Why Going to Law School is a Bad Idea/ Why Asian Americans Shouldn't Go to Law School

[Music] driving to the office i was supposed to interview another attorney today for a new episode but something came up so she had to reschedule so since i'm going to office anyway i guess i might as well just wing it and just speak about another topic that i feel passionate about which is why people should not go to law school and i know i'm probably gonna make some people upset but this episode i would like it to focus on specifically asian americans why asian americans should not go to law school now i graduated over 20 years ago from georgetown university law center and it has been a bumpy road in my career people will look at me and say well look judy you seem pretty successful you have your own practice your own practice has thrived for 14 years which is really great because you always hear about how most small businesses fail within the first couple of years and from what i've seen from other attorneys you know there are plenty of attorneys who have tried to start their own practices and then threw in the towel within a few years because it was too hard to generate business or perhaps they found out they didn't have those management or business skills to deal with all the day-to-day grind of trying to run a business in addition to practicing law and dealing with your clients um there's a lot more administrative work that you have to deal with if you start to practice um so people might look at me and think like well you know she did it so i should be able to go to law school and start my own practice too but no you know i feel like i i was in a very unusual situation i had had a lot of not only just luck but a lot of extra privileges that um many young graduates may or may not have um so it's not anything that i would strongly encourage and as an asian american attorney who tried to start up or i i founded the asian pacific american bar association here in north carolina back in 2002 um it's kind of been a stop-and-go venture where originally another attorney a filipino american guy and i were the ones that really wanted to wrap up our apova chapter the asia pacific american bar association chapter here in north carolina but um back then like 2002 2003 there were very very few asian american attorneys in the triangle area and those that we did have you know some of them were way too busy with their family obligations or didn't care to get involved or just from a practical standpoint we were so spread out in terms of geography that it was just really hard for us to have any get-togethers or really build much momentum but there there has been another younger attorney who has tried to revise the organization so um with that about my background i will go ahead and dive into some of the main reasons i feel that going to law school is a very bad idea and particularly for asian americans i was the first person in my entire extended family that includes a ton of cousins aunts and uncles to go to law school and we didn't really have any any close family friends that had been long-time practicing attorneys there were some kids who were my parents friends kids who had gone to law school but it wasn't like i knew them that well we might see each other a little bit during say like christmas break at some family get together but nobody ever had a really candid frank discussion with me about what it really meant to be a practicing attorney and what the career potential is the income potential how vastly different people's salaries or income potential is depending on which avenue you go down after law school if you even get a job at all you know it just seemed like everybody always wants to put on this show of being financially successful and being graded their career everything's going fine nobody's really telling the truth about what the legal profession really is like or how tough it really is in the legal job market now and i feel that people especially if you haven't even started going to law school yet you're just considering it you really need to know the facts and it's really hard to get the truth also because let's say you're thinking about going to law school well then you know like a typical career advisor might say well let me put you in touch with some people from the bar association or this person we know like an alumni who is now partner at a big law firm so that's really self-selecting because the only people you're going to be talking to are people who clearly you know 10 20 30 years later out of law school are still practicing and actually have jobs in the legal field are actually still practicing attorneys not having been part of that whole chunk of people who already got washed out of the profession after only five or ten years after graduation so you're already going to get a skewed picture of what life is like as an attorney or your prospects once you graduate from law school if you just follow the conventional path of thinking well i'll just get a mentor i will talk to some people that the bar association recommends that i talk to and then my career is pretty much going to be like these people that's not the case i mean clearly someone who graduated from law school couldn't find a job or maybe couldn't even pass the bar exam or maybe they worked for a few years at a big law firm and got laid off or fired and then decided to just forget about being a practicing attorney couldn't find another job and that totally switched careers i mean how are you going to find those people and talk to them and have a candid discussion well maybe on some anonymous internet forum but i don't know of any anymore there used to be this really interesting internet legal forum called jd underground so i'm coming out now i'm letting everybody publicly know that hey i used to be an active poster on jd underground and my screen name was cranky so um anybody out there who might have been active on jd underground i think it was founded in 2007 but just based on the postings that i had read the person who created it was a asian american it was a south asian indian american guy who i guess maybe i don't even know if he had actually practiced as an attorney or not but um during the time that i was reading on jd underground it sounded like he didn't even have a real legal job and he had switched to working in the i.t field so he was obviously very jaded and cynical about the legal profession as many of the posters were so i first heard about jd underground probably like roughly around the same time that i started my own legal practice um so around 2007-ish 2000 yeah because i started my own practice back in 2006. so um i heard about it through above the law which is another website which is kind of catered more towards uh corporate law people you know people that graduate from ivy leagues um more serious legal topics so above the law was a blog that was originally started by david latt and um so that's a really interesting um legal website which i think they no longer allow commentary on that so there used to be a bunch of comments that people would leave underneath some of the articles so somehow i was scrolling through the comments and somebody mentioned jd underground so i was thinking welcome look at this jd underground so i kind of got hooked into this and it was an interesting forum where you could really see or read a lot of the honest appraisals of the legal profession from other attorneys and i just really enjoyed it because you know once again when you meet people face to face at bar functions continuing legal ads you know everybody's always trying to market themselves and make it look like everything's all rosy and sunny you know where are you going to be like griping about how difficult it is to be an attorney or how you hate your job or you you can't stand the place where you work you know the real life experiences where people can be candid well that's what jd underground was for but unfortunately i think that um that forum got shut down or maybe voluntarily shut down by the guy who started the um the website probably because he kept getting hacked and he couldn't deal with it anymore it sounded like he had like family and kids to deal with and he had a real job not legal anymore so unfortunately jd underground met its demise about a year ago so i do miss that i miss the camaraderie i don't miss the sexism and the racism of some of the posters that's why when i was posting as cranky i was always very careful not to let people know that i was a female much less an asian american female attorney tried to make things as general as possible whenever i posted because a funny thing is that sometimes when i would be reading some of the posts from other you know disenchanted attorneys or angry people people who felt screwed over after having gone to law school and having like 150 000 worth of debt you know sometimes i would think i think i know this person you know just based on all of the personal details that they're giving online you know i think i know who who this person is just based on the way they're writing or some personal background details that they're giving so you don't have that information there that's why i want to post some um some recordings of myself just kind of talking i know i'm maybe rambling as usual about the real truth behind the legal profession because you're not going to hear this from your career advisor or those people marketing the law schools the slick brochures that you might be getting if you have a good lsat score you might be getting lots of you know marketed shiny booklets or solicitations through email to get you to apply to their law schools so hopefully this will help give people a more educated and informed decision if you do decide to go to law school or not it's probably about 10 or more years ago when the unc chapel hill asian students association asked me to come and speak to them about being a lawyer so i was honored to go i always like speaking with people and young people in general if they want to pick my brain about legal careers sure um i don't think i was that negative about the legal profession with them but i did start out by asking people how many of you plan on going to law school there was probably there were probably at least 40 or 50 undergrad students at this event and not a single one of them raised their hands and said they planned on going to law school so that was kind of strange to then continue speaking on about my career and going to law school and everything but in hindsight i'm relieved that none of those kids wanted to go to law school because it's um it's not a guaranteed path towards having a job much less a prestigious high-paying job much less having a career that you have studied hard for or prepared for within 10 years you know a lot of people watch out of the profession and that's the dirty secret of the legal profession that nobody really talks about nobody tells you that when you're pre-law in college and all gung-ho about going to law school to save the world or something but you know that's that's just the reality you know based on all these friends of mine relatives friends of friends family friends kids you know you look at a lot of people if you even still keep in touch with people from law school or you know just by googling or linkedin or facebook or something you know eventually you figure out okay it looks like this person's not practicing law anymore you know i've heard of some people who seem to be pretty successful you know having good legal careers but then come to find out that the person was suffering from severe depression or having some problems with drugs or alcohol and just maybe depressed and just quit the profession entirely to try to do something else that didn't wear them down as much you also don't hear about document review now that's something you should ask those people who come over and try to market their law schools to you you know what percentage of your graduates wind up doing document review you know what is document review i have no idea what that was you know when i was a pre-law or even when i was in law school i had no idea what career progression really meant when you're not in the top five percent of the graduating class with a prestigious federal clerkship or a nice job as an associate in some cushy corporate law firm in new york city waiting for you so document review is basically a dead-end job that some students who graduate from law school wind up taking just to pay the bills um i never had to do document review but i do know people who did it or continue to do it as a quote career because they can't find anything else to do or maybe after a while they just don't care anymore and document review is kind of from what people have told me they've said it's brainless you know you basically it's work that a high school graduate should be able to do if you're if you're literate and you sit in a room with a bunch of other people who have graduated from law school not all of them have passed the bar some document reviews do require that you have a bar license others just want somebody to be quote like a life click monkey so you're sitting there in this like room in an office building in front of a computer the whole day maybe getting paid twenty to thirty dollars an hour no benefits and you just have to review tons and tons of documents that have been turned over most likely in some sort of huge litigation project so you're basically a contractor working for a company that then um you know is farming you out to these big law firms that need peons to review their documents from litigation discovery and they do keep close track of you um from someone i know who did do document re review for a couple of years she said like it made her feel like slitting her wrists every day you know you get treated like a little kid um if they wanted to go to the bathroom they would have to go up to somebody who was like a monitor who wasn't even a licensed attorney or anything um there was somebody that was there monitoring the document review people the whole day to make sure you are working you know you got to keep clicking that mouse you know keep looking at all those documents on that computer and keep scrolling and see if this is privileged or if this is some responsive document something like that um so even if you had to go to a bathroom you would have to check out with the monitor and then they would keep track of how long you were out because they didn't want people to be sort of running their own law practices on the side while doing document review because i guess some people would just run off and go outside the building or run into the bathroom to make phone calls or do something if they were sort of half-heartedly trying to do a law practice on the side this person also told me that she and another colleague at document review were humiliated because they got singled out for somebody ratted on them saying that they were spending too much time in the break room talking or or seem to be having too much fun and weren't spending enough time working so um it's it is humiliating because they would have to go in through the back door of some like fancy high-rise building where at the top of the building was the nice um law firm that was where the the real attorneys were and the law partners were but the document review people who um had also you know sweated through three years of law school taking the bar exam many of them were licensed attorneys that just couldn't find better jobs they had to go in through the back door and be stuck in some like crappy basement and then every so often one of the real attorneys that worked for the real law firm on the top floors would come down and you know maybe bark orders at them things like that so it's a very um hierarchical type of profession where if you don't get a good job right off the bat right when you graduate from law school you didn't get a offer from some big law firm where you had worked as a 2l then your career career really isn't going to go anywhere it's going to take a real big stroke of luck before you can break out of that mold of just fighting for the scraps and trying to work for smaller law firms or get a lower paying government job even those are becoming very competitive sometimes people go to law school thinking that hey i'm going to save the world you know like when i was in law school or even before law school you know i i was kind of pre-med at first and then kind of got swept away by camp does campus activism at uc berkeley became an ethnic studies major and gave up the pre-med track not that i would have been that successful at it at uc berkeley because it was so freaking competitive to do well in chemistry class so um yeah so what am i trying to say so basically it's it's just there's no guarantee you know getting a jd even from a top tier school doesn't mean that you're gonna get any sort of great job when you graduate it's kind of like like a pipe dream that keeps people going because they don't know any better you know when i was still in law school or in undergrad you know i i was kind of proud of myself for breaking the mold and um wanting to go to law school you know because that wasn't something that lots of asian americans bagged them say um 20 25 years ago were talking about doing but you know i kind of feel like if you're anybody watching this you know if you are like the quote stereotypical asian person or a stereotypical asian american and i know some people are going to get mad at me but if you're good at math and science then perhaps you really should consider going into the medical field okay you don't hear about people getting their md degrees and having no job after they pass all of their licensing exams you know you don't hear about some like terrible hierarchy where um even if you do score a great you know sweet corporate job paying close to two hundred thousand dollars a year plus bonuses then after three years you get shown the door and then you have to start from ground zero and can't find a job you know how many unemployed doctors are there how many unemployed nurses or physical therapists or psychologists are there um i'm not sure i mean you do hear people complaining about those jobs also i think for any sort of job there are going to be downsides and stress and politics and dealing with people you don't like and gross stuff you have to do but um it's just pretty overwhelmingly bizarre how many law schools there are in this country how many people continue to get that jd degree and how many people can't even get real licensed attorney type legal jobs within five years of graduation now i went to georgetown as i mentioned you know sometimes i'm proud of that you know it was a good school we had some really great you know famous professors um some extremely intelligent classmates it's a beautiful school got to be in dc but on the other hand you know nobody ever followed me after law school you hear about melp which is the what's it called like national association for law placement that puts out statistics about employment rates well after i graduated from georgetown nobody ever contacted me to find out how little i was making or whether i had a job or whether i had passed a bar and they certainly knew where i was i mean even to this day somehow the um the school's alumni association and their fundraising groups they still have tracked me down to north carolina and they know where to send stuff to me and i still get their emails but no nobody from career services or whoever keeps track of the statistics for employment ever asked me you know do you have a job at the time of graduation no i did not have a job when i graduated but luckily i did get a job within probably about a month or two after after graduating and um i mentioned in one of the other videos that my starting salary was really pathetically low working for a small law firm near tyson's corner in virginia i was making less than 30 000 a year no benefits and i was also supposed to get a percentage of the um how much we made off the cases that i handled but of course i didn't get the really great profitable cases and later on when i had to move to north carolina unfortunately the partners there then decided to cut my commissions because he didn't think i should take away so much money if i was going to leave the job and since it was my first job out of law school i really needed him to be a reference for me and you know felt like being a nice person so i didn't raise a stink about the fact that i was being stiffed out of commissions that i had originally been promised so i i hear that happens a lot with um people who work for smaller firms and then decide to leave oftentimes there is a fight over what cases are you going to take and what percentage of those cases are you going to get versus you know do those cases have to stay with them or do they deserve part of the fees since the client came to you while you're still working for your previous firm so these are just some of those issues i'd be glad to discuss it further but that will probably be yet another video and from what i'm reading you've been reading you're not supposed to keep these youtube videos too long because people have short attention spans so i'll just stop it right here and maybe continue on when i get another chance thanks for watching this latest episode hope you enjoyed it if you want me to evaluate whether you personally should go to law school i'd be happy to listen to you let me know what your lsat score is your gpa what you're thinking about doing whether you're going to have to take out debt and let me help you with that decision as to whether you should apply for law school or not but in most cases i think my answer is going to be no you do not want to apply to law school in this climate i would say it must have been maybe my senior year in college at uc berkeley there was an asian american activist i think he was probably like the director of maybe the east bay asian youth center or one of those non-profit community organizations he had also graduated from uc berkeley and in his op-ed he wrote our community doesn't need any more stinking lawyers and i do agree i mean it sounds really noble to some people or very impressive especially to immigrant families to say i'm going to law school or i'm going to go save the people and stuff but the reality is that the non-profit groups those social justice organizations that do hire attorneys it is extremely competitive to get attorney positions with those types of organizations and the pay is usually not very good so you might wind up living in a high cost of living area but yet be making not so great money how you're going to support yourself and your family and pay pay off your law school debt if you have any law school debt that makes things a lot harder to take on those kinds of jobs even if you can get them so i want everybody out there if you're still considering law school be sure to google lawyer buy moldow bimodal salary distribution so if you look that up you will find some very elucidating charts which ultimately look like two homes on a chart of how much people make when they first get out of law school and once again i'm not 100 sure how accurate these things are because nobody ever asked me when i got out of law school how much money i was making or if i was even employed but it does show you that there's going to be two humps okay so the first hump is a low crappy salary that the majority of the law school graduates particularly the lower tier of a law school you go to the more likely you're going to fall in that lower first bump of salary which is in the range of say like forty to sixty thousand dollars a year and then it dives down and then there's another big spike towards the end of people who start out making say like 150 to 180 000 so um once you're stuck you're pretty much stuck okay and that doesn't even factor in the huge huge number of people with jd's who never even find attorney jobs in the first place i mean those people just aren't even counted so i mentioned jd underground before the forum that i used to be active in for a number of years before the forum um disappeared about a year ago so there were all sorts of like kind of funny screen names that people took on just to show how disenchanted they were with the legal profession or having having gone to law school and um my name was cranky and there there was somebody named disappeared attorney um another person who went by the name lionel hutz um you know who is the doofy um crazy attorney from the simpsons cartoon another funny name that someone else took on was my anus hurts so um yeah those were the days when people could at least on an anonymous forum talk about how disenchanted they were with the legal profession how difficult it was to find jobs how crazy their employers were griped about how hard it was to practice law or try to try to run your own law practice feeling oppressed not not happy with your career choice things like that so um yeah the people are gonna say geez you're a real debbie downer aren't you well maybe i am um yes i'm bitter at times that um i did not choose to go to a less competitive undergrad where i probably could have made good grades in those pre-med science prerequisite classes and been on my way to a shiny md or d.o type of degree like many of my relatives and my family friends kids ended up doing so um i know that's not the key to happiness but i just want to be frank here my father was a doctor here in the u.s for a number of years and my maternal grandfather was also a doctor in taiwan my older sister is an optometrist and i have many many relatives and family friends kids who did follow that that path of their parents and ended up being successful doctors so that gives you a little bit of background as to why sometimes i did feel like what what the heck was i doing trying to bug the trend and and go to law school um let me tell tell you guys some more about um the lousy pay that i had um after not graduating at the top of my uh sad georgetown law school so this is kind of embarrassing but hey you know how many people are really watching this anyway right like 50 50 people thank you thank you for watching me um so after i moved from northern virginia where i was making less than 30 000 base salary and then had my commissions cut because the partner was angry that i was moving away due to my ex-husband's job um i did work for a firm where the people were extremely bizarre and screaming and yelling and they ended up terminating me after a couple of weeks it's uh i don't know how much i should talk about because this little firm is still in existence although one of the people i don't think is practicing more much anymore but it was extremely humiliating but i did find another job which paid a whopping 36 000 salary to start and it was a little bit of a retirement plan i got health insurance benefits from my husband i worked there for a while and then the job that i had before i started my own practice paid me something like a base salary of like a little over 41 000 plus a percentage of how much i brought in in terms of profit from cases that i primarily handled so um by the time i left that job i think the highest i made one year was like 57 000 and um you know i don't want to speak poorly of that place my close friends know about what was going on but um i did learn a lot at both of these jobs all of the jobs actually you know even when i wasn't happy you know looking back i did learn a lot had lots and lots of you know client contact handling cases almost primarily or solely on my own i'm doing a lot of things that people working for bigger law firms definitely wouldn't have been able to do until they were saying like five or more years in working for a big law firm instead i got to do depositions go to court constantly you know handle hearings um just pretty much run the show on my own which was scary at times but um you know ultimately i'd left my last firm because the paycheck started bouncing and i felt like there wasn't really any future for me there to want to become quote partner and i think it worked out for the best for all of us that you know i didn't continue working there and managed to start my own thing and here i've been 14 years later but it definitely doesn't work out that way for the vast majority of people who try to start their own practices especially if you're going to have to do it out of necessity because you can't find a job after law school many years ago when i was working for other small firms i did constantly think about switching careers i was even looking at some of those um you know post-baccalaureate programs like the one that they offer at east carolina university where it only takes you maybe a year and a half or two for you to take all the prerequisites in order to qualify for admission to medical or dental schools but ultimately i decided against it because back then i was probably in my maybe early 30s and i knew that you know eventually i might want to have kids and just ticking down how many years it's going to take to do this post-bacc program you know take mcat or whatever and um four years from medical school and there's residency you know that basically ate away at my so-called fertile years so as a woman um i think that weighed heavily against the idea of okay i'm gonna just chuck this legal career and and trying to head on to medical school and um you know just following my family's footsteps to do that so um of course there were many times that i did request regret that i can't tell you how many times i regretted not being pre-med as opposed to pre-law when i was much younger and um so what am i trying to say so i mean basically if you're smart enough to do really well in the lsat and by that i mean you know 168 or higher and i'll say if you're smart enough to do that if you were good at math and science when you were younger then don't go to law school don't waste time don't waste your educational years and all that money and time and stress you know going to law school from what i've read actually the number of law school applicants has gone down over the last several years as the word has gotten out that the legal job market is glutted and that even the attorneys that seem to have it all and have been able to score those prestigious high-paying jobs a lot of them are miserable or um they never see their families they're just working all the time they're a slave to the billable hour um even there there is very little job security too as i've found friends that got pushed out of their firms after about three to five years it's kind of funny because one of those um actually many of the big law firms they even have like an alumni book for people who worked for them for say like a year or two and then moved on to do something else well you know is that something to be proud of that your turnover is so high that you have this like whopping big alumni book of people who just barely crossed paths you know got their money got their bonus for a year and then just ran away as soon as they could or got booted shown the door after a few years that's that's what really happens in in the legal profession and inviting tells you about that too um i had this idea a long time ago that oh you know like the standing path is that after law school i'm going to take the bar exam and work for some great law firm making great money and then after five to six years i will make a partner everything will be peachy king of course that never happened for me so um i just want to be really candid out there to let people know if you're not able to um let's just say i'll just pick a number like if you can't score at least 155 on the lsat then you really should not even bother to go to law school there are going to be some law schools out there that will accept um this is what people on jd underground would say they will accept anybody with a pulse so they can get that federal student loan money from you or through you so um don't just be flattered because you still got admitted into some law school you know with a 150 or 148 lsat i mean that that doesn't bode well for your chances of passing a bar exam so um you wind up in debt have no job to show for it and probably not even be able to pass the bar exam okay so i said probably because there's always some people a few select people who despite scoring terribly on the lsat still managed to pass a bar exam and have brilliant wonderful legal careers and everything worked out for them but that's an anomaly so another thing that should also factor into your decision would also be did you get into a top top six law school and is there going to be a job waiting for you after you graduate for example do your parents own a law firm or you have a parent who is a partner at a law firm or a good family friend somebody who is guaranteeing you a job or if your employer is going to pay for you to get that law degree then sure why not as long as there's going to be a job at the end of the tunnel i mean this is not just for the sake of learning it's also because you need to get a job that's going to warrant getting that degree and missing out on three years of income potential so another thing that people never mention is potential job discrimination so you know people want to be around others who are like them right so what are the types of people that are in charge of hiring at most legal employers well you know most likely they are not asian they are not minorities okay so um you already have that disadvantage going um especially if you live in a state where there isn't a high asian american population there if you speak english with accent then i think your chances of getting a great job um are also going to be diminished i mean that's just a fact of it like people um you know it's not supposed to be legal but um by just the way the world operates you know people just don't feel as comfortable hiring people who have access okay so even if your employer thinks it's fine um you know i don't know i mean sometimes a clientele does care about that too i feel like i made it despite all of these unspoken barriers uh just through a stroke of luck and it just happens that the city of kerry has become a lot more diverse with a lot more asian americans that have moved in in the last last 15 20 years so the demographics of this area have really changed and i will turn that into another episode too about how i started my law practice and any tips if you've already gotten that jd degree and you have to start your law practice well then what tips would i offer i'll do that in another episode thanks for tuning in listening to my ramblings this was all very unrehearsed because like i said the other attorney i was supposed to interview for them so i was going to film today unfortunately i had to cancel so sorry for all my ramblings thanks for listening

Channel: AALegalFocus

Views: 11,327

Keywords: law school, JDU, document review, law firms, medical school, should i go to law school, applying to law school, legal career outcomes, legal careers, truth about the legal profession, going to law school, T14 law schools, top law schools, best law schools, legal job market, asian american lawyers, asian american attorneys, how much do lawyers make, after law school, attorney jobs, lawyer jobs, contract attorney, depressed lawyers, georgetown law school, don't be a lawyer

Id: yd1myS17q8c

Length: 41min 4sec (2464 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020