Law Basics
So you’re thinking of going to law school. This page is here to help you decide if it’s for you. First, you must ask yourself why you’re thinking of this path. You probably answered that you want to be a lawyer. Great! But do you actually know what a lawyer does?
Most lawyers practice law: they represent individuals, organizations, companies, and governments in a variety of matters that require legal guidance. A minority of lawyers teach in law schools or other institutions. Nearly all lawyers work long hours, and most earn comfortable salaries. The profession demands considerable effort and dedication. It’s a challenging yet rewarding option for those who enjoy critical thinking, writing and arguing.
Before you decide to start law school, we strongly recommend you find an internship where you can experience the practice of law first-hand and witness an average lawyer’s day-to-day routine.
Admissions
So you’ve decided that you want to attend law school. Great! Obviously, your first step is getting admitted. You need two things to make this happen: a Bachelor’s Degree and an LSAT score. Generally, the better your GPA and LSAT, the better your chance of attending a good school. Yes, there are other factors, but your GPA and LSAT represent the baseline for admissions.
Bachelor’s Degree
What’s particularly appealing about law school is that you don’t need any specific degree to attend. As long as you’ve earned a Bachelor’s from an accredited school, you’re good to go! Keep in mind, though, if you want to practice patent law, you will need a Bachelor’s in a hard science. Otherwise, any B.A. or B.S. will do. If you’re all set on attending but have yet to earn your Bachelor’s, perhaps consider taking an easier Major to ensure a solid GPA. At the same time, for example, a 3.5 GPA in particle physics evinces greater cognitive abilities than a 3.8 in gender studies, so keep that in mind. Click here for a list of valuable Majors.
It’s worth noting that a Bachelor’s degree from an accredited yeshiva is perfectly acceptable. In fact, we believe that a solid yeshiva background can help in admissions, school, and your career as a lawyer. First, understand that using a yeshiva degree will save you the time and money it takes to receive a typical Bachelor’s (and arguably avoid, at least in part, some of the Rebbe’s overt concerns about secular education). Second, your yeshiva education probably focused on serious Talmud study. At this point, you’re far ahead of the curve. Simply put, logic and reasoning are as much the yeshiva student’s bread-and-butter as the lawyer’s. The skills you gained in yeshiva will earn you a higher score on the LSAT, make the law-school workload bearable, and assist you throughout your career.
LSAT:
You must take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) before applying to law school. The LSAT is a multi-part exam that tests how you think. To be sure, it’s hard. Yet the hardest part is not the material per se. That is, if you had all day to complete the exam, you’d probably get a near-perfect score. The kicker is the time limit. Indeed, many people don’t even finish the exam before time’s up. Thus the best advice is to take as many practice exams as you can under the time constraints. You can take the LSAT several times, but some schools will consider the average of all your LSAT scores.
Additional Recommendations
Aside from the LSAT and a Bachelor’s degree, you don’t need anything else for admission. Yet law schools have a specific interest in who they accept. Indeed, law schools receive their rankings based on several factors: postgraduate, J.D. required employment rates; Bar passage rates; and postgraduate debt-to-income ratio. If you can show that you have a good chance of employment after graduating — for example, you worked for a firm and did so well that your employer writes you a letter of recommendation telling the school that you’ll have a job after graduating — you have a better chance of getting admitted (and receiving a scholarship, which we discuss below).
Also consider a lawyer’s bread-and-butter: writing. If you’re a good writer, you’ll be a better lawyer, and if you’ll be a better lawyer, schools will want you. Sadly most lawyers are poor authors, so demonstrating good writing skills can really set you apart.
Also get used to reading. Read anything (in English) you’re willing to — it’ll help.
Scholarships
With overall law-school applications declining, for whatever the reasons, many schools are lowering their admissions standards and offering increased merit-based scholarships. In our opinion, the lower standards actually require schools to incentivize enrollment through scholarships. As noted above, schools are interested in postgraduate employment and Bar passage rates. Yet because fewer people are applying, schools that lower their admissions standards see a decrease in postgraduate success. Thus many schools try and incentivize better-scoring students to enroll by offering partial or full-tuition scholarships. Often these scholarships only cover the cost of tuition, and not living expenses, which you’ll be responsible for independently. Moreover, most scholarships are contingent on maintaining a certain GPA throughout school.
It’s hard to tell what exactly you must do to receive a scholarship. Of course, if you score a 170 on the LSAT, you’ll probably receive a scholarship offers to most schools you apply (save for the top institutions) simply because you’re more likely to succeed. But you can receive one even if your LSAT falls within a school’s average if you demonstrate your likelihood of success.
What if you get a scholarship to one or several schools, but not to the one you really want to attend? That’s okay. You can, and should, inform your desired institution of your other offers. In fact, one of this article's authors did just that. After receiving a full scholarship from Brooklyn Law, and only a half scholarship from Cardozo, his top pick, he told the latter that he was considering Brooklyn. With only one email, he received a full-tuition offer from Cardozo in a matter of days. That said, don’t think that a school’s initial offer is final.
Where to Attend
You might think that you should attend the best school you can. But this might not be true. For example, if you’re accepted to Harvard, there’s little chance you’ll receive a scholarship, and between tuition, living expenses, and interest, you could graduate with over $300,000 debt. To be sure, getting a 175 on the LSAT and going to Harvard will all but guarantee you a high-paying salary ($160,000 plus starting). Yet a high salary means a big law firm, and big law firms usually mean grueling work days (and for big-firm lawyers, every day is a work day). Yes, it’s nice to have the option to work at a big firm. But going to Harvard and incurring substantial debt doesn’t give you much of an option; it basically compels you to take a big-firm job.
On the other hand, if you score a 175 on the LSAT, you’ll undoubtedly receive substantial offers from other lower-ranked schools. Going to a lower ranked school gives you less of a chance of gaining big-firm employment. Yet scoring a 175 means that you’ll probably do fairly well in school, and law students who fall within the top 10% of their classes at lower-ranked schools do indeed compete with students from higher-ranked ones in the job market. So going to a lower-ranked school on a full scholarship might be the smarter option than a better school with no scholarship.
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