Law School Success Stories: High Risk, High Reward
When it comes to law school, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sometimes you need to take a risk in order to reap the rewards.
Consider our next successful law school graduate, a recent graduate of Fordham School of Law (also a first-tier school, ranked at #29 by U.S. News):
I graduated from Fordham Law School last year. My graduation year was among the bleakest for law school graduates, especially for a graduate not in a Top 20 law school. I decided on Fordham because it had a good reputation for placing students at Biglaw jobs prior to the collapse, had a cordial atmosphere, and was in the city that I wanted to live/practice in.
I ended up with grades in the top 25 percent of my law school class after 1L — not the best, not the worst. Though top 25 percent was normally guaranteed to get you a Vault 100 job from Fordham pre-collapse, OCI was an utter bloodbath and we were stressed out of our minds. Still, I managed to find a Biglaw legal job making NY market.
I’ve got a lot of debt outstanding — probably in the neighborhood of $70K when it’s all totaled up, as I didn’t have anyone helping me out financially during law school. Still, I have no doubts that I’ll be able to pay my debts off.
Now, $70,000 in debt is nothing to scoff at. But if this fellow is making NYC market — $160K, $170K, $185K, etc. — and if he sticks around his firm for a few years, he’ll have no problem paying it off (provided he lives within his means). Even if he leaves to do something less lucrative, like work for a small law firm or go in-house, he should still have no trouble servicing the debt.
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Would he be better off with no law school debt but no law degree? Definitely not, at least financially:
If I wasn’t practicing, I’d be hustling my English degree to try to get a job in publishing in the city. Chances are I’d be doing freelance work with some magazine, with no benefits, no stability, and no real exit strategy to survive when magazine publishing finally dies. I don’t have the same passion for the law as I do for publishing, but it was a smart decision. I’m definitely sure I wouldn’t be making six figures with an English degree doing anything non-legal.
It was a huge risk to end up in law school when I did, but I had no knowledge that the market would collapse as badly as it did when I applied, and it was too late to back out after I had accepted. Still, the risk paid off and I’m not upset about it.
And this, ladies and gentleman, is why so many humanities majors — I was one myself — wind up in law school. As the Avenue Q song goes, “What do you do with a BA in English?” Job opportunities in the legal profession aren’t what they once were, but the same is true for so many other fields — media and journalism, book publishing, etc. — that used to attract liberal-arts graduates who lack scientific or technical skills.
As I mentioned in point #3 of my defense of going to law school, “What else are you going to do with yourself?” The Fordham grad who wrote in to us — who was in the top 25 percent of his class, but not the top ten percent, or even the top five percent — is doing so much better financially than he would be as a freelance writer trying to make it in New York.
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There are lots of six-figure legal jobs in New York. But you can land such a position outside of NYC too (where your income will go farther). And you can go to a school that’s not as highly ranked as Fordham, as our next successful graduate did….
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