Legal News

Envision, if You Will, A Debt-Free Beginning . . .

By Ashby Jones

We’re nearly five months into 2009, and already the BigLaw employment figures have hit a scary milestone: 10,000. According to Lawshucks, that’s how many employees — staffers and lawyers combined — have been laid off at big law firms since the start of the year. It’s enough to make us bring back out the Sad Sack Associate (pictured), whom so many of you have grown to love, and so many others love to hate. Hello there, SSA.

Of followers of this and other blogs know, even those lawyers who still have jobs at big firms have had a rough go of it, what with the pay cuts. And we’re not even going to mention the poor folks who are either in law school now or recently graduated.

In light of all the awfulness, the ABA Journal threw a provocative question out to its readers: If you had to do it all over again, would you choose law school?

The answers, collected here, are interesting. We didn’t tally the ‘yays’ against the ‘nays,’ but sentiment seemed split largely right down the middle.

Many of the yesses went something like this: “I didn’t love my big firm job, but now I work at a medium-sized firm in a medium-sized city and I’m very happy.” And many of the nays went something like this: “Heck no. I hate my job and I’ll never get myself out from under the crush of this debt load.”

We liked the ABA Journal’s question so much that we’re going to ask you something simlilar.

The Law Blog Career Question of the Week: Let’s say you graduated from law school with absolutely zero debt. Would you have followed the path you followed or would you have branched out in a different direction? If so, what would you have done?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 28, 2009 (boomark / email).