(my background: finished law school a few years ago, work as a patent attorney, obviously have many friends/acquaintances who are attorneys.)
– whoever mentioned it before, i cannot emphasize enough that the legal marketplace (as a whole) was hit very hard. this is true nationwide, but nowhere moreso than NYC. put simply, the demand for lawyers has gone down drastically, but the supply of lawyers (i.e, the number of new law school graduates coming into the job market every year) is higher than ever before. you don’t need a degree in economics to understand what this means.
– the reason for this is (in part) due to the fact that the barrier for entry into law school (and the legal profession) is very low. there are no prerequisites for law school (case in point
– you can get a BTL, take the LSAT, and go to law school). as a result, 10’s of 1000’s of college graduates with relatively-worthless (from an employment/earning standpoint) undergraduate degrees (think philosophy, history, sociology, etc., etc.) apply to (and attend) law schools every year.
– the case has always been (and is true all the moreso now) that, when all things are equal, the best jobs will go to the most qualified students. since there are far fewer jobs now, the competition for them is incredibly fierce. if you do a bit of searching, you can find many reports, articles, etc., documenting how so many lawyers are unemployed now, including many ivy league graduates, etc. so, the only way that investing 3 years and probably around $150k in student loans is worth it, is if you attend one of the top 14 law schools (the higher the better in large part), or you finish at the very top (say %5-10) of one of the top 100 law schools. any school ranked below 100 (on the US news list) is simply not worth attending, in most cases. the reason being what i wrote above – would you rather hire a top student from hofstra, touro, etc., or an average student from columbia (again, assume all other factors are equal)? you simply do not have a good chance of getting a job paying more than 50k/year (starting salary) if you attend a law school ranked below 100 or so.
the ONLY exceptions to this rule (in sum: either go to a top 14 school, or else do VERY well at a top 100 school, or else it is VERY unlikely that you will be getting paid more than 50k/year when you graduate) are:
1. if you have a job waiting for you when you go to law school (i.e. your parent/close relative has a firm, or is a partner in a firm, or is a major client of a firm).
or
2. you have a specialized background/education that you can apply to your legal career (and which therefore distinguishes you, and makes it so that the history, philosophy, etc., majors can’t compete with you for the same jobs), for example, a hard science/engineering degree (i.e., chemistry, electrical engineering, etc.) which enables you to practice patent law, or an accounting/finance degree which may give you something of an advantage in tax law, as well as in corporate, securities, and bankruptcy. now, there are many unemployed lawyers in these areas, too, but far fewer.
something else to think about: your law school performance is based entirely on your grades which are (for the most part) given based on a single blind-graded (i.e., the professor does not see your name, just your answers, and gives the grade “blind”) exam for each class. the exams almost always consist of 3-5 essay questions, the answers to which are usually 10-20 paragraph responses. many BTL graduates have poor english writing skills, especially when compared to college graduates who have been writing essays/papers for 4 years. even with a “gemmara kup,” this puts many BTL graduates at a significant disadvantage.
not trying to dissuade you if you really think its for your, but you need to know the truth (at least from my own experiences/observations). law schools in particular try to skew their salary reporting data, because they make tons of $$$ every year from student loans from every student who goes to law school thinking they’re gonna make good $$ when they leave. if the schools were honest about this, far fewer people would go to law school, and the legal market would slowly normalize (hopefully).