Ideally, you'd like to know a lot of things before you choose among the 175 or so law schools in the U.S. that are now approved by the ABA.

[FOOTNOTE 3] Note: if you forget the definitions of terms in this book, see the Index for the locations of those definitions.

You might have only the vaguest idea of where and what you'd like to do as a lawyer. You could use a good source of information at this point.

Let's suppose, for instance, that you'd like to practice law in California. It would be helpful to know how much you might make as a lawyer in San Francisco or Los Angeles. And then you'd like to compare this California information against comparable data for, say, New York. It's one thing to decide between Manhattan and Malibu. But for all you know at this point, the wrong law school might have you choosing, instead, between Buffalo and Bakersfield. You'd like to know this kind of thing before committing to a particular school.

It could also make a difference in your planning if you could learn more about being a lawyer in your target place. Is there active discrimination, in that city or state, against lawyers of your ethnic group, race, religion, or sex, by the bar association, by law firms, or by judges? On the other hand, do any of your favorite law schools have strong local alumni networks that might help you get a job?

There are other kinds of information that would be helpful to you at this point. For instance, it would be nice to have a chart that lets you go down a column entitled "Annual salary," until you reach the number that appeals to you, and then look across to the column for the city and the size of firm that interest you, and see how many hours you'll work to make that much money in that city. It could also be helpful to know how many years the typical graduate of each law school stays in his/her first law job, or how much s/he makes there, and how many graduates of each school have become partners

[FOOTNOTE 4] Law firms are generally required to be run by lawyers, which means there is good reason to set them up as partnerships rather than as corporations. Typically, you go to a law firm as an "associate," or non-partner, and you stay there for a number of years, and if things work out well, they will make you a partner after five to eight years, depending on the firm and the city.

in top firms or judges in important courts.

Not to mention the bar exam. You might wonder how many people from each law school fail it the first time, and of those who fail, how many never pass it, so that they've effectively wasted their three years in law school.

[FOOTNOTE 5] This is not an idle concern. See fn. 360.

And you might want to know how much law school will cost, how much you'll have to borrow, and how long it will take to repay.

In short, if you were choosing among law schools according to whether they met your personal needs, you'd expect to be able to go down to the bookstore and pick up a book that contains a lot of data on questions like these.

But surprise, surprise! This is not how most law students go about deciding which law school to attend. It can't be, because there's no such book. In fact, even the raw data that you'd need to answer those questions isn't always published, and in some cases it's never even been collected.

[FOOTNOTE 6] This book will point out many instances of little or no data.  [1999 update:  laws now require much more data than previously. Important data gaps still remain. Overall, however, the greater available data appears to affect people's choices among law schools more than their decisions of whether to attend law school at all.]

So now we have two unanswered questions: What makes people suddenly become so sure that they want to go to law school, and how do they know which law school they want to go to? And, come to think of it, there's a third question: Why doesn't the bookstore stock a book that answers these practical questions about your legal future?

It's not that bookstores are afraid of the subject. After all, the shelves are full of resources like your LSAT preparation book

[FOOTNOTE 7] E.g., Thomas H. Martinson, LSAT: Law School Admissions Test (New York: Arco, 1989).

and your book on how to approach the law school application process

[FOOTNOTE 8] E.g., Jeff Deaver, The Complete Law School Companion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984).

and how to choose your law courses,

[FOOTNOTE 9] E.g., Stephen Gillers, ed., Looking at Law School: A Student Guide from the Society of American Law Teachers, revised ed. (New York: New American Library, 1984).

as well as war-story books about the first year of law school

[FOOTNOTE 10] E.g., Scott Turow, One-L (New York: Warner Books, 1977).

or about being a big-shot attorney,

[FOOTNOTE 11] E.g., Roy Grutman and Bill Thomas, Lawyers and Thieves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).

and guides to the various law schools,

[FOOTNOTE 12] E.g., Elliott M. Epstein et al., Barron's Guide to Law Schools, 8th ed. (New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1988).

and collections of articles by lawyers in which they say why their own specialties are so good

[FOOTNOTE 13] E.g., Full Disclosure: Do You Really Want to Be a Lawyer? Susan J. Bell, ed., for Young Lawyers Division of ABA (Princeton: Peterson's Guides, 1989).

or so bad.

[FOOTNOTE 14] E.g., Deborah L. Arron, Running From the Law: Why Good Lawyers Are Getting Out of the Legal System (Seattle: Niche Press, 1989); Richard W. Moll, The Lure of the Law: Why People Become Lawyers, and What the Profession Does to Them (New York: Viking, 1990).

Nor are lawyers reluctant to ask questions. On the contrary, they're bright. They're driven. Even at this pre-law stage, you'd think that these students, of all people, would insist on knowing exactly what's going to happen to them in this hard, expensive process of legal education.

So how can it be that many people who enter law school know less about what they're getting than when they go out to buy a new car? You have to assume that they believe they have enough information to make their career decisions. How can they be so smart, know so little, and feel that they have the knowledge they need, all at the same time?

There is an answer. The answer is that all this information doesn't matter.

 

b.  The Way You Really Choose a School

 

If you were going after a Ph.D. in philosophy, you'd know that one graduate school is very different from another. Unless you loved the kind of specialized work that they were doing at a particular school, you wouldn't fit in, and they probably wouldn't like you very much.

That's not how it is in law school. The ABA-approved schools all meet the same requirements, and the graduates all have to work in the same legal system, so you're a lot more likely to be studying exactly what you would have studied at some other school.

Since the schools are so similar, the choice of school might seem irrelevant. I mean, if you're destined to be at the bottom of your law school class, then no doubt you belong at a place like Harvard, whose fame will make it much easier for you to rest on your laurels. Otherwise, though, you have lots of highly comparable schools to choose among, and you'll work hard and learn a lot at any of them:

[A]t least 40 law schools in this country are of "superior quality." They ... produce graduates who can solve the most intellectually demanding [legal problems]. Alleged distinctions between or among these schools are distinctions in image ....

[FOOTNOTE 15] Scott Van Alstyne, "Ranking the Law Schools: The Reality of Illusion?" American Bar Foundation ("ABF") Research Journal, vol. 1982 [sic], 1982, pg. 684 (his emphasis). Grammar and punctuation note: (1) I have not used legal citations in footnotes. If you ever want to figure out a legal citation, consider the example "20 B.C.L. Rev. 601, 613," which means "look at page 613 of the article that begins at page 601 of volume 20 of the Boston College Law Review," as you would know from your copy of A Uniform System of Citation (known as the "Blue Book") prepared by the Law Reviews of Columbia, Harvard, Penn, and Yale and beloved of law students everywhere. (2) Sometimes, I have cut quotes down to show the author's most important words. As the Blue Book indicates, lawyers do not simply "paraphrase." Instead, they use brackets to indicate the addition or substitution of a word or letter (e.g., "Peter, Paul [or] Mary") and ellipses ("...") to indicate deletion of one or more words. But brackets and ellipses are ugly and distracting. So, in some places in this book, I have decided not to use them, and instead have simply indicated, in the footnote, that the quote has been paraphrased. You can check the original sources to resolve any doubt about the quality of my paraphrasings.

And that's why you care which school you get into. We agree: The schools really are similar. But that's not important. What's important is that your peers, your employers, and you yourself are going to believe that you're a cut above the crowd if you graduate from a big-image school.

[FOOTNOTE 16] After comparing starting salaries and schools' prestige rankings, "it is clear ... law school students had an incentive ... to get to the highest rated school they could." (Ronald G. Ehrenberg, "An Economic Analysis of the Market for Law School Students," Journal of Legal Education, vol. 39, 1989, pg. 639.)

Everyone goes to the "best" -- i.e., the most prestigious -- school they can, and therefore they assume that you're doing likewise. So if you go to a "loser" school, they think that's where you belong.

So no one cares about all those factual questions I was asking a moment ago. For most entering law students, the real question about a school is not whether it will give you a better education, but where it stands on the pecking order. And since a lot of people take that order so seriously, here are the top 20, according to one widely published survey:

[FOOTNOTE 17] Robert J. Morse and Elizabeth A. Wagner, "Top 25 Law Schools," U.S. News & World Report, vol. 110, Apr. 29, 1991, pp. 74-75.  [Click here for the latest rankings, and note how things have changed for your target school -- or not -- since the 1991 list shown below.]

1. Yale $
2. Harvard $
3. U. Chicago $
4. Stanford $
5. Columbia $
6. U. Michigan
7. NYU $
8. U. Virginia *
9. Duke
10. U. Penn. $
11. Georgetown $
12. Berkeley *
13. Cornell $
14. Northwestern $
15. U. Texas *
16. U. So. Calif. $
17. Vanderbilt
18. UCLA *
19. U. Iowa *
20. Hastings *

* out-of-state tuition well below $15,000/year
$ avg. starting salaries of grads = $65,000+

 

And now that you've feasted your greedy eyes, let's get back to the enterprise of figuring out what goes on here.

 

c.  This Logic Can Lead to Funny Results

 

There's room to question the pecking order -- not only because it pretends to detect important differences in the quality of the schools, but also because it sometimes ignores schools that seem to be quietly doing a good job of getting their graduates into high places. For instance, I was surprised, when I once paged through the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory,

[FOOTNOTE 18] Produced annually in Summit, NJ. Most public libraries have a copy.

to see how many of the lawyers in good law firms had gone to obscure schools. In the same spirit, a random look at more than 600 attorneys who made it into the Who's Who in American Law

[FOOTNOTE 19] Who's Who in American Law, Marquis Who's Who, Chicago. I can't remember which edition I used.

gave me this unexpected list, in descending order, of the 10 schools from which most of those attorneys had come: Harvard, Michigan, Columbia, George Washington, Virginia, Yale, Chicago, Fordham, Georgetown, and NYU.

[FOOTNOTE 20] My surprise went both ways. George Washington? Fordham? And where were Stanford, Berkeley, Duke, etc.? No doubt the list would have changed if I had looked at more entries. And I have grown more suspicious, in the intervening years, of the significance of a listing in Who's Who -- probably because they listed me. But this tabulation was enough to suggest that going to a less-famous school might not be so terrible.

Students often don't, but should, think about more than mere prestige. For example, one writer urges you to find out whether (a) you can take courses outside the law school in relevant subjects (business, for instance), (b) the clinical

[FOOTNOTE 21] For instance, from Harvard Law School: "Clinical programs put students into dozens of organizational settings. Placements are available in a variety of fields. Student roles range from direct client representation to research and writing, policy analysis, and litigation assistance. Some courses require half or more of a student's time for a semester; others involve only ten hours a week of field work. Some courses focus on lawyering skills, while others emphasize doctrine, policy, theory, or ethics." (Paraphrased from the 1989-90 catalog.)

courses are good, (c) the social life seems limited to beer blasts, (d) student government makes a difference, (e) you have a choice of interesting legal journals to join, and (f) the place has good physical facilities.

[FOOTNOTE 22] Sally F. Goldfarb, Inside the Law Schools: A Guide by Students, for Students, 4th ed. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1986), pp. 14-15.

Of course, I ignored all that and went to Columbia, mostly because it was the most prestigious school that accepted me. Columbia offered an excellent selection of legal journals and an abysmal physical and spiritual environment.  [PHOTOS]

For instance, you could barely stand the student lounge. The law library's photocopiers were broken-down and primitive, despite the hundreds of students who relied on them. When a graffiti nut lost his mind with a Magic Marker on the stalls in the men's restroom, the maintenance people (who seemed to hate us anyway) responded by simply scraping off the graffiti and the paint, leaving bare metal that eventually rusted. The halls were perpetually half-lit, although at least that helped to hide the filthy walls, army-like metal lockers, and beat-up furniture. The security guards did nothing, unless you forgot your student I.D. card, in which case they'd promptly turn you away -- never mind that you'd been coming through there every day, all year, trying to catch their eye to say hello. The students were very driven, which means that many of them did not hesitate to take books off the library shelves and leave them wherever they chose, forcing you to spend 10 minutes at a time, hunting through the entire library to find each missing volume.

[FOOTNOTE 23] Columbia has improved its physical plant since then. That did me no good, of course. As for its spiritual environment, I have not seen indications that it leads the struggle to make legal education more sensible or decent.

By way of comparison, I've recently done some work in the law library at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I think we snobs at Columbia would have looked on this school with disdain. It's not ancient, or famous, or expensive.

But they're friendly, at least by New York standards, and they seem to trust each other out there. The students have their own assigned desks in the library, where they leave pens, notebooks, sweaters, even their briefcases -- not just for a few minutes, but over the entire Christmas break. Nobody seems to steal anything.

All of the photocopiers at Boulder are modern, and they've all been working whenever I've visited. I wanted to use them, so I bought a copy card

[FOOTNOTE 24] "Copy cards" are like credit cards. They are magnetically programmed to allow a certain number of copies, so that you don't have to carry a lot of change or interrupt yourself each time to put in another dime.

at the front desk for $20. With $17 worth of copies still on the card, I forgot about it and walked away, leaving it in the machine. An hour later, I remembered it and went racing back, to find that some honest soul had turned it in at the front desk. I did it again a couple of days later, and, again, it was waiting for me up front. A woman there said the same thing had happened to her.

It blew me away. Columbia was not like this. If I'd dropped my copy card at Columbia, people would have followed me to see if I was going to drop anything else. I wished I had known, when applying to law school, how different one school's students can be from another's in terms of warmth and respect.

Most prelaw students don't deeply investigate the question of which law school would be best for them personally. Certainly not if it's a choice between Columbia and Boulder. The pecking order is hard to buck. You'd need an awfully good reason to reject a top school.

That's what the statistics say, anyway. The big-name schools get literally thousands of applications for a few hundred spaces, and those applications come from the college students with the best GPAs and LSAT scores. There's no denying the importance of prestige in this process.

So you wind up with a funny result. The students who are brightest and most questioning get in line behind one another, applying to the same schools in the same ways for the same reasons. They come a long way, in a very short time, from their initial doubts about going to law school.

But why? What is so compelling about law school and/or the practice of law? What grabs you and makes you shout, "Yes! Yes! That's for me!"

The answer is, you do this because you've got a dream. You buy into a projection, partially true and partially false, that's displayed for you by older people -- mostly lawyers -- who have their own ideas of what the law is all about.

 

B.  Wanting It Badly

 

When you graduate from college, you may be young, but you're not an idiot. If you're hardheaded enough to imagine yourself as a lawyer, then you're probably hardheaded enough to demand specific statements on why you should become one. In response to your demand, you will hear a number of reasons that you may find very persuasive. A few were especially important to me and to many of my peers.

 

1.  Diversity

 

First off, you may be seduced by the thought that, with a law degree, you can do almost anything you'd like. As one lawyer put it,

For someone not sure of his interests or how long he wants to commit himself to one profession, law is an attractive starting point. ... There is also security in knowing that if a second profession fails, one has the option of returning to the challenging and secure practice of law.

[FOOTNOTE 25] Charles Z. Cohen, Your Future as a Lawyer (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1977), pg. 89.

The people who want you to consider law school are very careful to remind you that it's OK if you're indecisive about your future. For example, the law school authorities have said this in their highly popular book, The Official Guide to U.S. Law Schools, formerly known as the Prelaw Handbook:

The law touches virtually every aspect of not only American society as a whole but of our lives as individuals .... American law practice is so diverse that it is difficult to describe what the "typical" lawyer does. Each lawyer works with different clients and different legal problems. ... A legal career is diverse enough to satisfy nearly any preference ....

[FOOTNOTE 26] Official Guide, fn. 2, pg. 3.

It's true that the law is everywhere we turn, and that lawyers are the ones who work with that law. Also, lawyers do many things besides practicing law. They become corporation executives, politicians, and Hollywood script-writers. You name it, and you can find lawyers doing it.

There are many roles within the law. There are advocates, who argue on behalf of the client; counselors, who advise the client on his/her options; and negotiators, who do a little of each. We might add that there are drones, who churn out reams of paper; grubs, whose thankless library labors allow the glamorous advocate to pour forth brilliant insights; and hatchet-people, who "facilitate" matters that are too petty to warrant much attention from the big-time lawyers.

We probably shouldn't go too far with this notion that the law is infinitely diverse, however. There are limits. Otherwise, we wouldn't call it "law." We'd just call it "working for a living." Law doesn't train you to ride broncos or design highways. Your years of law study and practice will lead you to jobs and attitudes that are very different from those of non-lawyers.

Law schools do offer a diverse selection of courses. But they're all law courses. If you want to get into another field, you have to go outside the law school.

Similarly, you'll find variety after graduating, when you go into law practice and get introduced to a number of subjects. But I emphasize introduce. It's one thing to be a lawyer who gets to learn a little bit about, say, farming, while defending a farmer who's been sued. It's quite another thing to go back to that farmer after the lawsuit is over and see if he has the least interest in hiring you to work with him there on the farm. You can take your law degree and your pride out into the nonlegal job market, but unless you've got marketable nonlegal skills, you're apt to come back a humbler person.

The point is, you're getting diverse training, but it's diverse only for purposes of practicing law. You'll have, at most, one or two nonlegal areas in which, after a number of years, you may know enough to be able to consider a second career. In this sense, law really isn't all that different from any number of other pursuits.

Lawyers can indeed become almost anything else, once they've gotten their basic training in law school. But why in the world would we give law the credit for that? These are some of the brightest people in the country. They could have gone into those other fields right at the start. The question isn't whether law school helped them to reach these nonlegal positions. It's whether they wasted a lot of time with law instead of proceeding directly to where they ended up.

In lieu of diversity in the job market, you might be intrigued by diversity in the classroom. You can tell yourself that law school will surround you with unique, special people. But you might want to think about what got these people into law school. The fact is, a lot of them are extreme nerds. Flamboyant they're not. They've proved that they can study endlessly. You should plan on doing some searching if you want to find stimulating friends.

You'll definitely find talented people in law school. But talents require feeding. If someone is willing to devote the time that law school demands, they've probably decided that their other talents weren't really that great or important. They're voting against, not in favor of, self-expansion.

You can benefit from asking yourself what kind of diversity you're seeking from your legal education. If you just want an excuse to pass three years without making any serious decisions, this will do, although you could probably find alternatives that would be more fun, productive, and affordable.

I've criticized the notion that the law is diverse. But I did admit that lawyers do wind up doing a wide variety of things. Isn't that good enough?

Look again, if you will, at that last quote from The Official Guide, and particularly the last sentence of it. It expresses a slightly different idea. It says, not that lawyers as a group are diverse, but that any individual lawyer's career can be "diverse enough to satisfy nearly any preference." That makes law school much more tempting. It sounds as though, once you become a lawyer, you'll get to decide whether to spend your days working with one, or three, or a dozen different kinds of law and people and activities.

Unfortunately, that's so wrong that I can't believe they wrote it. It may be that lawyers do many different things. But each individual lawyer is apt to be stuck doing the same thing over and over again.

[FOOTNOTE 27] A study of Australian lawyers confirmed that lawyers are strongly influenced by the area of law in which they take their first legal job, so that there is not much movement to other types of jobs. (Roma Tomasic, "Social Organization amongst Australian Lawyers," Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, vol. 19, Nov. 1983, pg. 471.)

Just because one ant goes in one direction and another ant goes in another direction doesn't mean that every ant is free to go in any direction.

[FOOTNOTE 28] "As the workers increase in number, more specialized castes are added." (E. Royte, "The Ant Man," New York Times Magazine, July 22, 1990, pg. 21.)

A lawyer is a professional. That requires him/her to become highly skilled in a few specific ways. People don't hire lawyers who'll have fun and make it up as they go along. Clients want a lawyer who has proved him/herself under fire in the same kind of situation many times before. If you practice law in an area that excites you, that's great, because you'll be doing a lot of it. But if you want to spend your career on a free ride around the intellectual world, I wish you luck. It's possible to get that kind of legal experience, but it's not likely. That's just not how most legal careers work.

[FOOTNOTE 29] Note that the Official Guide changes every year or two. Your copy may not contain exactly this quote. But the things I quote were said recently enough that you can't help wondering how reliable the Official Guide is on these topics. Anyway, I'll let you know the next time I see a written apology by the authors of the Official Guide for a previous year's wrongheaded statement.

People who spend too much time studying in college sometimes lose track of one final aspect of diversity. Their heads are telling them that "diversity" means learning lots of interesting subjects. But their hearts are telling them that "diversity" also means working with different kinds of people, going different places, and maybe even wearing different kinds of clothes. In these non-bookish ways, your experience with the law may not be merely less diverse than some people promised. It may not be diverse at all.

 

2.  Money

 

Lawyers also praise the law for giving them a way of making a lot of loot. As the saying goes, money is the root of all wealth.

[FOOTNOTE 30] I got this from a T-shirt I saw the other day.

But here, too, the news is not all good.

If you like to dream, you can look at Wall Street's salaries, ignore your living expenses, working hours, and risks, and simply assume that you'll eventually become a partner at a top firm and find yourself showered with wealth.

If you face reality, though, you consider a few more variables. Such as: What if I don't do so well in law school? As one of my classmates put it, "The thing about a place like Columbia is that they attract 300 of the brightest people in the country each year, and then convince 250 of them that they're stupid."

[FOOTNOTE 31] This is from the woman with the Ph.D. in astrophysics. (See below.) She included herself in the "feeling stupid" category. Remember how I said going to law school was like joining the Marines?

You're up against valedictorians from all over the place. You genuinely cannot count on being Top Gun.

Or another variable: What if you don't get that cutting-edge job? Maybe you're strange. Maybe your feet stink. The competition is fierce, and if you wear weird ties to your interviews, you could be history.

Or what if you finish the three years of law school and decide you don't even want that kind of big-firm job? Then you have to recalculate, using the salary structure, not of Wall Street, but of your new law job in Podunk.

[FOOTNOTE 32] See text, below, for statistics on these points.

Or, on the job: What if you can't stand it, and instead of staying around for the big money, you bail out after a couple of years and become a pianist? There's not usually a lot of money in pianism. Your grand plans may be washed up.

Or maybe you hang in there for eight years, and then they tell you to go fly a kite. It's not rare, you know, for that to happen, and opportunities for young lawyers to make partner are shrinking.

[FOOTNOTE 33] Thomas F. Gibbons, "Law Practice in 2001," ABA Journal, vol. 76, Jan. 1990, pp. 69-71.

You'll have to leave -- or, if you're working for a more enlightened firm and you haven't made major enemies, maybe they'll offer you a 7-percent raise and a chance to continue, forever, in purgatory, also known as "senior associateship," which means you'll always be a mere salaried employee.

Or even suppose you get the brass ring. You "make partner" -- that is, they make you a partner. Even at this point, all kinds of strange things can happen. They may require you to invest a portion of your income back in the firm. You may not get a very big piece of the pie for years.

[FOOTNOTE 34] Or, as one junior partner confided to me, in describing his relationship to a senior partner, "I like to think I work with Joe, not for him." Nowadays, partners do get demoted from partnership if they don't work hard enough. (See Stephen Gillers of NYU Law School, as quoted by Stephanie B. Goldberg, "Then and Now: 75 Years of Change," ABA Journal, vol. 76, Jan. 1990, pg. 59.)

You'll work long hours. You can be sued now, and you'll worry about that, despite your expensive malpractice insurance -- not only because of the malpractice claims, but also because of the possibility of spectacular lawsuits by former partners who decide they hate you.

[FOOTNOTE 35] Malpractice insurance is no cure-all. It often covers the date of the suit, rather than when the malpractice occurred, so you can imagine the discomfort of partners at those firms that now cannot obtain coverage for their past sins. An example: firms that might be held liable for the failures of banks or savings and loan companies. (Harlan Christ and Wade Lambert, "Malpractice Insurers Worry Over Legal Work for Banks," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 29, 1990, pg. B-7, col. 1.)

And this is what can happen to those who make partner at top firms! How about the many attorneys who start at salaries of less than $30,000?

[FOOTNOTE 36] The median income of all attorneys in 1988 was $32,750. (ABA Public Education Division, Law As a Career, (Chicago: ABA, 1989), pg. 6.) In 1990, starting attorneys at almost all governmental and public interest law jobs earned less than that. Even at law firms, the average was $43,000 or less in every city except Chicago, Cleveland, D.C., L.A., and New York. (See "The 16th Annual Salary Survey," Student Lawyer, Nov. 1990, pp. 30, 34.)

How about those who make more, but whose working hours are so long that they'd have earned more, on an hourly basis, as word processing operators?

Even on Wall Street, an income of $90,000 a year, with federal, state, and local taxes of, say, 25 percent, and with 2,700 working (not billable) hours, comes out to $25 an hour, which is probably less than the income of your average New York electrician.

[FOOTNOTE 37] Up to $136,000 a year. See "Including Overtime, A City Electrician Outearns the Mayor," New York Times, May 6, 1990, pg. A-19, col. 1.

The limo drivers who used to take me home from the office made that much. And your net hourly income figure drops way off if you don't like to think that you went through all that hard work in law school for free, and start counting those school hours and costs against your first five or 10 years' worth of income.

[FOOTNOTE 38] See David L. Chambers, "Educational Debts and the Worsening Position of Small-Firm, Government, and Legal-Services Lawyers," Journal of Legal Education, vol. 39, no. 5, 1989, pp. 714-18: For many, "the amounts devoted to debt repayment will ... seem extremely onerous ...." "Even if the first-year lawyer [who graduates with large student debts] obtains one of the most lucrative job offers in New York ..., debt repayment within a ten-year period would prove difficult." (Kramer, "Will Legal Education Remain Affordable, By Whom, and How?" Duke Law Journal, vol. 1987, April 1987, pg. 263.) Large student debts can now be consolidated into packages to be repaid over 20 to 25 years. (Kramer, pg. 265.) The average debt per student for the Harvard class of 1990 was $41,500 per student, with some as high as $80,000. (Ken Myers, "Administrators Are Worrying About Graduates' Growing Debt," National Law Journal, vol. 13, May 20, 1991, pg. 4, col. 4.)

As a general rule, your expenses keep pace with your income, even for lawyers who earn very good money.

[FOOTNOTE 39] See Deirdre Fanning, "New York Lawyer Leaves Fast Lane for Good Life Jackson, Wyo.-Style," Denver Post, Mar. 25, 1990, pg. 3-G.

You can hope to save a lot. But reality has a way of fouling that up. You might get married or, even more expensive, divorced. As they say, two can live as cheaply as one, for half as long. You might feel entitled to indulge yourself in expensive restaurants and vacations. You'll have high expectations from three years among your money-oriented law school classmates. You may have substantial student loans to pay back. The fact is, many other young attorneys before you have found themselves in deep debt despite nice incomes.

In short, going to law school to afford a nicer lifestyle over the long haul may make sense, especially if you marry someone who also has a decent income. Going in hopes of reaching financial security within a few years probably doesn't.

So here's a theory: If you're smart enough to get into law school, and if money is what motivates you, maybe you could have found a way of making money without law school. And if you're more motivated by your interests than by making money, you'll probably go back to fun and interesting things eventually anyway, even with your law degree, and find yourself somewhere near the level of financial security or poverty you'd have reached without law school.

Of course, you don't have a non-law-school alter ego, so there is no way of testing this theory. That's what makes it one of my favorites.

In case you don't believe it, though, here's a contrary theory. According to this one, your decision to go into law really does have an impact on your chances of becoming wealthy; unfortunately, it can go either way. I know people who would have made lousy lawyers but who've done quite well in business. And I know proud attorneys, trained to avoid risks, who've watched, rotting and festering in envy, while motivated youngsters without law degrees go out and start their own legitimate, successful businesses.

It's easier for those upstarts. They have nothing to lose. They haven't been taught that they must do nothing because doing almost anything means risking a lawsuit. They haven't piled up student loans that need to be paid off, and their egos have not been stroked by a prestigious law school to the point that they could never imagine themselves doing something as down-and-dirty as running a hardware store. Instead, these kids just go out and do it, and some of them make a lot of money from their little businesses, and maybe some of my law school classmates could have had the same kind of fortune, if only they hadn't gone into the stultifying practice of law.

There is indeed money in law. Some lawyers become very wealthy. But, generally, a lawyer is someone who works for a living. Maybe becoming wealthy from law is just like becoming wealthy from business -- it takes hard work, ability, and luck.

Let's step back, now, and review. I've suggested that there are two sides to (a) the thought that the law is an extremely diverse profession and (b) the claim that you can make a lot of money at it. I don't altogether deny the claims to either diversity or money. I only say that you have to be careful about the ways in which you make those claims.

Unfortunately, that's not what happens. As far as I recall, no law school ever gave me the kind of detailed look at money that I just gave you. Maybe this is what happens when the law school invites prelaw students to listen only to those alumni who have distinguished records of service to the law. They get a bunch of cheerleaders. I don't rue those alumni's successes. But I do regret the perpetuation of beliefs that will work only for a portion of the students who hear them.

 

3.  Excitement

 

I applied to law school because I wanted to make money and have diverse options. But once I was satisfied that those two elements were there, I began to think about other things. I especially liked the claim that law is exciting.

Some attorneys spend a lot of time dealing with clients, victims, judges, and opposing counsel. Examples include public defenders, assistant district attorneys, and Legal Aid lawyers. If your definition of excitement features lots of standing on your feet and thinking, these jobs may be for you.

For others, excitement means being intellectually engrossed. Personally, I enjoy legal research. Many lawyers sneer at it, but I find it fascinating to try to trace back through the history of an idea's expression in the law, so as to understand how the law came to its present form. It's especially exciting when I drink too much coffee, get wired, and find myself utterly absorbed in some trivial point that otherwise would have bored me silly.

But there are real limits on all these kinds of excitement. The assistant district attorneys, public defenders, and others who spend long hours on their feet or on the phone do not often handle issues of the greatest importance. People at the sophisticated

[FOOTNOTE 40] When I use the word "sophisticated" in this book, I don't usually mean to describe people who dress well or talk with a stuck-up accent. I'm referring, rather, to people who are very skilled in the area in which they work.

law firms -- who may or may not be better practitioners -- tend to look down their noses at these attorneys and wouldn't willingly trade places with them.

Legal research may be interesting when you get to choose the topic, but it goes downhill rapidly when you've been spending weeks at it, trying to learn how to handle the paperwork in a trivial (but big-money) case. It can be exciting to get involved with a case on the cutting edge of the law, but you can't expect to fill your day with that kind of work unless you're someone like Melvin Belli.

As a junior associate at a large firm, you might be assigned to handle some of the grunt work on a few important cases. And you'll find that exciting, for a while. But you can be tempted to consider it more important than it really is. I remember running a copy machine at a printing store during college and feeling personally involved with some of the important papers I was photocopying. When that thrill wears off, though, you eventually realize that great cases, like great people, look very different from the bottom.

Even the thrill of combat isn't what it used to be. The vast majority of cases settle out of court, after a period of pushing paper back and forth.

[FOOTNOTE 41] E.g., 15% of cases went through trial in the federal district courts in 1940, but only 6.5% in 1980. (Marc Galanter, "Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don't Know (and Think We Know) About Our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society," U.C.L.A. Law Review, vol. 31, Oct. 1983, pg. 44.)

More and more cases are handled by arbitration rather than trial. You may get to argue some relatively narrow, technical points in court, such as whether the other guy is required to give you certain documents that you seek. It's OK, and you can get engrossed in it. But glamorous it ain't.

Even if you work in a legal speciality that particularly interests you, you can be surprised to see yourself getting sick of the run-of-the-mill cases that fall within that area. As our college professors taught us, overkill can turn the scintillating into the surpassingly tedious.

Finally, how about the thought that law is intellectually exciting because it's so creative? Calling something "creative" makes it sound intelligent. Lawyers pride themselves on their intelligence, so of course they want to think law is creative. Unfortunately, in explaining what's creative about it, they describe not only the ability to come up with genuine solutions, but also the skill to manipulate, to deceive, and to confuse.

When you get away from such perverse kinds of creativity, you may find that lawyers -- including you, if you hang in there long enough -- are really not very creative.

[FOOTNOTE 42] "In contrast to non-lawyers, [lawyers] attach less importance to originality and creativity ...." (S. Warkov and J. Zelan, Lawyers in the Making (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965), as reprinted in Law Schools and Professional Education: Report and Recommendations of the Special Committee for a Study of Legal Education of the ABA (Chicago: ABA, 1980), pg. 30.)

And this is not surprising. The law is a conservative enterprise. Traditions and precedents are important. Too much experimentation can get you into hot water.

 

4.  Opportunity to Make a Difference

 

I had one other primary motive for applying to law school. Everything I've said so far had to do with wanting to improve my own life. But how about the idea that a person should try to improve the lives of others?

It seemed to me that there were two ways to fix the world's problems. You could be a star, and simply sweep in and move the masses, or you could work behind the scenes, proceeding step by methodical step.

Let's think, first, about people who become stars. Some are in music or in TV and film. Others make it by non-entertainment routes, particularly politics and religious broadcasting. Although most people seek stardom for selfish reasons, many who reach the top do become interested in trying to get the public's support for various good causes.

Lawyers don't use all those avenues. In particular, you don't see many lawyers becoming TV preachers or movie stars. Most lawyers who reach stardom do so through politics.

You often hear two comments about lawyers in the world of politics. One is that you need lawyers in politics, because much of politics concentrates on lawmaking. And the other is that law must be a good way to get into politics, because so many politicians are lawyers.

I now think, however, that those notions deserve a closer look. Accountants, realtors, and other businesspeople have long since shown that you don't need to be a lawyer to understand the laws that matter to you, and I'm sure the same is true of our non-lawyer senators.

[FOOTNOTE 43] See Heinz Eulau and John D. Sprague, Lawyers in Politics: A Study in Professional Convergence (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964, reprinted by Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1984), pg. 144.

What's surprising is not that many lawmakers are attorneys, but that so many are not.

By the same token, I don't think law school will make you into a politician if you aren't already. The lawyers who become politicians might have done so even if they hadn't gone to law school. Many of those lawyers who go into politics get involved in student government during college and law school, and many enter politics not long after graduation. This suggests that they already had a plan before they started law school, and that perhaps they wanted the law degree merely to appear more attractive to voters.

I don't know whether law school can help you get into politics. There's some risk that it'll turn you into a hopeless geek, or that you'll be a mediocre law student and that your opponents will use that against you in the election.

But if you do get into politics, the next question is whether your law school experience will have made you the kind of person, in the kind of position, who will do good for other people. And there's room for doubt on that point.

[FOOTNOTE 44] One guy who runs a seminar entitled, "Let Me Talk You Out of Going to Law School" says, "One-half of the people who attend the seminar are sent by their friends, lovers or families. They can't stand the thought that a nice person will even consider becoming an attorney." (Ed Sherman, quoted by Deborah L. Arron, "Running from the Law," Legal Economics, vol. 14, Sept. 1988, pg. 46.)

Will law school teach you more about honesty? What about the evidence that, during law school, law students gradually become less interested in such things as making the world a better place or going into public interest law -- isn't there a risk that law school will sidetrack you altogether?

[FOOTNOTE 45] Since the 1970s, the percentage of graduates of prestigious law schools going into private practice has jumped from 70% to 90% or more, and of those, more are going into the largest firms. (Chambers, fn. 38, pg. 720. See also Lawrence Dubin, "The Role of Law School in Balancing a Lawyer's Personal and Professional Life," Journal of Psychiatry & Law, vol. 10, spring 1982, pg. 63.)

You want to believe that you'll have the strength to stick with your vision, but, then again, you're fooling with your entire career here, and you don't want to be a chump about it.

Does law school develop your political skills? It's not so clear. Consider, for example, two groups of political leaders in the English-speaking world during the past 50 years, namely, our most famous lawyer and non-lawyer politicians.

Aside from the unusual circumstances of someone like Bobby Kennedy, it's tough to come up with an impressive list of leading lawyer-politicians. You've got Richard Nixon and, well, I don't even know where you'd look to find another successful lawyer who became a famous politician. Gary Hart? Ed Meese? Aside from Nixon, the only U.S. President in the last 50 years who ever practiced law was Franklin Roosevelt, and he didn't seem terribly interested in it. [1999 update:  Bill Clinton is the most recent exception. As of early 1999, there appears to be a national interest in a successor, from either party, who will display fewer lawyerly traits.]

Anyway, whoever the lawyers are, compare them against the famous non-lawyer political leaders, like Winston Churchill, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. Churchill was a mediocre student. King's fame did not come from his scholarship. And Reagan certainly was no rocket scientist.  But could those guys appeal to the collective imagination, or what?

So let's hesitate at the notion that a lawyer who wants to do good things must start out by becoming a star. If you know lawyers and the way they operate, you know that you're much more likely to see them working behind the scenes, in government and in nonprofit organizations, handling issues and solving problems that their political bosses simply don't have the time, interest, or training to comprehend. Without these attorneys, from Legal Aid to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), our lives would be less bearable.

This, by the way, is a perfectly valid way to make a difference. It does not do as much for the ego as being elected president, maybe, but it's still important.

I want to warn you, however, against making too much of it. Budgets, laws, and politics impose real limits that keep young lawyers from making a noticeable difference in government and other organizations. As a result, one's idealism can easily turn to frustration.

[FOOTNOTE 46] "'There are a million ways for recalcitrant Federal agencies to vitiate a law,' said Representative Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. 'It is extraordinarily frustrating. ... Passing legislation today is just the very first step. After that, you have to run through a veritable gauntlet of administrative ... procedures to get the law carried out.'" (Robert Pear, "U.S. Laws Delayed by Complex Rules and Partisanship," New York Times, March 31, 1991, pg. 1, col. 6.)

And on this avenue, too, law school can sidetrack you. Public-interest organizations, unlike private law firms, may not be able to afford to send interviewers to your law school. They also won't necessarily know, a year in advance, how many lawyers to hire for next year. This presents even the best-intentioned law student with a difficult choice: Accept a job offer from a private law firm in September of your third year in law school, and have all your job worries taken care of long before you graduate, or else "go naked" while your classmates are lining up their jobs, and hope that someone in public-interest law will offer you a job next April.

Your law school classmates may not understand how you could turn your back on the money (and, they'll say, the top-quality training) that you'd get if you went with a law firm instead of this public-interest stuff. They'll tell you that the law firm will look better on your résumé. They'll say that the improved résumé, and the superior training you'll get at that firm, will make it possible for you to get a much more important public service legal position after a few years, if you still want it at that point. And how about enjoying a little of the good life, and being able to pay off those student loans?

If that weren't enough temptation, big law firms make a point of announcing that their attorneys can pursue pro bono

[FOOTNOTE 47] "When attorneys take on cases without compensation to advance a social cause, they are ... representing the party 'pro bono publico.'" (Steven H. Gifis, Law Dictionary (Woodbury, NY: Barron's Educational Series, 1975), pg. 163.)

work while employed at the firm. (Once the firms have you, of course, they often behave as though your pro bono work had better not interfere with your regular duties, nor with the number of hours you bill. I didn't see a lot of pro bono work during my years around law firms.)

[FOOTNOTE 48] Pro bono work does not ordinarily include having sex with one's clients. For specific rules on that issue, we must look, of course, to California. (See Richard B. Schmitt, "Stated Simply, It'll Be Hands Off For Those Long Arms of the Law," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 13, 1990, pg. B-1, col. 1.)

In short, despite your most saintly dreams, it may not be too wise to just fly off to law school with a vague notion that you're going to become a happy, important do-gooder somehow. Different career plans require different approaches, and your idealism may not necessarily benefit from law school.

 

5.  What Makes Others Go to Law School

 

The things that motivated me to want to go to law school -- including diversity, money, excitement, and the opportunity to do good -- are not unusual. In one study, more than 500 Chicago attorneys checked off the items that described why they went to law school. Here are the answers they gave:

[FOOTNOTE 49] Frances Kahn Zemans and Victor G. Rosenblum, The Making of a Public Profession (Chicago: ABF, 1981), pg. 28.) Respondents could select multiple answers. I added the asterisks. Arguably, one asterisk (*) indicates an answer that says nothing positive about the law itself, two asterisks (**) indicate something to do with law that would also apply to other careers, and three asterisks (***) indicate something unique to law.

 

 

I'm not saying there's anything conclusive about this study. The factors listed here may be much more important for some law schools, for lawyers who are older or younger, etc. The main thing is to understand your own goals and decide whether law matches them.

 

C.  In Brief: Applying to Law School

 

I have been negative here because I've wanted to provide a counterpoint to the overwhelming popular beliefs about being a lawyer. Everyone knows the upside: among other things, you make lots of money and do work that's more interesting than working as a cashier at the supermarket. I've considered it important to point out some things that lawyers and law schools don't always tell you.

I wasn't aware of the objections I just raised for you when I, myself, was applying to law school. I was sold a dream, created by a complex chorus of praises sung all around me, about this profession called the law. I have to admit, I find it refreshing to read one lawyer's description of law school admissions officers as "salespersons" who produce "significant misconceptions" in the minds of people who are applying to law schools.

[FOOTNOTE 50] Anthony J. Scanlon, "Ethics and Law School Admission," Catholic Lawyer, 1988, vol. 32, pp. 152ff.

But I guess I should have known. You don't go to the Tourist Information Center and ask why the city is so ugly and mean.

My dream inspired me to work very hard to prepare for and take the LSAT and then file my applications for law schools. I was quite eager to be accepted by those schools. And when I was accepted, my future looked bright. The months between acceptance and enrollment passed quickly, and then I was a Columbia Law School student.

 

 

 

§ 2.  Your Success in Getting There

 

 

As I was applying to law schools, I began to imagine myself as a future Wall Street lawyer, a real wheeler and dealer. Once that self-image took hold, I went with it in a big way, and applied not only to law schools, but to business schools as well. Ultimately, I enrolled in the joint JD/MBA program between Columbia Law School and the Columbia Graduate School of Business. As it turned out, that joint program affected my view, not only of my future, but also of my present, of what I was experiencing as a student.

My courses at the business school taught me how to use computers and statistics. With those tools, and my interest in administration, it seemed natural to get involved in law school student government and to look into the way in which the law school was run.

I started with my own situation. Here I was, in a law school that got 6,000 applications each year, but actually enrolled only 300 of those students. I wondered what had made me and my classmates so worthy in the eyes of the admissions people. Were we really so special? And were we going to be able to live up to their faith in us?

 

A.  The GPA and the LSAT

 

I had assumed that the law school admissions people must have tons of data printouts and statistical reports, not to mention studies from all kinds of behavioral experts. I was sure they had lots of tricky ways to analyze the things we put on our applications from perspectives that we would never have imagined. After all, I knew that if Columbia Law School wanted to keep on producing top-quality attorneys, it would have to start by selecting the very best applicants.

I took this assumption, along with my business-school numbers-and-computers attitude, to the dean of admissions at the law school. I was very surprised to learn how simple the Columbia approach really was. There were no advanced computer programs and statistical analyses. Instead, the admissions people relied very heavily upon our scores on the LSAT and our GPAs, glancing briefly at other things from our applications.

I hadn't wanted to believe that, even though everyone had told me that this was how it worked. But there it was. And Columbia probably wasn't alone in that. For example, Harvard has been accused of rejecting several thousand applicants each year on the basis of those numbers alone, without even glancing at anything else in their applications.

[FOOTNOTE 51] R. Klitgard, Choosing Elites (1985), cited by Scanlon, fn. 50, pg. 154.

If you don't think about it too much, it seems sensible to concentrate heavily on LSAT and GPA numbers. You want your law students to be people who get good grades, because law school requires a lot of studying. And you want those who can show their smarts on a test like the LSAT.

But ponder, if you will, the applicant's grades. I knew lots of people in college who specialized in finding the easiest courses and the highest-grading professors. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone say that they were not going to take a particular course because of the risk that they'd get a B in it and would thereby damage their GPAs and their chances of getting into law school.

I've been told that law school admissions committees are skilled at figuring out which students have always taken the easiest classes and professors. But I doubt it. If the college senior's transcript reflects an average of five courses per semester for three years, and if each line on the transcript contains three relevant data items,

[FOOTNOTE 52] Namely, the date of the course, so that they can see how you're progressing; the name of the course; and the grade you got.

then a law school that receives 6,000 applications would have to review a total of more than a half-million data items if they were really going to examine the details on all those transcripts.

It might help the admissions people if they had the time to enter all that data into a computer and analyze it. But they don't. It would also help if all applicants came from the same college, because then the law schools could begin to figure out which professors were tough graders. As it is, there's no knowing whether an A in literature at College No. 1 is comparable to an A in literature at College No. 2.

So when someone tells me that the admissions people have a good feel for what your transcript means, I have to say that I don't think so. I think they look at the GPA, and that, in most cases, that's about all they get from your transcript.

There's a lot that you can't tell from the cumulative GPA, and even from the transcript's course-by-course details. For example, during my college years, I once skipped a final exam in protest, because I thought the professor had done such a bad job. In another course, I chose a thesis topic that interested me, even though I knew it irritated the professor. I awoke late another morning, and arrived at a final exam 45 minutes after it had started, because I had stayed up very late the night before, reading a lot of stuff that I knew probably wouldn't be on the exam but that interested me anyway. On some exams, I avenged truly stupid questions by scribbling discourses on unrelated subjects.

My professors penalized me for most of those escapades. I guess I'll never know for sure, but I often console myself with the thought that the grades I got for misbehaving in these courses were the only thing that kept me out of Harvard Law School, and then I feel better.

My transcript says nothing about all those experiences. It also ignores those that went the other way. I still remember the professor who apologized to me for the inferior quality of the other students in his course. I was amazed, and pleased, that he would say that. I didn't ask him for that opinion, and I didn't necessarily even share it. He gave me an A. That was the best he could do, short of giving me a medal, which wouldn't have appeared on the transcript either.

We all hear the standard comment that, "Well, the GPA is just a rough measure, but it is often a helpful one." I think we should shorten that comment thus: "Yes, the GPA is just a rough measure. Period."

And then there's the LSAT, that other primary determinant of your law school future. According to the people who created it, the LSAT is designed to give some measure of your aptitude for the work that you'll have to do in the first year of law school. This notion leads to an odd result.

It works like this. You take the LSAT and do extremely well. This gets you into an excellent law school. The LSAT is usually a pretty good predictor; sure enough, you do well in that school. People tend to like the things they do well, and, as the saying goes, if you love to study law, you'll hate to practice it. So you graduate from law school, go to work, and discover that you were really much happier back in school.

So you return to law school as a law professor, where you join other people who went through a similar process. As professors, you and your peers decide on the curriculum. The people who write the LSAT take a look at what you and your buddies are requiring of first-year law students, and they design the LSAT accordingly. This completes the circle, which I describe thus:

in·breed·ing ... 2.a.: confinement to a narrow range of intellectual and cultural resources issuing chiefly from a limited field of specialization. b: employment in an institution ... of an excessive number of people who received their training there.

[FOOTNOTE 53] Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). It may not be the same law school, but since law schools are so similar, it comes to the same thing.

The LSAT does not ask whether you have what it takes to be a good lawyer. It just wants to know whether you'll quickly pick up the attitudes and methods that you'll need to succeed in law school. If law school is closely linked with real-life lawyering, then the LSAT will be a good guide as to who should become a lawyer. And if law school is off in its own world, then the LSAT might have nothing at all to do with finding the best future lawyers.

 

B.  A Note on the LSAT and Being Smart

 

It's important to understand, at this point, that the LSAT does not necessarily try to find people who are smart.

There's a good reason for that. "Smart" is not a simple concept. For instance, I recently saw this idiot-savant

[FOOTNOTE 54] An "idiot-savant" scores very low on standard tests of intelligence -- but, in one particular way, is gifted. See Webster's.

on TV. He's barely able to talk. But he has an incredibly quick ability to create complex sculptures. When they ask him how he does it, he points at his head and says, "I'm smart." I may be sitting here laughing at him, thinking that he's dumb as a stick, but then watch me try to reproduce his sculpting feat. Clearly, there's more than one way to be brilliant.

You might think of lawyers as "savant-idiots" -- that is, as a reverse of that idiot-savant. They're brilliant in many ways, except where they're stupid. But where they're stupid, it's like they fell through a hole in the floor, and you suddenly get this weird feeling that there's nobody home inside their heads.

For example, the LSAT does not require nearly the same math abilities as, say, the GMAT, which you take as part of your application to business schools. Of course, you don't need to know as much math to practice law as you do to be a businessperson -- if only because the legal system was cooked up, and has been maintained, by people who like to work with words more than numbers. Numbers matter in the real world, but not much in law school, and therefore not much on the LSAT.

In fact, after three years of law school and another seven years of working with lawyers, I can say that a lot of them actually fear numbers. I've heard stuttering and I've seen nervousness in the eyes of influential attorneys when they've had to deal, under pressure, with a simple, but unfamiliar, math problem. I've watched managing partners spend thousands on consultants, apparently believing that some kind of black magic was involved, when those consultants' studies could have been assembled by any self-respecting MBA at a fraction of the cost. And I've had to keep my silence at times when partners, ignorant of the ways in which a computer could have aided them, have advised clients by guess and by golly.

I wouldn't say that math is beyond the grasp of those attorneys who fear it. I assume that most of them could pick it up. The problem is that they don't. They remain ignorant of quantitative procedures, and tend to forget even the math they used to know. But that doesn't stop them from thinking that they're brilliant, nor from handling highly numeric problems when perhaps they shouldn't.

The fact is, that's how they're trained: to approach all problems aggressively. Consider, for example, the findings of one study of what lawyers promised and what they actually delivered:

[L]awyers are overconfident of their chances of winning lawsuits, especially in cases in which they had been highly confident of winning to begin with. This affects the decisions they make about whether and how to settle or litigate cases.

[FOOTNOTE 55] Elizabeth F. Loftus and Willem A. Wagenaar, "Lawyers' Predictions of Success," Jurimetrics Journal, vol. 28, summer 1988, pg. 437.

You can talk to me about who's smart and who's stupid, but at some point I have to say that a brilliant person who doesn't know when s/he is skating on thin ice is more dangerous and, practically speaking, more stupid than people who get lower scores on the LSAT but who can tell when they're in over their heads.

The problem goes well beyond the subject of mathematics. In remarkable sympathy with the attitude of many of today's lawyers, Plato (a philosopher) observed about philosophers that

Until philosophers are kings ... cities will never have rest from their evils -- no, nor the human race, as I believe -- and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

[FOOTNOTE 56] John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1980), pg. 84.  [1999 update:  see my restatement of Plato's Republic, including this particular passage.]

Refreshingly, another great philosopher responded with the observation that "One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another."

[FOOTNOTE 57] René Descartes, as quoted in Bartlett, fn. 56, pg. 272.

For philosophy, the bloom is off the rose. Philosophy has ceded most of its old territory to the sciences. You don't philosophize, anymore, when you want to know something about the real world. Most of the time, you're better off finding, or becoming, a scientist.

If you're as non-scientific as the most muddled philosopher, and if you don't want scientists telling you to butt out because you don't know what you're talking about, my advice is this: Don't go into philosophy. Go, instead, into law. Law is perhaps the last refuge in our world for those who, knowing nothing, wish to assume that they know more than enough. Nowhere except the courtroom do you find people making arguments and arriving at far-reaching decisions about the most important problems of our society without ever having taken so much as a single college course in the subjects they address. As one judge put it,

Judges ... are handicapped not merely by lack of information but by the narrowness of their training .... No one ... can become an instant authority on psychiatry, lung diseases, computers, accounting, reconstructive dentistry, aviation, structural engineering, and hospital management -- to name only a few of the problems that I have had to rule upon in the past few years.

[FOOTNOTE 58] Judge Lois G. Forer, Money and Justice: Who Owns the Courts? (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984), pg. 216.

Attorneys pride themselves on their ability to think critically, and yet their egos and their training often forbid them to be self-critical and admit that they are not competent to solve certain kinds of problems. The fact is, law school's training makes you smarter in some ways, but it definitely makes you more stupid in others.

[FOOTNOTE 59] Mark H. McCormack, What I Should Have Learned at Yale Law School (New York: Avon, 1987), pp. 18-20.

You find the same thing in attorneys' social skills. As you'll learn, many lack even the most basic notions of courtesy.

[FOOTNOTE 60] How about the attorney who sneezes into his hand just before shaking yours? (See Sol Stein, A Feast for Lawyers (New York: M. Evans & Co., 1989), pg. 161.)

And I'll leave it to you to decide how well they have absorbed such helpful, productive attitudes as optimism and cooperation.

I don't need to say that all attorneys, or even a significant minority of them, have problems with numbers, social graces, or attitudes. All I need to say is that the LSAT does not test for these other ways in which one can be "smart."

[FOOTNOTE 61] Consider, for example, the comment by Patti Hulvershorn, a career consultant: "A satisfied lawyer has good analytical thinking skills, an aptitude for handling masses of detailed paperwork, and a good vocabulary (not a great vocabulary, a good one) and scores low in many other aptitudes." ("A Talent for Torts: Is Law for You?" in Full Disclosure, fn. 13, pg. 133.)

In any event, the brightest person is not always the best person for the job. I've seen bright people screw up the simplest task, either because they were bored or because they thought they knew it all and couldn't bear to take directions from someone else. Unfortunately, in the words of one legal administrator, "there is work floating around the hallways of the most prestigious law firms that could be done by a cadre of trained chimpanzees"

[FOOTNOTE 62] Arnold B. Kanter, Kanter on Hiring: A Lawyer's Guide to Lawyer Hiring (Chicago: LawLetters, 1983), pg. 36.

-- posing the very real risk that the lawyers will be too smart, and frustrated, for the job.

Since lawyers pride themselves on their precision, we might reasonably ask them to say, in the future, not that they are simply the best and the brightest -- because, for many purposes, they aren't -- but, rather, that they are the best and brightest, as measured by the LSAT, for the specific purpose of excelling in the first year of law school.

[FOOTNOTE 63] See Donald E. Powers, "Long-Term Predictive and Construct Validity of Two Traditional Predictors of Law School Performance," Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 74, Aug. 1982, pp. 568-76.

There are other kinds of brilliance, and there may even be other kinds of brilliance that would be valuable in the practice of law, but the LSAT does not recognize them, and therefore the law school admissions committees do not get a comparably objective measurement of them.

My criticism of lawyers may sound harsh. It's not meant to be. Many of my friends -- or perhaps I should now say former friends -- are lawyers. I understand that it may be difficult for some of them to admit that they are not, in all ways, simply amazing. But it's important to say so. I'd hate to see someone go into the practice of law merely because nothing else makes him/her feel quite as intelligent.

 

C.  How Little the Admissions Committee Really Knows About You

 

The LSAT, of course, can't measure all of the skills that you'll need in your first year of law school. For example, it won't tell us whether you can sit and read the same old stuff for a long time without getting bored, or how you'll react when you do get bored, or whether you can do good research or defend yourself in front of 150 classmates.

[FOOTNOTE 64] A word to the wise: Learn to speak in public. It's essential for any career in which you may take a leadership position. You'll find attorneys joining your local Toastmasters group.

"That's fine," the admissions committee might say. "We don't need to learn those things from the LSAT. We have the entire application of this student here on the table in front of us. It gives us everything we need with which to decide whether the applicant has those abilities."

That, however, is nonsense. The application period runs for about six months, from October through March or so. At a top school, 6,000 applications in six months means 1,000 per month, or about 50 per day, five days a week. Each application includes grade transcripts, the applicant's essays, and at least two recommendations from professors or former employers.

Every applicant is different, and so is every school. But if you assume that the transcripts, essays, and recommendations take 10 pages in a typical application, then the dean of admissions at a top school has to review about 500 pages of material every weekday for six solid months.

The law schools do not advise you that they may take one look and toss your application into the trash. On the contrary, in their Official Guide to Law Schools, they claim to review, not only your GPA and your LSAT, but also

your undergraduate course of study -- especially its difficulty and depth; the quality of the college you attended; improvement in your grades and grade distribution; your college activities, both curricular and extracurricular; your ethnic background; your moral character and personality; your letters of recommendation; your personal interview and/or written essay; significant activities since you graduated from college, such as work experience; your state of residency; your motivation to study and reasons for deciding to study law; and, finally, anything else from your file that might make the admissions committee sit up and take notice.

[FOOTNOTE 65] Official Guide, fn. 2, pg. 6.

So, OK, let's take them at their word. If they're going to look at all the materials in every serious application, how well are they going to get to know you?

Let's assume, for starters, that the college seniors who apply to law school are bright, and that they do a good job with their paperwork. Besides, they don't want to waste their application fees of $30 to $50. So, at most, maybe 10 percent of the applications are in such poor shape that the dean of admissions can safely reject them out of hand, without even reading them.

That leaves 450 pages of text to review every day. So the dean, being a sensible person, hires three assistants. Unless the dean wants to pay them to sit around for seven months out of the year, they'll have to be willing to take a five-month job and then get laid off. So they probably aren't exactly your career-track kinds of people. Also, they won't be formally trained,

[FOOTNOTE 66] Scanlon, fn. 50, pg. 158.

but that's OK. The dean can train them, and then give them the power to screen out 75 percent of the material. That still leaves the dean with more than 100 pages of highly individualized, personal writing to read each day.

I have never received 100 pages of letters from close friends on any single day of my life. But I can tell you that if I did, I'd be awfully tired a long time before I got through all of them. And I'd much rather read letters from close friends than the numbingly redundant essays and recommendations in a bunch of law school applications.

The dean will have other distractions, of course. Besides the bureaucratic hassles of life as a law school administrator, s/he will have to keep checking up on the assistants, to make sure they don't go haywire, and will also have to look at those applications that the assistants have singled out for special attention. There will always be a few turkeys who insist on a personal interview, and there will be occasional crises.

[FOOTNOTE 67] At some schools (e.g., Yale), faculty members read the applications. (See 1979-80 Prelaw Handbook (AALS/LSAC, 1980), pg. 381.) But faculty members presumably have limited time for this exercise, and may not be experts at choosing future lawyers. Consider, too, schools like Georgetown, which was once accused of having only two full-time admissions officers to screen 7,000 applications. (Philip M. Stern, Lawyers on Trial (New York: Time Books, 1980), pg. 176.)

I think you begin to see that something, somewhere, has gotta give.

Let's come at the problem from the other side of the table. Let's say you're applying to law school. The essay you write as part of your application will be your best chance to explain yourself to the admissions committee. Will that tell them enough to permit an informed decision on your application? A few comparisons may be instructive.

First, let me tell you that I recently visited a video dating service. Here's how it works. They videotape you for 10 minutes, while you chat with one of their employees and pretend to be normal. They ask lots of specific questions, and they make you write an essay about yourself. People of the opposite sex can look at these materials and then decide whether they're interested in you.

This is not a simple process. The list price for a year's membership is more than $1,700. It's also much more sophisticated than the process that the dean of admissions uses. For one thing, it's harder to hide phoniness, bad attitudes, or physical problems from this video club's camera. Also, you're being examined by potential lovers, who probably have a lot of experience with the long-term dangers of knowing someone like you. It's unlikely that the dean of admissions reviews your application materials with anxieties and hopes that are anywhere near as intense as those of the people who examine your dating/mating videotape.

Even so, the video dating service gets mixed results. Most people sign up for a three-year membership ($2,300) rather than betting that they'll hit the mark in only one year of dating. Most members apparently go out on lots of dates, which suggests that even though the video and the other materials give them a general impression of you, it's not enough, and they still need to meet you in person to appraise you properly.

That's one example of a technique for selecting the right person from among many applicants. For a more advanced approach, you might think about what happens in a headhunter's office. For example, the elite personnel agencies that try to find just the right lawyer for a major national law firm may be paid 20 percent of that attorney's annual salary for their effort. It can take months, and it can require scores of interviews. The headhunter earns his/her fee.

[FOOTNOTE 68] Consider my own experience as a headhunter, starting at this location.

These examples -- the video dating service and the headhunter -- show how far you can go if you care about the quality of the person you're looking for. There's quite a contrast between these examples and the $30 fee you pay for the privilege of having a one-shot, two-minute review by a dean of admissions whose momentary whim will affect your entire career.

The fact is, there are real limits on what the dean can do. If you come in with bad grades or bad LSAT scores, you're sunk. It's not just that you will appear unable to do the work in law school. It's also that there are books that publish the LSAT and GPA numbers of those students who are admitted to the law schools. If a school accepts a lot of low-scorers, it will look like they couldn't get better applicants, and the school's reputation will suffer.

[FOOTNOTE 69] This kind of disclosure probably affects law schools' willingness to publish statistics about themselves. (Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Long-Range Planning for Legal Education in the United States (Chicago: ABA, 1987), pg. 20.)

Of course, accepting no losers will discourage losers from applying and will therefore cut off a large source of funds. If people knew more about the application process, maybe only the 500 or 1,000 applicants who are likely to be admitted would apply to a school like Columbia. The other 5,000 would apply elsewhere instead, and the school would lose up to a quarter million a year in application fees.

[FOOTNOTE 70] Law schools are big business. In 1987, the combined budgets of the ABA-approved schools were already over $4 billion a year. (Long-Range Planning, fn. 69, pg. 8.)

 

D.  So Where Does That Leave You?

 

We've already seen that the law schools a