Law is a terrible career... at least the guys competing for your clients say so

I have done quite a bit of reading by people who are saying that going to law school is a horrible mistake.  Fair enough.  They'll point out that lawyers are unhappy.  They'll say the pay isn't so great.  They'll say the jobs just aren't there.

There's a grain of truth to all those things.  Frankly, I think folks considering going to law school should understand both sides of the argument.  It would be naive to go into this thinking that the day you pass the bar, somebody rolls up with your signing bonus and $160,000 a year job, and viola, that's the way it goes when you go to law school.

However, a lot of the griping about law school reminds me of the way a lot of other professions gripe.  This seems to happen whenever you have a bunch of people who work primarily with other people in the same profession.  They lose perspective.  They think about their dissatisfaction, which matches the dissatisfaction of the majority of people they bump into on any given day, and they forget that other people have their troubles, too.

Perfect example:  doctors.  A huge percentage of them believe that the world is really unfair to them.  That they get paid too little relative to their worth.  That if they had gone into business, they'd be much wealthier.

All I can figure is that doctors are smart.  They look at businesspeople and think, "They don't look so bright to me.  If I worked in their job, I'd be CEO." 

What they forget is that the CEO isn't the smartest guy in the place.  That's probably some database administrator, or financial analyst or actuary.  Maybe it's some guy working in HR who could win on Jeopardy, but he just hasn't had a lot of breaks in his career. 

The smartest guy isn't the highest paid.  In fact, most successful business people are successful because of interpersonal skills, not quantitative and scientific skills. 

If you've ever seen the way a typical doctor's office is run, you have an idea of their true business skills.  They don't have any.  They're completely delusional.

The idea that they could make a lot more money doing pretty much anything else is laughable.  According to the BLS, the mean wage for a GP or family practice doctor is almost $170,000 a year.  Yes, they have monster student loan debt to pay off.  So, if they got $200,000 in student loans and paid it off over 10 years, yeah, they'd have to make do on the equivalent of only $140,000 a year or so.

So, when they whine that they shouldn't have gone into medicine, the reality is that they're just whining.  They don't know what they're talking about.

Same for teachers.  They whine that they're overworked and underpaid.  Now, I won't say they're overpaid, but they're certainly not underpaid.  They love to tell folks how low the pay is for brand-new teachers.  Okay, fair enough, but teachers are paid based on seniority.  You'll notice they almost never talk about what mid-career and late-career teachers make.  According to the BLS, they make about $47,000 a year, on average.

Do they earn their pay?  Sure they do.  I think they earn every penny.  They also work about 190 days a year, compared to about 240 days a year for your typical person working for a company.  They get a LOT of time off.  Their work-day isn't that long.  Yes, they have to bring home work now and then. 

However, because they only work around other teachers, they lose sight of the fact that, gee, most baccalaureate holders who have jobs with real companies put in long hours and work hard, too.  But they don't get a good retirement plan.  They don't get to avoid paying social security, they don't get nearly as many holidays, they don't get 2 weeks off at christmas or a week in the Spring, and they sure don't get their Summers off.

This is not to say that either doctors or teachers are bad people or that they are overpaid or whatever.  All I'm saying is that they are insular groups in society that band together and feed each other's petty gripes to the point that they believe that they have a crappy deal out of life and that the grass would be so much greener if they had chosen to do X instead of Y.

Same for attorneys.  According to BLS, the median wage of salaried attorneys is $110,000 a year.  That, I presume, does not include partners.  So the idea that the law pays poorly is pretty misguided.  That's still more than twice the median wage in the US.  It's not what doctors make, but it isn't what teachers make, either.

So, are attorneys underpaid?  Unlike most professions, it's very, very easy for an attorney to get paid exactly what they're worth by going into private practice.  Sure, some attorneys aren't paid much, but frankly, not everybody is cut out to be an attorney.

Other complaints about the legal profession circle around the idea that attorneys are (take your pick):  depressed, substance abusers, pessimistic, high strung, hyper competitive, no personality, workaholic, etc.

To this, I sort of wonder if people realize that the legal profession probably didn't make people this way.  It's highly likely that those traits are ones they brought into the law, and to one degree or another, it helps them become good lawyers.

Example:  pessimists do well in law school.  However, it sort of makes sense that a person who is always thinking about what could go wrong might do well in this profession. 

To me, the charges that "attorneys are (fill in the negative character trait here)" is about like saying that NBA players are, disproportionately, black and very tall.  So, what conclusion would you draw?  That basketball makes people grow and darkens their skin?

Or would you presume that maybe inner city kids who play basketball all the time tend to be black, and that being tall helps you get further in your career.

If the law wasn't there for all these socially challenged, hyper-competitive depressing people, what else would they do?  Go into sales?  Yeah, everybody wants to buy a car from the nerd who prattles on and on about seemingly insignificant details of stuff and is always sorta mopey.

I'm gonna say that the law doesn't make people that way.  It gives people who are that way a place to feel at home and earn a living.

There are some other legitimate gripes such as the number of legal jobs seems to be smaller than the number of graduates every year.  To that, I can only say that six-figure salaries don't grow on trees.  Want one?  You better be a big enough boy to go out and take one.  If you finish last in your class from anything but the very best law schools around, you're going to be treated like somebody who was the absolute worst person in their peer group.

Again, if you finish last in your law school class and can pass the bar, there's still hope for you.  You can go out and hang out a shingle and through nothing more than sheer force of will and hard work, you can make a good living.  That's just not an option for most folks.

Contrast to another degree that I categorize as being roughly in the same ballpark:  the MBA.  Most of the time, you can't get one from a good school without demonstrating some level of professional achievement, first.  And the bad schools?  That will take you with essentially no work experience?  Just try graduating last in your class from some liberal arts college with a non-AACSB-accredited MBA program and no work experience. 

You will not likely find a good job.  At least not one that pays what most people associate with MBA salaries.  Your life will be no better, whatsoever, for having gone to get your graduate degree. 

So, the takeaway from all this?  If you're going to graduate last in your class, you'd better make sure it's from medical school.  Otherwise, you aren't getting a job. 

Is that law school's fault?  Maybe.  Nobody forces anybody to go to law school.  A lot of the 3rd and 4th tier schools are there to present an opportunity to people (like me) who could not attend law school if only the first and second tier were around.  It's a possibility of attaining something better, but without any guarantees.

Perhaps more realistically, a person should take an honest inventory of themselves before going to law school.  Are you going to kick butt?  Did you get accepted to a first tier school?  If not, are you ready to get in there and do what it takes to graduate #1 in your class?  If all you want to do is slack off and graduate in the fat part of the bell curve, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the prize waiting for you at the end is the same one everybody else on the fat part of the bell curve is likely to get.

You buy your ticket.  You take your chances.  Go big or stay home.  Either one are perfectly valid options.  If you're entrepreneurial and smart, you can make a lot of money.  If you're just smart, you can make a lot of money working for somebody else  If you just want a credential that gives you an easy access to a cushy life, you're probably going to end up with what most people who look for the easy path to a cushy life end up with.

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.