Today, April 15, is Tax Day. But it’s an important day for another reason as well: it happens to be the day that some law schools want to hear back from applicants — and collect their deposit checks, of course.
Let’s close out our series of posts soliciting advice on picking a law school with three fact patterns. All of them involve at least two members of the so-called “T14,” the nation’s 14 leading law schools according to the U.S. News rankings….
In our last story asking you to advise a law school applicant, the 0L in question was choosing between UVA, Northwestern, and Minnesota, which offered him scholarships of different sizes. You voted in favor of Northwestern, which offered him a generous scholarship, and he took your advice.
Today we bring you a doubleheader. Our first candidate wants to know whether she should go to law school at all, given the options she faces. Our second candidate is choosing between two excellent law schools, but with different price points….
Yesterday we asked you to advise a prospective law student choosing between NYU Law School, at full sticker price, and UVA Law School, at half price. You overwhelmingly voted in favor of UVA. (Some of you suggested in the comments that he try to use his UVA scholarship to wrangle some scholarship money out of NYU; he did, but NYU said no.)
Today we bring you another 0L choosing between some excellent law schools. This individual has narrowed his decision down to three places: UVA, Northwestern, and Minnesota. For those of you who slavishly adhere to the U.S. News rankings, the three schools check in at #7, #12, and #19, respectively.
So what makes this choice more challenging? The differing scholarship amounts they’re offering this candidate….
Continue reading “The Decision: UVA v. Northwestern v. Minnesota (With Varying Scholarship Amounts)”
Going to law school is a smart choice for many people. It’s not a smart choice for all people or probably even the majority of people who end up going, and it’s not a decision to be entered into lightly. But if you want to be a practicing lawyer, based on an informed view of what lawyers actually do, and if you’ve concluded that law school is right for you, after a rigorous process of psychological and financial self-examination, then by all means, matriculate.
(We are not uniformly anti-law-school here at Above the Law. I’ve written many times in defense of going to law school, provided you’ve done your research. See, e.g., here, here, here, and all of these law school success stories. And Elie’s on vacation this week, hahaha….)
The question then becomes where you should go to law school. It’s a timely topic, since now is the time of year when prospective law students or “0Ls” must decide where to put down their deposits. So help a brother out and offer some advice on the following situation….
Continue reading “The Decision: NYU Law v. UVA Law at Half-Price Tuition?”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought you a few sets of rankings based on the class of 2011 employment statistics that were used in compiling the 2014 U.S. News law school rankings. These data points — in particular the one concerning full-time, long-term employment where bar passage was required — were the downfall of many a law school. If administrators weren’t looking out for their graduates before, now they’ll be forced to, unless they want to suffer even more in future rankings.
As for the 2015 U.S. News rankings, most law schools already have an idea of the fates they’ll be subjected to when Bob Morse gets his hands on the jobs data for the class of 2012. The fact that only 56 percent of the most recent graduating class were employed as lawyers nine months after graduation is already set in stone, so they’ll have to aim higher when it comes to the class of 2013.
But just because U.S. News hasn’t evaluated the most recent set of employment statistics doesn’t mean that we can’t. Today, the National Law Journal released a study on the latest employment outcomes from all 202 ABA-accredited law schools, ranging from the schools that sent the highest percentages of their class into Biglaw’s gaping maw to the schools with the highest percentage of Article III groupies.
The NLJ also has information on the law schools with the highest unemployment rates, and because we know that our readers are big fans of schadenfreude, we’re going to delve into that data. So which law schools had the highest percentage of graduates willing to review documents for food? Let’s find out….
Continue reading “The Law Schools With the Highest Unemployment Rates”
We are often fascinated by what we have not yet experienced. I grew up within commuting distance of a lot of great colleges, and never imagined myself one for dorm life. So while high school classmates less enthused with their home situations eagerly availed themselves of the “college visit” experience, I sat it out completely — as in never visiting any school, even the one I ended up at. So “college visits,” at least in the abstract, are interesting to me.
Sure, I enjoyed getting the post-PSAT academic recruiting letters from schools far and wide, and may have daydreamed about attending the University of Hawaii on full scholarship. But it was all just daydreaming. In hindsight, my relative lack of interest in college selection was fine. (And don’t get me started on the sham that universal college education actually is.)
Other kids at my high (-achieving) school, especially those who had given a little more of themselves to meet all the necessary high school academic benchmarks, took the process a lot more seriously. Many were hell-bent on licking the Ivy, or at least landing in some “specialized program” like a BA-MD-MPH degree-fest. So they hit the road, and drove, and flew, and visited. In the end, everyone went to the best school they were able to get into anyway. But they had the experience — of listening to a photogenic upperclassman spout eloquently about the joys of trudging from dorm to library in a howling blizzard. Of visiting a lecture hall with 300 seats, where the first three rows were full with the eager beavers, and the last three full as well with the “learners by osmosis,” while the 150 seats in the middle were as empty as a pre-Strasburg Nationals game against the Marlins in late September. Of seeing the gleaming “rec center” where the students actually looked fit, and seemed to be enjoying permanent recess. In the end, it is all about providing fodder for the daydream: “I could be here, enjoying every minute.”
So what does this have to do with Biglaw? Or law in general?
Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today, Gregory Henning of Anna Ivey Consulting explains to prospective law school applicants what they can expect in the application process. Part one of the series can be found here.
The typical law school application might require you to write three pieces: a main essay (two pages), a résumé (one page), and an optional statement on your interest in the school or some other topic (one page). That’s only four pages. Not too bad, right?
But those four pages are your only chance (in most cases) to communicate directly to the admissions officers. These documents are your only opportunity to step outside of the “numbers” to make a case for why you should be admitted. This is the only time the school will hear from you. Those four pages are starting to become pretty important…
Now think about your entire list of schools. Let’s say you plan to apply to 10 schools. You can expect to write two main essays (a personal statement and professional statement, depending on what a given school is asking for) and at least one résumé (some schools might ask for a longer variation of the one-page version that other schools require). If you apply to 10 schools, five might invite an optional statement about your interest in attending the school. Another three or four might ask for an optional essay on a different topic. If you believe you could add to the diversity of an incoming class, you may have a chance to submit an optional statement about that. Do you have any academic or criminal disclosure issues that need to be discussed and explained separately? If so, you’ll be producing another document.
Did you lose count? Even using a conservative estimate, it’s fair to say that you’ll probably be producing at least 10 separate pieces of writing when you apply to law school. That’s manageable, and certainly the content may overlap in many cases. You can create 10 documents. But wait, there’s more…
In Professor Paul Campos’s new book, Don’t Go To Law School (Unless) (affiliate link) — a book I’d recommend to anyone thinking seriously about law school — he shares an email from an individual who, after much research and thought, decides to enroll in law school. The email sheds some light on why people continue to sign up for law school despite all the warnings (from folks like Professor Campos, my colleague Elie Mystal, and many others). The law student writes:
[Prospective law students] think: debt doesn’t matter. There is no penalty for defaulting on the debt, except the relinquishment of the privileges of an advanced financial life. . . Students evaluating the horrible deal in question believe they have no access anyway to those privileges (e.g. a retirement account, a home purchase, a start-up business). For the student in question, all law school has to do is provide some potential benefit, and it becomes a rational choice.
After acknowledging that “[t]here’s a lot of force in this line of argument,” Professor Campos tries to refute it, basically arguing that many who go to law school based on such reasoning are “making a difficult situation worse.” But maybe the argument is not so easily refuted.
After all, what else are you going to do with yourself? Before you criticize law schools and those who matriculate at them, please familiarize yourself with the grim economic realities of twenty-first century America….
Continue reading “In Defense of Law School: Because What Else Are You Going To Do With Yourself?”
Are you thinking about going to law school — and being encouraged to go, or even pressured to go, by your parents? Let’s start with the probably reasonable premise that your parents want the best for you. (Sure, your parents might be sociopaths who are trying to destroy your life, but why would you listen to them at all, if that’s the case?)
Not infrequently, the parental conception of “what’s best for you” involves a stint in law school. If you don’t want to go, how can you convince your parents that law school is a terrible, awful, very bad idea?
Continue reading “From the Career Files: How To Tell Your Parents You’re Not Going to Law School”
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
Also, we have the two below in-house openings:
Keep reading »
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
Keep reading »
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