LSAT, Public Interest

What Should A Prospective Public Defender With A Middling LSAT Score Do?

Law school can be expensive, and sometimes mid-tier law schools may be a worse investment than one lower down the food chain.

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Last week I received an email asking for advice about whether a prospective public defender should go to law school. I’ll provide my thoughts; you can provide yours in the comments. Here’s the email, edited to remove many identifying details:

I currently work at a DA’s Office. Before that, I worked in Pretrial Services as a social worker, advocating for clients to be in treatment instead of custody before trial. I also taught in a prison and have done some juvenile justice research for national and local organizations. Finally, I have a master’s degree from [Top-Tier University].

After several years of stressing over possibly flunking the LSAT, I got a mediocre score and was admitted to [Mid-Tier Law School]! I saw the insane amount of loans, lamented at the awful job market and decided not to attend this year. I thought for many years that I was destined to be a public defender. Now, I’m not so sure…

I just thought I would reach out to ask about your thoughts on the legal job market for nerds like me who are still hugely passionate about public interest work — who genuinely want to help people avoid convictions on dumb cases (particularly when they’re homeless and mentally ill and chronic drug addicts).

To me, the emailer sounds like she’s informed and genuinely interested in being a public defender. She’s worked in the criminal-justice arena for a while in different capacities. She’s had interactions with members of her future client base. She’s even advocated on behalf of criminal defendants before. All this and she still wants to do the work — she may be a starry-eyed idealist, but she also has an idea what she’s getting herself into. In other words, she’s one of the rare few who should indeed consider going to law school.

With a work history like hers, I’d expect she’d have no trouble getting an unpaid summer internship at a PD’s office, repeating the same after 2L year, but this time with a student-practice license that allows her to make court appearances, and then ending up in relatively good shape when post-graduate hiring kicks into gear.

That said, relatively good shape is still not all that great. At the start of the legal job market collapse, I interviewed with a public defender’s office for a single open position that the interviewer told me 279 people had applied for. I’m not sure things have gotten any better since then.

And even if she got a job as a public defender, I did some of the math for her situation and it’s not pretty. Given the debt load from three years of tuition and living expenses at her Mid-Tier Law School and the starting salary for a public defender in her market, and assuming 20% withholding, she’d be paying 37% of her take-home pay toward her loans. That’s not taking into account the reduced loan payments that would likely result from Income-Based Repayment (IBR), Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE), or Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs,). But I counsel debt avoidance for would-be public interest lawyers, and there are reasons for that. Her Mid-Tier Law School’s LRAP would only help so much. The program requires enrollment in one of the federal repayment programs (IBR or PAYE), and the maximum annual LRAP benefit is only 17% of her overall loan payments. Under the federal repayment programs, some unpaid loan interest can be capitalized, and it’s impossible to count on the now-existing ten-year public-service loan forgiveness (PSLF) program since it may soon be subject to a cap. So it is entirely possible that the emailer could find herself stuck in IBR or PAYE for decades.

And again, this is assuming the emailer in fact gets a job as a public defender. In this market, she could end up unemployed, unable even to get the types of jobs she’s held before because of her shiny new JD, and unable to make a dent in her mountain of debt.

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Perhaps I’m missing something, but I would not willingly wade into that situation.

So my advice to the emailer, then, is this: when it comes to law schools, shoot lower.

My answer might be different if, say, Yale were within the emailer’s reach based on a simple LSAT retake. (Here’s why.) Then I’d say either shoot higher or shoot lower. But getting from a “mediocre score” to a score sufficient to secure admission to Yale is pretty unlikely.

So: shoot lower. Is there a school in your market where you can get a full ride? I don’t mean one of those “full rides” contingent on meeting some unrealistic benchmark, but a real full ride. You might be surprised: schools are still competing for students in order to bring up their admissions statistics, and even a mediocre LSAT score might be enough to bring up a 4th tier school’s median LSAT. An undergrad GPA that was enough to get you into a decent master’s program is probably worth something to lower-ranked law schools too.

And if a law school does offer you full ride, look into whether the school provides funding for students who take on unpaid summer work. If the answer is yes, then that may well be the school for you. Once your tuition’s paid for and you’ve secured some summer income, all of a sudden the economics of law school look a little better. You may have mixed feelings getting a JD from the Allstate School of Insurance Defense Law and Other Kinds of Law Too, but keep your eye on the prize. In my experience at least, it’s unlikely that a PD’s office will care much if your law school is in the 20s, 50s, 80s, or even lower.

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That’s my two cents’ worth. Readers, what say you?

Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at [email protected].

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