John Houseman played the disagreeable Professor Kingsfield in the 1973 movie, "The Paper Chase." Credit: Everett Collection
In the 1973 movie classic �The Paper Chase,� based on the novel by John Jay Osborn, Jr., the famous but fictitious Professor Charles W. Kingsfield of Harvard Law School (played by John Houseman) humiliates students in his contracts class by hammering them with questions that they can�t answer. He may be best known for his admonition, �Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer.�
Another legendary quote from a Harvard Law School professor of the same era: �Look to your left, look to your right. One of you won�t be here next year.�
Law schools are kinder, gentler places these days, with more experiential learning and collegial relationships between students and professors. But while the issue used to be whether you could survive the rigors of a legal education, now a more pressing question is whether you can find work once you graduate. Meanwhile, unless you are super rich, you may be in substantial debt for your law degree. According to the latest statistics from American Student Assistance, a nonprofit, the average law school graduate has $80,081 of debt for that degree alone ($92,937 of debt for law school and college combined).
Understandably, students want someone to blame. Using newly honed courtroom skills, some have lashed back at their alma maters. Class action lawsuits brought by recent graduates are now pending against Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego; the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law, based in Lansing, MI, and New York Law School. The gist of their complaints is that the schools misrepresented post-graduation employment statistics when recruiting students to enroll. This might be unconscionable, but I suspect that the newly-minted lawyers will have a tough time proving it violates the law.
Perhaps those now suing should have done more due diligence before signing up for the schools they attended. The abysmal job market for new lawyers has been well documented. Approximately 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have been lost during the past three years, Northwestern Law estimates. Law firms are outsourcing work to India.
Apparently this is scaring off at least some potential applicants: the number of people taking the Law School Admissions Test declined by 9.6% during the 2010-2011 academic year, to 155,050, from 171,500 in the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council.
Anyone thinking of applying to law school should start by reading �The End of Lawyers?� by Richard Susskind. His thesis is that there will be less need for lawyers in the future because increasingly their work is being done by computers. There is evidence of this all around us. For example, in August, a group of venture capitalists, including Google, invested $18.5 million in in Rocket Lawyer, one of a growing number of web-based services that can spew out documents like wills, leases and incorporation papers for a fraction of what many lawyers charge. In a separate deal, its competitor, LegalZoom, raised $66 million of venture capital the previous month from Kleiner Perkins and Institutional Venture Partners, among others.
The other essential piece of reading for anyone thinking of going to law school isSteve Jobs� 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, delivered about a year after his diagnosis with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. In it, Jobs reflected on his life and his career. With vivid anecdotes, he showed how one thing led to another, but moved along without a pre-charted course. For instance, a calligraphy course that he took on a lark after dropping out of Reed College found practical application 10 years later in designing the first Macintosh computer, and influenced the typefaces used in other computers.
�If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do,� Jobs told the graduates. �You can�t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something � your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.�
I went to law school because I didn�t initially trust my gut. I always loved to write, but I was afraid I wasn�t good enough to make a living as a writer. I wish someone had told me then what Jobs told the Stanford graduates: �Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.�
After practicing law for six years, someone gave me that courage. One summer I took a vacation from my law job to attend an intensive one-week magazine writing course at Columbia Journalism School. On the last day of that program, the professor took me aside and said, �Why don�t you go to journalism school and do what you love?� I hadn�t told him about my secret passion � he could see it for himself.
I followed his advice. Changing careers has not only made me very happy � it may have also saved my life, as I wrote here.
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