Maggie's Farm

My experience has been that a legal education ruins you for any sort of honest employment.

I have to echo your comment. I seriously try to dissuade anyone from going to law school at this point. The legal market collapsed in 2007-08 in synch with the collapse of the real estate and financial markets, and never really recovered. The fact is that other than a couple of major markets like New York, L.A., etc. many business, corporate and transactional attorneys are just struggling to stay alive. And if you don't have a law degree from a Top Five or maybe Top Ten school (or a local law school that has pull in the community you are going to practice in), you are going to have a real problem finding a job when you get out of law school. We now have a part time young associate working here, a very bright, talented and nice guy, who because of the economic crash got laid off from another firm a short time after being hired by them out of law school, and then couldn't find a job. This guy has both a law degree from Michigan and is a member of the federal patent bar. Not so long ago, firms would have been fighting over hiring him. No longer.

Ironically, what is about to kill us off is Obamacare. Medical insurance premiums have rocketed up so dramatically in the past couple of years that we cannot afford to pay associates a competitive salary or give partners enough compensation to stick around. My premiums for basic family coverage have gone from $19K to $24K in the past two years, and are estimated to go up again to $27K in May. I think that means we are also going to get hit with the 40% Cadillac Tax when that takes effect. So it's at the point where folks are just walking away from the practice of law, at least in a firm, because all the costs of managing a firm and paying for employees and mandated benefits just eats you alive.

Just to show you how bad it is. I now make less as a fairly senior partner than I made as an associate in the 1980s, and that is before factoring the cost of healthcare, which is probably nine to ten times higher than it was then. (I think I, or rather my firm, paid between $2K and $4K a year for family coverage back then.) And we won't even talk about malpractice insurance costs.

I think it teaches you how to think analytically and problem solve, which you do not get with most liberal arts education at this point. A liberal arts education, even at the most elite institutions, rewards you for simply voicing back to your instructors what you have learned from your instructors. You may get a lot of knowledge, but you aren't taught how you are supposed to use that knowledge or even how to distinguish the good knowledge from the bad knowledge. (Partly because less and less liberal arts education is actually about learning, but more about being propagandized and socialized into a "progressive" leftist society.)

I was fortunate to go to one of the top colleges in the country, but I have to say most of my education was simply having to memorize and remember huge amounts of information I never used again.

When I got to law school (which I hated, by the way), they at least made you think and analyze, and then you had to be able to debate and stand up to your professors in class, which could be a very intimidating experience. (I actually went through property law with the real Professor Kingsfield, who managed to have a woman crying the first day of class because she didn't know the difference between a possibility of reverter, a defeasible fee, a remainder subject to a condition subsequent, and a remainder subject to an executory limitation. "When the initial assignment is posted prior to commencement of term, I expect you to have read the materials and come prepared to discuss them.")