Law School is My Corvette

I got two interesting packets in the mail.  One was from University of Toledo.  It was my official acceptance packet.  The other was from Seton Hall.

Yet another school that, yes, I would LOVE to go to, but no, I won't be attending.  The way this works for those who haven't done this before is that the guys who give you the LSAT also are the ones you send all your application stuff to.  They put you on lists that other law schools have access to, and you end up getting a never-ending stream of e-mails and the occassional mail-mail that invites you to apply to some law school, somewhere.

I wanted the UT packet because I was curious if I might have gotten a scholarship.  I wasn't thinking this at first, but read some stuff on blogs about people who had LSATs like mine who got full-rides.  Even a half ride or a quarter ride would be a big chunk of money.

I have my official acceptance letter.  I also have a piece of xeroxed paper from financial aid that mentions that scholarships are awarded on a rolling basis, and that the decision is made shortly after the acceptance decision and the scholarship recipients are informed, directly.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the two items, when you put them together, mean I didn't get a scholarship.  However, I shot off an e-mail just to make sure. 

I suspect that I didn't get one, but they don't put things like, "incidentally, we reviewed you for one of our scholarships, but we don't give scholarships to dumbasses... nice gpa, doofus" on the acceptance letter.

Still, I want to hear one way or the other.

By not giving a scholarship, UT actually puts CWRU back in play.  CWRU, with a 50% scholarship, is the same cost as UT at sticker price.  Between the two, CWRU would be a monumentally huge hassle to attend.  However, if the cost were the same, I'd seriously have to consider driving to the mistake on the lake... I mean Cleveland, to go to Case Western Reserve again.

I will almost certainly take out the maximum allowable direct loans, if for no other reason than I can use the money to pay off higher interest debt. 

So, now, just waiting to hear back from financial aid on whether this is their final answer on a scholarship, then to wait to hear from CWRU.  From what I remember about CWRU, though, they give precious few scholarships. 

We'll wait and see.

If I don't get one, now, I can always try to compete for one later, but I think I would need something like a top 10 class rank to get one later in the process.  It would give me something to work for, though.  $20,000 isn't the biggest amount of money in the world, but it's real money.

The way I look at it, if my business recovers and I start making money again, it's only a matter of time until I buy a Corvette or Escalade.  Instead, Law School will be my Corvette.

When did I first decide to go to law school?

The first time I remember wanting to go to law school was in the Army.  Being an attorney seemed like a pretty sweet gig.  It was clean work, mostly indoors.  There seemed to be some money involved. 

Some time during my undergrad studies, I got dissuaded.  Perhaps part of it was seeing the other students who were saying their goal after graduation was to go to Law School.  I know this is a harsh assessment, but by and large, they were an unimpressive lot.  It was very hard to tell whether they were doing it because they really wanted to be attorneys, or because there just weren't a lot of jobs for political science and sociology majors. 

I also heard a statistic about the pay that some attorneys were getting.  Apparently, for some, being an attorney wasn't a path to wealth, but was, instead, a path to a crappy job in the public defender's office or some other equally dreadful career.

I also got a taste of the absolute bile and hatred that society seems to have for attorneys.  So, I really didn't give it much thought.  I was going to major in computer science, and computers were going to change the world and make me and a bunch of other nerds rich in the process.

Unfortunately, my academic performance was spotty at best and it took me six years, 4 changes of major and one change of university to graduate.  I was lucky to graduate at all.  Though I did finish with a marketable degree:  a BBA in Information Systems.  Thus, I was able to look down my nose at sociology and political science majors just a little while longer.

During my first few years working in business, I met a woman who was a law school student at Case Western Reserve University.  CWRU is Cleveland's top academic institution and is basically on-par with Ohio State in quality of graduate programs. 

Her performance landed her a job at Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue, the nation's largest law-firm, which just happens to be located in Cleveland. 

She was the daughter of a famous litigator, and spent her entire law-school experience talking about what it took to get into a top law firm.  Sure enough, she had both the brains and drive to make it happen.

To know a person at Jones Day was, to me, about like knowing a person who plays for the Cleveland Indians.  You know it's possible to do it.  You hear of people doing it all the time.  You just also, deep down, know that you're not the kind of person who gets there.

The folks who work at firms like Jones Day are what are known as "biglaw" associates.  They work for big law firms, representing big clients, making big, big money.  Even in the 80s and early 90s, biglaw associates might make six figures in their first year of employment. 

Society may hate lawyers, but there aren't many professions where 25 year olds can make six figures in their first job that doesn't involve athletic skill with some sort of ball.

I stayed on the business side of things.  Business people were the good guys in my world.  They wore the white hats.  They saved the day.  They created jobs and wealth and products and services.  The lawyers were the guys tying the local school marm to the railroad tracks.  Business people were the guys who rescued the damsels before train arrived.

Even so, after a couple of years of my MBA program, I started looking at the law school rankings.  I wondered, what schools would accept me?  Could I do well enough to land a biglaw job?  I didn't have any money and frankly, I almost always had some debt.  Granted, these days, I think back on my "debt" back then and laugh, but the idea of owing a thousand or two thousand dollars back then was mortifying to me.  The idea of taking out, say, a hundred thousand dollars in loans was just crazy.

I was also starting to see the way this puzzle fits together, too.  It's not generally enough to graduate from any old law school.  I was still in my 20s, but I already knew a handful of people who had taken their law school experience not quite seriously enough and were not in biglaw, but did have bigdebt and worked at crapjobs.

This was something where you had to either go big or stay home.  I figured I would stick with my business career.  I had no real way to go to law school without going deep into debt, and I had a decent career.  Giving up 3 years of earnings, after having worked that long to get to that point, just seemed like too great a sacrifice.

The business career went mostly as I would have liked, until 2004, when I decided to be an entrepreneur.  That, too, went about as well as I would have liked, right until the point when the wall street guys drove the economy off a cliff and made us pay so they wouldn't get hurt when we hit bottom.

The business guys were no longer the guys in the white hats anymore.  The guys getting bailed out were just as wholly evil as the most unscrupulous ambulance chasers. 

Any moral objection I had ever had to practicing law as a career went right out the window. 

I also really don't see how I could track back into a business career, and if I did, I'm not sure I'd know what I want to do.  I haven't worked for anybody else for six years, now.  My Information Systems degree is 18 years old.  Technology has moved pretty far in the time I've been gone, and the last 7 years of my corporate career were as a project manager and department manager. 

So, when you see a job for an entry-level computer programmer at $45,000 a year, I can get that job.  Provided that nobody else applying got his degree more recently (because sorry, they're probably more hip to the computer languages that are being taught today.  I learned pascal, assembly language and cobol.  I doubt they even teach those anymore.  Kids today come out of school knowing how to program Ruby on Rails and honestly, I don't even know what that is.)

And provided that everybody else will be as iffy as far as committment to an entry-level job as I will.  Let's be serious:  an employer will be thinking I'd leave that job the minute I could get back into a management-type job.  And they'd be right.

My credentials are stale.  They're not desireable.  Much like the giant bald spot on the back of my head.

Being an entrepreneur is awesome because it never goes stale.  All you need to do is come up with a profitable business idea, raise the capital and make the bank.  Yep, that's all.  It's so simple a caveman can do it, provided the caveman isn't part of the 95% of cavemen who try to do it and end up in bankruptcy within 5 years.

I need to do something different with my life.  Owning a business has been mostly great, somewhat sucky, but the sometimes the suckiness can last a while.  I think I'll navigate my business through this awful downturn, which is more than a lot of businesses will manage.  However, there will be future downturns.  I don't like having all my eggs in one basket.  Also, my franchisor has really changed the game lately, and the upside in my current business just got a lot more limited. 

So, I'm looking for a change and this one makes sense at the moment.  I've been kicking around this idea for a quarter of a century, and frankly, if I don't do it now, I'll never get around to doing it at all. 

I am relatively sure I will be doing this.  I wish my business were doing better.  That would take a lot of financial pressure off.  However, if my business doesn't do well, that makes this all the more imperative. 

The rest?  I have some ideas, but in I really won't know for sure until I'm in it.  Now is a tough time to try and be a prosperous attorney, but frankly, right now is a tough time to be a prosperous anything.