The Law School for Veterans series was written by a friend of the site who is a current veteran student at a Top 10 Law School. Going from the military to law school can be a popular option for many veterans looking to take advantage of their GI Bill.
ICON_PLACEHOLDEREstimated reading time: 16 minutes
Do you want to be a lawyer? This is the question you need to answer before committing to attend law school. The rest of this piece will divide the advice into two, and only two, answers.
1) Yes, I want to be a lawyer
and
2) any answer other than answer 1.
We’ll start with #2.
If the answer to the question is anything other than an unqualified “yes” then you need to stop immediately and re-evaluate.
There is a common maxim out there that “you can do anything with a law degree”. This may have been true as late as 1985. It is no longer true today. In 2019, almost 40,000 graduates earned their J.D. Fewer than 60% of them will ever become lawyers. Many can’t pass the bar exam – the post-graduation state examination hurdle that all lawyers must pass. Others just get so fed up with the process that they quit. Lots hated law school and abhor the idea of ever becoming a lawyer. Think about that before you head from the military to law school.
There are literally tens-of-thousands of J.D.s out there trying to get work in other fields, everything from compliance officers to insurance adjusters to baristas. They are all struggling as much as any other recent graduate. Though a J.D. MIGHT be helpful in getting your application past the computer screener, it’s not necessary.
Factor in that a J.D. can cost upwards of $300,000 when including living expenses, and at minimum you must do the cost/benefit analysis before choosing law school. I know someone from my time in the enlisted Army who got out, used his GI Bill to attend law school, couldn’t find quick employment, and re-joined as an E5 SGT with a law degree. He later eventually passed the state bar and STILL is working as an enlisted paralegal.
If you want to be a paralegal, law school is not necessary. If you want to work in compliance, law school is not necessary. Don’t go. Even if you have the money, don’t waste three years of your life. If you want to try and work in any other “J.D. Advantage” position, you should, at minimum, research how you can obtain that position without a law degree.
Nothing would make me happier than for you to read this previous paragraph and decide against attending law school because you realize it isn’t worth the cost for your goals. Seriously. For those of you who I just saved $300,000, you’re welcome. Buy me a beer later.
(For those reading, the “buy me a beer” also applies to Mark who runs this site and not just the author…)
If the answer to the initial question is yes, you do want to be a lawyer, law school is for you. In fact, other than a few methods of becoming a lawyer not even worth discussing, it’s the only way. (yes, I know Kim Kardashian isn’t taking the traditional route. When you have her money you can waste your time “reading the law” as well).
In fact, in order to become a lawyer, the American Bar Association (ABA) requires that you acquire a law degree (almost always a J.D.) from an ABA-approved law school in order to be eligible to sit for any state’s bar exam in the country.
So, consider this your first (of many) logic lessons:
If you want to be a lawyer, you should go to law school. If you do not want to be a lawyer, do not go.
What are the costs of going from the military to law school?
As with anything else worth doing, backwards planning is a must. Heading from the military to law school is only helpful is that degree is worth the cost.
Several variables play into this. What kind of a lawyer do you want to be? How highly ranked is your law school? How are you financing your education? If you’ve got a GI Bill sitting on the shelf gathering dust and you’re not otherwise going to use it, law school may make a ton of sense. But remember, it’s three years of your life, and successful law students aren’t working jobs while they go, they’re treating law school like a full-time job.
A law degree is three years of full-time schooling (four years part time) at a cost of roughly (in 2021) $65,000 a year. The GI Bill will pay 100% of tuition costs for any public school. Most private law schools, including the elite ones like Yale and Harvard, also have unlimited Yellow Ribbon Program participation. If this is not familiar terminology to you, go look it up.
It’s important. I’ll wait. … … …
(Pro tip: If asking you to open a new tab to search for “yellow ribbon program” is too much…maybe law school isn’t for you)
Okay, so now you know just how important it is to have a 100% GI Bill rating. It opens up so many opportunities that aren’t otherwise available.
Living allowances are also paid by the VA on Chapter 33/GI Bill (only while actually in class, not during the summer) so my law school income looks like this:
-VA covers $195,000 of total tuition
-Roughly 24 months of living expenses at $1800 a month (based on the BAH of your school’s zip code)
If you can extend $45,000 over three years (plus whatever money you can earn during the summers) you can go to law school absolutely free. Adjust as needed using a BAH calculator for the zip code where your future school is located.
I want to underscore this important point: This is the biggest financial advantage you have as a vet.
Where other students must weigh the cost of their attendance, often in loans that balloon with interest, to the point where they often settle for a school that’s lesser than what they qualify for because of available scholarship money, you don’t have that problem. You can literally attend the best school you get into free of charge if you’re at 100% GI Bill. This is an immense advantage for your long-term financial health and career prospects.
You have an absolute competitive advantage in going from the military to law school. USE IT.
But that’s not all. There’s a super saiyan level of achievement that’s out there for those of you at the very top of the money-grubbing tables. Law schools are notorious for their pricing structure. Specifically, they essentially use the people paying full freight tuition to fund merit scholarships for students who they are attempting to attract.
But what if you’re not the plebe barely scraping in, but rather someone who they WANT to attract? Some schools, especially the public schools, will re-code merit scholarships to “living stipends” to encourage you to attend their schools. These payments skirt the VA regulations and end up directly in your pocket.
This is a real thing, I promise.
I’m advising a student this fall who has 100% GI Bill and has been accepted into the University of Michigan Law School, a top 10 school, with a $20,000 annual scholarship award. It has been re-coded to a living stipend that will deposit directly into his account while the VA pays 100% of his tuition. Yes, he is getting paid $60,000 by the University of Michigan to go to law school on top of what the VA is paying him. For technical reasons, this is really only a “thing” at public universities. You will not find this deal, almost assuredly, at Harvard or Columbia. You may, however, find it at Texas or UCLA. Know that it’s out there. Do your homework and take the smart path from military to law school.
Thinking about the rankings
There are over 200 ABA-approved law schools in America. But the classist nature of the legal sphere renders almost all of those J.D.s degrees “lower class” and MOST of them next to useless. Allow me to explain:
Law schools are traditionally tiered by a publication called US News World Report. This publication controls the prestige surrounding law schools and, thus, how lawyers sell their attorneys to clients. There are 14 traditional American law schools (the T-14) that have occupied the top 14 places in the USNWR rankings since the inception of the rankings.
If you have a degree from one of these 14 schools, you’re in pretty great shape relatively in the job market. They are schools with a “national reach”. This makes sense. If you have a degree from Harvard, you will be competitive in every American market as long as you sell yourself properly. If, however. you don’t have a degree from one of these 14 schools, the region where you want to work matters FAR MORE than the ranking of your school.
Consider:
The University of Arkansas is ranked #90 by USNWR. The University of Arizona is ranked #47. If you want to work in Little Rock, however, you’re MUCH BETTER OFF attending Arkansas than Arizona. Why is that? Because the networking opportunities and the “reach back” of the alumni in the Little Rock market are going to allow you to place into a job much easier out of Fayetteville, Arkansas than out of Tucson, Arizona. These schools are 40 spots apart in the rankings, but they’re essentially the same school aside from one consideration: one is the school you should attend if you want to work in Arkansas and the other is a school to attend if you want to work in Arizona.
In this way you should be working backwards. Choose the market where you want to work and THEN choose the law school that feeds that market. Want LA? Try UCLA, or USC. Want Miami? Try UF or UMiami. Each market is different, but it’s always easier to network into a location from a regional school (again, stressing this is NOT T-14) in the local market than from some market outside the domain, even from a higher-ranked school.
What’s the timeline?
Law school admissions operate on a “rolling admissions” system that runs roughly from September 1 through right up until classes start the following August. Unfortunately, many applicants take this to mean they can operate in an “I’ll get to it when I get to it” mindset. The contrary is actually true.
On September 1, law schools have more open seats and more scholarship money available than they will have at any point in the cycle. Though most schools don’t start admitting applicants until, at the earliest, November, the wisdom among the professional admissions counseling industry (yes, this is actually a thing) is that each applicant’s goal should be to have all materials READY TO GO on September 1.
That means your LSAC transcript processed for your undergraduate GPA, your completed LSAT score, your essays, your character admissions, and your letters of recommendation are all processed by that date. If you are missing one portion of the application, that’s fine on September 1. You’ve got a few weeks or so to get it corrected before you start losing opportunities. If you’re not close to it by September 1 it’s really time to step on the gas. If you’re missing materials at Thanksgiving, you really should be thinking about waiting one more year to start law school.
So let’s take an example military to law school path:
Let’s say you’re getting out of the military in February of 2024 and want to start law school in August of 2024. That means that hopefully you will have started preparing for the LSAT in fall of 2022 at the latest, taken your time to take the LSAT (maybe more than once) to get the score you want, have notified your recommenders and submitted all your transcripts, and then ideally you can have all of that out of the way so you can spend the summer of 2023 before working on your essays. In this ideal way, you can start your application cycle on September 1 of 2023 without the stress of everything coming late in the spring and no seats being available for even strong applicants.
Where do mistakes happen? This same applicant instead decides in Christmas of 2023 that she actually wants to go to law school and, for financial reasons, MUST start in August of 2024. This is a very typical situation where the applicant has set herself up for failure. She suddenly NEEDS an LSAT score on the first go, she NEEDS all her materials processed IMMEDIATELY and gets incredibly stressed when it takes the average 4-6 weeks. If she bombs the LSAT in January, something that happens when you don’t prepare properly, she feels the walls closing in, lowers her standards, and convinces herself that she’ll “be at the top of her class at a lower ranked school anyway.” Please trust me when I say that it doesn’t work this way.
Mark talking here: I personally used The Princeton Review to prep for the GRE and found their test service truly be second to none. At first glance, the price tag on these services can appear hefty, but when you factor in the difference that a good LSAT score can make on your career outcomes, the ROI is WELL worth it. To check out The Princeton Review’s LSAT 165+ prep course, go here and use code “LSAT165” to save $200. You can also check out their self-paced course.
This is how you do it wrong. Do not be like this. You’ve got to prepare, ideally, 1.5-2 years before you want to start your first day of classes.
Law School Itself
There are more considerations when it comes to heading from the military to law school and succeeding.
First, outside some small exceptions, you need a mastery of the English language in order to do well. This includes the ability to write coherently and read critically for hours on end and, yes, type under pressure. Law school is not “idea time” where you get to go argue about the law with other intellectuals. Instead, law school is a series of classes designed to help you “think like a lawyer” which is a stupid axiom for an outdated methodology of instruction.
What this involves is reading dozens (per class) of old court opinions, understanding the key information in them, and outlining the resulting rules into a coherent doctrine of existing law in order to prepare you for your single exam. Yes, most law school classes have only one exam. It almost always counts for 100% of your grade. It is stressful, even for those of us who have been on deployments. If you cannot read and write to a high level, and enjoy doing it, you’re setting yourself up for failure by attending law school.
Furthermore, law school is not graded against an objective standard. Instead, you’re graded on a standard curve. That is to say, you will be ranked first-last with all your classmates.
A decent way to imagine what that’s like is to think of a specific, competitive, selection course in the military where everybody already had to be a big fish to qualify to attend. Now imagine that everyone is gunning to be number 1. You could all theoretically be badass, but someone is still coming in last. Welcome to law school!
Certain jobs have strict grade cutoffs. Many high-paying jobs hire immediately after only your first (of three) years of law school. That means you have essentially 8 total tests that more or less determine your eligibility for some of those jobs. This is also stressful. That’s not to say you cannot be successful if you don’t end up at the top of your class, this is just something to ponder before attending.
One last thought, many of your classmates are coming into law school with significant pre-existing opportunities. Either they have a parent who is already a lawyer, some previous experience working at a law firm in another capacity, or someone is going to pull them up after they graduate no matter how they perform. Law school may be designed to be somewhat of a meritocracy, but the professional legal sphere is not.
Many people get jobs for reasons outside of their skill level and ability. If you are not one of the pre-selected, be aware that the legal field is incredibly classist, incredibly elitist, and that you are going to have to fit in to the job you want.
That leads me to my last piece of advice: try to identify what kind of a lawyer you want to be and talk to one before you go to law school. Yes, email one and ask them how they got to where they are because you’d like to be like them someday. Before heading from the military to law school, first learn what being a lawyer is like. It really is that simple.
As you can see from my unending writing, law students and lawyers love to talk about themselves. Head down to the JAG or TDS office and set up a meeting. Ask to be hooked up with someone that does what you want to do. All of those officers have J.D.s. They all know SOMEBODY who is doing what you want to do. Take advantage of your hookup.
If you’re already out, ask around your family and friends. SOMEBODY knows a lawyer. See if you can’t set up a 10-minute phone call and ask them how they got to where they are. Bonus point if they’ve been to law school in the last 5 years.
(Mark’s pro tip: go on LinkedIn and search “army lawyer” or “air force law” to pull up veterans wo are working in law. Message the people that look interesting and ask for a 20 minute call to learn more about their work.)
The Opportunity for Veterans at Law School
By now you’ve noticed that I speak about law school with a lot of warning language. This is purposeful. I don’t want you making an incredibly stupid decision. “But” , you ask, “you ended up attending, so what’s up with that?”
That brings me to the vet’s real advantage.
I attend a T-14. I was enlisted, and I have a degree from an online college that I earned for almost no money while I was on active duty. My undergraduate GPA was a 3.1, FAR below what any law school median is. Pretty much no graduate program in the country would want to accept me.
So how did I get to where I am?
The LSAT.
The LSAT is the greatest advantage vets have to go from the military to law school. Schools want vets. I promise. Schools LOVE vets. But they WILL NOT accept you, absent some other exceptional reason, if you don’t bump one of “the numbers”: either undergraduate GPA or LSAT.
The LSAT is a learnable test. It measures how much you can put your head to the grindstone and study, study, study until you have a score they want. It requires no previous knowledge. It’s simply a test of learnable processes. That’s the secret. That’s the opportunity. That’s all I did. I studied until I was capable of scoring above a median score for every school I wanted, then I took the real thing and put that score on record.
I hesitate to speak in platitudes, but if you truly want to be a lawyer, the single most important thing you can do is to get an LSAT score that’s above the median of the school you want to attend. If you can do that, the world opens up for you. More on this in the LSAT chapter.
Conclusion
There’s a lot more to this process than just what I’ve mentioned, but this is a good overview to scare away the people who aren’t serious about it. I invite you to read more, I’m happy to keep helping, but before you do, make sure you honestly answer the question: “Do I want to be a lawyer”?
Military to Law School: Evaluating and Choosing Law Schools (Part 2/7)
Related Articles:
100 Things Veterans Should Know Before Leaving the Military
Military to JD Interview: David Atkinson (Georgetown Law)
Military to MBA (Part 1/7): Is It for You?
Advice for veterans: No one Owes You Shit.
GI Bill® is a registered trademark of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.