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Law School for a Comp Sci major
Lewisham
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi guys,
I'm currently "in-between education", as I graduated with my Computer Science Masters last year, and I have since realised that I really really do enjoy research and learning, so I will be applying to head back to uni for a PhD in Computer Science for 2008, hopefully to study video game AI.
However, I have had this niggling suspicion that I should also be thinking about Law School. I took one class in my degree; called Law and IT, which I greatly enjoyed. I came top of the class, and I have a natural aptitude for writing and arguing (I am sure my English teacher from secondary school is upset I'm wasting these talents). I eat up everything that Lawrence Lessig comes up with, and the regular columns that appear in Wired about legal issues in tech.
I read this this morning:
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/05/20/ap3739692.html
and I have been entertaining the thought ever since. I am deeply interested in the legal aspects around IT... but I don't have any interest in non-technical work. It's the technology that interests me, and the law that applies to it, I don't have any interest in property law or pension law or anything else.
What is Law School like? Can I specialise in technology law fairly easily? What's the actual job like? I need to learn. Always. I'm hooked on Monkey-Phonics, Technology-Phonics and Your Mum-phonics. If I feel like I'm doing the same thing each day, I'll want to die. I enjoy Computer Science (not boring business-man IT!) because there's always a different way of doing things, always a new technology or piece of research coming down the pipe. I wonder if law has the stimulus I need.
The LSAT looks like a cake-walk, so I'm not fussed about that either.
The other consideration is what happens when I graduate. Where do lawyers go? Is it all working for a practice, or can you do policy research and things? I want to be Lessig, not Cochran. I have friends who have graduated from law in the UK, and they have to pay their dues in legal practices doing shit jobs in uninteresting departments like pensions before they get anything of interest. I'm not sure I'm prepared to continue paying my dues at 28 and with 7 years of schooling.
With the way academia/research is, there may not be the jobs I want, and that PhD won't be worth all that much to me. I certainly won't be bagging the big bucks, but I will hopefully be able to be a researcher and continue learning day in and out.
My girlfriend's family are heavily into law, and she thinks I don't have the mind for it. I am not very good at remembering the details of something, which "is all law is". I am good at spotting weak arguments and the main points of things, but I have a habit of not remembering whether such-and-such a recipe needed one cup of rice or two and things like that. She also said "you had better be passionate about it, because law school is designed to kill you, and then you get married to your job. You only like coming in from 9-5 [true], my uncle works 12 hour days. Otherwise you are wasting your time."
What do you guys think? It's hard to crystallise my thoughts.
I'm currently "in-between education", as I graduated with my Computer Science Masters last year, and I have since realised that I really really do enjoy research and learning, so I will be applying to head back to uni for a PhD in Computer Science for 2008, hopefully to study video game AI.
However, I have had this niggling suspicion that I should also be thinking about Law School. I took one class in my degree; called Law and IT, which I greatly enjoyed. I came top of the class, and I have a natural aptitude for writing and arguing (I am sure my English teacher from secondary school is upset I'm wasting these talents). I eat up everything that Lawrence Lessig comes up with, and the regular columns that appear in Wired about legal issues in tech.
I read this this morning:
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/05/20/ap3739692.html
and I have been entertaining the thought ever since. I am deeply interested in the legal aspects around IT... but I don't have any interest in non-technical work. It's the technology that interests me, and the law that applies to it, I don't have any interest in property law or pension law or anything else.
What is Law School like? Can I specialise in technology law fairly easily? What's the actual job like? I need to learn. Always. I'm hooked on Monkey-Phonics, Technology-Phonics and Your Mum-phonics. If I feel like I'm doing the same thing each day, I'll want to die. I enjoy Computer Science (not boring business-man IT!) because there's always a different way of doing things, always a new technology or piece of research coming down the pipe. I wonder if law has the stimulus I need.
The LSAT looks like a cake-walk, so I'm not fussed about that either.
The other consideration is what happens when I graduate. Where do lawyers go? Is it all working for a practice, or can you do policy research and things? I want to be Lessig, not Cochran. I have friends who have graduated from law in the UK, and they have to pay their dues in legal practices doing shit jobs in uninteresting departments like pensions before they get anything of interest. I'm not sure I'm prepared to continue paying my dues at 28 and with 7 years of schooling.
With the way academia/research is, there may not be the jobs I want, and that PhD won't be worth all that much to me. I certainly won't be bagging the big bucks, but I will hopefully be able to be a researcher and continue learning day in and out.
My girlfriend's family are heavily into law, and she thinks I don't have the mind for it. I am not very good at remembering the details of something, which "is all law is". I am good at spotting weak arguments and the main points of things, but I have a habit of not remembering whether such-and-such a recipe needed one cup of rice or two and things like that. She also said "you had better be passionate about it, because law school is designed to kill you, and then you get married to your job. You only like coming in from 9-5 [true], my uncle works 12 hour days. Otherwise you are wasting your time."
What do you guys think? It's hard to crystallise my thoughts.
Lewisham on
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Posts
I go to law school in the U.S., so I don't know how well it will translate to the NZ experience.
I just finished my first year. To say that it was the most difficult academic experience of my life would be a pitiful understatement. Even if you find the material to be relatively easy to grasp (which I did, though I seemed to be in a pretty small minority), there is a ridiculous amount of material which you need to read every day.
Essentially, you have to study for every class period in law school as if you're studying for finals in undergrad.
Hopefully Stanford or Berkeley.
I haven't been to law school, so I can't comment on that.
I have been involved with the actual practice of law, which I can comment on. Effectively, legal work runs the gamut from extreme tedium to extreme intensity. It is not uncommon for an associate to be given 10-20 boxes (like full document boxes - the kind that will hold 10-20 reams of paper) of documents, completely unorganized, and asked to make sense of it, determine whether there's anything of use in there, catalog it, and so on. Also, if you miss something that could have made a difference in the case...well, that's a possibility you don't even want to think about. In preparing for a trial, a good lawyer will come up with perhaps 100 carefully crafted arguments and PowerPoint slides so they can actually use two. Litigation is like a chess game and you need to be thinking and planning three moves ahead. Always.
There's a tension between doing law on the fly and preparation. You have to be ultra-prepared for any possibility. If something happens you didn't anticipate, then you didn't prepare well enough.
That's the tedious part. The intensity is there too. Law is also done on the fly. Once you've done your prep, you have to have all those 100s of possibilities in your head, and when one comes up, you act on it. Taking depositions, going to trial, sitting and waiting for the verdict to be read. Sitting in a courtroom listening to a witness for the other side being interrogated, and having to remember whose deposition had the one-line quote that refutes the guy's claim and pulling it out for redirect. I've done all that. No experience quite like it. The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. The stress levels are heightened as well. Always the stress. Some people thrive on it, some don't.
Law requires a special temperment, one I do not have, which is why I am not a lawyer. There are two things that you need to be a lawyer:
1. The instinct to fight. I don't have this. I don't like fighting with people, I like trying to come to agreement. I like it when everybody's happy. I like win-win situations. The U.S. legal system is by its nature adversarial.
2. To be able to deal with the fact that you can work as hard as you possibly can, master all the material, come up with responses and answers to every possible outcome, and still lose completely. Almost no other profession is like this. Imagine if you understood all the material for a class inside and out, and study really hard, and you go take a test, and you feel really good about the answers, and then the teacher says that congratulations, you got an F. And you just cost somebody who put their faith in you a lot of money to boot.
Law is detail-oriented. Spotting the weak argument is the easy part. Spotting the subtle flaw in the strong argument is where cases are won and lost. Keeping all the various what-ifs and what-happeneds straight is not easy and absolutely necessary anyway.
Anyway, technology is a booming area in the law, especially in the fields of commerce and intellectual property.
In addition to being very lucrative, the law in that area is really in its infancy, so it will be very interesting to be a part of it.
As far as specializing in a given area, most law schools let you do that. However, in the first year, everybody takes the same classes. The standard first year curriculum includes contracts, torts, property, criminal law, writing and research, civil procedure, and maybe constitutional law (though a lot of schools are making that a second year course now).
I can't really give you any advice on career prospects, but having a law degree by now means restricts you to being a lawyer. It can be extremely useful in almost any field.
I have to say though, it sounds like I simply don't have the brain function (details, reading huge missives) to do the lawyer thing. I'd really need to think hard.
But they'd love to have a CS major, I'm sure.
What you're doing in law school is not learning the law. It is learning how the law works, and how to quickly absorb massive amounts of information, parse it, and use the relevant stuff to make strong arguments. It is about spotting issues in fact patterns, and making arguments.
Your exams are pretty much going to be, you get a fact pattern, a question about it, and you write for three hours. That's your only grade in the class. No other tests or quizzes or homework. Just three hours of writing. Oh, and you don't get a grade based on how well you do. No, everything is on a curve, so you are measured against your classmates. You could write an excellent exam, but if you are in a class full of people that also wrote really great exams, well, you get a B rather than an A.
Your daily classes? Well, pretty much you get between 20 and 50 pages to read for the average class. You go in. The professor picks someone, and they ask questions of them. It is not a lecture. It is the professors testing the students on materials. You have a question? The professor makes has you answer your own question. On really good days, the professor will pick you, and only you, all class. An hour and a half barrage of questions. 90% chance of looking stupid at least once. But if you really get the material, man, there is nothing better. You feel great, your professor smiles, after class other students congratulate you for a job well done. It is really rewarding, even if it only happens rarely.
It's pretty miserable. But not hard. It just takes dedication.
CB: You got your second semester grades already? You must have done well at GG to transfer! Congrats!
OP: Uh...you should do more research on what law school and the legal profession are actually like - starting places would be One L by Scott Turow, and Law School Confidential.
If you want to do tech law stuff, you don't need a compsci phd. You need a JD, though. My advice is one or the other. Most people aren't doing what larry lessig is doing - working for the EFF and like-minded organizations is one of the hardest gigs to get, and it's highly school dependent. If this is your desired career track, you should only be looking at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Chicago. Maybe michigan, penn, berkeley and duke. The LSAT is easy, but to get into any of those schools you have to be in the 98th or 99th percentile.
The other problem is that with a jd from one of those schools you will have A) ~$150k in debt (this is true for any law school without a scholarship, actually.), and
It's possible to do this. You can be an expert witness or legal consultant, which gets you as close to practicing law as you can get without actually going to law school. You can study computer law and teach it, as well. There are probably some workshops and conferences, and if so you can do research in the area, but I'm not sure. However, most of the people I know who get deeply into the teaching aspect have a JD as well as a PhD, or they have a CS Masters and a JD.
Going into law school with a technical background can be really cool. Law school does not teach you how to be a lawyer, it teaches you how to think like one. In my experience, people with technical backgrounds (I've got a bunch of engineer/lawyer buddies) had an easier time grasping the logical, step-by-step, approach to legal reasoning and it paid off for them big time. At the same time, some of them had a more difficulties with accepting the fact that in the law, there are very few absolutes. Everything is liquid and more often than not, the "answer" changes depending on how you frame/approach the answer. The most common answer to any question you'll hear in law school is "it depends..." That said, a good, solid argumentative streak goes a long way in helping to get over the lack of absolutes.
Based on your background, regarding the patent bar, you've got something most law students don't. In order to sit for the patent bar, you need an undergraduate degree in a technical field. Not only is work in this area exploding right now, but the lack of technical lawyers makes the field... lucrative, if you play your cards right, go to a school that's good at this kind of training and (most importantly) itwhat you really want to do. Further more, as a patent lawyer you'd be exposed to LOTS of different technologies and (from the OP) it sounds like that's the kind of stuff you like.
Law school is hard but, in my experience, it is nothing like One-L or The Paper Chase. That may have been the way it was in the 60's but these days, even you most bad-ass socratic professors are generally pretty friendly and will help you outside of class if you just ask them. Nobody at my school hung themselves because the pressure was just too great.
Finally, regarding relationships. You said you have a girlfriend, it's probably good that her families into law- that might make things easier. Law school is hard on relationships. In my class of about 100, we had around 20 divorces in the three years I was there and I can't even begin to guess how many people broke up with long time boyfriend/girlfriends. I think there are two main reasons for this phenomenon. First, law school is a HUGE time commitment. The people above spoke about the amount of reading, that doesn't count the class time, the writing, the extra curriculars like Moot Court, or the hours and hours spent before finals trying to cram as much information into your head as you possibly can. Some significant others just don't understand why you had lots of time for them in undergrad but don't anymore. The second reason I think law school affects relationships is that, in subtle and not so subtle ways, it changes your personality. You are bring trained to argue. You are being told how to cut through bullshit using only words and rewarded for doing it effectively. It tends to make you a bit more cocky and a hell of a lot "meaner" when someone disagrees with you. The first time you accidentally start cross-examining your significant other during an argument can be very frustrating for them. I'm not saying that going to law school will doom your relationships (I met the love of my life in Torts class) but it's something to be wary of.
Even after all that, people make it through just fine and, looking back, I had a great time.