I was recently exposed to the growing ranks of disaffected lawyers blogging about what they’ve dubbed the “Law School Scam.” They put a voice to the myriad of feelings I have about my choice to attend law school and become a lawyer. Some of them are angry, others are passionate about preventing other would-be lawyers from making the same mistake. Time will tell what form this blog takes, but I felt that it was important to join the chorus of voices and tell my story. It would be nice if what I have to say helps some enterprising young person avoid the same bad decisions I have made, but if nothing else, I hope this blog will be an outlet for the feelings that shame and pride prevent me from expressing openly in front of friends, family, and associates.
Other scambloggers seem to get flak from prospective law students and others in the law community, accusing them of being bitter, angry, losers. If anyone ever reads this, I’m sure I will receive my share of that derision. But honestly, there is nothing that some glib winner of the legal lottery might say about me that I haven’t thought about myself. For that matter, there is probably nothing that some cocky 0L has to say about their chances at success that I wouldn’t have similarly thought at that point in my life. The point of this blog, and other scamblogs in general, is that you don’t ever know what life holds for you. The fact that some of us have succeeded in the perverse arena of law school, passed the bar exam with ease, and yet have seen our life’s ambition crumble before our eyes, should give the reader pause. Succeeding in law school doesn’t mean you will succeed in a career as a lawyer, if you can even get that career off of the ground.
I view myself as an absolute failure. I “did everything right” in law school, and yet once I graduated and passed the bar exam I couldn’t get employers to take a second look at me. Even though I work as a lawyer, I am being crushed by a load of student loan debt that I can never foresee paying off. I work endlessly for little or no reward.
I decided to go to law school in my early twenties, around the same time I was engaged to be married. I was a recent graduate with a B.A., and because the job market seemed utterly uninterested in what I had to offer, I decided to go to law school. I don’t hesitate to say that my primary motivation for pursuing a career in law was that I wanted to provide for my wife; and ultimately for our children when we decided to have them. I imagined a future where I was the breadwinner and she would have the luxury of staying home with the kids. As bad as my debt is, the worst aspect of my failure is having to suffer the disappointment I see in her every time we talk about money or children or taking a vacation. I feel like I could bear the burden of my mistakes alone; I hate that she has to bear it alongside me.
Many of the scambloggers I have read are bitter, angry, and resentful. They are entitled to be. But more than anything, I feel sad- sad that I have made such a mess of my life, sad that with all my apparent potential, this is how I ended up.
I have a lot more to say.
Welcome to the club and thanks for your insight. The similarities I see in our motivation to go to law school are striking. I think it’s the same way for a lot of law students. We arrive on the job market with a undergraduate degree with diluted value and want to do better for ourselves. Law school seems like a good option, and looking into it, we get nothing but a big “thumbs up” from the schools regarding our future prospects and earning potential. There’s never any discussion of the dark side, until you’re out on your ass and living it yourself.
I too am particularly bitter about how the decision to go to law school has thrown a wrench in my plans for life. The thought I (and presumably many, many others) had going in was that law school would be a way to improve my life. With a J.D., I could get a job with a decent salary and be able to eventually have a decent life. Supporting a family would no longer be out of the question. Unfortunately, exactly the opposite has happened. The crushing debt, low salary, and lack of security and/or opportunity to advance makes dreams we once had like home ownership, marriage, a family, or even a trip to Florida once a year, out of reach. It’s a horrible feeling, and “scam” is the only way to really describe what’s happened to all of us.
Keep your head up!
thanks!
Scammed,
Thanks for your comment. FWIW, your post “Lost Generation” really resonated with me. I must have gone back and read it three or four times, and I dwelled on it all weekend. It was one of the motivating factors in putting this blog together.
I look forward to getting to know all of you.
LN
I know the feelings of sadness, despair and desperation. As we are all different, I lash out at the law school cartel with anger. Because we have been defrauded I will stop at nothing until some form of justice has been served on them. I guarantee you that more attorneys out there will come online to express their anger and frustrations over this once “honorable” profession.
On a positive note this is great as more scamblogs are being added by the week! We will have more strength in larger numbers. Pretty soon our blogs will be unavoidable. Fuck the law school cartel.
thanks. I hope together we can accomplish something. It would be cool if there was some sort of centralized database where scammed law students could post honest, anonymous reviews of their respective institutions. Perhaps such a thing exists already. Something that 0L’s could reference to counter US News.
Welcome to the fight, Nihilist!
Every person that joins the fray is important, because together we are making an impact. Several new blogs appeared over the last ten days, and already they are being visited frequently. I’ve already linked to your blog, so hopefully that will drive some traffic your way.
Your voice needs to be heard…and I hope it helps you to know that you are not suffering alone…there are many more of us out there too afraid to speak up.
Thanks for the welcome. I hope together we can affect some sort of change.
Welcome to the club! I will provide a link to this site on my blogroll. When the lemmings discount us as losers, they fail to recognize that MOST of us had sterling academic accomplishments – at least in undergrad. Most of us simply wanted to support our spouses, and have children. Many of us were extremely hard workers, often working FT and attending school full-time, while balancing other things into our busy lives.
I see the disappointment in my wife’s face and voice- and every time I see it, I want to take a bulldozer to Third Tier Drake. When the pre-law lemmings try to drag me through the mud, it simply drives me harder to expose this disgusting cartel that financially crushes LEGIONS of highly-educated people.
We are building momentum. We have seen SEVERAL strong, recent scam-blogs as well. Eight days ago, a law professor had the decency and guts to post the following, in support of the scam-bloggers.
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/06/wake-up-fellow-law-professors-to.html
Feel free to email me, nihilist. Thank you for adding your voice into this fight.
Nando
Thanks for the kind welcome. I think being able to talk about this with others who share my perspective will be cathartic.
Your post sounds sad, but understandably so. There are days when you think what did I do to my life by attending law school? Other times wondering how much depth you have to maintain your sanity. All of this while trying to stay motivated for better job prospects, trying to make sense of it all. Welcome, but it’s sad that tgere are so many of us out there.
I always considered myself to be quite fortunate. And then I went to law school, and it seems like my luck has never quite recovered.
Welcome to the club. I’ll be sure to link to you. Thanks for linking to me!
I also would like you to join a forum for scam bloggers only. Please email me and I’ll take you through an authentication process to get there.
Thanks!
Thanks, I’ll be in touch.
i went to undergrad with friends who have been making 50k + since we graduated undergrad because they got into nursing. i didn’t want to be a nurse. fuck i was stupid.
Hello LN and others,
I would like to give you all my sympathies and some perspective from another career track. I am a 45 y.o. software developer and finance professional, and it seems to me that the legal job market is going through the same upheavals that the tech world experienced about 10 years ago– namely, there was a steady run-up followed by a catastrophic collapse in demand for our services. True, software engineers usually don’t have $150k in loans from career training, but many (myself included) had taken out that much, or more, in home mortgage debt in anticipation that the good times would keep going.
The past decade has been one hideous hellacious disaster after another for me. In November of 2000, I was laid off from my job at a small software firm. This was about 3 months after I had bought a house, and about 3 months before my second child was due. I had savings, and was able to find other work, but then was fired from 6 more jobs before finding my current one. Fortunately, though tech was no longer an option, I was able to return to my previous career in finance. As of now, I have paid off most of my debt, but am by no means out of the woods. I am a sole breadwinner, have high ongoing expenses and a fairly crappy marriage situation to boot.
Now a few words of advice. First, don’t worry so much about your debt. Yes, it is a serious problem, but I predict that in 10 years, it will be less so. You will not suffer through a lifetime of serfdom because of this. There are just too many people in the same situation. Either Congress will change the law to allow discharging the debt, or you will default without grave consequences, or there will be hyperinflation, or you will find a better life abroad, or there will be a revolution. Something has to give. So keep the debt in mind, but don’t let the worry eat you alive.
This does not mean that you will get off scot-free. You have made serious mistakes and you know it. And you will have to redeem yourselves in some other way. You are already starting to do so with these blogs.
But this brings me to my second piece of advice. Please use your considerable talents to analyze the macro picture and figure out how this happened. This is an advanced exercise in law and economics, and somewhat off topic, so I’ll be brief. My take is that the country and economy are very poorly served by corporate law. The government winds up chartering political, inefficient organizations that chase fads instead of delivering real value. This state of affairs creates wild fluctuations in demand for corporate services, that leave white-collar workers whipsawed and trapped in debt.
Thanks for reading and hang in there. I do believe you will climb out of this.
Jason,
Thanks for your comment. I hope you are right. Although my raison d’etre in writing this blog is to talk about my experiences (which have been largely negative) on the journey towards lawyerdom, I am not entirely pessimistic.
There are some things I am optimistic about… although it is unfortunate that even when I have reason to be hopeful I tend to hold such things at arms length- willing to work towards them without expecting any particular result. I can’t decide whether this is a legitimate philosophical position or the sad delusions of a broken man.
I am angry about the complete lack of employment options I had upon passing the bar, but I haven’t done nothing simply because no one would hire me. I am currently working as a solo practitioner, and I hope to discuss that option at some time in the future. It is certainly not all sunshine and unicorns, but it isn’t impossible either. And as much as our law schools screwed us over, we don’t have much of an option but to do *something.*
LN
I graduated in the top 0.5% of my class in college and aced the LSAT. I graduated from a top ten law school and easily got in several other top ten ranked law schools. I believe that I deserve, yes, fucking deserve, a job. I also believe it should be a pretty damn good one too. It was promised to me, repeatedly. I was lied to. I was not some rich frat kid with a lawyer for a daddy and a 2.0 gpa and a 145 LSAT who saw the ad for the newest 5th tier law school, decided to become a lawyer. I had the ability to make the cut and I worked for it, while unable to even pay for an LSAT prep course or decent clothes for school. I never had my own car till I got out of law school.
I never got a good job, with no explanation of why. Career services was a joke. I was a kid from a trailer park with the iq to get good grades and a high LSAT score, but no connections and no snobby personality that they are looking for in interviews. (It seems that the shiniest shoe and the most fake, arrogant, uppity personality is the only thing they are looking for in law interviews, not ability.) I worked several low paying small firm jobs, never above 50k with each employer being more type A, bipolar and abusive than the previous.
Tired of the insane abuse, I quit my last job. I have sent hundreds of resumes and done dozens of costly interviews where I don’t even get comped for gas or a hotel room so I have to drive all night there and back, across the state, sometimes 400 miles each way. Every fucking time, some idiot 3rd or 4th tier grad is sitting across the interview table with a shit eating grin, telling me they are “looking for a fit”, doing everything they can without coming outright and saying it, that they are not going to hire me because I went to the law school that they couldn’t get into.
Not breaking into Biglaw while having an T-10 degree means I am fucked because the small firm partners are jealous dickheads who won’t hire me because my school turned them down, even though they had daddies who were rich lawyers or doctors and all their connections didn’t get them in where I did. But, here’s the kicker, I am fucking broke! I don’t have a fucking job, and they are goddamn millionaires, narcissistic fucks who are jealous of a guy living in poverty because he may have a few higher i.q. points than they do. I’ll trade the 20+ point difference in LSAT score I have on them for their fucking money and inherited connections.
The situation is pretty bad. I am spongeing off my 70 something year old dad to do thousands of dollars worth of interviews which always amount to nothing, with some moron from a 3rd rate school with half my gpa beating me out for the job, every time. It just doesn’t make fucking sense.
And to top it off, there is no fucking way I could ever repay these fucking rip off loans. I refuse to in fact. Whatever it takes.
My realistic options: blow my fucking head off or check in to the local mental hospital and tell them the truth about what I want to do to all these talentless, empty headed fucks who turn me down for jobs and what I would like to do all the Deans and Profs who scammed me and ruined my life. It is not likely I would ever be allowed to leave, but at least I would have food and a place to sleep and I might not blow my brains out. I simply don’t give a fuck. These are my two options and I am weighing them carefully. No kidding here, just the gravity of the situation. Not that anybody gives a fuck. I don’t even give a fuck at this point.
Hadenough: My brotha. My man…or wo-man! Other than the superior IQ, high LSAT, top 10 school things (because I went to a tier II toilet), I totally can relate to your anger. My anger is directed at the devils at those small firms that you tried to get into and I actually worked at. It won’t be me, but I do hope that someone like me or you will pay a visit to some of those pricks that run those types of firms and straighten them out hard. And, I suppose, it would be nice if someone straightened out some of the biglaw types who shut you out and those of us who went to 2nd tier toilets. The ones who created and perpetuate the lawland caste system that ends the game for many of us before we ever get in.
Not for nothing, you don’t know the bullet that you dodged by not getting into the toilet law scene. A few years ago I would have told you to skip shitlaw and get the doc review money when it was pretty good, save up and move on to something out of law…but now, doc review is dead.
You just have to go cold turkey and leave law now. Leave it behind you like a bad date or nightmare. God bless you.