This may be the one piece of advice I can’t repeat often enough: you should conduct a thorough, realistic cost/benefit analysis of whether law school is a good investment before you start laying down the big bucks. A recent National Law Journal explored this issue at length (may require UMass login), and I strongly recommend reading the entire thing, but here’s one of the central points:
Even a committee of the American Bar Association has concluded that law school applicants need a dose of reality.
“Far too many law students expect that earning a law degree will solve their financial problems for life,” reads a recent message posted on the ABA’s Web site from the organization’s Commission on the Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Profession and Legal Needs. “In reality, however, attending law school can become a financial burden for law students who fail to consider carefully the financial implications of their decision.”
(Emphasis added.)
After you’ve read the narrative version, then you can click over to watch the video version—produced by an anonymous blogger who blogs under the pseudonym Esq. Never—which exaggerates a little bit, and takes unnecessary pot shots at so-called “third tier” law schools. It also assumes that the only reason that anyone goes to law school is to work in “BigLaw”—one of the super-large law firms based in New York, Boston or Washington (and I know that very few of the UMass applicants I see have set that as their goal). But the underlying message is one to contemplate at length: a law school degree is no guarantee of financial stability. In many cases, it represents a serious setback.