I think most attorneys would consider being a new associate the worst part of the process. The billable hours are crazy (especially in large or boutique firms) and you basically are living at the office. I have been out over twenty years and my typical day is still at least 10 hours long and 12 hours days are common. In contrast, my brother and friends who are physicians work fewer hours and make more $$$. That being said, there is a lot of satisfication in helping people, correcting mistakes, etc.

If it wasn't that you were an engineer, I'd suggest against it.

IF you want to practice patent law, it should pay better than engineering.

My nephew is about to graduate from UCLA Law School. He already has a Job lined up with a big law firm. He will be making six figures plus just starting out.

I haven't seen him much in the last three years as JALLEN stated.

He will be working his ass off.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig Sauer Kraut:
o'sully, feel free to email me if you like. I am happy to give you my two cents.

How about tossing your 2 cents out here for us to hear, also?

Don't do it. It seriously sucks for the vast, vast, majority of lawyers.

The successful ones will all agree they worked damn hard, maybe too hard, to get where they are.

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

quote:

Originally posted by Sig Sauer Kraut:
o'sully, feel free to email me if you like. I am happy to give you my two cents.

How about tossing your 2 cents out here for us to hear, also?

It's hard to give a one-size fits all opinion. This is a subject that is easier to give an accurate opinion with some personal details. I can sure try.

What most have said in here rings true. There are exceptions. Most people think that they are he exception, but most people are wrong about that.

o-sully, why do you want to practice law?

Where do you want practice?

What's your LSAT and undergraduate gpa?

Where are you planning to go to law school?

How are you paying for it?

If you have a spouse, is she on board? What does she think it'll be like?

Like most here, I'd recommend against it for most, but in some instances in may make sense. Candidly, it's less likely to make sense given your age and current career.

quote:

Originally posted by BurtonRW:
If you have a technical (engineering) background, the market will not be saturated for you, but you'll have to work yourself into your niche. That's patent law. A friend of mine in law school (median age for my evening division class was 46, BTW) had a background in biopharmaceutical engineering and took the patent bar before our third year. He's doing very well.

I intended to use law school as a bridge to my PhD (instead of the traditional masters route) and teach young, impressionable college students. I gave up on that plan when I realized that I actually wanted to be a trial lawyer (but not the bad plaintiff kind).

I can tell you that you should NOT go to law school if you don't have the support of your family. They will have to understand in advance that they will have no idea what you're going through and that you will be unavailable for a few years.

I would strongly encourage considering a "part time" evening program. Your adjunct faculty will be coming to lectures with fresh war stories and evening students (second career for the most part) are MUCH more grounded and less neurotic than day students fresh out of college.

Good luck!

-Rob

Some great advice from JALLEN and BurtonRW.

In case you think either of them are exaggerating, they aren't.

And, as others have said, law schools in this country continue to churn out thousands of lawyers every year with no regard for whether there are jobs for them.

Finally, if I recall correctly, lawyers have one of the highest job dissatisfaction scores. I know lots of lawyers who admit that they wish they'd gone into a different profession.

Everything JAllan said is correct. My wife will graduate on May 13th, she is a CPA who decide to go to law school and will graduate 3rd in her class. She works full time and went through the Part time program at UALR Bowen and the last 4 years have been tough.

Instead of becoming a lawyer, get you an honest job as a piano player in a whorehouse.

All that said, I was a lawyer for 40 years, and glad of it. That's what I wanted.

I was never an associate, never in a large firm. I was either at a title insurance company, or in my own operation, a partner with other lawyers or on my own with non lawyer operations and the investment company I ran for ~23 years. When I litigated, especially, there were some long hours. Otherwise, I seldom spent more than 60 hours a week.

I'd still be doing that if it weren't for this health problem. I did take a vow to avoid real estate investment after a couple of years of walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, watching many folks lose everything in the real estate debacle 10 years ago.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig Sauer Kraut:

quote:

Originally posted by Xer0:
Average Attorney income according to salary.com is 89K.

But it's not a bell curve for the legal profession.

Can you expand on that?

Prosecutors where I've worked were salaried, making $40,000 - $50,000, I believe. The police attorney where I last worked made something around $85-90k. I know some attorneys make real money, but how many are making 100k+ vs less? That was why I didn't go back for the PA program. $150,000 + in debt to make 90k, vs current situation with guaranteed pension and no student loans.

OP, what kind of salary are you expecting?

quote:

Originally posted by chongosuerte:

quote:

Originally posted by Sig Sauer Kraut:

quote:

Originally posted by Xer0:
Average Attorney income according to salary.com is 89K.

But it's not a bell curve for the legal profession.

Can you expand on that?

Prosecutors where I've worked were salaried, making $40,000 - $50,000, I believe. The police attorney where I last worked made something around $85-90k. I know some attorneys make real money, but how many are making 100k+ vs less? That was why I didn't go back for the PA program. $150,000 + in debt to make 90k, vs current situation with guaranteed pension and no student loans.

OP, what kind of salary are you expecting?

Sure. Salaries in the profession (starting at least) have a bimodal distribution instead of a bell curve. http://www.nalp.org/class_of_2014_salary_curve

quote:

Other lawyers are greedy, untrustworthy jerks who lay awake nights trying to figure out a way to make you look stupid, or crooked, or both, and you do the same to them.

God that sounds like so much fun.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I know a few lawyers. Many of them have told me that success can depend on servicing very specialized areas of law.
And the younger ones told me the first five years or more out of school were very lean times.

And A LOT OF HOURS. I dated an attorney. The first 5 years you're pretty much working 100 hours a week for a large firm for around $85k a year.

I'm neither a lawyer* nor an engineer, and I don't know what your engineering background/specialty is.

But if you're interested in the law, have you considered forensic engineering? That might be a good option. Unless, of course, you're already a forensic engineer, in which case, disregard my suggestion.



*I have been told I think like a lawyer, but I was never sure if that was a compliment or an insult.

There are WAY more law school graduates every year than good legal jobs to be had. We've been dealing with this since my fiancé graduated from law school (and she went to a good school getting very good grades). My parents are lawyers as well, -!: the first thing they'll tell people considering that route is "you likely won't graduate law school now and have a dozen six figure job offers waiting for you like when we graduated". Heidi(fiancé) works for a hospital doing compliance, she needs her law degree for the job, but it's not even close to what she thought she'd be doing while in law school.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
I know a few lawyers. Many of them have told me that success can depend on servicing very specialized areas of law.
And the younger ones told me the first five years or more out of school were very lean times.

And A LOT OF HOURS. I dated an attorney. The first 5 years you're pretty much working 100 hours a week for a large firm for around $85k a year.

Not sure how long ago this was, but an associate at a big law firm starts at almost $200k now after bonus. The hours suck but it'd be rare to bill 100 hours per week consistently. It happens, but not week after week after week (very often at least).

quote:

Originally posted by cmr076:
There are WAY more law school graduates every year than good legal jobs to be had. We've been dealing with this since my fiancé graduated from law school (and she went to a good school getting very good grades). My parents are lawyers as well, -!: the first thing they'll tell people considering that route is "you likely won't graduate law school now and have a dozen six figure job offers waiting for you like when we graduated". Heidi(fiancé) works for a hospital doing compliance, she needs her law degree for the job, but it's not even close to what she thought she'd be doing while in law school.

I hope the op reads your post. This information is important.

I have been a lawyer since 1991. Graduated from Boston University, passed the Mass Bar in 1991 and the Florida bar in 2011.

I feel like I have spent most of my career trying to figure out what I like to do and how to make money at it. I have finally figured it out, and am starting to make money my way, but it has been a long road.

I don't like trial work, it bugs me, and the constant conflict isn't my thing. But I graduated into a recession and became an Army JAG so that I could eat. Money sucked, but Germany was nice. Hated trial work and got out. The path to success in the Army as a lawyer is trials, and I didn't want that, so out I went.

On to big white shoe law. Made a lot of money, worked a ton of hours (more than 36 in a row, more than once) loved the transactions, hated most of the people I worked with because they were anal, petulant, short tempered, arrogant assholes. Finally found my niche doing the ".com" boom in the late 90s. Loved it, liked the people I was working with, made lots of money with the promise of lots more but the boom crashed.

I spent 14 months out of work, because I was specialized in early stage companies and high tech, and no one was doing that after the crash and 9/11. No one.

Went to work "in house" as a commercial lawyer inside a company. Good job, decent money, but no where to go in the company so I left. Into the recession of 2009. That was fun.

When you are relatively senior and relatively specialized, you are expensive and hard to rehire, especially in a recession.

I now have my own firm, work for myself, and am finally reasonably happy. I'm not making near what I was at my peak, but things are improving. I am doing something I enjoy now, which is launching start-ups, licensing technology, raising venture capital, guiding business strategy, and negotiating transactions. It has been a long road to get to a place where I am finally happy doing what I do, and beginning to see a pay check that justifies the work.

My suggestion, if you are interested in being a lawyer, is figuring out what kind of lawyer you want to be, understand what the employment market looks like for that skill set, determine what you might get paid if you are successful, and then make the decision if you want to do it. For every guy making a killing and driving a Porsche, there are 15 just getting through the day, and self-medicating at night.

When it comes to law schools, where you go is very important. You either need to go to a major national player so you have great name recognition (and by that I mean Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, BU, BC, Princeton, etc., you get the picture), or some place that is important in your geographic area. By way of example, I had a friend who went to UF Gainsville, the best law school in Florida at the time. Could not even get an interview in Boston. Boston firms considered any school that wasn't a national top 25 to be shit. It's not true, by the way, but that doesn't matter. It's the perception of the person hiring you that matters. Some firms and some towns are very cliquish that way.

Next, you must be top quarter if you go to a top 25 school, and you must be top 10% if you go to anything other than a top 25 school if you want to be considered for the best jobs in the big cities. There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to all rules except gravity, but it's generally true.

The hours will suck. When you are responsible to solve someone's problems, or responsible to reduce their risk in multi million dollar transactions, or even responsible to make sure that they close on their house in time, you are working no matter what you think you'd rather be doing, and no matter how senior you might be.

Your ability to make money is somewhat constrained by by your ability to work. Generally, you get paid for the time you put in, unless you are in something like car accidents where you get 1/3 of the settlement or trial award. Sometimes you work very hard for that money, some times it's a couple of phone calls. You also make money if you get senior enough to have associates working for clients you bill on. Then you get a chunk of their earnings as well. That can be a lot of money (relatively speaking) but it can end quickly if you or the firm lose those clients.

Finally, there is a distinct risk that the law firm model is dying. It is increasingly difficult for people, and even businesses to pay the amounts that lawyers are demanding for their services, based on their income expectations, law school debt, office rental, and other overhead. One of the reasons I am being successful now is that I have broken that mold. I am working solely for entrepreneurs and businesses. I work in their offices, or at my home on a fast internet connection, and I am able to provide sophisticated services at lower costs than the downtown firms. Essentially I perform the role of "in house" counsel on an outsourced basis. Companies like it because I understand their business better then most outside lawyers, and am able to provide more personalized and customized services, while keeping bills reasonable by limiting overhead expenses. This model is not a slam dunk yet, and may still fail.

What all of this means is, law is a tougher place to make a good living with a decent quality of life than it appears from the outside. The current economic model is creaking at the seams, law schools are churning out more lawyers than the market can reasonably employ, and only the top school/top academic performers are easy to hire at significant starting salaries.

You are already an engineer. As noted by others, as a dual degree guy, you will have some distinct advantages if you can find a niche where you can use both skills. You would be eligible to be a patent lawyer, although the formality of that work would kill me. Depending on the kind of engineer you are, you might find interesting work back in your old field, either as a litigator working cases related to the field, a compliance guy keeping everyone legal, or an in-house guy made more useful with distinct industry knowledge.

It's a tough call to decide to go, and hard to do when you have significant outside responsibilities. What has been said by others about having to learn a new way of thinking is true. You don't know shit about the law when you come out of law school. Most of what you learn is how to think, how to research and how to write. Experience and legal knowledge are picked up on the job.

I'm sorry for the almost endless post. Mostly when people ask me if they should go to law school, I suggest they get an MBA. Without intending to sound flip, you might consider that path. An engineer with an MBA could be very useful to a lot of companies IF you are still interested in your branch of engineering.

One other thing to keep in mind- in addition to actually practicing law, lawyers have to be salesmen, for lack of a better word. Whether you are in your own one man shop or one of the big law firms, success long term means getting your own clients, and that rapidly becomes more important than being a good lawyer. There are lots of great lawyers out there who are not good salesmen or hate being one.