In my very first post on this blog, I promised more detail about why the jobs that one might expect after law school aren't anything to look forward to. I'm fulfilling that promise here, and moreover offering some more reasons why you, yes you, dear undergraduate reader who is applying to law school, should decline to go there. Most of my examples come from litigation, because that's what I know, but I'll bet one could come up with an equally good set from transactional work too. My aim here is to come up with the definitive anti-practice-of-law essay, one to which I and others can point bright-eyed undergraduates to for some time to come. What follows is a loosely divided list of things that you might not know about the practice of law, and which should give you pause before you invest three years of your life and countless thousands of dollars in tuition and opportunity costs to go to law school. Law school really has little value other than to prepare you for a legal career of some sort. If you want to go into business or consulting, an MBA is quicker and provides more useful skills ("Thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature.), and, while lawyers do enter other careers (prominently writing for some reason) there's no reason to believe anything they got in law school put them there.
This topic has come up before: The Problem with the Legal Profession It's all about fear. Law firms prey on fear. Some of that fear is real. A lot of it is imaginary, and it is the imaginary fears that have created a system that appears to take really bright people and chew them up.
Law firm driven to rein in workload "You have this expectation that when you get out of law school, things will be better. Sometimes it's not true."
Why am I here? Let's face it. It's bullshit that people need to hire lawyers to solve their problems. It's ridiculous that the law is written in such confusing and arbitrarily convoluted language that ordinary people can't understand their rights or laws that are meant to protect them. And it's insane that to pay for law school you need to either be born rich or crazy. But who does it help to stay out of the field and let it be a one-sided conversation? That fundie guy uses the education he has received in science to (attempt to) dismantle its core assumptions and prove that his view of the world is correct. If I can do something analogous with my law degree, without convincing myself along the way that my core assumptions about humanity were wrong, then I will consider this law school thing a success.
Why you shouldn't go to law school | 
