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Comment by mwint | Hacker News Reader

What’s the disadvantage to skipping law school (other than resume issues, I assume)? Could one actually do this and come out a “real” lawyer?

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The disadvantage is that the vast majority of states no longer let anyone just sign up and take the bar, you need a degree, or at least some sort of sponsorship to even register to take the exam. The days of just taking the bar “Catch me if you can” style are long since past.

Source: Years ago I looked into “just taking the bar” only to come across ridiculous hoops and requirements.

Once upon a long time ago, when I lived in Florida, I was interested in running for election as a county judge. There were provisions in the statutes for small counties (under 40k population). There was a special program only offered at UF in Gainesville that was 3 years long and only for people who wanted to run for County Judge. I believe even though it was the same length as a regular JD, that if you passed this course you could not sit for the bar exam.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/34.021

I'd like to add to the rest of the discussions: you can get a JD from a law school and still end up not being able to practice law if you fail the Bar. Yes, you need a JD to take the Bar exam in most places, but the 'credential' that gives any actual value is just the exam.

Practically every profession in healthcare has equivalent exams - physician, nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, occupational therapist. You must have the degree to take the exam, and you must have the exam to get a license. I know of quite a few nurse anesthetists who had graduated and taken - and passed - their boards, but had not yet had those results blessed by the credentialing committees. Most relied on their still-valid RN license to pay the bills for a month or two until the committees could do their work.

At least in nursing they have the nurse licensure compact; if you are a certified RN in any NLC state, you can practice in any other. It's not perfect, but it's a lot easier than medicine.

Have a friend who had to take it a couple times over the course of I think 5 years before he finally passed. Worked IT until he finally passed.

Was your friend Joe Pesci?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBarc_-Eoek

The disadvantage is obviously that you need the stuff you learn in law school to pass the bar. If you can independently learn it then you can come out as a "real" lawyer. But it seems it's not all states you can just do the bar and be a lawyer, some do require law shool.

Essentially all require law school.

Specific details here, if anyone is actually curious: https://barprephero.com/learn/take-the-bar-exam-without-law-...

Which also includes the important detail that the people who go to law school are 3x as likely to pass than the people who didn't (but had multi-year apprentices at a law firm).

That suggests the value of the actual teaching isn't insignificant.

It doesn't suggest whether the teaching is useful for the career of a lawyer, or just for passing the Bar, though. You'd hope it to be true of both, of course, and ideally more about being a good lawyer than about how to pass the Bar.

From what I recall, majority of people who tried failed. The pass rates for people who did not went through school were abysmal.

Was it more than zero? Did they pay to take the test?

Yes they did paid. Yes some passed, but it was very small percent .

Unfortunately, the primary value of law school is signaling, but it’s a big one. You could skip law school in California and take the Baby Bar and become a “real lawyer” in the sense you could legally do everything any other lawyer can do. But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

E.g. in the recent leaked conversation between Macron and Putin: https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/leaked-call-reveals-fiery-exch...

> Putin quickly turned the conversation to “our dear colleague Mr. Zelensky,” accusing the Ukrainian president of “lying” to Macron about his intention to implement the Minsk Accords, which had sought to end the war in the Donbas region.

> Putin then took issue with Zelensky’s apparent refusal to negotiate with pro-Kremlin Ukrainian separatists, which infuriated the French president and prompted him to exclaim in audible frustration: “I don’t know where your lawyer learned law!”

> But even ordinary people (much less corporations) rely on law school pedigree as a signal for competence and quality.

This isn't that different from any other profession though. A doctor, professor, or engineer from Harvard or Stanford etc is going to get a lot more respect than the one had no schooling at all (even absent licensing requirements).

I'd say all three of those cases are a bit different from each other and from law. Schools do make a difference for doctors but you still have an MD (or whatever) and can probably earn a pretty decent living in the US even if you went to a lower-ranged US school and aren't a total hack. Yes, academia is pretty status conscious. Engineering (especially software) is more forgiving. The common wisdom around law is that if you can't get into a better school and ideally get a prestigious clerkship, it may not be a great professional choice.

In medicine, residencies matter, and good ones in specialties are competitive. Income ranges for MDs vary tremendously by specialty, with GPs / FPs closer to the bottom.

In computer science, the current hawtness is a FANG pedigree, though the bloom may be comming off that rose. (I've been predichoping that for a decade, salt appropriately.)

I'm not sure what the situation for hard engineering (EE, ME, civil, aero, petroleum, etc.) is, though I'd suspect there's benefit to a larger firm initially. See the MBA route through McKinsey or Big N consultancies for example.

"don't worry, I watched a bunch of youtube videos on this."

"I got my legal degree from Legal Eagle"

Yeah, it's totally just like all of these no-degree developers, except when there's a failure in your lawyering, you might get sued, disbarred, and also get jail time for being incompetent in addition to potentially ruining someone else's life, or at least wasting a lot of their time.

I also got the idea from law school that a lot of going to law school is to show to the courts that you've shown you're not going to waste the legal system's time by not knowing how to follow all the procedure and how to write legal documents you submit to the court. The rules of civil litigation and how you must write documents are hideously complicated due to having been built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance to prove their case.

For example, the clerk at the civil litigation court is often like a compiler that will just ignore your document if you didn't do it just right. It's like writing a nice big long program and the compiler's only response is to segmentation fault on you if you made any error in the filing. I bet these court clerks receive lots and lots of filings that are a big unprofessional mess that they just throw in the trash.

> built up over centuries to strike a balance between unnecessary and time wasting game playing by very crafty players and giving parties a fair chance

Did they strike a balance? Or did they just make it pay to play?

Not in computer science. In the valley, Stanford and UCB graduates are common. I know many self-taught ones that get just as much respect.

It's tangential but what a confusingly written article, it could have very well been machine translated and I'd have been none the wiser.

The jump from bringing up Zelensky not dealing with Donbass situation as per agreement to Macron and him exclaiming that he doesn't know where Putin's lawyer learned law is comical in its absurdity too.

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