Don't have to answer if you don't want, but why is going to law school a bad idea?
Law school is really fun! Being a lawyer is (usually) not.
CW Network Parody Song sums up the points pretty well, but here’s the longer version:
It’s a very stressful and often very unpleasant job, no matter what area of law you go into
Seriously, being a lawyer means your entire job is to get yelled at for many hours every day, and having to be brave enough to stand your ground and yell right back. Yes, even if you do [x area of law] - and yes, even if you never see the inside of a courtroom. It’s a very aggressive and often mean profession.
You’ll be so deep in student debt, the only people who attend your funeral will be your creditors.
Law actually pays really poorly in comparison to the amount of work you do + your student loans. Almost every other profession requiring a doctoral degree pays MUCH better per hour than most legal jobs, factoring in your loan repayments.
The job market notoriously really sucks. It’s very hard to get a good job as a lawyer, even if you go to a great law school. It’s a crazy hustle culture with new grads searching for months and often fighting for scraps.
Due to ~21st century efficiency~ you’re expected to have a work-product and billed hour output that is basically impossible to achieve. You’ll agonize over every hour you don’t spend working, and then agonize some more about your billables. Several of my peers have been admitted to the hospital before due to extreme stress and exhaustion making us dangerously ill.
At least a fourth of the people I know who did everything right - went to a fancy high-ranked school, passed the bar, and got an excellent job right out of school - stopped practicing within the first three years because they were so miserable. In other law schools, it’s probably at least a third of the school.
Unsurprisingly, we have the highest suicide rate of any profession per capita - by a very wide margin. And let’s not talk about the alcoholism issue (something like 75-80% of attorneys)
To enjoy and be successful in the legal profession, you have to be someone who really, REALLY, *REALLY* needs to win at everything. Even in transactional law - you’re always trying to beat someone and “win” at the deal. And so you’ll inevitably become a bit of a dick, even if you don’t want to be. It’s not like morally abhorrent or anything, but you have to accept that you’ll eventually become a little insufferable to be around.
…and I say all of that as somebody who genuinely loves my job and loves being a lawyer. And who practices in a relatively lowkey, low-stress field of law, working for some of my favorite people on the planet.
Now, if you read all of that and said “fuck you! That’s all totally worth the feeling of winning a case/achieving an outcome and sticking it to the man!” then congrats - you’re the rare person who probably should go to law school.
Otherwise: you have only one life. Please spend it doing literally any other profession.
