Get a great attorney job with bad school, bad grades, AMA

[Anonymous]

Well done, OP. I'm your polar opposite: T5 law school, graduated with honors, federal clerkship, and I've worked my way down the career ladder to where I'm doing doc review. With a firm, but still. I've stayed with it a few years because the hours are good and my kids are young, but it's past time for me to move on. So, congrats on your career path!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP I hate to say it but it sounds like you've made so many career moves that your law school's reputation and GPA are pretty much irrelevant at this point. I would say that the fact that it took you so many hops skips and jumps to get to where you are illustrates the difficulty of getting on your feet as a lawyer from a T3-T4 school.

totally disagree. your point of view is the myopic T1 grad's viewpoint, expecting that jobs are going to be handed out like candy and you're entitled to a 6 figure salary out of the gate. people like OP realize that they aren't going to be handed anything, and they're not to proud to take and invest in the job in front of them. that's pretty much the way to succeed in any kind of career! I find that T1 law grads can be REALLY crippled if things don't go exactly as planned, or if they don't manage to acclimate to firm life and can't find an exit. they seem to have very little resiliancy or ability to think about their law careers outside of the extremely rigid "prestige" paths they think are obligatory/deserved (2L summer, fed clerkship, law firm job.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well done, OP. I'm your polar opposite: T5 law school, graduated with honors, federal clerkship, and I've worked my way down the career ladder to where I'm doing doc review. With a firm, but still. I've stayed with it a few years because the hours are good and my kids are young, but it's past time for me to move on. So, congrats on your career path!

Yep -- this is common amongst my crew. T10 grad. Many/most of us had all the markers of "success" -- magna grads; fed clerks; v20 firms etc. Except almost no one made partner -- some lacked sponsorship/political savvy; some were in departments that just haven't recovered well post recession; some were in firms that have recovered extremely well post recession but partners do not want to share the pie. So then there were all kinds of step down jobs -- vendors; HR/professional dev at law firms; government; etc.

[Anonymous]

I don't know what the PP would think of me. I went to Chicago. Then three years in biglaw. Then a clerkship. Then 3 years at a US Attorney's office. Then two years in a firm as "counsel." Then in house at company 1 for three years. Now at my second, more senior in-house gig.

I've lived in cities across the country hustling. I like my work and enjoyed the ride, but sometimes my career has felt akin to being a white collar migrant worker.

[Anonymous]

Some of the PP’s on this thread are such assholes. You do realize that being a law firm partner is not everyone’s goal in life, right?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of the PP’s on this thread are such assholes. You do realize that being a law firm partner is not everyone’s goal in life, right?

It’s funny. When I worked in-house, I would assist the General Counsel with reviewing work from the law firms that we hired. Some work was sent to small solos, some to boutique firms, some mid sized regional firms, and some larger national big law firms.

What always showed me was how consistently good the work product was from the solos and boutique firms, and how often we found serious issues with the work product given to us by the regional firms and big law firms. We literally were billed over $1,000 per hour by a major firm, and their documents had a typo or grammatical error on every page.

Point is, that these snobby lawyers at big firms are incompetent and likely are so over worked that they can string a logical sentence together.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well done, OP. I'm your polar opposite: T5 law school, graduated with honors, federal clerkship, and I've worked my way down the career ladder to where I'm doing doc review. With a firm, but still. I've stayed with it a few years because the hours are good and my kids are young, but it's past time for me to move on. So, congrats on your career path!

You sound like a good person and actually that can get you far. The only thing I can recommend is trying to find yourself in a niche specialty. But good hours when you have kids goes a long way! I have kids too. Thank you so much for the kind words. - OP