Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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How old are you? If you can raise it to 179 or 180 you have a solid (say 30%) shot at the top 6 if you’re also charismatic and good at interview, which in turn means that you can hustle for the top tier of clerkships, big law jobs etc.
But it’s still insanely expensive, 2 years of not making money or developing a career, and no guarantee of wealth, power or (particular) status.
25. I've actually been working as a software developer for a few years--this would be a return to college. Have maybe $300k saved up. Though, I think I'd be better off investing that money and taking out a loan to pay for the law school.
I don't think it would make sense for me to do this for money; tech is an easier road for that. It would be more to contribute to the conservative lawyer army. If I didn't make it big I'd be seriously curtailing my potential (my current tech job is already better than the average lawyer job, and that's before going to school for another 4-5 years), and if I did I'd probably make a little more money than I do now and have much worse quality of life. It's not worth it unless I can meaningfully affect public policy, which is why I ask how much of a need there is for that in the first place, and how talented one needs to be to compete at that level. Extremely talented, like the average Harvard graduate whose LSAT I can probably beat, or off-the-charts talented?
Demographics are pretty much worst possible. Straight, white, male, Christian (Mormon, so I expect little help even from most Christian orgs), etc. What I have going for me is my work experience in crypto, my intelligence, and a pretty strong inherent interest in law. And some reasonably good connections with established lawyers I could probably leverage.
Fwiw, there is no conservative lawyer army. At best a division. Political donations by attorneys go 10:1 to Democrats. Law school professorships and biglaw very much reflect this. The 9% of non-left attorneys trend libertarian more than conservative.
The upshot is that if you somehow navigate the scylla/charybdis of top law schools and biglaw with your politics intact, and can land a clerkship with a conservative justice, you can probably turn that into a federal judicial appointment because there just isn’t that much competition.
That's pretty much what I want to hear. The less of an army there is the more they need me.
If the process really is
All for a 30% chance of having a chance at clerkships, though, that's pretty miserably unlikely.
A 179 or 180 is more than a 30% chance of admission. Stanford median LSAT score is 173 and median gpa is 3.8. They love 180s to counteract some of the legacy 165 scores. I’m not sure what the methodology is, but lsd.law/rankings says you’re guaranteed to get into Harvard Law with a 3.5 gpa and 179 LSAT.
Even if you don’t shoot for a top-10 school, you can turn a high LSAT into a full scholarship at a top-25 school. Some of the biglaw firms have HQs outside the Acela corridor, and they tend to recruit from well-regarded regional schools. E.g. some of the big Chicago firms prefer Northwestern or Michigan over Ivy League. Vanderbilt and UGA grads generally don’t have problems finding work in firms based in the southeast. You are also much more likely to make the network connections to conservative judges if you aren’t in Massachusetts or NY.
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