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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you passed the bar, you should go into practice for youself.  A first year attorney in practice with no real experience can charge $150/hr and should have no problem billing at least 10-20 hrs per week.  You can literally go to the courthouse and hang out at traffic court.  Plenty of people would pay $100 to represent them. A few of those a day is real money (drastically more than everything else suggested on here).

There are also court appointed cases for probate and other fields.  They pay mediocre for lawyers but 5-10 times what any of the other jobs you are looking at pay.  You may even find that you are a good lawyer (just a bad student).

I went into practice myself right after lawschool and 10 years later make more than anyone else I know, even those are large firms.  For the record I graduated in the bottom half of my class.[/quote]

This advice is way outdated. My husband does this right now (and he is not a brand new graduate like OP) and it is hard hard hard. Hanging around the courthouse does not get you a few traffic cases a day - its not going to get you even one a day. In five years of practice which has involved hanging out at the courthouse almost daily, my huband has gotten maybe 5 cases total on the spot like that. To even make enough to cover childcare, OP will have to invest something in overhead to set up a virtual office at a minimum, not to mention creating a website and getting the word out somehow. The only way to succeed at hanging out a shingle these days is to invest looong hours in the beginning, hustle your butt off, develop some sort of niche, and be able to tolerate making almost nothing for at least a year, likely longer. The market for general practice guys (traffic, wills, criminal, divorce) in this area is utterly saturated. I would definitely try to pick up contract atty work before this. [/quote]

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