Ask HN: Law School?
In what scenarios is it worth it for someone of the hacker type to consider attending law school?
Lots of people go to law school without any clear idea or ambition of actually pursuing a career as a lawyer, because they think law just sounds interesting, or it's what everyone tells them to do, or because they watch too many TV lawyer shows. This is a Very Bad Idea. You will be taking on a huge amount of debt in exchange for a credential that will not make you substantially more employable in any other field than law.
Question Two: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO BECOME A LAWYER?
There is a glut of J.D.s out there currently, far more than there are real legal jobs available (see http://www.newrepublic.com/article/87251/law-school-employme...). This means competition is fierce for the jobs that do open up, and that pay for young lawyers tends to suck more than they generally expect. (Which exacerbates the "holy moley look at all that debt I rang up to go to law school" problem, too.)
Question Three: ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH TO GET INTO A TOP-TIER LAW SCHOOL?
If answered "yes" to Questions One and Two, you need to take a hard look at your admissions credentials (LSAT scores, references, etc.) and appraise honestly whether they're good enough to get you into a really, really good law school, because if you want to stand out in that sea of newly minted J.D.s, the only 100% reliable method is to have a degree from a seriously impressive school. Going into debt to get a J.D. from Harvard or Yale or Penn or Duke is a reasonably sensible long-term financial proposition; going into debt to get one from Bob's Chicken-Fried Steak Shack and School of Law, much less so.
(I am not a lawyer, but I know a bunch of them.)
If you win this BigLaw competition, you'll work impossible hours for as long as you can. Typically that's two to five years before you burn out/get fired and search desperately for any other line of work. Nobody makes partner anymore unless you have connections to make it rain. The traditional escape routes of government work (which is difficult and way underpaid, but at least provides a more reasonable workweek) or public interest work simply don't exist anymore. Between austerity and poverty and desperate competition by established attorneys, we no longer have a chance at a decent living over the course of a lifelong career.
If you "win" at law school, you get to join BigLaw firms that consume you, body and soul, for a handful of years. Only the tiniest percentage of graduates can earn these jobs, mostly the upper tier of the best schools. The middle tier at these schools can try for second-tier firms which pay two-thirds of the salary for exactly the same brutal hours and terrible conditions of BigLaw. The bottom tier, or virtually anyone at lower schools, gets nothing at all.
My local Starbucks has a staff of about eight people, two of whom are freshly minted JDs. And the future is coming for us. I strongly endorse reading this article (http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_machines-vs-lawyers.ht...) to understand the future of legal practice. Important quote: "Discovering information, finding precedents, drafting documents and briefs, and predicting the outcomes of lawsuits—these tasks encompass the bulk of legal practice. The rise of machine intelligence will therefore disrupt and transform the legal profession."
Don't do it. I wish I had pursued computer science instead. HN will eat law alive, and it'll do a vastly better job of it than human lawyers have. If you must get involved in the field, do it as a hacker in the fields of electronic discovery, contract databases, or intelligent query research. As it stands, most legal questions are assembled from disjointed queries into truly awful Westlaw/Lexis databases by tech-illiterate lawyers, harried by their enormous workloads and failing personal lives. The field is crying out for better data sorting and search. Fix that problem and get rich, but don't join the hopeless masses of law school graduates.
It reminds me of that great Alec Baldwin monologue in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross: "First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize: a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."
I do have to point out that many of the people I know at these firms who seriously enjoy their lawyering jobs are people who go to law school after having a real job in Field A and then practicing law in Field A. For example, someone with a PhD in Biochem and worked at Amgen as a research scientist then becoming a licensing attorney in biotech. Or someone with an EECS degree who becomes a patent litigator focusing on hardware or software disputes.
I don't think escaping to government is out of reach. I also don't think its "underpaid" (although that's relative). Granted, you'll likely have to be at the top of your class in order to find that sort of escape route, and if you're at the top of your class, the world is your oyster anyways.
A lot of the cruft will go away with the rise of machine intelligence. But the $xxxx/hr attorneys won't be replaced. Knowing the law and the facts is only 1/3 the battle. The rest of it is crafting your story if you're a litigator or negotiation position if you're a transactional attorney, understanding your clients business and needs, and putting all the pieces together. Good artists and story tellers haven't been replaced even though everyone already knows www.tvtropes.org. Rails engineers won't disappear because of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985162. If your value proposition is dependent on doing menial, time-intensive tasks, you will eventually replaced by a computer.
Feel free to contact me.
I studied law for a year and dropped out. Went on to work in IT (already had engineering degree) for several top end of town law firms. Earned more than the associates and they envied my far nicer office. Even my working hours were more humane.
But I'd like to argue for going to law school in other countries where you don't incur massive debt:
Engineers not only don't understand law at all, they actively avoid getting clued in.
The sheer stupidness in knowing on the one hand that societal processes cannot work like a dumb flowchart, and on the other hand still arguing for stupid flowcharts and simple decisions in every societal context is mind-blowing.
That is pretty much all of us.
If you can get a solid foundation in law, you are on your best way to carve out a very rewarding niche, both financially and personally.
Remember what 'tptacek always says: you're not making money knowing a tool. You're making money knowing a client's context and needs.
Alternatively, you can get a PhD, spend six years living on a stipend, and get hired into a pretty solid job with a pretty nice salary. Best case is that you end up in the same place as the folks who didn't get the PhD, but they have six years of earnings and savings behind them, and you're not getting paid enough to make up that deficit.
I was offered a chance to become a PhD candidate and they were very clear that it wouldn't drastically increase my earning potential and that the opportunity cost would be pretty high; the benefits they quoted at me were things like the opportunity to do the cutting edge research myself instead of reading about it, a chance to meet a bunch of people who would become the titans of the field, and a chance to stay in the environment of academia.
A PhD is an apprenticeship to become an academic. Your thesis is but the price of admission to the race to find an academic job. The chances, even in CS, are about 1:7. It is rare to succeed in doing a PhD part time. If you do it full time then you might have trouble living a life on ramen noodles and constantly re-writing papers.
You can do research without going to uni and slogging through a PhD.
There is ALWAYS room for a good lawyer who gets truly gets the tech realm. Conceivably, someone could build a great law practice specialty in that space.