Why Law School Can Still Be A Good Investment In Your Future

Man, who would’ve thought that one day everyone was going to consider attending law school to be a fool’s errand?  Probably the same people who saw through the madness that suddenly spotlighted comic books as an eternally solid investment in the 90s, supposedly beyond stocks or gold.  However, even the outing of that sham is coming back to haunt us.  Hmm… maybe everything is truly cyclical?

Anyway, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, law school has been getting a terrible rap lately.  The ire of which is targeted mainly at greedy law school administrators, the U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings, and the American Bar Association for letting everything get and stay out of control.  Last week the New York Times ran an epic-length article about the current fate of new attorneys looking to enter the work force.  To make a long story short, it’s basically bad news on all fronts.

The article points out, quite accurately in my opinion, that law schools have been inflating their employment statistics in an effort to curry favor among students and raise their profile both to the public at large and in the much maligned annual U.S. News Law School Rankings.  Essentially the article reminds us that law schools, like any other profit based institution, are still businesses.  So in order for them to stay afloat and grow, school administers have been gaming their graduate employment stats to make their graduates appear to make a higher average annual income and be more meaningfully employed beyond what is reality.

The reality being that despite the vast majority of law schools reporting six figure salaries and 90 percent and above employment rates for student, the real statistics fall significantly shorter in all circumstances.  The reason this is a problem is because with the country’s depressed economy, potential law students who can’t afford to go to law school are incurring massive debt in order to do so, all on the false promise that completing the arduous (and I do mean arduous) three year journey to the finish line will yield a guaranteed six-figure job.  This problem is only made worst due to the ABA’s very loose reporting standards for law school, which, for example, allow a graduate waiting tables after law school to be counted as “employed” for the purposes of the school’s statistics.

I don’t doubt that the practices described in the New York Times article are going on in law schools nationwide, or that the U.S. News Rankings are anything but garbage when it comes to evaluating a school or the students it produces.  These are all valid points that need to be corrected.

However, what I do take issue with is the poor characterization that the article’s author and indeed the legal blogosphere have been making about the quality of a law school education.  Because law school can still be a worthwhile endeavor regardless of whether one actually intends to practice law.

Why do I believe this?  Because law school teaches you how to think like a lawyer.  This phrase on its own may seem like a very narrowly tailored benefit geared only toward people wanting to practice law.  However, if you unpack it, thinking like a lawyer is actually a very practical thing.  Essentially lawyers are problem solvers.  People come to attorneys when they have problems that they can’t solve on their own.  While certainly the skills a lawyer employs to solve said problems involve a lot of legal knowledge, the way they approach it uses plenty of practical knowledge gained by going through the rigors of law school.

Lawyers are by and large great organizers.  Law school teaches a student how to look at very complex problems and break them down into manageable parts that can then be conquered one at a time.  This is an invaluable ability that is beneficial to all situations of life, from trying to figure out what to get your mom for her birthday to how to structure a property purchase.  The problems that can arise in life are complicated.  Law school teaches you the logic necessary to simplify such complexities.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying to drop everything and go to law school so you can be an excellent problem solver.  Tuition is still cripplingly expensive after all and there are many personal and practical considerations one must think through before attending law school.

What I am saying is that opting to go, or finish if you’re already enrolled, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve wasted three years of your life.