throwawaylaw

That's rough dude.

The best I can say is at least you have relatively secure and decent-paying employment at the end of the road, but I know that isn't much consolation.

This is a good way of approaching the situation. Thanks.

So how do I do this?

Not really no. In-house counsel are hired pretty much exclusively from the ranks of associates at firms with several years experience. I guess most big companies don't like to pay and build out the capacity to to develop in-house legal talent when they can just let the law firms do it.

The legal hiring model is like the opposite of a "let the talent rise" kinda system. It's pretty depressing. If you don't get tracked with a good job early on, good luck with decent-paying private sector work.

Thanks for your comments.

Overwhelmingly majority of my loans are either federal, or a type of loan (GradPLUS) which you can consolidate with federal and get debt forgiveness on.

So yeah I've factored IBR into my plans, and might do public interest for the debt forgiveness (and because I don't have a lot else going on at the moment anyways).

Even 10 years is a long haul though!

Thanks for your comments. I'll comment on joining the legal profession at the entry level and on public interest law.

How legal hiring works at big law schools is this: you go through your first year and get your grades. At the beginning of your second year, you interview with big firms. You hopefully get an offer to work at one summer of your second year. You do well that summer and hopefully get an offer.

This is the primary hiring pipeline for all big firms. A much smaller pipeline is lateraling over from another big firm after you've worked there a few years, but still, you need get through this pipeline at some firm.

If you miss this window, you're basically finished in terms of prospects at a big firm. A couple of people manage to pick up a job their third year but its pretty hard (I tried but failed).

It's a really weird system I know. But yeah, there's no way for me to go to a big firm and say "I'll work for free if you give me a shot."

I could do that with much smaller firms but then instead of 160k market salary + high-level, interesting legal work being the end game its more like 40k and much less interesting work.

As to public interest orgs like EFF, if I work at some place like that, then between the federal government program and my school's program I can get some assistance and, after 10 years, get my debt forgiven. I'm looking into this seriously and this is my "backup" plan. 10 years is a long haul for something I'm not too excited about (see post) and at a very low salary, though.

2 and 3 are interesting, thanks.

As to 1 (JAG) I've looked into it extensively. Every branch except Army is insanely competitive and Army is just super-competitive. I might have a decent shot at Army though, but decided that it wasn't for me.

yeah this is a good point, thanks.

Oh I had a plan it just hit the skids when I didn't get any offers from law firms...I think it was a bad plan from the get-go though.

I'm not sure what I would do.

I have an idea or two for an app but I need to develop the coding skills.

I game to relax. Steam for the win!

I have lots of friends going into patent law.

But most of them have PhDs in the hard sciences and if you look at job listings they tend to want that.

Oh and don't worry about more debt, I don't think that's possible at this point :)

Yeah I'm going to be on IBR no matter what, it's the only way I won't go into default.

My loans are all mixed but a good chunk of them are at the GradPLUS rate which is 8.5%.