Job Searches, Law Schools

Prestige, Not Training, Is What Helps You Get A Job

If you give that nimrod money for clinical training I'll shoot him on general principle.

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Are you going to a good, well-ranked law school according to U.S. News? Good. Then you will probably get a job. Are you going to a poorly ranked law school? Oh, so sorry, it’s going to be a struggle for you to get a job.

And there’s nothing you can do to change that. I know it sounds harsh. I know it is unfair. But for most people, the die on their entry level job prospects was cast on a Saturday back in college when they took the LSAT. That was your day. That was your opportunity to show potential employers that they should call you in for an interview. That was your moment.

If the moment passed you, well, there’s a new study out showing that all of the “practical” or “clinical” training in the world doesn’t mean a hill of beans to employers. They care about what law school you went to and almost nothing else. Here’s a graph from Jason Yackee’s paper Does Experiential Learning Improve JD Employment Outcomes? (gavel bang, Paul Caron):

For those who don’t like math, the answer to Yackee’s question is “no.” Experiential curricula have become the magic beans of the current law school brochures. Or as Yackee puts it:

To summarize the paper’s key finding: there is no statistical relationship between law school opportunities for skills training and JD employment outcomes. In contrast, employment outcomes do seem to be strongly related to law school prestige.

Now, I don’t point this out to encourage students at middling law schools to abandon all hope and try their hands at waste removal or Mets shortstop. I point this out to say that the value proposition of clinical education has not matured to the point where any law school has any business charging you for it. Nobody should be spending money on a law degree that they wouldn’t have otherwise purchased because of clinical training. You shouldn’t give up anything — like spots in the rankings, or a better scholarship package — because you were “wowed” by the a law school’s clinical offerings. Because there is NO STATISTICAL PROOF that clinical training is actually worth anything.

It might be worth something to somebody someday. Yackee himself engages in some delightful wishcasting about the theoretical value of practical training while in law school:

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It is easy to imagine a number of plausible and perhaps even empirically testable hypotheses about the positive consequences of skills training. For example, perhaps students who engage in skills training have a more enjoyable time in law school. Perhaps they enter their first job with more confidence and less stress. Perhaps they obtain better jobs than they otherwise would have obtained. Perhaps they have a meaningful impact on the lives of the legally underserved. Perhaps they are less likely to commit professional malpractice in their first jobs. And so on.

Sure, why not? Clinical training might make you a happier, more awesome, do-gooder-er. In related news, sleeping in a bed of tarantulas might one day give me the power to shoot silk out of my dick. I CAN IMAGINE IT! Maybe it will happen for me. But in the meantime, there is no evidence that my hallucinations are real and so I won’t be giving Stan Lee any money.

Go to the best law schools in the country, go to the best law school in your state, go to the best law school that will allow you to go for free, or don’t go at all. These are your choices. Going to the law school that offers you the best practical training is, as of now, foolish.

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