Re: Let's accumulate knowledge a bit.
That's a good article, and completely accurate.Originally Posted by Hosakawa Tito
That said, I do feel like I have perhaps put a bit too much of a damper on the situation. It is possible to do well even today. I graduated in 2003 and am currently practicing law and doing very well financially. My situation is typical in some ways and non-typical in other ways. Most significantly, my wife and I are both lawyers (met first year of law school) and both of us graduated without any debt. We are both only children and our parents were able to pay our way. Our school was a decently ranked public school (William & Mary) and my wife got in-state tuition and her parents were able to pay it comfortably without being exorbitantly wealthy (her father was career military). My parents are pretty well off and would have paid my way no matter where I went. Both of us graduating without any debt made a massive difference in our financial well-being.
My wife was a very good student, graduating in the top 15% of our class. I was an average student, at about the 50% level, but I did have decent summer internships through family connection. After we graduated, neither of us got stellar jobs. On graduation, my wife got a full-time government job, but not as an attorney. Her starting salary was only a little over $40k. I could not find permanent employment. The article Hosakawa Tito linked to briefly discussed a temp position reviewing documents (described as a "veal pen"). That's what I did for two and a half years. It payed decently, between $35 and $50 per hour, but due to the temp nature of the work I was only employed about 9 months a year on average. I averaged about $60k per year while doing it. So, if both my wife and I had been encumbered with the normal amount of student loan debt, we would not have been able to keep up with the payments, just like everyone else in that article. However, without the debt we actually did ok. We lived within our means, saved money regularly, and did not buy anything if we didn't already have the money for it in the bank. Eventually my wife moved into a full legal position with the government, and I applied and was accepted at the same agency. My first year, I actually earned less working for the government than I did with the legal temping. We've both been at this agency for about 5 years now, and our salaries have increased significantly from when we were first hired. We have boatloads of solid legal experience on our resumes and are now locked in with very good career experience in an area of law that is bankable (medicine).
So, it's all worked out well in the end. However, the key was not having any debt. Our experience was pretty much identical to that reported in those articles... no employment on graduation as a lawyer for either of us, and no full-time employment at all for me. It took my wife two years to land a full-time legal job, and it took me two and a half years. However, without the debt we were able to get through it without any financial problems. If you can get yourself into a similar situation, law school might work out well for you. The key is the debt, and you need to take a careful look at how much it is going to cost you before you make that decision.
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