was summer, lunchtime, and I was walking on said avenue when my boss crossed me. He stopped and all of a sudden reached for my tie knot, to check if the button behind it was correctly buttoned (is this the right word?). He proceeded to tell me I was an employee of his high-tier office even during lunchtime and I should always keep appearances. Luckily I'm deeply anti-violence, because my first instinct when he touched my tie was to smash his face. I didn't return to the office, and soon after that I quit law school. By that time my tactics to circumvent the office proxy and access forbidden websites had gone viral :P.

> Luckily I'm deeply anti-violence, because my first instinct when he touched my tie was to smash his face.

this is contradictory

Lol

This cracks me up because I had an individual in my fraternity who was an advocate to integrity to the highest degree. “How we conduct ourselves when no one is watching” type of individual. Your boss had good intentions but it just comes off as too much for the average joe like you or I.

Not only that. He didn't ask for permission and acted fast. I don't know where you live but I'm pretty sure I would be excused if I had punched him, these are not safe lands. We didn't exchange a few words, or even eyesights - I was not aware he was approaching until he was. Also this particular button hurts by adam's apple so this is stupid as fuck as it is hidden all times by the knot. How you dress has nothing to do with integrity - that's a stupid idea.

My brother just did a joint JD/MBA, he said it was one of the hardest things he's ever done. I think it was a pretty smart move to hedge the JD though, due to many of the anecdotes in this thread.

scary. Also a bad signal for the future (in the US).

Having a lawyer or two as your indentured servant would amplify your rights in this country (US)

There are alot of privacy benefits possible

Nice to see this becoming more economical to do

another red flag of an impending crash?

How so?

Interesting how you came to this conclusion, can you elaborate? I can understand the argument for how increasing law/regulations is detrimental for society in the longrun(ex. europe) but to directly cause a crash is a bit dramatic

Phew. Good luck to all of them.

I was part of the crowd that used law school to avoid entering the job market on the tail end of the 2007 crisis. I actually really enjoyed law school itself; it's a good fit for people with brains that are a combination of analytical and philosophical. Of course, it's trite at this point to mention the reality that law school does not prepare you whatsoever for the job of being a lawyer. Imagine if med school classes were all about the 'idea' of medicine, the philosophy of medicine, that sort of thing, and actually practicing medicine was limited to electives and extracurriculars.

I went to a school that was T20 and on the cusp of being T14, so a good school. I had a half tuition scholarship on $40,000+/yr and still walked away with nearly $150k in student loans.

Law schools are extremely cheap for universities to run, but they can get away with charging astronomical tuition because everyone is convinced law school will make them rich. (It won't, unless you have a dedication to the work of being a biglaw attorney that most people don't have.) Universities love law schools because they can use them to pay for more expensive programs (science labs, etc.).

The idea of making multiple six figures is almost universally a myth that schools love to cultivate. You only really have a shot at this if you go to a T20 school (or are highly connected). And even if you do get this sort of job, it is soul sucking work; your job at that sort of firm is simply to maximize billings. Nothing of value is created. You will work 70/80 hour weeks creating nothing. I had many friends from school go to these sort of firms and, almost to a one, they have all quit the biglaw scene.

But what the law schools don't tell you is how oversaturated the legal employment market is, and oversaturation => depressed salaries. If you are not one of the few to go biglaw (or do not want biglaw), good luck. I worked as a criminal prosecutor because I found the work interesting. I started at $39k -- in a fairly major city, too. I know so many people with eye-wateringly expensive law degrees who are thrilled to be finding contract or temp work at $20 an hour.

As for me, it took me about six months to realize the practice of law wasn't for me and a total of six years to get out of it. I ended up rediscovering a love of programming I had had from when I was a kid, and spend 4 years self-studying CS/software dev. I transitioned to a software dev role going on 3 years ago now and feel like a new person. I can't really say I regret law school, firstly because I met my wife and many good friends there and in the legal profession generally, but secondly because there's a chance having the degree from a well known school could pay off down the road in some sort of management role. However, was it worth the cost? Almost certainly not.

I'll close by saying, if you are someone who loves building things, you will likely not do well with the law. It is mental work, yes, and logic is involved definitely, but the 'products' you will be creating are motions, briefs, and memos. If you are someone who has a love for collaborative problem solving, you will likely hate it. There is very little I found collaborative in law. Even in law school, absurdly competitive attitudes abound, and in the big firms themselves, the ones who will succeed are in constant 'cold war'-style competition for things like partner track. If your work is litigation, then by definition the work is the polar opposite of collaborative. This was what probably put me off the practice the most; I would be handling a criminal case and my brain would be aching for an easily available compromise, but being an advocate means fighting for your client (in my case, the "people").

Here's some not so positive data - "recent University of Miami law school graduates borrowed a median of $163k, two years later were earning $59k or less."

That's a considerable increase since the dot-com bubble. Being in law gives you a considerable salary compared to other jobs. Also, it attracts many people because of its salary, but that's not always the case; the ones that receive high salaries are the people in the top part of the pyramid. It might take a decade but if you're willing to make the grind then, go for it.

I know I’ve considered applying to law school because I want someone to fight these damn lockdowns.

I’m curious how much of this is really a combination of more study time and people seeing value in law. Between election cases, lockdowns, etc law has been the center of a lot of the last year.

As a potential law student how would you frame your argument against lockdowns in a world where trust in subject matter experts is down across the board (on both side, pro and against lockdowns)?

Irrelevant. You’d have to find statute and precedent for the authorities required in enforcement. Law is not supposed to be rhetoric.

IANAPLS but I'd suggest looking into all the risks that are being completely ignored to chase the one risk that may not that be that big anymore, perhaps never was to warrant the first round of lockdowns to begin with. Who is profitting by keeping the public's focus on COVID like a laser beam and off everything else?

Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Google, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Pfizer, Moderna, …

There’s quite a few people I know as well who are considering going to school as well.

The gist has been the same, the constitution doesn’t appear to be being followed and as a lawyer you have the ability to defend your rights.

I’m not sure what caused this particular spike (a lot of alone time?) but I know a lot of people are feeling this way.

In terms of an argument: 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, 14th are amendments are clearly being violated in many regions. Further, given the risk profile of this disease (mitigation’s, high survival rate, etc), there’s no reasonable argument to abridge rights. Particularly, for a long period of time

Can you describe why you think the Constitution isn't being followed? That's kind of a generic argument. "People might believe something" without there being any rational basis for it.

In CA and NY the Supreme Court ruled laws baring religious practices as unconstitutional for one.

So, clearly there’s some issue there.

In LA they were shutting off peoples utilities for not following mayoral edicts.

The first amendment for peaceable assembly doesn’t go away — period — during time of crisis. Facebook has a portal setup where the CA Secretary of State is marking content to ban (court case is making its way through the federal circuits)

Arguably, the 9th amendment is being violated as it related to vaccine passports. https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt9-2-1/ALD...

There is an absolute insane number of issues with the past year... I can go on and on

The ninth amendment means whatever someone wants it to mean, Louisiana enforced quarantines in the 19th century but I never see that mentioned

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact”

Anyone can hire a lawyer for money. A lawyer will happily argue whatever quirky take on the constitution you have, and happily bill you per hour as they lose in court.

I think a gofundme funded by likeminded people to support your doomed lawsuits would be a lot more cost efficient than going to law school.

You'd be surprised to learn that the 1st Amendment is the strongest it has ever been: I'd recommend reading Anthony Lewis's "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate." It covers how people were imprisoned for criticizing the government from as late as the early 1800s to the early 20th century in the United States. The power of the 1st Amendment is a new concept.

There are plenty of lawyers out there already who are perfectly capable of making cogent arguments as to why lockdowns are unlawful. But the problem is that they are lawful, so even the most eloquent argument will still lose in court. Adding more voices to the chorus won't help, in the same way that having more attorneys arguing that speed limits and income taxes are unconstitutional won't help.

On the other hand, going to law school will help you learn the law, so perhaps you will come out with more realistic views than when you went in. :-)

You assume these people entering law school don’t intend to go into politics.

I suspect a large number do intend to make the laws.

Also it’s not entirely accurate that lockdowns are lawful. There’s been several Supreme Court cases that have limited what they can do in the past several months.

Spending 6 figures to go to law school for the sole purpose of entering politics is a terrible waste of money. The best way to enter politics is to run in a local race and convince people to vote for you. It'll cost you a lot less than that, and other people may even pay for your campaign. Once you're there, there are staff lawyers to help draft legislation.

> Also it’s not entirely accurate that lockdowns are lawful. There’s been several Supreme Court cases that have limited what they can do in the past several months.

The only one I'm aware of is an order that prohibited New York from imposing more significant restrictions on churches than shops. That's not a decision that lockdowns are unlawful; it's a decision that they need to be applied evenly. Are you aware of any others?

Rich, connected people are not going to spend years slumming it in local politics if a more glamorous option is available. A brand-name education and a couple of years at a white-shoe law firm might not get you many votes, but it can open doors to the people that can help you mount a successful campaign.

As a software developer who just finished law school, I have precisely zero intentions of going into politics.

I have plenty of views on how you could improve things, but elected politics is about as appealling as a skin disease.

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