The Price of a Harvard Lawyer
theflaw.org
theflaw.org
I guess most Harvard grads go where the money is.
EDIT: But a bit more related to the OP, when I studied EE (undergrad) in a college with close ties to the oil and gas industry, we were all wined and dined by big oil for the last 2 years.
During one of those dinner events, hosted by a big service company, they told us to just sign our names and major on a form they passed around - if we did that, we'd get a job offer in the mail a week later. Some of the larger oil (production) companies guaranteed free housing for the first two years, and they'd cover 50% of the mortgage for 5 years if we decided to purchase a house. That was on top of a high starting salary w/annual bonuses.
Should be mentioned that this was during the height of a boom cycle.
It’s one of the dumbest speeches I’ve ever heard, but what made it especially delicious was knowing that 2/3 of the kids she was talking to apparently were “finding their bliss” working for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.
I went undergrad to a state school, studied CS and graduated to a great tech/finance job. But something I recognize in retrospect I never got in college was "being challenged by my peers."
I didn't really get this until I started doing recruiting for my company. I would go to career fairs at most colleges and the kids would remind me of kids I went to school with. Then I'd visit a "top" school and the kids blew me away: they were mature, articulate, focused and ambitious. It came through in how they talked about their careers.
The student body at a top school makes it harder for you to coast as an unfocused mushmouth. So you have 4 years of being shaped by the environment and challenged by your peers. I didn't get that until after I graduated and lucked out into a company that gave me such an environment.
In my college, I probably ranked pretty high on "articulate and driven" so there was no motivation to elevate that. At MIT, I would have probably been below average on these categories, and you don't want to be below average so you naturally do it more and better.
Lots of people graduated from Harvard to go on to make very little money but large contributions e.g. Richard Stallman is the parsimonious example that comes to mind. Noam Chomsky and other top academics probably aren't rolling around in cash either.
Pay is seemingly great, you get to travel a lot, you're exposed to a bunch of different industries and companies from the highest level. The McKinsey/Bain/BCG prestige factor can open a lot of doors down the road, and you probably get a solid network of future titans of industry.
I haven't worked as a consultant, but that was the sales pitch we got.
And I've at least noticed that a many startups tend to have ex-consultants onboard as founders or executives.
Dated two management consultants in my life. One was deeply involved in deciding the next CEO of Disney after a few years out of college, as an example. The other reported being basically in charge of a turnaround effort at a fortune 500 company.
Both examples required them to deeply understand the situation and the options and then to advocate for the path they have chosen.
Seemed fun and impactful.
It's difficult to imagine they would be anything more than assistants to the real decision makers.
Of course but it's the same thing.
Executives and the board make the decisions and take responsibility for them. But generally they make these decisions based on the framing and options presented to them by people who work for them.
As a consultant, you get to decide what dimensions matter to the decisions, gather data and arguments, and present the executive with a choice.
The executive skill is to have oriented you around the right topics, deciding whether to trust you and your analysis, and ability to stand behind the decision made.
The "assistants" do the work to enable this. It's a big deal.
Anyone can do that, it's Bob Iger.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
On top of that, the accession process for public interest is full of uncertainty. Law firms, as private entities, can structure their recruiting process however they like; and the common practice is for a 2L summer job to turn into a full-time offer. But federal agencies (and typically state agencies) are required to go through the government hiring process; and non-profits typically don't have the budgetary margin to make offers a year in advance. Even the DOJ Honors Program, specifically designed for recruiting directly from law schools, is only open to graduating law students; you can't compete as a 2L and then get a full-time offer at the end of your 2L summer.
I applaud this student for writing about their experience, but at the end of this coming summer, when facing down the barrel of $300,000 in debt and no immediately apparent way to pay it, their perspective may change. If it does, it will likely be for far more compelling reasons than a Paul Weiss hoodie.
Out of interest, how much of that is caused by the law degree being (as far as I understand it) a postgraduate degree in the US? Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
At face value, the sticker price of grad school will always be more expensive, however, UF[1], UNC Chapel Hill[2], UT Austin[3], etc. are just a few reputable public universities with relatively affordable law programs, in particular, for in-state residents with enough grit to skip on-campus housing.
> Here in the UK you can just go straight to law school if you want without a first degree.
Hasn't been a thing in the US for decades[4].
[1] https://www.law.ufl.edu/admissions/costs-and-financial-aid
[2] https://law.unc.edu/admissions/financing-your-legal-educatio...
[3] https://law.utexas.edu/admissions/tuition-fees-and-expenses/
Why? Just seems like a barrier to entry to me for no good reason?
The ABA considered the appropriateness in 1964 without a dissenting vote and raised the standard in 1965[1]:
WHEREAS, There is a lack of uniformity among the law schools approved
by The American Bar Association as to the name of the first degree in law
awarded to successful applicants; and
WHEREAS, Confusion has arisen in the minds of the public as to the dif-
ference, if any, between the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree and the Juris
Doctor (J.D.) degree; and
WHEREAS, Both of these degrees normally signify a first professional de-
gree in law; and
WHEREAS, Graduation from an approved law school requires the successful
completion of a course of study substantially above and beyond that re-
quired for the bachelor's degree in the Arts or Sciences: and
WHEREAS, The course of study in an approved law school is comparable to
or more demanding than other professional courses of study in which the
professional doctor's degree is awarded; and
WHEREAS, It is deemed to be in the best interest of the public and of the
legal profession that this confusion in terminology be eliminated and that
the high standards of professional training and the competency of graduates
of approved law schools be recognized by a uniform practice with respect to
the title of the first degree in law.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT: The Section of Legal Edu-
cation and Admissions to the Bar of The American Bar Association recom-
mends for all approved law schools favorable consideration of the con-
ferring of the degree of Juris Doctor (J.D.) by such schools on those students
who successfully complete the program leading to the first professional de-
gree in law.
Seeing a trend here?
While there are respectable salaries among the others, there are also a lot of lawyers doing real estate law in shopping malls that are just getting by.
What I see among friends with liberal arts degrees from Ivies and adjacent is that, while a few were probably already destined to be lawyers like three previous generations of their family, for most it's something they sort of fell into because they graduated with a classics major and now what? Many never even ended up practicing law--at least not for long.
There are low-cost law schools in the US. What you'll find, however, is that big-name law firms, Supreme Court clerkships, and other prestigious (and well-compensated) opportunities tend not to hire from them.
If you're looking to go into private practice or are targeting a less-ambitious role, or get lucky with a roll of the dice / spin of the wheel, they might work out fine.
Searching for "low cost law school" will come up with various listings. The top options on this list appear to run about 1/20th the cost of Harvard (I'm presuming that the tuition figure is for a full three-year programme, not on a per-year basis, the text makes this ... less than clear).
<https://affordableschools.net/the-10-most-affordable-law-sch...>
"1/20th the cost of Harvard" is in the ballpark of what a super affordable undergraduate program at a US public university goes for.
To be sure, your cite lists annual cost of tuition as clarified in Methodology section language.
Their "average program cost" metric is also pretty meaningless; you either pay in-state or out-of-state rates---not some arbitrary arithmetic mean---so ~3x for a rough lower bound of what tuition alone will run you, and that assumes the unlikely scenario of no tuition increases during subsequent years of study.
There's also the mention that law school is not necessarily required to join the bar, as addressed in the FAQ "Do You Have to go to Law School in Order to Become a Lawyer?":
To begin, 99 percent of lawyers who earn their license will have completed a law school program. This is for a very good reason: there are only four states in the United States that enable potential lawyers to sit for the bar exam without having completed law school. Those states are California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. In these states, less than one-quarter of the professionals without a law degree passed the bar exam and won the right to practice law. In fact, all four states are in the top 20 hardest bar exams, with California leading the pack at a pass rate of 54.3 percent.
Arguably three of those are nontrivial states for the practice of law.
Point remains however that $300k tuition is not strictly required to join the bar in the US, though it may offer a substantial selection advantage for prime opportunities.
NB Given the multiple legal systems in the UK there will be a lot of variations - e.g. to become an advocate here in Scotland (our equivalent of barristers) I think you could do that in 4 years: 2 year LLB, 1 year training in a law firm and then one year devilling (where you are an Advocate's Devil!).
Edit: Might be out of date - its a while since my wife did her 2 year LLB and then qualified and became an advocate.
3 year (or more) undergrad, plus 5 years becoming a lawyer.
Or, in Scotland, typically 4 years undergrad (it can be 3y), plus 4 years.
Or the 7 years the parent comment said.
Edit: Relatively few people (I think) do a first degree and then immediately go to law school - most people I knew who did that were changing to law after some other career and had a degree in something unrelated.
The rebuttal should be that counsel acting for an organization is somewhat like a teacher to students. Putting such people in positions of authority in corporate America is a "win" for justice to the extent they can effectively guide more, and more influential, people to the ends of justice and fair play. Maybe that's an ideal, but unfortunately from my own experience it's just not what HLS has taught its students in recent years to do, and I hold the faculty responsible.
It’s not our job to leverage our trusted position in the system to advance our personal view of morality or ethics. Society doesn’t need us to be its conscience. Indeed, that destroys the very system we are supposed to serve.
> [We only] ensure that the system operates according to the specification
Right. That's the substance of the complaint.
While your viewpoint is a reasonable interpretation of "the law", it completely ignores the higher-order responsibility for "justice" to serve as a moral compass and balance of power.
Your comparison to “following orders” is specious. Lawyers are bound by criminal laws the same as soldiers are bound by the laws of war. “Following orders” isn’t a defense in either case. But soldiers aren’t expected to independently apply their moral judgment. “War crimes” are defined by international consensus. And soldiers are bound to “follow orders” when they’re not being asked to commit war crimes.
In fact, attorneys typically hold themselves to extremely high standards of ethics - just not the ethics people think of. I'm sure they exist, but out of all the many lawyers I've met, I have never met one who did not take things like attorney-client privilege, being an officer of the court, or duties surrounding disclosure and discovery and conflicts of interest extremely seriously. It's very much a case of "orange and blue morality"[0]: It's not that the rules they follow aren't taken seriously, it's that those rules are not the rules most people imagine.
So, the idea that attorneys should abandon the principles of the system they've dedicated their life to because some layperson's sense of ethics demands it is foolish, in that even if it might produce a "better" result to your sensibilities or mine, it's simply not going to happen, not because attorneys are amoral, but precisely the opposite: Because they are moral according to the morality of their system.
Look: People don't like the justice system because it doesn't always produce results that they agree with. They don't like or understand its convoluted, highly layered, self-referential sets of ever-shifting, multi-faceted rules and tests and interpretations and arguments about the technicalities of meanings of words. And that's fine. But a system of justice based on even the most altruistic "X seems right to me" is going to be an order of magnitude worse for at least some people, and I have yet to hear an idea for replacing our current system that doesn't boil down to either that or our current system, but it somehow magically always makes the decisions people personally want.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...
Since when are lawyers anything other than mercenaries?
They are hired to win an adversarial game, not to decide what is moral or not.
I never understood the appeal of free swag. Here we have someone who feels like a walking billboard yet still decides to wear them. I get it if purchasing a $20 non-ad-supported t-shirt poses a significant financial burden, but most students aren’t in that position. Why would you choose to be a frigging ad then? Especially for questionable companies, say Palantir, which IIRC used to be quiet a common sight on Stanford campus.
> law students can now sip out of their Wilke water bottles months later in memory of the big law networking event that stood as the celebration of our first year of learning how to conduct legal research.
There is a lot of money being thrown around towards recruitment in many fields. Tuition is worth a whole lot of free food and branded swag.
In any other job, on-the-job-training is compensated as work, even if it takes a while to complete, even if the employer provides training or seminars to clients as part of its business. (Yes, a school is a business. If one wants to say that it isn’t, it should stop charging money for its services first.)
Job applicants in other sectors are warned that it’s the red flag of a scam to pay an employer for a chance at an offer or promotion. By normal standards, an employee paying their employer is bonkers.
Your scenario is enlightening. If paying a student’s tuition benefits the university and the student’s manager more than the student, what access or benefit might the corporate sponsor be able to derive from inducing a favorable bias in the teacher or school? Could we end up with a situation where Java, of all things, is taught to impressionable undergraduate students across the country? An obvious answer would be to secure a recruiting channel. The things researchers write can also be important to industry sponsors, and the opportunity to bias those exists as well.
Maybe. There's a lot of scholarship money available at elite law schools. For those paying something close to sticker price, Big Law summer associates make good money.
Being married to a Big Law partner, I hear constant griping about how it seems like all they’re doing is training associates to go work somewhere else.
However these kids are socialized in at least superficially left wing undergraduate environments. So the kids destined to work for a big law firm defending tobacco corporations for trying to get kids hooked on cigarettes can’t embrace their role and function in society. That’s how you get, as the article observes, 50% of first year students saying they want to work in public interest law.
But of course by 3L the reality sets in. There are few jobs in public interest law and none pay off the debt of a Harvard Law education. Meanwhile corporate America can always use bodies. So you end up with only 2% actually going into public interest law. But law students are smart kids, they knew what they were signing up to do.
The operation of this cognitive dissonance is very interesting to me as a foreigner. As far as I can tell, most Americans are loathe to believe in social and economic roles. “I’m not a cog in a machine with a specific function and purpose, I’m an individual with agency who can change the world.” What does that belief system do to someone who literally functions as a cog in the machine? (Don’t feel bad for them, they make a lot of money doing it.)
By that standard the vast vast majority of people are 'cogs' since very few people have any observable effect on the direction of mankind.