The road to riches runs straight through Wall Street, financial capital of the universe. The world’s top lawyers work here, starting at $160K, raking in $250K and up after only three years on the job.
Small potatoes, you say? That’s just the beginning. Those who make partner six or seven years later hit the jackpot, their incomes soaring to seven figures. Even here in New York, the financial capital of the universe, that kind of money says WOW!
Yes, but there are lawyers, and there are lawyers. A mere address on this international financial highway is not enough to convey Wall Street stardom. You need an office in a top ranked law firm. You want the million dollar view. You want to be the big fish in the big pond.
Congratulations! Your timing is perfect. Competition these days for that corner office is getting scarcer by the minute.
For one thing, law school applicant numbers are dwindling. The number of people taking the LSAT – the law school admissions test – is the lowest in 10 years. Those who do take the test tend to be ho-hum types with average scores – not the cream of the crop.
Do you hear what I’m saying? Score high on your LSAT and your odds soar for a coveted spot in one of those designer law schools you need to graduate from to hit the big time.
As Above The Law put it recently: “Fewer high scorers are taking the LSAT, while the number of people who can’t even break 145 remains strong.” Yes, Virginia, it looks like your dream job is just an LSAT away.
Let me guess: You have no idea what I’m talking about. That, my friend, is why the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Unless you had an uncle in the business, you would never know how to get there from here.
Until now.
Like they say in the stock market, timing is everything. Herewith, your map on the road to legal riches:
1. The college of your choice. You don’t have to go to a fancy college. Pick a school where you can thrive. Community college is the perfect stepping stone, especially if you’re one of those people who has to work for a living.
2. Go to the head of the class. Ace every class you take. Never take the Pass-Fail option. This will kill your chances of entering, say, Harvard Law School. And be strategic — this is not the time to prove you are the first amazing “A” some nutty professor has ever dished out. Avoid at all cost: (a) all online colleges; (b) all non-accredited schools; (c) all for-profit schools. Sure, they have great ads. Just don’t waste your money.
3. Major in money. You don’t have to be “pre-law.” 2011 summer associates at one BigLaw firm I know held degrees in molecular biology (from UC Berkeley), broadcasting (Northwest Missouri), nursing (Univ. of Rochester), psychology (N.Y.U.) and chemical engineering (Princeton). Only one in five majored in political science, the traditional “pre-law” concentration.
4. Volunteer. School clubs with services for the underprivileged are probably most convenient. Don’t dabble. Commitment is what counts. The dates on your curriculum vitae should be counted in years, not months. Better to volunteer once a month for 5 years than once a day for 5 months. If it’s legal, even better.
5. Work, work, work. Yes, the cream rises to the top; the 99% sweat it out. Intimidated? Afraid you won’t measure up around those white-shoe country club trust fund babies? Can’t tell the salad fork from the dessert spoon? Listen, the Financial District is littered with lazy rich kids who graduated from Ivy League schools and now follow their parents’ footsteps down The Street. Not all CEOs are enamored of spoiled brats. Somebody has to do the heavy lifting! Seriously, employers always need young, hungry candidates who relish the opportunity to work like a dog. This means you! Work your way through college, even if it takes you 5 years. When you’re done, anyone who reads your resume will hear what you’re saying in an instant: No one has handed me anything. Trust me, you do not need that silver spoon.
6. Target your law school references. Your law school application is going to require letters of recommendation. Identify three very important people in your life who can’t say enough great things about you. Then spend every waking moment reinforcing their admiration. You don’t have to ask for their endorsement yet. Just don’t ever stop thinking about those recommendations. I know a Wall Street partner who scored a rec from the college dean by working in the financial aid office at Queens College. He insists today that this is what put him over the top into NYU Law (#6 on the 2011 US News rankings).
7. Ace the LSATs. This gets easier every day. Fewer test-takers are signing up; more test-takers are doing badly. Some 22,000 people suffered through LSAT sessions this past February 2012, said to be the lowest acitvity since 2001, according to data from the Law School Admission Council. Sign up for a Kaplan course and do all the homework. Trust me, everyone else will. The LSAT blog ponts out that in 2010, there were about 4,052 170+ scoring applicants. Your LSAT score will catapult you to a top-tier, high-paying summer associate position which by the way amounts to a job offer. There’s an LSAT blog to obsess over that while you’re waiting for the big day with columns like ” 7 Sage LSAT tips to improve your score .”
8. Go to Harvard. Someone has to get in. May as well be you. Life is too short to be second-rate. Look at it this way: If you go to a top law school, Wall Street firms recruit you, instead of you applying to them. By the way: Forget Yale. Few of those eggheads practice law; they do things like become televangelists, or run for President. Not sure about Harvard? OK – put applications in for the entire T14 — that’s law school shorthand for “Top 14” on the US News rankings (in contrast with “TTT” and “TTTT” law schools, which you must avoid like the plague. No one wants to hire these people). Warning: High GPAs get unsolicited scholarships from TTT and TTTT law schools. Do not compromise. Go for the golden ring.
9. Aim for BigLaw. Getting a high-paying BigLaw job on Wall Street is quite simply not as hard as it used to be. Law school admissions are down, which means the competition is less fierce. The Top Law Schools website provides guidance on personal statements to people like you. Don’t apply to anything below the top 15 on their list. To get into Yale, you need to score between 170 and 177 on the LSAT. (But like I said, forget Yale, unless you want to represent rice pickers in some Bolivian village.)
10. Make Law Review. This can be something of a mystery on law school campuses. Selection takes place at the end of your first year. Whether you do or do not “make law review” defines pretty much the rest of your legal career. At Harvard, 44 students are invited to join the Harvard Law Review each year. Acceptance is mostly based on a writing competition, plus first year grades, plus sometimes other criteria. Wes Henricksen, author of the popular Making Law Review: The Expert’s Guide to Mastering the Write-On Competition , interviewed law review members at several competitive law schools to find out how they handled the writing competition. It would not hurt to read up on Henricksen.
11. Take the Summer Associate Offer. Top tier law schools are good for one thing: You get offers. And you don’t even have to graduate first. Those offers roll in at the end of your second year, when Wall Street law firms are looking for their next wave of new lawyers. These Summer Associate jobs pay very, very well – as well as a permanent job offer, right out of the gate. This is where most Wall Street legal job offers come from. Note, though, that unless your daddy is a ceo or board bigwig, you must be on Law Review to be taken seriously.
Decisions, decisions. If you cross the t’s and dot the i’s, you too will someday be contemplating your future career on Wall Street. The mind reels.
Hey, you don’t have to wait this long to study the two annual lists put out by American Lawyer Magazine: The AmLaw 100 and the AmLaw A-List. These rankings are like maps of buried treasure, the legal version of the Fortune 500 (which happens to make up a lot of the client base of the AmLaw 100). You’re looking for firms that have high billing rates and pay their lawyers a ridiculous amount of money.
Look at it this way. The 1 percent has been skating for generations. The 99 percent were locked out of their private club. For most of history, the only way work on Wall Street was to be born there. And you had to be male. Today, anyone can play in the sandbox.
The late Joseph H. Flom, name partner at Skadden Arps who was editor of law review at Harvard, was the wrong religion. His son points out that when Flom graduated, “he couldn’t get a job at a ‘good’ firm – they didn’t hire Jews.”
Baritone Paul Robeson, the former NFL pro – Columbia Law grad, never got to practice law. He had to settle for becoming became a famous singing actor after a secretary at the Wall Street law firm that hired him refused to take orders from a black man.
And when Sheila L. Birnbaum, a litigator so legendary she has a nickname — “Queen of Torts” –graduated from NYU Law School in 1965, she couldn’t let anyone know she could type or “they would start using me as a secretary.”
Almost seems like yesterday.
Remember, living well is the best revenge. Cha-ching Cha-ching!
