Law School Dress Code: Jeans & T-Shirts or Suits & Tie?
The first time this concept occurred to me, I was packing my bags for law school and my mother was staring at my clothes as I packed them. I asked her what was wrong and all she did was ask me whether that was all the clothes I was going to take with me. I said that of course it was because I had just packed all the clothes I owned. She looked at me in disbelief and said, “Don’t you know where you are going? You need to take some dress clothes.” She refused to believe that my jeans, t-shirts and sweatshirts were going to do the job. I didn’t really want to argue so we went to the store to buy some more “professional-looking” clothes. The first few days of orientation it was humid in Cambridge, so I didn’t need my “professional” clothes then. When classes started, I tried to wear slacks and collared shirts but after a while I noticed that not many other people were wearing anything fancier than jeans and polos or blouses. I decided to push the more “work-like” clothing to the back of my closet and get back to my more comfortable clothing.
Although I had returned to my more normal attire, I didn’t stop paying attention to what everyone was wearing so that I wouldn’t slip up and find myself completely underdressed. After a while, though, I stopped worrying about it because I realized that people were all over the board. Male students tend to wear jeans or khakis and polo shirts. Female students tend to have more variation. In my section, there were a few women who definitely shared my mother’s mentality. They came to class everyday with perfectly coordinated outfits and nail polish that matched their lipstick. Then there were people like me who generally didn’t wear makeup and only wore jeans and sweaters to class. Toward the end of the semester a friend of mine and I even started to wear sweats to our 8 a.m. property class because we routinely went to the gym together after class.
It wasn’t until the middle of the spring semester of that year that I thought about the subject again. I was sitting down with a group of people for lunch in the Hark. Somehow we ended up talking about clothes. I think someone said that they didn’t like wearing t-shirts and then suddenly another student from my section saw his opening and let us all know how he felt about the way students dress at HLS. I know he isn’t the only one that believes people should try a little harder when they are getting ready in the morning, but he went as far as saying he believed there should be a dress code. “This is professional school,” he exclaimed, “people should be dressing like professionals.” His plan involved a ban on jeans, sweatshirts and t-shirts. As someone who loves to be able to wear her gym clothes to class (and no, I’m not the only one), I have to say that I’m glad there isn’t a dress code here. I do applaud this guy though, I have never seen him wear gym shoes to class and I have never seen him without a collar.
Rest assured there is no dress code at HLS. I think people feel pretty comfortable wearing whatever they want and I don’t think that anyone ever looks out of place. On any given day there will be one person wearing a suit to class and another who looks ready for the gym. If you’re like me, you shouldn’t worry too much about buying special new clothes just to come to law school. You should just come with whatever makes you feel comfortable.
[thanks to ed yourdon and hls in focus via cc]
How the Changing Legal Landscape Will Affect Legal Education
As the fall progresses, many law students and law school administers will be trying to assess the direction of three market trends: (1) the number or percentage of summer associates who receive offers of permanent employment; (2) the prevalence of deferrals among those lucky enough to be offered jobs; and (3) the volume of summer offers coming out of this year’s OCI process. Nobody expects cheery numbers. But as the market information comes in over the next few months, law schools will be in a better position to assess the new landscape.
In a nutshell, here is the issue: Since the last major legal recession of the early 1990s, elite law schools adapted their business model to the seeming certainty of virtually guaranteed high paying jobs for their graduates. This meant increasing tuition, hiring more faculty, reducing teaching loads, and generally loading more debt onto students. For at least the last 15 years, the sizzling corporate legal market made this high-cost model financially viable, even though the only thing these models maximized (or strongly incentivized) was faculty scholarship. Because corporate counsel are fundamentally changing how they value and buy outside legal services, there may not be enough high-paying entry level jobs to support the very high cost of legal education, even at elite schools.
Yet, unbelievably, due to the weighting of per pupil direct expenditures, schools with higher cost structures generally fare better in the US News rankings. Among elite schools, direct expense (financed with high tuition, high student debt, and large endowments) is the input that keeps the elite schools at the top of the pecking order — Yale’s is three times the average, and Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and Columbia are more than double. Of course, less elite law schools wishing to become more elite–i.e., pretty much every school with a few exceptions– have tried to keep up by modeling themselves after elite schools, including a “scholarship-first” strategy. Thus, the cost structure at virtually all law schools has climbed far in excess of the earning capacity of the median law school graduate. See Morriss & Henderson, The New Math of Legal Education, ABA Young Lawyer (July 2008). Yet, due to deficiencies in (a) information, and (b) how information is analyzed, the status quo rolls on.
I can think of at least four reasons for these information inefficiencies.
- Naivete. The modal student entering law school is not homo economicus. Rather, he or she is young, inexperienced, and overly impressed with branding–largely through US News–and the opinions of peers. IQ does not shield the young from overconfidence and the reflexive desire to impress others through the acquisition of positional goods. Indeed, sometimes intelligence in the absence of commonsense can make matters worse.
- Poorly Priced Credit. Banks have lent students funds without a sharp eye to repayment risk. The terms of loans are largely the same regardless of law school attended, geographic market conditions, and law school performance. Yes, historically law students have repaid their loans. But that is the same sloppy logic that created the housing bubble. The only way the math works is if the vast majority of law school graduates, despite low or no starting salaries, experience a steady, multi-year surge in income. This is a foolish assumption for anyone who understands the current state of law firm economics. Of course, just like most home mortgages, student debt over and above the Federal Stafford Loans, often get bundled together, turned into securities, and sold.
- Law Schools are Self-Interested and Locked in a Positional Competition. This is not a criticism; it is a statement of fact. Law schools work very hard to manage their market position, including their US News rank, because students and alumni can be completely demoralized with a significant decline. It does not matter if the decline in quality is illusory; stakeholders will declare the patient sick. This may surprise naive law students, but law schools cannot be counted on to be an objective broker. We need a regulator to level the playing field and force us to be transparent. Which brings me to my fourth point … .
- Failure of Self-Regulation. The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar bears some responsibility here, but not become it has accredited too many law schools — the antitrust implications of barring market entry are real. Rather, the Section has become too focused on the comfort of its law school members. If the Section collected and published detailed employment outcome information in a way that facilitated school-to-school comparisons–yes, just like US News–the information would trickle down to potential law schools. It is not helpful to say that 15% of a school’s graduates work in business — they need to know how many of those 15% are waiting tables, driving a cab, or selling insurance. Re jobs in private practice, how many are working as contract attorneys? Nobody really knows, and the issue is not on the Section’s agenda. If these data are published, some law schools would probably go out of business.
With corporate firms experiencing sluggish demand and tremendous downward pressure on fees, changes in hiring patterns (both the number of jobs and their remuneration) are going to exert tremendous pressure on law schools to rethink their business models. To my mind, the proper response is for law schools to really think through how they can maximally enhance the human capital of law school graduates. (Others might think the proper response is offer the same quality at a lower price, which is the situation confronted by most law firms these days.)
Here, the greatest risk is drawing the wrong inferences from the historical record and confusing market signals with professional education that truly enhances the decision-making and judgment of young lawyers. For the last several decades, entry level-lawyer remuneration–a tempting market-based metric of value-added–has been based on a combination of branding and sorting of raw inputs. In other words, it is not the curriculum at Harvard or Yale, or the massive scholarly output of the faculty, that drove the demand for their graduates. Rather, it was the Ivy-League brand (think Pavlov’s dog) buttressed by statistics that these schools had admitted students with very high IQs. In turn, firms used this information to signal their superior collective credentials to their clients. At end of the day, pedigree definitely has CYA value for many general counsel. But the Bi-Modal distribution suggests that this signal became dramatically overvalued. See Henderson, The Bursting of the Pedigree Bubble, NALP Bulletin (July 2009).
So the open question goes to the very heart of professional education: what type of law school curriculum and teaching methods are really worth the price paid by today’s students? Even if law schools instituted a moratorium on the writing of law review articles for an entire academic year, our collective brain power may be inadequate to answer this question. But I guarantee that the answer requires a strong engagement with practicing lawyers and recourse to empirical methods — not necessarily to publish articles (that is a mere second order effect) but to refashion and retool what and how we teach. The schools that rise to this challenge are, in the long run, going to fare better than those who continue to be believe that more faculty law review articles will raise the school’s ranking, thus enticing more employers to hire their students.
[thanks to shopliftertoo and bill henderson via cc]
Law School Interview Tips: Advice and How to Answer Questions
How can I prepare for my interview?
You should do research on the school itself. Learn a little about the city it is in, the programs offered, grading policies, and instruction style. Look at the school’s information packet and their web site. If you’re interested in going into a particular field after law school, find out which faculty at the school are teaching in that area. The more you read about the school, the more questions you will have to ask your interviewer.
What should I wear to the interview?
Dress professionally in your style. This simply means to dress like you would if you were a lawyer, but do not lose all of your personality (i.e. if you are a guy with long hair, don’t cut it; if you normally have a mustache, leave it…you are not trying to produce a standard image, you want to be yourself).
Should I bring anything to the interview?
Bring a list of any questions you wish to ask (you will probably forget most of them if you try to memorize them). Always have a pen and paper on you. Find out what the weather will be like and bring a coat if necessary. Bring your application to look over between interviews.
What will I be asked?
This is largely dependent on the school and on the interviewer (in other words, on chance). Be prepared to answer questions about “defining” moments in your life–elaborating on what you do for fun, what your favorite activity is, what sports you play, and just about anything that interests you. Some schools still drill you though, so beware (these interviews can truly be draining). Stress interviews (empty rooms with phones ringing, being asked to open windows that are nailed shut) are very rare. If it’s on your application, be prepared to discuss it.
Some commonly asked law school interview questions:
- The favorite: Tell me about yourself.
- Where do you see yourself in 10 years? (often asked)
- What does your family think about this?
- What is the biggest problem facing the legal field today?
- What are the disadvantages/downsides of a career in law, beside no time?
- What are you looking for in a law school?
- What do you think about “insert current hot topic here”?
- What field of law are you interested in?
- What do you like to do that isn’t law related?
- What will you do if you do not get accepted somewhere this year?
- What are your strengths/weaknesses?
And, perhaps the most popular…
Why do you want to be a lawyer?
If you want to say “to help people,” please just make that an introduction to a much deeper soliloquy! You can tie this answer to personal experiences (i.e. things you may have seen while working/volunteering in the legal field, or possibly a personal experience that you or a family member went through). The key is to come across as someone who has genuinely thought through the decision.
What questions should I ask?
Ask anything you want about the school. Many times faculty or students may not know the answer, but will be willing to find out and get back to you.
Should I do anything after the interview?
Sending a thank you note is purely optional, and some consider it an outdated practice. Others feel that acknowledging time spent on your behalf is just common courtesy. One suggestion is to follow up with the admissions office, expressing your interest in the school.
What does “waitlisted” mean? What does “hold” mean?
The terms “wait list,” “acceptance range,” “hold,” and any others synonymous with these all mean that the class was full, but you have been placed on a ranked list. If spots open up, people on the wait list will be moved up and offered seats in the class. In general a school will accept twice as many people as its class size when all is said and done. Also, even though waitlists ARE ranked, they do not have to pull from them in order, so if something about you really stands out (such as a follow up letter stating how impressed you were with the school and how much you would like to become part of their institution), you can increase your chances of getting in off the wait list.
What if I don’t get accepted?
Try again. Trying 2 times seems to be the norm these days but after 3 times you might want to consider doing something else (there have been some people who have finally been accepted after applying 4+ times, but they are the exception rather than the norm). The most important thing to do is to consult each school as to why you were rejected or not taken off of the waitlist and ask what you can do to improve your chances. Follow their advice.
How should I choose what school to go to?
This depends on several factors. Important ones include location and what the school “typically” produces. In other words, if you want to specialize, it may not be in your best interest to go to a state school where most of the class goes into general practice. Financial issues are also a factor, as state-funded schools are often much less expensive than private schools. Going to a school with an established reputation may be of benefit, especially when applying for fellowships and positions in academic law. If you feel that you may end up in an academic position, or are considering a very competitive specialty, you may consider going to a “name” school. If you narrow it down to two schools which are virtually identical, go to the one that feels right–that might be your best choice. How do the students at the school feel? Are they treated well?
What should I do during the summer before law school?
Nothing at all. Take a deep breath.
[thanks to kafta4prez and sdnwiki via cc]
