OT: Very much OT: Daughter/Lawyer career choice advice

Don’t think about lawyering until you are in law school. Unless she’s committed to pick up a small local practice, most law hiring is formalized and credential-driven by right school, right rank, right law professor writing the letter, which she has little control over now nor should worry about  

Don’t think about law school until you are a junior or so in college. Beyond grades, be interesting and active as an undergrad. 

good student that she is, that's a great start.  easy enough to get internships at firms, even paid positions as she gets older, and i recommend it as many here have. 

the law allows you to cover many, many bases in the sense of the skills you learn can assist in a myriad of circumstances/clients/problems.

one proviso:  the law is a jealous mistress.  you don't 'dabble' in law, or at least you shouldn't  unless you want to send a client unwittingly over a legal cliff.  few exceptions to that, but not many. 

make your bones early on if you can.  try all the cases you can get to trial without being unreasonable, and learn your craft.  if you end up as a paper lawyer or a business type like our mgostar bronxblue, the experience in trial is so helpful as you draft documents (e.g., if i had to explain this to a jury, would they have any idea what the heck i just wrote? ) and deal with blustering in various business deals.  

I'm a public defender at one of the best, if not the best, public defender organizations in the country and I love my job but it is extremely stressful. The adversarial nature of litigation is not for everyone and burns lots of people out. Mock trial is great but outside of public defenders and prosecutors, not very representative of what most lawyers do (even litigators at huge firms). Talking to a variety of lawyers and getting a scope on their day to day would be helpful to her. She needs to focus on getting as high of a GPA as possible. Major doesn't really matter, classes don't really matter, just the number. Similarly, she needs to focus on getting a high LSAT score. The LSAT is a very learnable test with lots of practice and if she puts the time in a 170+ is very doable even if starting from a low score at her diagnostic. A high GPA and LSAT not only opens doors for admission but also scholarships. 

Two Stories: 

My daughter also knew she wanted to be a lawyer from her early high school years.  She was laser focused and took classes and did volunteer work that would enhance her chances.  If I remember, she finish HS with a 3.85 gpa, undergrad with a 3.9 gpa and end up top 5% in her graduating class.  She worked for 10 years as a prosecutor then opened a law firm with her husband who also was a former prosecutor.  From everything I have seen, she really enjoys her line of work! 

I also have a good friend who got an civil engineering degree from Michigan. He got a law degree from WSU and worked as an automotive engineer. Even though he had the law degree, he never sat for the bar. Decided that the law wasn't for him but he had a GREAT backup plan with the Michigan Engineering degree.  He was able to retire in his early 50's as well! 

Tell her to major in something she's interested in since law school comes later, and diversify her interests if all she wants to do is law. Nothing worse than a lawyer that has no real world experience in anything but lawyering.

Lots of local firms may want some extra help on the administrative side. Even if she works for free, have it be conditioned on her being allowed to sit in on a deposition or attend a trial. Great exposure to how litigation really works and what it looks like.

HS Sophomore is very early but you might be able to find an internship.  I'd recommend shadowing-  Mrs. Realelonmusk is a lawyer and a lot of our friends are lawyers (and some of them are actually decent people!  :  )

Working for most law firms sucks.  My lawyer friends who like their jobs are all partners at their firms or work as corporate counsel.

A good career route is to work for a national or well known firm for 1-3 years.  It helps if she knows the area of law she wants to work in.  For instance, my wife loved healthcare law and while working at a national firm a senior partner tried to get her to move to securities work (very boring).  She declined many times and ended up Assistant General Counsel at a large hospital group.

Are you in AA?

I am a 23 year attorney. I grew up in Michigan and went to UM for my undergrad. I went to UM law school admissions my freshman year of undergrad and asked what I needed to do to get in to law school eventually. They said just major in something that challenges your ability to read and write. There is no "pre-law" major and they claimed they were looking for more diverse majors than poli sci or history. 

I majored in Anthro as I loved the field and UM's (grad) program is top 2 in the country along with Harvard's Peabody School. I took a lot of grad-level classes and it challenged me to read and write and gave me a good foundation for law school. (Law schools don't expect you to have any legal knowledge or training.) 

I clerked for a law firm in AA for a couple summers during undergrad, but my LSAT was too low for Michigan Law and I applied too late for my scores. I ended up going to Pepperdine Law and and have been happy every since. 

Tell her to pursue what she loves because it's not "work" when you love what you do. Studying law is a good foundation for other fields too if she grows to love something else.

Congratulations to your daughter on her work, smarts, and ambition.

However, though the culture insists on long-term planning and despite her current eagerness, it seems to me that she should take her time. She will have many new experiences, especially once she hits college.

With a little planning, she'll be ready to apply to law school after college. BUT with too much planning, she'll be hindering other thoughts, other perspectives, other experiences that might steer her to biology or statistics or teaching or law enforcement or animal care or anything. 

She's got time. 

At this point - let it all play out.  Your daughter shouldn't even sit for the LSAT unless she is 100% committed to becoming a lawyer.  Note - not committed to going to law school, but to becoming a lawyer in some form or another.

Closely related to the above - the one thing they will not teach you in law school is how to make money doing it.  If your daughter wants to be a practicing attorney, unless she wants to just work at a large firm, she'll likely need to come to grips with the idea of being a small business owner.

Tell her to major in chemistry, get at least a masters, and become a patent lawyer.  She can set her hourly price because no normal lawyer has the capacity to write-up complex physical science patents into legal doctrine.  In today's money she would likely be able to charge $1500-2500 an hour and never leave her home except to meet with her clients in their labs.  I was on this path but decided to apply to medical school instead and became a much lower-paid doctor.  

I have a brother-in-law who is an estate attorney, has been in practice with the same firm for 30+ years, and appears (to me anyways) to be at the "top" of his chosen profession. He's been the managing partner in the past for a stint, seems to be one of the most respected partners in his large firm, etc. He works remotely off and on, and he's used this to get out of Michigan at times to warmer weather. He's helped my wife & myself with will creation and modification, as well as trusts, etc. Great guy, very knowledgeable, friendly, social, etc.

He seems like he'd be a guy who'd love his job and advise anyone to pursue law as a career. And just this past weekend he told me he had advised all of his kids (my neices and nephew) to avoid going into law. This blew my mind. I'm sorry that I didn't get into his reasoning for this, mostly because I was so stunned to hear that.

I know this is a vague story and sucks, but I thought I should pass it along. Of course, you can get a law degree and not practice law/do something else, but most people don't go that route. I wish your daughter the best of luck and happiness in whatever career she pursues.

Upon realizing after my sole exposure to intro chemistry during my fall semester of sophomore year at U-M that medical school was an absurd fantasy, I had a brief infatuation with the idea of law school (don't all U-M sophomores?).

I took a legal processes course winter semester that was sort of a broad introduction to various aspects of practicing law, and after trying to wade through incredibly dense legal tomes in the grad library stacks I concluded that I'd rather pluck my eyes out. Architecture school was much more fun, although the work load was crazy.

I'm a junior biglaw associate at a V10 who went to one of Michigan's peer law schools (the band has been referred to as MVPN colloquially. It's below CCN, which is below HYS. If reading this makes her cringe, biglaw might not be the best idea). There are two problems with law school: (1) it's expensive as hell (total COA at Columbia surpassed $300k all in recently) and ain't getting cheaper and (2) the only jobs where one can reasonably feel confident paying back that debt come in the type of work I do, where I trade all of my life for a lot of money. I never say "don't" to someone thinking of law school. But I do say, "don't pay for it."

Law schools give "scholarships" to like more than half of their applicants these days. What they're doing is having students that barely slip in subsidize the students they are competing with Harvard for. The thought is, someone might decide that going to M for free is a better deal than paying 300k for the Harvard brand.

Here's a link to Michigan's APA 509 disclosures: https://michigan.law.umich.edu/system/files/2022-12/Std509InfoReport-99…. Read that. In order to qualify for significant scholarships she needs to "be above both numbers". That means having both a GPA and an LSAT score above the school's median which here is 3.83/171. Those are not easy numbers to get, but since she's started early enough, I cannot stress enough that her undergrad course load matters VERY little to law school admissions. Only the GPA she gets. As a previous poster stated, if she loves chemistry, by all means, study chemistry. If she decides she's dead set on law school, getting an A outweighs everything else. 3.95 should be the goal. The LSAT can take care of itself after getting the uGPA.

It works the same for any law school. Look at their median uGPA/LSAT numbers and get above both of them. I went into the Army to get the GI Bill to pay for law school (covers 100% tuition at M and all other public schools - YRP covers many of the pvt schools). I don't recommend serving unless someone REALLY wants to serve, but it saved me, when all is said and done with debt interest, probably half a million dollars.

Edit: I wrote a series of articles for a veteran website a few years back talking about this process. It's vet centered but it goes step-by-step through the application process. I don't own the website and did not get paid for this. I just think it might be helpful: https://theveteranpro.com/military-to-law-school-1/

I only know one lawyer who is happy they are a lawyer and would happily do it over again.

my sister in law is a patent attorney in the biotech space. gets paid enough to live comfortable in Palo Alto and works like 35-45 hours a week.

I had always been fascinated by law and even dabbled at the prospect of going to law school myself at one point. However, I had lawyers tell me 2 things

1. Certain law specialities are obviously better than others. The law area I was interested in at the time would have been big mega firms out of NY and DC which I was told I wouldn't have a life and be miserable. Unfortunately I don't have that list and this is so long ago, I  am sure things have changed to some degree. 

2. Not worth the cost of the degree. Just don't do it.

Reading some of these posts reaffirms not much has changed since I was considering it a long time ago. I still wonder every now and then,  "what if I had", but I feel like I hear more about the cons than the pros from the legal community more now than I had before.

So many things have changed about legal education and the legal profession in the last 50 years that my experience would be utterly irrelevant to a student contemplating law school, so my advice would be ill- informed and useless.

For a current (and pretty cynical) take on the current situation, with a big law focus, have her subscribe to (free) and follow abovethelaw.com for a while. 

A general liberal arts education is still a good preparation for law school. And it is too early to look too far ahead. That said, on the job market an undergraduate degree in physics, engineering, or hard science is a leg up for the work I do (antitrust litigation and other expert-intensive work). Plus it is a solid Plan B if she wants to work after college. 

I can help her become an as of yet (and let's be honest, might always will be) unpublished writer who would rather be poor than continue to work full time in the legal profession. If that's of any interest, hit me up.

And I help poor people, by the way- and make pretty good money as a lawyer on top of it!

But good luck to her, and go with God. 

Career coach. If I can be of help, give me a call 

Thrive Consulting 

Maybe she could be commissioner of whatever league U-M is in.