Law School Grads Struggle

That made my heart smile!!

 

Rookie enthusiasm, it comes with every profession, and the guy in my example was guilty as sin. It was just an OUI (drunk driving), but he sent 3 people to hospital and destroyed a car other than his own, so I understood why the student prosecutor was excited about the conviction.

 

37-year-old who says she can't get a lawyer job after applying to 150 firms loses her lawsuit against her school

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/37-old-says-she-cant-222046178.html

 

Being in the Boston area, there are 3 top-ranked law schools close-by (Harvard, Boston University, Boston College), and I can't recall any of their graduates having a problem finding employment with law firms.

However, I do know of a LOT of graduates from New England School of Law (ABA), Suffolk University Law School (ABA), and Massachusetts School of Law (RA but not ABA) who are working as ADA's, college adjuncts, real estate brokers, and other jobs that may not be the ideal envisioned by law school graduates, but they're working, and probably wouldn't have those positions without their legal training.

I'm wondering how many decent jobs that Ms. Alaburda has turned down, because it wasn't something glamorous, like out of L.A. Law?

 

My brother in law graduated from a top 20 law school located in the Midwest, he then moved to the greater Boston area but struggled to find a job because all the air was taken out of the room by graduates of the three law schools you mentioned. According to him, there were interviewers who had the attitude of "not Harvard/not interested". However, when he set his sights a bit lower he found a job at a small firm, paid his dues after several years of increasing responsibility, then moved on to a somewhat better firm (though still not white shoe) and recently made partner. He'll almost certainly do quite well now and will be able to buy and sell me, 15 years older, several times over. One just has to be realistic. When I got into the practice of law I graduated from a top 30, got above average (but not top 10%) grades, and tried to hold out for something better than I was qualified to do. As a result, I never really caught on all that well, bounced around doing this and that, eventually it worked out as I made it into academia, but if only I'd swallowed the pride and accepted the jobs for which I was legitimately qualified (county judicial clerk, low-paid associate in small firm) I'd have eventually made good just like the brother in law.

 

Beyond the specifics of this particular case, just the fact that this suit occurred at all is an indication tat the tide is turning. Hopefully the publicity of the case serves the purpose of encouraging prospective law grads to think at least twice before they spend the time and money for a law degree. And then there's this

Dorothy A. Brown predicts a top law school will close - Business Insider

 

According to the article, she turned down a legal job, but it was one that paid less than what she could make in the private sector. Yeah, so what? Bet that's the case with most law school graduates, only the top 10 or 15% of the class of most law schools start at > $150K in big law, the rest almost always have to make do with much less. This is especially the case when you attend a bottom feeder school like TJSL. I graduated top-half of class, bar passage first time, school ranked top 30 (at the time, since has slid to 40-something, possibly because they graduated me), but two decades ago, when starting, I got only two offers: one at a small firm and one as a judicial clerk, both offers were in the range of $35 to $40K a year in today's dollars adjusting for inflation. I turned them down because I thought I could do better, I thought it was an insult. Had no idea my resume was not all that impressive. Had no idea that was pretty close to average to start for most lawyers outside of the tip-top people or graduates of the uber elite universities. Had I known, I'd have probably taken one of those and been on my way to a solid career. The big money for the great majority of lawyers doesn't come until at least a decade after graduation.

 

At least once a year I extend a job offer to a freshly minted (fresh out of an undergrad engineering program) engineer. These are people with zero experience beyond whatever internships or co-ops they had while in school. And while many are thrilled to get a big boy/girl job that pays them enough to sustain an apartment and a car (the job pays mid-40s) as well as a promising start to a career that could easily lead them to six figures within a reasonable timeframe; there is always at least one applicant who gets insulted, usually fills my voicemail with a profanity laden rant about how my offer is an insult to them and walks away from the process entirely.

Granted, some turn me down more gracefully for what I'm sure are similar reasons. But it's the loudest, rudest ones that stick in my mind as I mentally file them into a bucket of "No way, never again" deep in the recesses of my mind.

It happens occasionally with new accountants but we hire so few accountants without experience it is a rather uncommon show.

So I'm not the least bit surprised that young lawyers get offended when they are offered an entry level legal job, like a public defender, and scoff at the money. They've been watching The Good Wife for a good many years and have determined that all lawyers have amazing city views from their offices and multi-million dollar apartments in the hottest neighborhoods of the best cities. Having reality come and slap that fantasy out of your head probably hurts.

But those young engineers soon learn that they didn't actually hurt me by telling me to F-off. I just went to the next brand new engineer on the list and offered him/her the job and moved on. I'm sure the job that was offered to this young woman, like the ones FTFaculty turned down, were gobbled up by an eager JD looking to get a foot into the industry.

So this isn't entirely a "lawyer" sort of problem. A lot of it is a disconnect between schools and the industries they supposedly serve. Engineers very often work summers for companies. And many of them have entirely realistic expectations. Those who feel that my offer is "beneath them" generally did their co-op summers at huge companies that pay their engineers gobs and gobs of cash. So they interacted with engineers who would never dream of accepting a job that paid under $180k. Those who work in a place like this, where the salaries are lower but layoffs are very infrequent, have tempered expectations. They tend to transition smoothly because they know what awaits them and, generally, how one builds a career from these humble beginnings.

Perhaps our law school graduates can enlighten me here. I see a lot of law school grads who clerked for judges and things during their time in law school. But I see many, many more who have no such experience. Is it required? Encouraged? Completely up to the individual?

Because if you have very little to no exposure to the industry you aim to work in then I imagine the culture shock upon arrival is even more severe.

 

Neuhaus -

Problem is an attitude of privilege and entitlement. I had it a couple decades ago, at least to an extent, otherwise I'd not have turned down jobs that were suited to my modest qualifications. Students at the university here get out of the dorms after their freshman year and move into apartments because they think the accommodations are beneath them; some parents buy them their own house at the start of college, then sell it when the kid graduates. When I found out the dorms each had their own private areas and it was two students to one bathroom, that it was typical for a couple students to share a big screen TV, I was amazed. For students to have this sort of luxury, it's remarkable that it would be considered unacceptable to the average undergrad. Thirty years ago our dorms were two to a room that had one built in desk and little single beds. No TV. You walked down the hallway to take a shower, you walked in the other direction to find a TV, shared among about 60 on a floor. At my wife's school it was three to a bedroom with bunks. The rooms to accommodate three were about the size of today's common area that two students share in addition to their private rooms. Not asking for violins to be played here, because we felt perfectly comfortable, we had food and a bed to sleep on at night. We were fine.

But many students today expect to be able to live fresh out of undergrad in the same way that it took us 10 years of hard work and increasing responsibility to attain. My students are amazed that the wife and I made do just fine with our first apartment with some boards and bricks for a bookcase, no TV, an inflatable air mattress, and two lawn chairs and a used furniture store kitchen table. Total catalog of our furniture at the outset, both of us with undergraduate degrees in hand. The air mattress had a leak, we'd wake up almost flat on the floor, I reinflated it by mouth. If we happened upon a $5 bill on the street, it would temporarily change our quality of life. We saw nothing amiss in this, it was normal.

Not so now--some young people expect big bucks up front, are insulted if they don't get them. That said, I used to be one of them--though my standards were still generally lower than I see today amongst undergraduates.

 

Yeah, kids these days . . . I had to walk 20 miles to school, uphill, both ways and when I got there I was flogged for being late, no matter the time, and we had classrooms in a ditch and lunch in the sewer . . .:jester:

and another thing . . . all you kids, get off my lawn!!!:lmao:

 

There's a line between youthful exuberance and acting like a whiny, self-entitled little <insert word of choice here>.

Our starting wage for engineers is fairly fixed. Sometimes I get some push back and (futile) attempts to negotiate it upward. Those don't offend me. I wish more people, of all ages and levels, took the time to push back on an offer to see if they can get more rather than accepting it at face value and then sitting around stewing about how underpaid they are.

Turn the job offer down. See that the other side of the fence is woefully not as green as you expected and move on. Lesson learned. Such is life.

But if you call the HR person and leave me your own personal rendition of a George Carlin skit or, and this is the unforgivable sin, call and abuse the various staffing assistants who set up the interviews and make some low level offers, then you kind of deserve the slap that life is about to deliver to you as you tear through the countryside burning bridges before realizing that you are now stuck on an island with no means of escape.

For my own part, I was fresh out of high school when I got a job at a drug and alcohol treatment center and I was insufferable to all around me. At school, I acted like a jerk because I was actually working "in the field" while my classmates were flipping burgers when they weren't in class. At home, I had plenty of cash for a young man of my age and the promise of prestigious degrees and the eventual career as a psychologist ahead of me. I know I pissed off my father (who helped me get the job, by the way) to no end.

Aside from the occasional tussle on this forum, and firing people for things they absolutely deserve to be fired for, I'm a much more pleasant person to be around. Honest!

 

When I was a kid the term "snot" was often used to fill in that blank space. I can think of others too.

 

I know, I know, I was anticipating that response, but heck, Kizmet, I really didn't make any of that up. It's just so, really happened, and the dorms around here really are veritable palaces compared with what we had (for that matter, a colleague of mine originally from Mainland China told me they stacked them up like cordwood at his university back in the day, ten to a room!). Of course the previous generation said the same about us. My mom during the Great Depression had to sleep in the car with her mom, dad, brother for some time. Homeless, barely hanging on. We had it good compared to them, today they have it good compared to us. That's what you get when you have roughly 3% growth in GDP year after year, stretching out over decades. But you also get some relatively privileged kids who have a tough time adjusting to the working world.

 

I thought I was pretty well behaved, but evidently must have been exuding arrogant, entitled insufferable vibes, because the first law firm where I had any affiliation, the attorney who ran the show called me into his office and said "Hey X, don't go putting on airs around here, because my legal secretary could try a case better than you right now." Really put me in my place.

 

My own experience was much like yours. I lived in a crappy little apartment, shared by too many students. If someone had a TV then there was TV. If they moved out . . . no TV. Cinder bocks and 2x4s for shelving. Once we borrowed some DPW sawhorses and a sheet of construction company plywood to make a table. We used it for everything. Meals, study, pingpong for an entire academic year before quietly returning the components to where we found them. All of it was OK with no permanent emotional scarring.

 

Yeah, exactly, sounds very familiar. My own kids, we try to make them rugged by not giving them much. Don't really have the money to do so anyway on a college teacher's salary since my wife decided she didn't want to work anymore, just tend the homefront (she put me through law school, then later started working on the side, adjuncting, to put me through grad B-school, so not like I can complain). They go to college, they go on Pell grants and scholarships and loans and whatever's left that has to be paid, they work for it. We don't help much because we don't have the wherewithal. I hope this makes them a little more tough and competitive--either that, or it'll make them bitter at us and they'll refuse to clip our toenails and change our diapers in 30 years.

 

I'm not going to say that we thought it was all fun because we did our share of complaining. But we knew it was temporary and soon things would be better.

 

I had a colleague who hired a recent college grad as a temp (in HR). And he was constantly getting frustrated with the young man. He was starting to resemble some combination of Mr. Slate (from the Flintstones) and Mr. Spacely.

At a certain point while he was commiserating in my office I reminded him that we all got put in our place at some point early in our careers. It's part of the process. My own attitude adjustment was aided greatly by recruit training when I joined the Navy. I felt like hot stuff walking into the recruiter's office with my A.A. in hand. At the time, I was able to finagle being inducted as an E-3 because of my education. I had this notion that my being an E-3 actually mattered since I outranked the lowly E-1's and E-2's. Fortunately, that idea was knocked out of my head by the end of my first day. And when I hit the fleet and realized that I wouldn't matter to anyone for at least two more promotions.

So, I try not to hold it against people.

I think when you go suing your law school, though, the most likely outcome is that you pretty much guarantee that you won't even be able to get the entry level crap jobs. I fault her attorney who is likely hoping to make a quick buck off of a brush off settlement with the law school at the expense of burning this young woman's bridges. Also, if you sue every time life tries to put you in your place you don't actually learn that valuable lesson and then you eventually morph into an older spoiled brat.