Comment by snitty
4 hours ago
It’s people who graduated law school. First year was brutal. Second and third were a breeze and kind of boring.
The first year is really teaching you the lingo and how to think like a lawyer. After that it’s almost entirely electives and rarely requires hard work (Fed Courts being the exception).
I've also heard of successful lawyers who did correspondence classes and night school for 18 months or something and just went and took the bar exam. I guess those guys mostly make their money by putting up billboards and farming out referrals?
>I guess those guys mostly make their money by putting up billboards and farming out referrals?
I don't know why the manner in which someone studied law would have any impact on how or what they practice now. Most of the law and skill learned is by actually practicing, not what you learn in law school. Law school is about how to think like a lawyer, not how to practice law.
Pretty much any even mid-sized legal market is going to have really well-respected attorneys who graduated from some fancy top 5 law school, and some really well-respected attorneys who graduated from a local law school where they took night classes.
The manner in which a lawyer studied obviously impacts their practice. If someone passes the bar at the age of 35 without a degree from anywhere, they're not going to be hired as an associate. If they want to make money, they're going to be a sole practitioner, and need to spend their time attracting clients. The economics of that naturally lead to a situation where a lawyer would arbitrage between paying for ads and doling out referrals. That's not to say they can't think like a lawyer or be a great lawyer, just that the starting point and the ladder to making money are very different from both that of a 26-year-old grad entering a firm and that of someone who leaves a firm to start their own practice.
So many employers over-index on name brand credentials though. In Law and otherwise. In tech we’ve all witnessed a brilliant, hard working, experienced developer candidate who went to a no name school get overlooked in favor of some doofus who happened to go to Stanford.