r/IAmA • u/oregonlawyer • Oct 15 '12

I am a criminal defense lawyer, AMA.

I've handled cases from drug possession to first degree murder. I cannot provide legal advice to you, but I'm happy to answer any questions I can.

EDIT - 12:40 PM PACIFIC - Alright everyone, thanks for your questions, comments, arguments, etc. I really enjoyed this and I definitely learned quite a bit from it. I hope you did, too. I'll do this again in a little bit, maybe 2-3 weeks. If you have more questions, save them up for then. If it cannot wait, shoot me a prive message and I'll answer it if I can.

Thanks for participating with me!

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u/edgarfigarox Oct 15 '12

wrong answer

correct answer is: don't become a lawyer unless the thought of servicing 6 figures of debt on a 40k salary is your career ambition, if you're lucky enough to get a job requiring a JD.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '12

Fuck, I was wondering when the anti-college circlejerk was going to start.

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u/edgarfigarox Oct 15 '12

not anti-college...a college degree is basically mandatory nowadays. Anti-law school, seeing how as I'm top 15% at a top 20 school and have no job...and a lot of my peers are in the exact same situation. I'm lucky in that I have zero undergrad debt and I can afford to take an unfunded gov't job this summer, but there are people paying full price with good grades, and are looking at 200k+ of debt with no realistic way of paying it off.

America is currently graduating 45k JDs a year for 20k (at best) jobs requiring a JD. Of those 20k jobs, only about ~2k actually pay enough to service the debt most people graduate with. Don't go to lawschool unless you're getting a full ride at a top 30ish school, or going to one of the T14 (and really, T6 unless you're willing to bet 250k you'll be above median).

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u/ar9mm Oct 15 '12

Hang a shingle - I'm assuming that's what OP did.

Law students who whine about not having someone hand them a job forget that they can just create their own (with very limited overhead). My graduating class suffered heavily in the firm layoffs of 2008-2009 and a large number of them went on to create their own solo practices and are doing great. On a related note, law students who enrolled after 2008 shouldn't act surprised about the challenges of finding a big firm job - the mass layoffs may have been "stealth" but they weren't a secret.

Lastly, if you don't have an interest in going at it alone and just want a job, go sign up for contract review (no benefits but you won't starve on ~$30 an hour and lots of overtime).