Anonymous wrote:My sister did it at 55 yo, after she took early retirement from her school system. She was an English teacher and did well on LSAT. She paid cash for her tuition at state school. Got a job in her Midwest home town for $40,000 per year and a million hours expected every week .... she hated it and quit after 1 year. She did wills, estates, trusts.

Now she takes a few projects from home, but is mostly retired.

Her biggest gain was settling our parents estate/trust for which she charged (at a discount) $150,000, which for me as co-trustee, I charged nothing and had to take several weeks off at work, fly to her town, after I had cared for my sick mom the last three years of her life, and had already consolidated most of her finances for ease of management and disposition at the time of her death.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
How realistic is it to gradually take some courses while still teaching full time? Going to law school is not just about taking some courses here and there--it is a lifestyle choice. You'd be required to take several core areas of law during your first year (or first few semester if part time)--torts, contract, crim, civ pro, property, constitutional, crim pro. Theoretically, the rest of your career lies on how well you perform in those courses as you'd be graded on a scale with the rest of the students. However, since you already have a specialty area in mind, it won't matter as much, but you'd still want to do your best. Next comes the law school activities, the most prestigious ones being moot court and law review. Again, you may forego those opportunities if you already have an area in mind, but you'd need to hustle and bustle your ass off to network with potential employers.

I just want to address this point - there are a lot of PART-TIME law school options. My own part-time law school class had several teachers in it who seemed to manage pretty well. You can indeed "just take a few" classes. The first year is the hardest, because the part time program will be a structured curriculum to get you through your 1L year -- at my law school, this meant 4 nights a week from 6-9 pm with three substantive classes each semester (e.g. con law, torts, contracts, etc.) plus legal writing and then two classes over the summer. Once you got through that you had completed the same "1L" as everyone else, and then had more control of your class selection for subsequent years. If you wanted to stay on track to graduate in four years, this meant keeping up the rate of about 3 evening classes per semester, and 1-2 classes in the summer. But you don't need to graduate in four years, you can pace it and take less. You might find a better schedule for you -- for instance 1-2 classes each semester during the regular year and more classes in the summer (beware though summer can be limited), also some schools offer an intersession class which would be one week of 8-hour classes offered over spring break or Christmas break which would align with your time off teaching. I worked full time as an engineer during the day and found it very manageable to take 3 classes at night, even with pretty regular work travel requiring me to miss class. I just had to be organized and not buy into all things full-time law students did with their time. I didn't have kids, so that's a whole separate thing, and I would make sure you have sufficient spousal support for that, but people in my program did have children and did make it work.

You have to take advice like this with perspective, people who went to law school full-time talk about it like its a 40-60 hr a week job that shuts out the whole rest of the world for them for three years otherwise its impossible to succeed. It does not have to be that way. Yes, class rank absolutely does matter. But the students in my part-time program held their own against the full time students, and when ranked against them for graduation, were proportionally members of the top ranks of the class as well.

Anonymous wrote:hmmm. it depends on what you want to do of course. your best bet is to seek out people whose jobs you think are interesting and ask them. this isn't my area, but know many different kinds of lawyers that touch on "education" law.

- lawyers representing kids with IEPs or other kids who don't think they're getting a fair shake. good work, not a lot of money in it. small and solo practitioners tend to do this as part of their practice. you may well have an "in" to the system and be a real asset to work like this, but its not lucrative, and might not be a good option if you would need to incur a heavy debt load
- institutional lawyers at schools, school systems, etc. This seems like good work too, and steadier. and bigger lawfirms will represent private schools and universities as well. In any such role, you're dealing with a wide range of things beyond "education law"
- lawyers at teachers unions, advocacy organizations, thinktanks, etc. Not wellpaid, and not strictly "education law"

anyway, I don't know that I could really recommend any of this unless you had the money end figured out - ie, could get scholarship money or other funding or have money set aside for which this would be a good use. it might be!

Anonymous wrote:
How realistic is it to gradually take some courses while still teaching full time? Going to law school is not just about taking some courses here and there--it is a lifestyle choice. You'd be required to take several core areas of law during your first year (or first few semester if part time)--torts, contract, crim, civ pro, property, constitutional, crim pro. Theoretically, the rest of your career lies on how well you perform in those courses as you'd be graded on a scale with the rest of the students. However, since you already have a specialty area in mind, it won't matter as much, but you'd still want to do your best. Next comes the law school activities, the most prestigious ones being moot court and law review. Again, you may forego those opportunities if you already have an area in mind, but you'd need to hustle and bustle your ass off to network with potential employers.

Anonymous wrote:My friend's dad became a lawyer in his 50's. My high school friend's mom became a lawyer in her 40's.

Education law? Ummm ... like you want to represent kids whose IEPs aren't being met or something?

I know of one law school in Maryland that lets you do law school in four years.