Why you shouldn't go to law school.
lawandletters.blogspot.com
lawandletters.blogspot.com
I actually attended a top 5 law school (for one semester) before getting out and going to grad school in engineering instead. I agree with the statement that "thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature - it wasn't just that I didn't want to be a lawyer - I felt that getting wired like a lawyer would do actual damage to my brain and my character.
I have friends (yes, they genuinely are still friends) who do often exhibit the lawyer tendencies identified in this post, far more often than my engineer and science friends do. Yes, there's pettiness, bluffing, and intellectual dishonesty in all fields. But these are traits that are encouraged by the culture of law, and discouraged by the culture of engineering.
Lawyers have a tendency to go into "lawyer mode", where they start acting like total dickheads who are impossible to talk to.
As far as the rest of the article is concerned, it is a collection of generalizations that are unconvincing. The best thing to takeaway, I think, is this:
"As I said, there are some people who are happy with the practice of law. But the data are [sic] not in your favor. Make this decision very carefully. Don't just drift into it because you're not sure what else to do with a humanities degree."
Frankly, the problems of which the post speaks are really all rooted in the same problem: there are too many people graduating from law school already. The competition allows the firms the luxury of such monotonous work.
Unfortunately, I wanted something else - I wanted to become an expert at some portion of law and exploit my ability to keep many pieces of a situation in my head. However, the opportunity cost, considering the competition, did not seem to match up with the expected reward.
"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Those liberal arts majors who counted on a JD for a career often wind up hating life and themselves.
But don't get me wrong, my experience both on the debate team, going to tournaments involving all of ivies and NESCAC school's has taught me to stay away from law.
One time, I went against one of the eventual national champion of college debate from Cornell; as I went out of time in my closing argument, my dear opponent, the future model of Corporate America counsel, took his rolex off his wrist and shook it at me, and shouted exasperatedly that my time was up.
But, I have to say: once, when I was a young clueless college student, I tried both the pre-med and pre-law path. It was the thing to do at my school which charged 40K+ for being a holding pen for New England rich family's kids. And even now, I have friends on campus who question my decision to pursue a career that will be soon "outsourced" and not the tried and proven path of i-banking/medicine/law. In response, I just smile because the irony is that, they are the ones who don't know any thing better than writing abstract essays on obtuse topics, memorizing tedious information on biological structures, and tinkering with Excel spreadsheets (and programming in VBA...oh the horrors!) at their summer i-banking internships.
They have no idea how fun it is to fire up your compiler on a late night and to plug away at your own ideas, to work for fun and not for work. That there is a whole world out there,of one's own with interesting areas to explore, outside of the usual everyday social small-talk BS and climbing the corporate ladder.