The Ivey Files

Just received this press release: 

 

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Email a brief paragraph with your non-confidential business idea, a recent

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I started a thread called 1L Blues a while back, because I thought it would give other aspiring law school students something useful and realistic to chew on.

Here's another unhappy camper (maybe he'll become a happier camper?) with some interesting things to say:

To be quite honest, I have not been happy at all with my law school experience. We are reading and discussing "big" cases in our nation's history (Marbury v. Madison, McCulloch v. Maryland, etc.), but the material leaves me cold. If anything, it feels stifling and a bit underwhelming. There are roughly 70 people in my Legal Methods section (out of a class of ~380), and I feel like I'm in a room full of pedants, people whose only goal is to correct my mistakes. I can't imagine dealing with these people and this material for three years, let alone some number of years afterwards.

All the grim realities of the legal profession seem to have reared their ugly heads. I feel like I'm taking a huge risk by spending three years and $130,000 to stay the course on school. If I had to summarize my feelings: I see why they have to pay people to do this work.

In thinking about it and speaking others, the main argument in favor of staying seems to be that finishing at [top law school] would be a valuable enough credential to allow me to do other things. The counter-point to this is that looking at the numbers, both debt and recruiting statistics, the main thing this degree is going to prepare me to do is work as a lawyer, with other possible initial opportunities in lobbying, policy, or government work. If I want to do something else, why not spend the time and money directing myself toward that goal?

While I've known this information in the abstract, being immersed in the environment and material has thrown everything into stark relief. I wish I could have come to this realization sooner, but I'd rather have it now than later. If I was 18 and just starting school, I'd tell myself that I probably just have cold feet. But at 26, I trust my judgment enough to realize that something else is going on here.

But I don't trust myself enough to operate in a vacuum. Is this a normal reaction? Is it something I'll get over? Is it something I should get over?

After polling as many good people as I could get a hold of, the general recommendation seemed to be that I should stick things out for a year and a summer and see where I stand then. Although this is contrary to my initial reaction, hearing the same advice from a number of people did pound the point home. I can't really believe that [top law school] is somehow conspiring with the people I know to keep me here.

Worst case, [top law school] has gave me enough money that firm work over the summer (assuming I'm diligent with the funds) comes pretty close to clearing out my debt for the year. I also had some people advise me to keep my eyes open for the area of law that interests me (not product liability suits from the 1800s) and be proactive in making sure I found opportunities to get work in that area. I have no idea if that area of the law is going to pop up for me, but I feel like after a year, I should have more information to make a better decision. Plus, it's a horrible time to reenter the job market in financial services.

I think too that if I left prior to completing the first year, there would always be some nagging doubt about whether or not I would have enjoyed it. Like you suggested, there is apparently a big disparity between legal study and legal practice, and the former may not have a lot of bearing on the latter. After making the initial decision to apply to law school, I know that I didn't really examine that decision again during the application process. It's hard to keep yourself motivated unless you are working toward a fixed goal. And once the results are in, the visiting, financial aid, and deciding processes take on a life of their own. This has actually been a good chance to sit down and reflect a bit on what I want to get out of this experience. Whatever that is, if a year goes by and it looks like I can't do it, then will be the time to reexamine.

Sounds as if this 1L is thinking about things sensibly. I'm curious to hear reactions from others. Thoughts? Please comment.

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine who works (as I do) with lots of twenty-somethings. When we got around to the gratuitous praise to which Gen Y/the "Praise Generation" has become accustomed (phony praise that inflates their sense of achievement and rewards them for process rather than outcomes), he had this observation to share:

On all of this, I'll point out that, having worked with a literally never-ending stream of recent college graduates--half of everyone is 22 in my world--I notice that the people who consistently are the best to work with are ex-elite athletes. If you spent a substantial chunk of your life in sports, how could you:

• Think fairness is relevant? Losers talk about fairness.
• Fail to put stock in hard work, hoping to hide in the pack instead?
• Think hard work guarantees success?
• Fail to appreciate the importance of natural talent?
• Fail to focus on outcomes?
• Over-focus on process to the detriment of outcomes?
• Get confused by multiple goals and so fail to achieve any of them?

I say this as someone who frankly is more committed to the arts than to sports, but it has become clear to me that those who live a life in the arts and/or academics are prone to *ALL* of the fatal mistakes outlined above, and these are failures of outlook that wouldn't last past your first varsity season in high school, let alone college.

The difference is simple--top athletes are trained to focus on outcomes, period. Everything else is whining. Business is about outcomes, period. Non-athletes are shocked by that.

As an addendum, I was amazed when I got to [college] how many kids arrived there believing they had genuine artistic talent. They were going to be performers, or artists, for a living. They thought themselves that good.

No similar problem with sports. But in the arts, it's subjective. If you are the best in your high school, well, as far as you can tell, you're Kristin Chenoweth. There's no mechanism -- or incentive -- to level-set. In individual sports, there's no chance of this at all. In team sports, there's a little self-delusion, but not too much. [Anna asks: But what about teams where everyone gets a trophy? Helicopter parents invented that rank stupidity. Makes sense though that *elite* athletes don't suffer from this syndrome.]

Can I speculate that this problem is more an issue in law school, where kids majored in subjective disciplines like Poli Sci, Religon, and other stuff, and that math and physics grad programs don't have these problems? Even med schools probably don't have the problem as much?

Fascinating. Thoughts? Please comment.

BusinessWeek just launched a year-by-year guide to get you on track to apply to business school in five years. This is perfect for recent college graduates.

Here's their plan for Year 1, with special emphasis on your first job out of school.

Marketing guru (and Stanford GSB grad) Seth Godin makes this intriguing offer: Go intern for him for six months instead of getting an MBA. Deadline is December 14, 2008. Start date is January 19, 2009.

[Our law school admissions consultant David Yi is going to be contributing to the Ivey Files, starting with this post. Please welcome him to the blog! ~ Anna]

Why should the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) matter so much?

The obvious answer is: Because law school admissions officers will rely heavily on the LSAT in making admissions decisions.

The not so obvious answer (the one that most people don't like to hear) is: the LSAT is an extremely efficient test. It does what it is supposed to do very well, very quickly and very accurately.

What is the LSAT supposed to measure?

Well, it’s supposed to measure how well you will do during the first year of law school (see here and here). So is a low LSAT score (120) a definite prophecy of your imminent failure in law school? No.

However, if you did get a low LSAT score (120), there is a good chance you will fail. Although imperfect, the LSAT is as perfect as it can get in measuring an individual's success in law school.

My experience has been that the skills required to do well on the LSAT (reading vast and diverse amounts of information, and critically thinking and assessing the validity of these arguments/sets-of-facts; reading through dense and boring literature, and pin-pointing the flaws and main-points; quickly thinking of all the different angles and possibilities to a complex problem/situation) are also the skills required to do well in law school.

The only major flaw on the LSAT is the fact that it measures all of this in one sitting. I do believe that some people are not such good standardized test-takers. For these people the pressure of having to sit through a timed test chokes them. This is the only drawback to the LSAT's otherwise perfect (my opinion) testing.

Anyone who moans and groans about the LSAT's logic games and how they are irrelevant are simply in denial...trying to make themselves feel better about their failure.

I'm not an elitist; simply a realist.

Having said all this …

I firmly believe that ANYONE can do well on the LSAT. It comes only after great sacrifice and due diligence. The LSAT can be studied; people can learn to think more logically (unfortunately, many people's minds do not think very logically … I know, I've taught this thing).

In teaching this test to hundreds of students, I've seen it crop out the bright from the dense, the quick and keen from the slow and dull. The good news is that the LSAT can be studied, and that everyone who studies could improve (drastically).

The Financial Times has just released its latest rankings of European Business Schools. Its top 10:

1. HEC Paris
2. London Business School
3. INSEAD
4. IE Business School
5. IMD
6. ESCP-EAP European School of Management
7. IESE Business School
8. EM Lyon
9. Rotterdam School of Management/Erasmus
10. Vierick Leuven Gent Management School

Some oddities and observations in the accompanying articles (here and here):

• Eric Weber, the associate dean at IESE in Barcelona, "says that so far the school is not worried about job placements, but he acknowledges that student expectations may not be met." [I'm thinking maybe they should be worried about job placements, particularly when over half of their graduates in recent years have pursued finance careers.]

• Eric Cornuel, director general and chief executive of the European Foundation for Management Development based in Brussels, "believes that European schools are less exposed and less sensitive to the economic downturn than US schools" because "European schools have some degree of state support and few if any endowments, and will not be exposed financially to the same degree" as American business schools. [What's left unsaid is that publicly funded European schools have far less money to throw around than their privately funded counterparts in the United States, and their failure to raise money privately has arguably compromised their quality compared to American institutions.]

• The shorter MBA track at European business schools (one year, rather than two in the US) is usually considered an upside for many applicants, but in a down economy like this one, it might be better to ride out the downturn in a 2-year program than have to graduate at a low point. The opportunity costs of attending a 2-year program just got a whole lot lower, although the cost of an additional year can be an issue when credit is this tight.

I'm going to be moderating a panel of architects who specialize in designing the next generation of spaces for university students. Please weigh in with your wishlist, as well as any complaints or thoughts about the current state of your school spaces. Some topics to consider:

• Technology
• Dorms/Housing
• Safety
• Food
• Fun
• Fitness
• Athletics
• Performing Arts
• Religion/Spirituality
• Classrooms
• Study spaces

I realize it doesn't even make sense to break these out into separate categories, because Gen Y likes its spaces to be blended, so thoughts on blending are also welcome, and feel free to make up your own categories. Also, no details are too small or trivial. Be as picky as you like.

Please pass this around -- the more input, the merrier.

More info about the panel here.

Today's WSJ profiles six college students who give their first-hand accounts of the admissions process. They ended up at Stanford, Cornell, Wellesley, Michigan, Grinnell, and Lafayette (Pennsylvania). The lessons:

 

• It's possible to defy the odds and get in off the waitlist (Stanford), even after everyone tells you you won't get in.

• Repeatedly misspelling basic words like literature ("literatre") and chemistry ("chemestry") on one form likely got an applicant dinged at Dartmouth, and after fixing them he got into five other schools, including Cornell. Attention to the smallest details matters in applications.

• You can be happy at the school you considered your safety (Michigan -- lucky boy, not a safety for most people). "And make sure that all the schools you're applying to, you're pretty sure you'd be willing to go to." Very true.

• Don't be a poser in your essays, and don't try to tell admissions officers what you think they want to hear. The school she got into -- Wellesley -- is the one for whom she wrote an essay that "really sounded like her." The schools that received the phony-baloney essays all rejected her.

• Be honest with yourself about where you'll thrive. One applicant turned down Georgetown and Cornell, because she was worried she'd stress over the student loans (Georgetown) and that she'd get lost in a sea of 13,000 undergrads (Cornell). She ended up at Lafayette.

• Taking a "gap year" made the difference between getting dinged the first time and getting in the second time for an applicant to Grinnell.

Read the whole article here. All great advice, to which I would add the following:

• It is the kiss of death to have your application essays worked over by a bunch of people, because essays written by committee are never, ever good, and the applicant's voice gets lost in the process. Even worse are the essays that the parents wrote themselves. Aside from the ethical violation that poses, those essays always stink, because no teenager ever writes like a 40 or 50-something, or sees the world the way they do. People who are trying to help you with your essays should be doing two things, and only these two things: helping you figure out what you want to say, and helping you say it in your best voice. Any other kind of assistance leads to junk.

• I'm a big fan of gap years, as are admissions officers, even at top schools. Parents are usually the only skeptics, and I would urge them to read my gap year postings here.

 

I love the question a commenter asked in my last posting called “International Law: Believe the Hype?” Here I’ve been telling you not to fall for the “International Law” hype, but I haven’t told you what areas of the law you should focus on instead. I’ll address that here.

In a perfect world, people don’t go to law school right out of college. They’ve experienced the world, and the working world in particular, so that they have some idea who they are outside of that bubble called school, and they have some sense of their talents and inclinations (and disinclinations!) in the “real” world, which is so very different from the academic world.

In a perfect world, that person gets some experience, say, working in the compliance department of a big bank, and discovers that she loves the compliance world, she’s psyched about the intersection of banking and finance and the law and the regulatory state. And she can apply to law school articulating that interest in a coherent and credible and persuasive way (making her application stronger), and she can start law school knowing what she hopes to get out of it, and knowing what courses she wants to concentrate on in her second and third years (making her academic experience, and her career, stronger). Those people exist, and yay for them.

Or, also in a perfect world, that person discovers that she hates banking or finance or the nitty-gritty obsession with details that such laws and regulations require, and she’s just learned something very important: what she doesn’t want to do. That has enormous value as well. Should she go running off to law school? I would argue no – not until she has been able to observe, first-hand, somebody, somewhere, practicing the kind of law that does excite her, and whose life she can envision living (because lifestyle matters too).

You should go to law school only if you like the idea of being a lawyer. A real lawyer, not a lawyer that exists only in your head, or only on TV. If what is drawing you to law school is the adjective rather than the noun -- "international" or "corporate" or "environmental" or something else rather than "lawyer" -- then go explore that world first: work at the State Department or the Peace Corps, work in a corporation, intern at an environmental group. Don’t go running off to law school until you’ve done that. I’ve written about that more in a posting called “Law School for Non-Lawyers.”

But we don’t live in a perfect world, and most law school applicants do go jumping into law school without having reached that level of self-awareness, and I should have what is (I hope) advice for them too. Here’s what I say to those applicants.

A good legal education – whether you already know what you want to do with it or not – should give you a set of tools that teach you how to “think like a lawyer.” You’ll hear that phrase a lot among law professors and lawyers. It’s hard to understand what that means until you’re actually doing it, but it’s basically a very particular way of analyzing and solving problems (both legal and non-legal). It rewires your brain – whether for good or for ill, because once you’ve been properly trained to “think like a lawyer,” it’s not really something you can undo. It’s a whole new way of thinking about things, and those glasses don’t come off again. They’re soldered on… if the training is done right.

Those tools should be fundamental ones, and they are typically the ones you learn during your first year. Will you ever again need to know the Rule Against Perpetuities, or the Parol Evidence Rule, or Judge Learned Hand’s formula for calculating negligence damages? Maybe not. But those 1L courses teach you the basic tools of learning how to think like a lawyer, and then you can go explore different pockets of the law in your second and third years, and for your entire career. Here’s one way to think about this: during your first year, you’re learning the law; in your second and third years, you’re learning laws. Big difference.

Laws are going to change before you even graduate from law school. Laws change constantly, and you have to learn how to understand them and use them as they change. You might even have a role in changing them. Your career path is going to take you through many different areas of the law, and it’s almost impossible to predict what those are going to be. There was a time when I thought (along with many others) that IP lawyers were going to rule the roost, but over time IP has become so commoditized that it has even started to wreck some law firm business models. And right now bankruptcy is hot, but that can change quickly.

Those are just examples. You may choose to migrate through different areas of the law over the course of your career, but chances are you’ll be forced to. Just as the law changes, your career will change too, and the odds that you’ll end up doing – for your entire career – what you thought you’d be doing when you applied to graduate school at age 21 are pretty slim.

In our dynamic economy, with many lawyers changing jobs multiple times over the course of a career, flexibility is crucial. General training enables that; specializations and boutique seminars don't. That’s also an argument against picking a law school because it has some alleged expertise in some narrow area.

For that reason, in your second and third years, take only at most a sprinkling of esoteric seminars. The goal should be to have some specialized knowledge and sustained interest in a particular area or areas that might become hot, or that interest you. But at the same time, have general training to fall back on.

Also go easy on all those Law & Whatever seminars. I’ve written before about how the law schools' obsession with "interdisciplinary" approaches to the law is also a big marketing exercise (I’m looking at you, Penn, but all the schools do it to some degree, including my own law school, Chicago). Why do applicants love the Law & Whatever courses? Because the Law & Whatever courses look and feel just like advanced courses in the humanities, and lost and confused college students who have no idea why they’re applying to law school are wildly attracted to more coursework that looks just like college.

And guess what? Those Law & Whatever courses are often pretty fluffy. They aren’t terribly respected out in the real world, and they don’t really make you better lawyers. I can’t make this argument better than Judge Easterbrook in his article “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” where he talks about the "cross-sterilization of ideas" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Read it.

A lawyer friend of mine also put it really well:

I'm firmly with Easterbrook on this based partly on my own experience -- thought I wanted to be a litigator while I was in law school and loaded up on litigation-oriented classes that are of little relevance to what I now do.

My [big NYC] firm and, as far as I know, others like mine, are recruiting for well-trained generalists and have very extensive internal training programs for the specialized stuff that's needed for our practice. I don't expect summer associate interviewees to know anything about cross-border M&A or whatever; the point is that if they're telling me they want to come to my firm to practice international law, they need to at least be able to identify the thing we do that most plausibly could be called international law. Otherwise it's like they're telling me they want to come here to do admiralty law, or dogbite litigation, or something else that we don't do.

This profession is chock full o’ malcontents and my advice to students is, think hard about all the people out there who regret becoming lawyers or who regret choosing a particular practice. Other than trial and error, the best way to avoid becoming one of those people is to steer toward an area that you'll enjoy practicing as opposed to studying. The fact that a practice area has relatively little demand (trusts and estates), or has clients who nitpick the bills (insurance defense), or results in your making less money than your friends (many specialty practices), or results in your clients being criminals (public defender) are all things that need to be taken into account in deciding how much you're going to like what you do.

To boil all this down:

• If you have observed lawyers whose work life you want, and whose personal life you want, go to law school. Otherwise, don’t. Yet.

• If you’re certain you want to do “X Law,” go experience X before you tack on the Law part.

• Go to the best law school you can get into that will give the best fundamental training. Don’t pay too much attention to a school’s marketing or fame in specialties X, Y, or Z.

• During your first year, learn how to read, write, and think like a lawyer, and learn how to network. In your second and third years, take whatever classes you want, and do specialize in areas you discover that you love (they can be great distinguishing factors out on the job market), but go easy on the esoteric seminars and the Law of the Horse.