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Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

priceonomics.com

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Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#91

Post by richardfontana »

AskewEgret wrote: post #63
senatorobama wrote: post #53

Who has switched from Software Engineering to Law? I'm considering it because of the lack of women in software engineering, and the multitudes in Law.

Unmentioned in the linked article is the fact that sitting for the Patent Bar exam with the USPTO does not require a law degree but instead it requires an engineering or hard science degree. If you like the idea of working with patents, trademarks and copyrights, you may wish to take that route. A lot of Computer Science programs at universities don't meet the requirements and you'd need to supplement your existing d…

Patent agents - the term for a non-lawyer who passes the patent bar exam and gets a USPTO registration - are qualified to directly file for patents, and tend to be used by law firms for other analytical tasks requiring technical expertise. However, they tend not to be involved in trademark work, nor copyright work, for a variety of reasons.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#92

Post by regulation_d »

senatorobama wrote: post #53

Who has switched from Software Engineering to Law? I'm considering it because of the lack of women in software engineering, and the multitudes in Law.

I went the other direction. My advice would be to make pretty certain you know you'll like whichever area of law you want to go into.

I thought I would like corporate law especially working with startups. I got a job doing pretty much exactly what I wanted to do, but I didn't actually like it and only practiced for a year.

In my limited, purely anecdotal experience, comparing my developer friends and my lawyer friends, a much larger percentage of my lawyer friends hate their jobs.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#93

Post by sjy »

rxhernandez wrote: post #90
sjy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income in those professions is not bimodal; it follows a power law. The frequency distribution of income for US lawyers has two clear modes (local maxima) at around $50,000 and $160,000 [1], meaning that roughly the same number of lawyers earn each of those salaries. Put another way, a randomly-selected US lawyer is more likely to earn $160,000 than the much lower mean US lawyer salary. [1]: https://economix.blogs.ny…

I literally posted a bls link where they discussed how bimodal at least a couple of those types jobs are. Did you bother to ctrl+F "bimodal" in that link? Furthermore upon a quick glance at your source, nothing in your source seems to discuss any of the jobs I had mentioned. Were you hoping your gut feeling was evidence enough?

The bimodal distributions mentioned in that source are not salary distributions.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#95

Post by pseudolus »

jlos wrote: post #40
pseingatl wrote: post #28

First, this article only addresses the USA. If you don't want to practice in the US, there are lots of options. See Korshak, Landing a Legal Job Overseas. Law school is an American anomaly. In Canada/UK/Ireland, you can major in law as an undergraduate. You can't do so in the US. With a LLB degree, you can do legal work in lots of countries--and even qualify to take the bar in the U.S. The author leaves out little de…

Not true in Canada. Law degree's first require an Undergraduate degree prior to entrance into the law faculty: https://www.law.utoronto.ca/admissions/youth-outreach/so-you...

That's not entirely correct. In Quebec, medicine and law are first degrees. The bulk of law and medicine graduates from French language universities do not have an undergraduate degree but rather enter with what is roughly equivalent to the first year of an undergraduate degree. Also, many English language universities accept applications from students who have completed the second or third year of their undergraduate degree.

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#97

Post by balbaugh »

gnicholas wrote: post #69
kenpomeroy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying I disagree, because I think the bar association is a cartel and everyone should be "allowed" to practice law. However, the reason the CA bar is "notoriously hard" is precisely because they allow anyone to sit for it. If lots of unqualified people take an exam and fail, it causes the passage rate to drop and makes the exam appear "harder."

Another reason the CA pass rate is lower than other states’ is that in CA you can take the bar exam as many times as you want. NY cuts you off st 3, as a comparison.

The NY bar exam can be taken until you pass[1].

[1]see NCBE Bar Admission Guide http://www.ncbex.org/publications/bar-admissions-guide/

Re: Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)

#98

Post by meddlepal »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #82
meddlepal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's terrible the ABA has created a system that rigorously weeds out unqualified individuals, polices it's professional members ethics and uses education and testing to ensure all lawyers have a solid baseline education. Terrible! I wish software engineerers had an actual equivalent to the ABA, and no the ACM doesn't count.

There's a software engineering PE exam now, fwiw. I don't know anyone who's taken it though. I took the computer engineering exam the year before the SE exam was offered; I would imagine the two have a lot of overlap.

An exam is useless if nobody hiring uses it. Good luck getting a job as an lawyer if you have not passed the bar exam because the bar exam and the ability to practice as a lawyer are linked by law.
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