Brutal but true . . .

http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-you-shouldnt-go-to-law-school.html

There are good reasons for going to law school. I think I did everything wrong that this gentleman mentions.

How I got the position I hold now, in all its glory, is too strange to account, but it works something like this:

Graduated from a less than "elite" law school, with a modicum of debt. Not bad, but not great either. Attended a tax LLM program.

Work at a firm in Albuquerque, NM. Great folks, great place to live, crappy job overall.
Worked for a financial planning firm where they hired attorneys. Wrong skill set entirely for me.
Back to private practice, reminded how much I hated it. Big firm hours, little firm pay!! Hooray!! Stay late! Get less!!

To give someone a sense of perspective, in a typical law firm, Saturday is just another work day. Leaving at 7 pm was normal, 10 pm wasn't unusual, and that was for ordinary work. You stop taking lunch to squeeze out another hour of time (5 hours a week! 260 extra hours a year!)

It can work for some folks, perhaps, if you get out of school without a wife and kids at age 24 and devote yourself to working until say 32 to establish yourself, then look up an start finding dates, yeah. But don't kid yourself that you're different otherwise someone would have blazed the trail before you. Your specific roll in the machine is to be a profit cog early on. Someone is living off the sweat of your brow . . . and it aint you.

Figure you bill out at $200 an hour (the amount you bill at a large firm is probably more like $300 . . . because after all those mahogany partners' desks aren't gonna build themselves . . . ). And you only billed 2000 hours. That's not quite 40 hours a week, but we'll pretend you got to take a vacation. That means you billed $400,000. You got $130,000 of that. Hmmm. Overhead. Was it $170,000 all for you? Hmm. Methinks not.

Then to my current position. Sane working hours. Great learning environment. Pay was less than market for similar experience. . . but for the hours worked, as an economic being, I get paid waaaaaay more when I get to leave work at 4:30 pm (note, I get here at 7:30, I put in a full and fair day, just not a stupid 12-14 hour one . . . .in case someone might stumble upon this).

But all of that occurred specifically because it's not a typical law firm job.