Served

I actually spend time trying to devise cutesy titles for my posTTTs. It comes from a desire for something attention grabbing and years of submitting headlines to Fark, mostly unsuccessfully.

Headlines are an art. I know a former NY Daily News headline writer and they come to him naturally. His terse e-mail responses often require a second (or third) look lest they sail over my head.

Sometimes an article's headline is so good that it needs no embellishment; it's perfect as is. Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, handed me the title for this post. His article, Served How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers, is one more nail in the law school carTTTel's coffin.

"Served," "owned," and "pwned" all mean the same thing to me: To be obliterated in a contest, usually publically. It's a succinct description of the fate awaiting lemmings heading off to law school. Campos probably used "served" because of its legal connotation. I prefer pwned, myself.

Follwing the incendiary subtitle, Campos trods familiar ground, noting that schools claim almost all their graduates get jobs as lawyers and that US Snooze has revised its employment rate calculations to make them "somewhat less inaccurate."

He hits his stride when he begins analyzing National Association for Law Placement (NALP) data. NALP reports that 63% of graduates of ABA schools have full-time legal positions within 9 months of graduating. Campos points out that NALP does not distinguish between permanent and temporary jobs. While the latter are typically low-status, low-paid clerical and document review, he also includes state trial-level clerkships as temporary positions.

Based on a T50 he analyzed, the true 9-month employment rate is 45%; lower-ranked schools fare worse.

In other news that will surprise only Ric Romero, he notes that employment figures are self-reported and that neither the schools nor NALP audit them. Unemployed and underemployed graduates tend not to report back to the school. Campos further "found several instances of people describing themselves as employed permanently or full-time, when in fact they had temporary or part-time jobs (I found no instances of inaccuracies running in the other direction)." Even T14s game their ranking by hiring alumni temporarily.

So, life after T50 is mostly for losers? What happens to the winners? They "often accept jobs that make them miserable, featuring insane hours and unfulfilling work, but which these graduates conclude they must take in order to pay their often astronomical educational debt."

Served. Indeed.

Tune in at 11:00

Pictured is Ric Romero a KABC-TV reporter and Fark cliché who "[r]eports the obvious, usually long after everyone else knows it's obvious." Ric made a name for himself reporting on the blogging phenomenon; his photo alone normally suffices as a response in a thread, though some will add "water is wet" to drive the point home.

Ric's protégé, Nikita Lalwani over at Yale Daily News, has a promising career ahead of her. She recently reported that law firms prefer to hire from elite law schools. Further, the law schools themselves draw from elite colleges; half the Yale class comes from either the Ivy League or Stanford and the balance comes from from selective schools like Wesleyan.

"The exclusivity of the legal profession is reinforced at top law firms, according to a study by Lauren Rivera ’00 published this year, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Rivera interviewed roughly 40 professionals involved in law firm recruitment and hiring, and found that these people give particular preference to candidates from Harvard, Yale or Stanford law schools when reviewing job applications.

Although many recruiters actually believed that graduates of non-elite law schools were more prepared for the practical aspects of being a lawyer, they still preferred to hire from super-elite schools because of the prestige associated with them."

So, 0Ls, what can we learn from Nikita? Simply, Yale or fail. Unless your goal is to work in shitlaw, you need to go to an elite school. What part of that do you not understand? Any employer worth working for cares deeply what school you attended. Your T50 law review or moot court is nice, and it's helpful that your school revamped its curriculum so you could hit the ground running, but you're still going to be an also-ran and always will be. Don't blame me; I don't make the rules. Decades after a Harvard graduates, his degree will impress people. Seton Hall, not so much.

The legal industry is comprised of prestige whores from top to bottom. That's how this blog got its name.

When you fork over $200K, you're buying a brand, not just an education. Everyone learns the same irrelevant law, generally from professors who are graduates of the same go-to schools.

Your first inkling something is amiss may come at OCI. You may also try looking on a firm's site for graduates, and find there is but one ... who graduated in 1977. You try to volunteer, but those organizations are selective, too. Like I said, I don't make the rules.

You don't want to work in biglaw, anyway? That's fine, but nowadays you're going to be rubbing shoulders with T14 grads all the way down to doc review. When push comes to shove, who do you think is going to get the job?

Don't take my word for it. Ask Nikita.