Over before it even started?
Been thinking about something else lately, call it the 2 million dollar question maybe, which is could it be possible that my legal career is now over before it ever started due to the fact that I was simply too average of a law student on paper?
The fact of the matter is that law is an extremely elitist and ultra-conservative field in which your achievements are constantly being rated and compared to others, be it what class rank you were, what ranked school you went to, where you interned over the summer, etc. You see this in the pass/fail nature of the bar, and the subjectivity of law school grading. This would not be a problem if these things started decreasing in importance as time went by, but I’m worried that the remnants of the elitist nitpicking carries on a while after law school. According to the measures that everyone is so obsessed with, I was a decent law student, but nothing exception on paper. I have no published papers, no law review, no moot court experience, achievements that seem like a minimum for a lot of attorney jobs out there right now, and I was ranked in the middle of my class. I had no interest in the big law firms while in school, not that I would’ve been very competitive for on-campus interviews anyway, and for my summer internship I instead opted to work in the school’s legal aid clinic. All of these things apparently broadcast mediocrity to the employer-elite out there in the legal field.
From a more practical standpoint, I have a lot to offer by way of actual work experience with at the state government and judiciary, more practical legal clinical experience working with actual clients, and more than 5 years of federal work experience at my current job gained concurrently to working on the JD at night. While I sort out this post-JD limbo, I’m continuing to gain more work experience, and am currently a developing subject matter expertise in a quasi-legal field. Despite all of this, it seems though that none of this matters, law is such an exclusive field that it disregards any and all experience outside of the law school universe, no matter how relevant it might be to the position. Also based on sheer market competition grounds, with the flood of licensed JDs out there scrambling for any job, legal or non-legal, I’m more likely to just be another name and resume in a the reject pile.
Whats more is that every year that I go not landing that first legal job, there will be another wave of 45,000 recently graduated JDs out there to compete with. Another thing that I’ve realized about law is that it really favors those students that go straight out of undergrad. Even at the young age of 30, I may be too old for an entry level law position. I noticed that a lot of the recruiting models are better designed for the younger, single types, your mind is much more malleable and you don’t ask as many questions if all you know is undergrad, even more so if you’ve never worked a full time job before. The crazy hours of the law firms would only seem normal if you never worked anywhere else before. A lot of law is being reprogrammed to think like a conservative, risk-adverse, slightly paranoid lawyer, which I’ve come to accept the sometimes counter-intuitive way that legal rulings come down, and more importantly to not ask questions that would suggest that there is a better way of solving societal problems, something that I found myself asking a lot.