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Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

reuters.com

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Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#101

Post by draw_down »

reader_mode wrote: post #89
JCM9 wrote: post #46

When I was growing up there was this idea that the best of the best became doctors (physicians) and lawyers; and that these were well paid careers. Today that’s broadly no longer the case. Both professions certainly have a top tier that earns a lot (top firm partner, top specialist surgeon) that does very well but the vast majority in both professions aren’t particularly well paid and also are no longer attracting th…

Money isn't everything, there's a status component related to those professions (especially if you are coming from poorer background) and a lot of people like the idea of being a doctor or a lawyer. TBH you have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy sitting in front of a screen 8H a day to work on stuff most people would find meaningless (eg. getting paid to optimize ad revenue, speed up PHP execution to save data…

> TBH you have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy sitting in front of a screen 8H a day to work on stuff most people would find meaningless

I agree with this as stated, I just suspect that many/most law jobs also fit this description.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#102

Post by llimos »

cudgy wrote: post #67
llimos wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plumbers produce real value, i.e. the total value of the world is higher after they finish their work. This cannot be said for lawyers.

Or most software developers.

That's an interesting question.

Some software is valuable according to this definition, e.g. Google search. Some is not, e.g. Google ad algorithms.

Software is an enabler. It depends what it's enabling.

Would be interesting to know the proportions.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#103

Post by robinhouston »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #85
ethbr0 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've taught code-lite tools to a bunch of repurposed analysts, and your idea tracks with my experience too. Students that had an analytical perspective (e.g. from supply chain debugging) typically excelled. Students from more fuzzy, language-based perspectives (e.g. marketing) had a lot more difficulty.

Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant r…

Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi?

It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0]

0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#104

Post by bryanrasmussen »

robinhouston wrote: post #103
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere around 2004-2006 I read a blog post / article that I have been unable to find since that was supposed to be from a CS professor at a relatively prestigious university where they had done a study on entering classes for a number of years, at the beginning of the class they gave some very rudimentary problems focused on if you could handle arbitrary rules - those that could ended up passing at a significant r…

Are you thinking of the research by Richard Bornat and his student Saeed Dehnadi? It may be the reason it’s hard to find now is that Bornat later retracted it, blaming his struggles with mental health. [0] 0. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...

hmm, ok. I think I might have heard that as well one time but I forgot, probably less interesting to me than the first idea.

I think it is that, although it doesn't match exactly what I remember either.

I wonder what Saeed Dehnadi says about it though.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#105

Post by chrisseaton »

adrianN wrote: post #91
chrisseaton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can make high five figures and low six figures. That’s good money for real life. High five figures is not good money for a professional in the US.

That depends on the location, no?

'Can earn high figures' - so what are others earning? 'Mid five figures', so $50k, for a professional? In the US? That's not good anywhere.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#106

Post by lowercased »

hutzlibu wrote: post #73
jelling wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to code prepares you to deal with lawyers that say something is complex but then you verbally break it down into an if-elseif-else in 5m and they get flummoxed. And when you find a possible bug / loop-hole / fuzziness, they tell you they will need weeks to research it on your dime when it has all the complexity of a stack overflow post.

Hm, maybe in some instances. But since laws involve humans and the laws are intentionally not always mathematically clear and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts, I would be careful to generalize here.

> and depend on the current interpretations of the various courts

it's run time interpretation vs compiled, and the interpreters vary wildly with respect to speed and how they were built. running a scenario through one court may not give you the same output as another, and may not even give you the same output 6 months later as it did previously.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#107

Post by lowercased »

user5994461 wrote: post #88
pmoriarty wrote: post #7

When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts: - something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law - there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers - while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1] For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help t…

The trouble in law is to get qualified (in the UK). If you can't finish the 5 years of study or you can't find an internship at the end (extremely competitive), you've wasted your entire time and money and you will never be able to give legal advice and charge £500 an hour. But after that it's a walk in the park. The competitiveness of lawyer and developer jobs is really not comparable. All companies have a legal dep…

"only tech companies hire developers".

Not sure that's really 100% true, although it may have more to do with a company considering themselves a tech company or not. Companies do hire programmers/devs/tech folks, but may look on them more as a cost-center than a revenue generation opportunity.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#108

Post by __s »

pmoriarty wrote: post #7

When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts: - something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law - there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers - while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1] For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help t…

My mother's a secretary at a law firm. Growing up it sounded like lawyers spent a lot of time on planes away from family. My parents had plenty (father works in furniture repair), so it was pretty clear to me that with a bit of budgeting you don't need a lot of money for a good life

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#109

Post by badpun »

user5994461 wrote: post #88
pmoriarty wrote: post #7

When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts: - something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law - there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers - while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1] For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help t…

The trouble in law is to get qualified (in the UK). If you can't finish the 5 years of study or you can't find an internship at the end (extremely competitive), you've wasted your entire time and money and you will never be able to give legal advice and charge £500 an hour. But after that it's a walk in the park. The competitiveness of lawyer and developer jobs is really not comparable. All companies have a legal dep…

All large companies hire plenty of developers. I suspect that, in total, there’s way more devs in non-tech than in tech, esp. outside of US.

Re: Law school applicants surge 13%, biggest increase since dot-com bubble

#110

Post by fighterpilot »

hackitup7 wrote: post #39
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #23

Man, so many people are going to be in for a world of hurt: 1. The increased applications and class sizes means there will be more competition for a smaller number of jobs when these folks graduate (tech is automating away a lot of legal work, too). 2. As others have commented, a huge percentage of lawyers regret going to law school. This is actually in direct contrast to many other professional degrees, e.g. MBAs sc…

Fwiw I don't think that going to a non-top MBA is generally worth it either... It's very expensive and employer sponsorship isn't that common. But I'm not surprised to learn that most MBAs don't regret going since it's basically 2 years of partying with an internship in between (during which you mainly party). My partner's 2 years in bschool were 2 of the best years of my life.

Isn't that stressful for a regular person who has sub-100k in savings? Racking up debt while not earning any income for two years in your mid-20s or 30s would be pretty tough for me. I wouldn't feel like partying in that context.
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