I want to go to law school.
Where should I go?
How do I get in?

These are the two most frequently asked questions.

A legal education is intellectually challenging, often emotionally exhausting and very expensive. The practice of law, respected and honored by many, the business of law, however, is fundamentally a consumer-driven enterprise.
I think the most frequently asked questions are the wrong questions to ask at the outset of thinking about law!

The right questions, I suggest, are:
Do I want to be a lawyer?
Do I know enough to make a reasoned judgment about this important life decision?

Why should you ask these questions?

Because when you finish, you will have invested three years of your life, spent up to $150,000 and you will owe $20,000 to $80,000 in educational loans. As a graduate you will confront a highly competitive and continually changing job market. A lawyer entering practice today can expect to change firms and his practice specialty at least four times during his or her career. Indeed, most law schools inform their first-year students that they should expect to have a life-long relationship with the schools career services department.

As a young lawyer, you should expect to work 55 to 70 hours a week to bill 40 hours. Law firms are continuously consolidating or imploding. Job security is increasingly tenuous. These are high stakes, before applying to law school consider carefully and well.

Because the market is relentless, constantly changing and always demanding.

Today lawyers at every stage of their career confront greater uncertainty than at any time in the past forty years. From the outset, lawyers today are taught that attracting, obtaining, and keeping clients is required of everyone in the firm "it's a business first. The prelaw student must be a careful consumer and realistically assess the marketplace and in evaluating their own prospects in the marketplace.

In the halcyon days of the 1990s, when jobs were plentiful, salaries were rising and law school graduates could look forward to the order and security of a partnership and to a fulfilling career.

All this has changed.

The major forces affecting the national economy- globalization, consolidation, restructuring and draconian cost constraints- are having a dramatic impact on the legal profession and on the employment prospects for recent law school graduates. As one disillusioned lawyer wrote recently that, "the tradition of professional loyalty and stability has given way to the turmoil of the marketplace, we need to understand the forces of supply and demand that are shaping the practice of law."

The United States Department of Labor reports that white-collar unemployment is the highest it's ever been, nearly 9 percent. For lawyers, at 1.2 percent, it's the highest since 1997. While that rate is low in absolute terms (in 2002, 11,000 unemployed out of 940,000), it's up sharply from 0.8 percent in 2001 and 0.6 percent in 1999. In other words, attorney joblessness jumped by half last year and has doubled since the Internet boom's peak. For example, San Francisco's Brobeck Phleger & Harrison, a quintessential high flyer during the "dot com. boom" employing some 875 attorneys at its peak in 2001, dissolved completely.

Last April 4th, The National Law Journal depicted the plight of 33-year-old entertainment lawyer Lee Feldshon, who lives in New York:

A graduate of Columbia University Law School in 1994, Feldshon worked as an associate in two prestigious national law firms with a six-figure salary. In 2001, he landed a job as director of legal affairs for Madison Square Garden. 2001. He got laid off in 2002. For the past fifteen months Feldshon has been unable to secure full time employment." Not only were jobs hard to get, they just didn't exist," Feldshon said. "It was the same chant: 'you have great qualifications. We just wish we had a job for you.'" He has approached at least 250 companies or firms.

Many law graduates report satisfaction with their work and regard themselves satisfied with their compensation and working conditions. However, there are other lawyers, undoubtedly a minority, who are dissatisfied and indeed report being "burned-out."

One embittered former lawyer is Walt Buchman a former Rhoads Scholar and a successful Minneapolis litigator (Buchman, LAW VS. LIFE (1997). Buchman captures the extent to which law is increasingly a marketing driven business, "[t]he transformation of the legal marketplace within the past twenty years and has added to the work burdens of lawyers on a daily basis." Buchman argues the daunting task of being both a successful lawyer and a successful human being explains the high "burn-out rate" and the numerous failed marriages among lawyers. Buchman's criticism has triggered a lively debate in legal educational circles. No one disputes Buchanan's claim that practicing law is a tough and stressful way to make a living. However, many regard Buchanan's claims as exaggerated and overdrawn. A number of challengers suggested that medicine and law enforcement are at least as stressful as law and others noted that Buchanan was overemphasizing the role of lawyer as litigator and downplaying the lawyer's important role as counselor.

Should you go to law school? - You are the best judge.

You know your own tolerance for stress, confrontation and uncertainty. You should investigate the realities of the legal marketplace before you try to get a law school to choose you.
As prelaw advisor I am here to help you decide if law is the profession for you, to help you select a law school and to help you successfully navigate the admissions process to get a law school to choose you.

This web site is intended as a gateway for Pomona College students considering law as a career.