JD, No Job, Debt - What An Opportunity!

Over 200 comments flooded THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Law Blog post on the law Have-nots - those of you who have received a JD but have no job in law and no income [yet] to pay those student loans. Given that heavy traffic on the blog, you can bet the folks in charge will be featuring the most extreme examples of the Have-Nots.  That's in their self-interest, especially with new owner Rupert Murdoch ready to pounce.

But the real story here is what will your gen do in response.  You're not the first gen to invest time, money and hope in a degree that didn't pan out. 

We Baby Boomers were there first. My stay in the doctoral program for linguistics and literature at the University of Michigan coincided with the government's realizing it had made an error forecasting the demand for college professors with those credentials. 

Our story turned out to be one of shrewd leverage.  We deconstructed what skills and experience we could put out there and sell.  I spent about 20 years as a speechwriter/ghostwriter.  My best friend who was writing her dissertation on Virginia Woolf became a trainer in government.  Another school chum also dissertating on Crazy Virginia went high up the ladder in human resources at a bank.

Your advantage is that for your gen there is ample research on the transformational power of adversity.  We assumed we had done something wrong. 

In his breakthrough book "Firing Back," Jeffrey Sonnenfeld [who had plenty of his own career setbacks] documents how it wasn't until an unexpected visit with adversity that ordinary professionals excelled.  On page 48, Sonnenfeld observes, "... leaders who triumphed over adversity recognized that greatness was thrust upon them by opportunities they did not seek."  Steve Jobs, the patron saint of overcoming obstacles, essentially says the same thing in his now-classic Stanford commencement speech "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish." And Bill Clinton aka Houdini seems to become stronger and smarter after each career crisis.

A number of you have contacted me, asking: Do I do career coaching?  The answer is yes. But if you were intelligent enough to navigate getting into law school and graduating you can probably put together a new career path yourself. 

Here are the steps to greatness:

• Never panic.  Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Kanter sees panic as the source of all career failures. In her book "Confidence," Kanter notes, "It's not mistakes that cause winners to lose, it's panic.  Panic is a sudden, anxious feeling of loss of control, and panicking can make a small fumble worse, by causing people to lose their heads and forget to think clearly."

• Get a job, any job.  Money coming in, no matter how little, is not money going out.

• While you're at the survival job that might not even support survival, observe how people make a good living.  What are the Emotional IQ, skills, knowledge base required? Read the want ads in many categories.  The goal is to think outside the law box.

• Outside the law box may be creative ventures that pay off big.  What about a documentary on your journey from a JD into the unknown? You can chronicle it on a blog or video feeds on YouTube.  Maybe you can write a play or novel about this experience? Do stand-up?

• Take a comprehensive inventory of your work experiences since childhood.  Perhaps you helped out in the family deli or sold the most brownies for a fundraiser.  Detail your skills.  Review your personality strengths.  How could you package or bundle together some of these into a resume and cover letter to try going after non-law opportunities?  For example, as a law graduate you are probably highly verbal and aggressive.  You were a real little salesperson as a child.  What about breaking into sales, marketing, public affairs, and/or public relations.  Here's the 2% Rule.  About 98% of what you try won't be a fit.  The other 2% will create magic.

• For those whose passion remains in law, there are a growing number of opportunities in legal journalism and publishing.  Check monster.com, journalismjobs.com, mediabistro.com [membership required].  If your strength is marketing, more and more law firms, of all sizes, are hiring full-time marketing staff. Having a JD is a plus.

• Thank those who suggest that you go for another degree.  The more you thank them for this inane advice the more quickly they will leave you alone.

 

• The mindset here is opportunity, not the salary or prestige.  A job leads to a better job.  No job leads no where.

• Heed Hofstadter's Law: A venture takes longer than estimated.  For some reason, a 180-degree career shift requires anywhere from 18 months to 4 years.  It isn't like those inspirational stories in the B-level magazines.

• Be prepared to remember this time of struggle as one of the most astounding in your life - to you and to everyone who knows you.  You got through adversity to a greatness you never envisioned.  Expert on uncertainty Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls that encountering a Black Swan [unexpected development] and making it an advantage.

If you don't exactly feel lucky being blessed with this opportunity, forget feelings.  It's what you do.    

Comments

[shelly]

Hi, as i was going through ur blog i found some interesting section..I would like to get ur hand as my link partner...i have sites related to finance,and having good pr which will help u a lot.

I can provide u link form good content page or article page of mi site..your blog is pretty nice.

I am ready to post one article in ur blog...

if ur interested then plz mail me ..at shellybrown1984(at)gmail.com

Regards
Shelly.

[Law Student]

The word is out: if someone next year is dumb enough to go to a TTT (third tier toilet), they deserve to drown in debt. The world needs ditch-diggers too. Prospective students need to help themselves because these terrible schools will bleed them dry otherwise. If you can't get above a 160 on the LSAT, you probably should save yourself the time and money and not go to law school.

[sd]

this sucks

[Lawyer]

I suspect many overstate the problems in the job market. That is, yes, you may not be able to find a job with a V50 or V100 firm, but the reality is that most lawyers don't work in those rarefied airs anyway. Have you looked at smaller firms, government jobs, public interest, in-house, or clerkships? While it's true you don't want to just take any job, the reality is that taking a job as a lawyer will probably pay more than anything you can find now which you are not as qualified for.

Considering moving. You don't have to work in a major city to pull down a nice income. If you want to be a litigator, move out to the county seats and become one of those "local counsels" that we all hated going up against b/c your opponent played golf with the judge.

Some companies will take on new lawyers in house, with the expectation that you stay there for a while to give that company a return on your investment.

Ultimately, yes, some lawyers simply won't find the job they want/need, and yes, there are too many law schools giving too many students an unrealistic view of the what happens upon graduation. But too many lawyers I know and went to school with went to law school b/c they didn't know what else to do. That isn't the Dean of Admissions' fault.

[Jeremy]

The traditional wisdom is to attend the best ranked law school that accepts you. If you rack up $150K in debt, and end up in the middle of the pack, your prospects are glum.

But is you ignore conventional wisdom, and enroll into a lower-ranked school that offers a good financial aid package, you can graduate higher in the class and with less debt.

True, the lower ranked school will make it more difficult to land a high paying job right out of school. But high salary is less important if you have less debt.

[J G]

Question: did you baby boomers leave school with over 3x the median household income in non-default debt? I wonder if Harvard Business School also teaches anything about compound interest.

It's very easy to get crushed under nearly $200k of law school debt that institutions have encouraged students to take on. The numbers are staggering and for many there will be no way around them.

For example, a brief glance at the journalism jobs site shows the average salary offered for specialty journalists (legal, financial) with relevant experience to be about $40k-$45k. After federal and state taxes, you can plan on having at most about $30k left. Since these jobs will be in major metropolitan areas, you will have to spend at least $1500 for rent a month, leaving $12k. Living extremely frugally will leave you with about $3000 for things like student loans and health care. In the meantime, you may have accrued up to an additional $25k in interest. Even if you get $5k annual raises for the rest of your career you will never catch your debt.

No consumer finance company would extend $200k of unsecured credit to an individual with that kind of earning capacity because there would be an extremely high risk of default. Fortunately, educational lenders have convinced congress to bar default on these obligations, ensuring that there can be no escape from debt servitude.

JDs are resourceful people who are very capable of reassessing their situation and starting a different career path. The problem is that their ability to forge any meaningful standard of living from their new careers is hobbled by crippling financial obligations.

No amount of research on the "transformational power of adversity" can compensate for this.