Going to a Law School: Making the Decision

When you decide to go to law school, you're not just offhandedly agreeing to waste a couple of years in an entertaining way. You're consciously, nervously putting yourself on a path that makes you a different kind of person, just as surely as if you were joining the Marines.

Click Here to Find Law Student Jobs on LawCrossing




Parents, teachers, and peers don't usually hold a gun to your head and make you go to law school. It's your choice.
For some future law students, it happens without question. They always wanted to be attorneys. But for most of us, it's not so cut-and-dried. We look ahead and try to decide what will pay the most and lead to the best career.

That's the way it was for me. During my last two years in college, I attended meetings and gathered information on different possible futures for myself. I thought about going off to work for some company, and I also thought about continuing on in school for another few years.

I eventually decided to get an advanced degree. At that point, the choice for me was between law school and a Ph.D.
In political science, I quickly learned that hundreds of Ph.D.s might compete for the same position. I got the picture. It didn't make much sense to go to graduate school if I wanted to have self-respect and an income.
Still, I had reservations about law school. I wanted neither to work that hard nor to be identified with the bad things you hear about lawyers.

1. The Psychology of Applying
It finally dawned on me that I could apply to law schools, "just to see what happens." I figured I could make a better decision when I knew whether I could get into a good school. If I didn't succeed in that, I planned to try the Ph.D.
That was naive of me. I had underestimated what happens to your mind when you fill out your law school applications. They're a lot of work, and they require some thought about yourself and your future.

In particular, you have to write at least one essay for each school, responding to specific questions on the application form. Among other things, they want to know what you're hoping to get from law school, and how you think you'll fit in, and why their school appeals to you.

This may be the first time in your life that you'll have to explain to someone, carefully, that you are an adult now and that you know what you're doing with your life. Moreover, you're applying to law school, so you have to be especially persuasive. By the time you're done, it's not surprising if you believe your own propaganda, and are now convinced that law school is exactly the place for you.

Once you've filed the applications, you wait. You wait for weeks, watching your mail nervously, praying for a positive response from, say, Yale Law School, you’re selected. And then the magical envelope appears in your mailbox. You cross yourself, maybe even pour a drink, and open it. And there, in black and white, are the words, "You've got to be kidding!"

Click Here to Find Summer Associate Jobs on LawCrossing

Not really. The words of rejection are usually much kinder. But it's still a rejection. You may think you're smart. But as the letters saying "No" pour in from Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, and all the rest, all across the country, you get the message. They've rejected you because they got literally thousands of applications that were better than yours. They don't want you. You're not nearly good enough.

It makes you crave a chance to go to law school, just to show them all how good you are. And here's the point: If you had any doubt before, you're quite certain now that, in law school, you'll be among the truly elite young people of America. Everything else seems lackluster by comparison.

So now that you've gone for the hook, they can reel you in. Sure enough, a week or two later, you start getting letters of acceptance from some very good schools. You can hold your head up again among your friends who are also applying to law school. You're somebody after all.

I'm sure the schools don't plan it this way. And you'll still agonize over the thought that you're really going to bite the bullet and go to law school. But you'll know the meaning of fright now. When you feared that nobody wanted you, you panicked. You looked into the abyss and had to imagine your future, not as a dynamic young attorney, but instead as a middle-aged, moth-eaten fop earning minimum wage, shelving books or washing cars, with no hopes and no challenges. Are we surprised that law school suddenly looks so good?

2. Choosing a School
In the next weeks, your excitement grows. You get obsessed with the thought that you're going to be a lawyer. If you hadn't realized it before, you begin to notice, now, that lawyers appear a lot in the newspapers and history books. You walk through the law school at your university, or one nearby, and notice how lively the law students are. They seem to talk about such significant issues. You can hardly wait to become part of it all.

You go through all this during the middle of your senior year in college. You start classes at law school six months later. But in those few months, even the college seniors who had doubts about law school grow to be quite sure that it's exactly what they want to do. They think they understand their legal future well.

Of course, a few rejections and acceptances on law school applications, and the sight of some attorneys' names in the newspapers and the history books, are not necessarily enough to persuade you to commit yourself to three years of hard study in law school. There's something else, and it's worth understanding.

It starts with the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), which you take as part of your application process. To prepare for it, you buy a study guidebook. If you're rich, you also sign up for a $700 preparation course. Either way, you spend weeks practicing the odd kinds of questions they throw at you.

The exam itself is a case study in anxiety. When you arrive, you see people with candy bars, coffee, and potato chips; you notice that some are fondling their favorite pencil, while others have a whole pre-sharpened boxful. (Just in case they break six or eight of them during the exam, I guess.) You even see a few fanatics jump up and run out of the room and back in again, in the last few moments before the exam begins, just to stimulate themselves.

When your test scores come back, you move on to a new level of anxiety. You go back to the bookstore and buy one of the standard guides to law schools. These books have charts that tell you how likely you are, with your college grade-point average (GPA) and LSAT scores, to get into each law school. At some colleges, you can even go to your dean's office and find out how many people from your college, with your LSAT and GPA combination, applied to (and were accepted at) each law school in the U.S. last year, and the year before, and the year before that.

Armed with these materials, you can decide which schools are "sure bets," which of the better ones are "maybes," and which of the very best are worth a shot. Each application requires all that paperwork, plus a fee of $30 or more, so you try to choose well. Your goal is to cover the spectrum: If you apply to a minimum of one humble school and one elite school, you're less likely to kick yourself for shooting too low or too high, and you won't spend a year sitting around to try again.
With fees, transcripts, and other expenses, my own applications to law schools cost me about $600. I applied to a lot of schools, and I think it was the right thing to do. In a typical year, 20 percent of all law school applicants may find themselves rejected by all of the schools to which they apply, even though three out of four of those rejects probably would have been admitted if they had applied to different schools.