How many of you JDs do not work anymore because it is not worth it financially?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Open your own shop. You'll make way more than $40-$50k doing court appointed work alone. I left my private practice job with a small firm with big firm hours and have never looked back. I went from making under $100k and working 60-80 hours/week to making over $100 and working 30-40 hours per week (more if I have a trial).

What jurisdiction? I have no criminal law background other than crim law class. Would I still get court appointed work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Open your own shop. You'll make way more than $40-$50k doing court appointed work alone. I left my private practice job with a small firm with big firm hours and have never looked back. I went from making under $100k and working 60-80 hours/week to making over $100 and working 30-40 hours per week (more if I have a trial).

What jurisdiction? I have no criminal law background other than crim law class. Would I still get court appointed work?

No! I laugh when I hear people say, "oh, just do court appointed work." You have to have experience and prove that you know what you're doing before courts will trust you to represent criminal defendants. And if you don't want to do nonprofit or government work, you will surely find court appointed misdemeanor defense (where you'll have to start) beneath you.

[Anonymous]

Didn't you post previously about. Your problem? And part of it was that you had meh grades from a non-top tier school?

[Anonymous]

Sorry, but you have no shot at big law unless you are hired fresh out of law school. Especially since you are a SAHM with no experience. Simply put, you missed the boat. And if you were serious about big law you would not have spent a summer in Africa (which seems odd to me coming from a person who ultimately wanted big law). If you ever want to practice then you need a job where you can get some experience asp. Any career gap will kill your odds...and saying you took a break to be with your baby doesn't help either. You are competing with kids fresh out of school who aren't saddled with families as well as more seasoned lawyers with actual experience. The market stinks, so if you want to work then you shouldn't rule out any legal positions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. The reason why I did not have a BigLaw offer lined up at graduation is that I spent the summer after 2L with my newborn son. The summer after 1L I did humanitarian law in Africa.

My parents paid for law school.

Ahhh. Poor little rich girl syndrome. Mommy and daddy paid for law school and then you married some bald pot bellied banker to fund your lifestyle.

I'm not OP but seriously, what a bitchy comment. If you don't have anything nice to say...

I don't know, but I was thinking the same thing about entitlement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. The reason why I did not have a BigLaw offer lined up at graduation is that I spent the summer after 2L with my newborn son. The summer after 1L I did humanitarian law in Africa.

My parents paid for law school.

Ahhh. Poor little rich girl syndrome. Mommy and daddy paid for law school and then you married some bald pot bellied banker to fund your lifestyle.

Not OP either, and I agree OP is being kind of ridiculous about the job thing. But this PP's comment is silly, and also totally typical DCUM. It never ceases to amaze me how fast and how viciously the claws come out whenever anyone says they have money. The green eyed monster is alive and well on DCUM.

[Anonymous]

Which school did you graduate from?
Where in your class did you graduate?

Being in Biglaw involves making sacrifices. Like delaying having kids till you are out of law school. What were you thinking?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you have already graduated and do not have a Big Law job, then that ship has already sailed. You missed it.

Kids are only in daycare for a few years. Your career hopefully will continue well beyond that. So while you may not be making much money those first few years, you will be investing in your career. You can't just do nothing after law school and expect to land a great job years later when you are ready. It just doesn't work like that, especially not in this legal job market.

+1

[Anonymous]

What you want is impossible. You don't want "nanny to raise your children" but you also want a high powered career that takes all day, every day. Even if you could get BigLaw job (which is itself unlikely) you can never have both of these.

Plus: the fact that you are so dismissive of government and non-profit jobs speaks very poorly of you. It looks like you think you are too good for those jobs despite 1) having zero experience 2) zero offers, even for those measly 50-60k jobs and 3) not wanting to work long hours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. The reason why I did not have a BigLaw offer lined up at graduation is that I spent the summer after 2L with my newborn son. The summer after 1L I did humanitarian law in Africa.

My parents paid for law school.

Reading this, I still don't see how you think BigLaw was an option. You didn't work for BigLaw as a law student, apparently you had no relationship with BigLaw - so why do you think the reason you didn't have an offer lined up was that you were doing other things?

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure this is real. If it is - when did you graduate? Have you taken and passed the bar? Why are you excluding certain types of legal jobs? Why do you care how much you make when your husband makes so much (as PP above said - it's not 'paying for daycare' it's building your resume, gaining experience and independence, etc)?

Your parents paid for law school when you were already married and having a kid?

Something's off.

[Anonymous]

You cannot go directly into Biglaw at this point. However, my DH's firm (a very big international firm) has plenty of associates and partners who didn't go to top tier law schools or who had unusual career trajectories. Those people usually took a job in government and developed a very specialized skill set (think SEC, FEC, etc.) and made themselves valuable to a firm as someone coming out of government already trained in a small bar. If you are serious about a legal career (and it doesn't really sound like you are) you might think about taking a slightly more family-friendly government legal job as a way to springboard into big law later. This route will still take time, effort, and commitment, but plenty of people pull it off.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I had my son in my second year of law school. Now that I graduated and he can go to daycare, I find that all law jobs with halfway family-friendly hours pay only $ 40-50k. My DH makes $ 450-500k. My net income would be $ 20-25k, while daycare costs $ 18k. The thought of working for nothing is so depressing. Do I have to wait until my child is a teenager to work at BigLaw (which is why I went to law school in the first place). My husband works such long hours that that would not be an option now. I don't want to have a nanny raise my kid.

The problem is that I do not have any work experience. I am almost convinced that I would not have a chance to find a decent job if I waited until my son grows up. I am thrilled to have this particular child, but I wish I had worked for a few years in the legal field before having children.

The lawyer moms out there, how would you handle this situation? For the record, I am only interested in private practice and maybe in-house, so no government, non-profit or academia.

Thanks in advance!

If my husband made $450-500k, I would not be working!! You are so lucky!! If you get a government job, you can make a nice salary and get great benefits. The TSP is worth it.

[Anonymous]

I completely disagree that BigLaw is off limits if you don't get an offer right out of law school. If you plan to practice law in the long run, you do need to work rather than SAH -- it is much harder to on-ramp after taking time off, particularly if you have no substantive work experience.

If your long-term goals is BigLaw, consider a position in government while your child is young, particularly an agency in a practice area that is marketable to firms, such as securities, commodities regulation, financial regulatory work, antitrust, energy. While not all government positions are family-friendly, and your first year as a GS-11 or 12 will not pay well, you will get more hands-on experience in government than you will at a firm. Whether and how quickly you will be able to leverage this into a BigLaw position depends on the practice area, the economy, and whether you have a desire and are able to climb the ranks into management.

If you are interested in "humanitarian law," however, that is not something you generally will encounter at BigLaw, unless you are working on a pro bono case or defending a corporation against TVPA/ATCA claims. There may be exceptions to this, but "humanitarian law" is not the bread-and-butter of most firms. If that is your intended practice area, I would focus on non-profit or advocacy work. If you do exceptionally well in that, you may be able (one day, far in the future) to leverage that into a lobbying or government affairs position at a firm.

But my bottom line advice is to get over any "prestige" issues that may be driving you topward BigLaw. There is lots of other interesting (okay, semi-interesting) legal work out there, some of it actually compatible with having a family.

[Anonymous]

people--I'd bet anything that this post is FAKE.
It has all the favorite DCUM triggers in it:

-big law
-high HHI
-slam against a "nanny raising my kid"
-young motherhood
-sugar daddy

Come on, it's a joke post!