Why Your Success Won't Entirely Depend On Which Law School You Came From
[00:00:00] Is it true that if a law student doesn't graduate at the top of their class or from an Ivy league... it's very difficult to get a high paying legal job.
It's absolutely not true. If you are in Detroit and you went to Wayne state or University of Detroit, or any of those schools, you can get a job with a top firm in Detroit and probably in Chicago. From there you could lateral on to even a top firm in New York. And if you're in the right practice area, you can get a job at those firms, even if you didn't go to a top law school. You can go to New York law school in New York, which is a top rated law school and there's attorneys at every top law firm in New York that went through that law school.
Obviously you have to do well to get a job at the top law firms, but most law firms and major cities hire from local schools. The best law schools always hire the best people from those law schools. The benefits of an Ivy league law school or top Penn law school, if you go to Columbia Law School, you have no problem getting interviews in California, Texas and different markets you might be interested in. Whereas, if you go to New York Law School, it's going to be very difficult to get [00:01:00] interviews with firms in California.
So Ivy League law schools and the best of the top 10 or 25, or even more law schools, they'd make your degree portable and they make it easy for you to move to major markets, early on. The other thing, if you go to any law school, pretty much, if you're at the very top of your class, you have a good opportunity in getting jobs.
Cravath Swaine and Moore, which is was one of the top, most prestigious law firms, probably at the top five in the world, hires a lot of people out of the University of Iowa that do welfare because it likes them.
You can definitely get high paying legal jobs without going to an Ivy league law school, or even being at the top of your class.
If you go to Yale Law School and didn't do well there, you can still get a job most places. If you go to Harvard, it's a different question because there's so many people in the class. But even Harvard or any of those places, and don't do very well, you can still get a job in most law firms. So you may not get a job at the top law firm, you can still get a very highly paid job.
I would say it's not to worry too much about, I don't think that people really realize it's not something worry about [00:02:00] that much.
If it was me, I wouldn't worry too much about it. You can always do well. And again, the laws of business, because it's a business, there's always going to be ways to make a great living, no matter where you went to law school. I thought law schools were important when I was in law school. And before I went to law school, I worked very hard to, go to law school and all this stuff, and I thought it was very important. Since I've been sitting where I'm sitting and keep in mind, I reviewed the resumes of probably more than half of the attorneys practicing in the United States. So seeing that, in my opinion, the law school you went to, isn't really the most important one, to be successful. Even how you do there, isn't the most important to be successful.
I always say that the eight students worked for the B students and the B students and the C students own the law firms. There's a lot of truth to that because there's just different skills that different people have. So if you didn't go to a great law school, the most important thing is just being very enthusiastic about what you're doing. And if you want to work at a top firm, I know people that have come out of the bottom of their class from the [00:03:00] top 20 law schools, failed the bar exam several times and then managed to get a job with a small law firm. And now we're at some of the best, maybe the top 10 type law firms in the country as partners.
So none of this stuff matters. It's it does matter to you when you're. But it doesn't matter in the long run. That's like saying if I'm born poor, doesn't mean I'll always be poor. It's just not the case. You need to understand that.
