I should also mention that I am generally excited to chat with EAs considering law school. PM me if interested, or join the Effective Altruism & Law Facebook Group.
The 80,000 Hours career review on UK commercial law finds that “while almost 10% of the Members of Parliament are lawyers, only around 0.6% have any background in high-end commercial law.” I have been unable to find any similar analysis for the US. Do you know of any?
I dug up a few other places 80,000 Hours mentions law careers, but I couldn’t find any article where they discuss US commercial law for earning-to-give. The other mentions I found include:
In their profile on US AI Policy, one of their recommended graduate programs is a “prestigious law JD from Yale or Harvard, or possibly another top 6 law school.”
In this article for people with existing experience in a particular field, they write “If you have experience as a lawyer in the U.S. that’s great because it’s among the best ways to get positions in government & policy, which is one of our top priority areas.”
It’s also mentioned in this article that Congress has a lot of HLS graduates.
TL;DR, I think EAs should probably use the following heuristics if they are interested in some career for which law school is a plausible path:
If you can get into a T3 law school (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), have a fairly strong prior that it’s worth going.
If you can get into a T6 law school (Columbia, Chicago, NYU), probably take it.
If you can get into a T14 law school, seriously consider it. But employment statistics at the bottom of the T14 are very different from those at the top.
Be wary of things outside the T14.
In general, definitely carefully research employment prospects for the school you’re considering.
Other notes:
The 80K UK commercial law ETG article significantly underestimates how much US-trained lawyers can make. Starting salary for commercial law firms in the US are $190K. It is pretty easy to get these jobs from T6 schools. Of course, American students will probably have higher debt burden.
ROI on the mean law schools is actually quite good, though should be adjusted for risk since the downside (huge debt + underemployment) is huge.
If you’re going to ETG, try to get a bunch of admissions offers and heavily negotiate downwards to get a good scholarship offer within the T6 or ~T10. Chicago, NYU, and Columbia all offer merit scholarships; if you want to ETG, these seem like good bets.
If you’re going to ETG, probably work in Texas, where you get NY salaries at a much lower cost of living and tax burden.
If you’re going into law for policy or other non-ETG reasons, go to a law school with a really good debt forgiveness program (unless you get a good scholarship elsewhere). HLS’s LIPP is quite good; Yale has an even better similar program.
You should also account for the possibility of economic downturn; many law firms stopped hiring during the ’08 crash.
If you’re an undergrad, you have a high leverage over your law school potential choices. 80% of your law school admissions decision will be based on your GPA and LSAT scores. Carefully research the quartiles for your target schools and aim for at least median, ideally >75%ile. The LSAT is very learnable with focused study. Take a formal logic course and LSAT courses if you can afford them. This will help tremendously in law school scholarship negotiations.
This is not what I set out to do when I began my career. When I was sitting where you are, back in 1989, I would’ve told you that I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t really know what lawyers do all day, but I knew they first had to go to law school, and school was familiar to me.
I had been competitively tracked from middle school to high school to college, and by going straight to law school I knew I would be competing at the same kinds of tests I’d been taking ever since I was a kid, but I could tell everyone that I was now doing it for the sake of becoming a professional adult.
I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York law firm, but it turned out to be a very strange place. From the outside, everybody wanted to get in; and from the inside, everybody wanted to get out.
When I left the firm, after seven months and three days, my coworkers were surprised. One of them told me that he hadn’t known it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. Now that might sound odd, because all you had to do to escape was walk through the front door and not come back. But people really did find it very hard to leave, because so much of their identity was wrapped up in having won the competitions to get there in the first place.
Just as I was leaving the law firm, I got an interview for a Supreme Court clerkship. This is sort of the top prize you can get as a lawyer. It was the absolute last stage of the competition. But I lost. At the time I was totally devastated. It seemed just like the end of the world.
About a decade later, I ran into an old friend. Someone who had helped me prepare for the Supreme Court interview, whom I hadn’t seen in years. His first words to me were not, you know, “Hi Peter” or “How are you doing?” But rather, “So, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” Because if I hadn’t lost that last competition, we both knew that I never would have left the track laid down since middle school, I wouldn’t have moved to California and co-founded a startup, I wouldn’t have done anything new.
Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more like an alibi for the present. It was a way to explain to anyone who would ask – to my parents, to my peers, and most of all to myself – that there was no need to worry. I was perfectly on track. But it turned out in retrospect that my biggest problem was taking the track without thinking really hard about where it was going.
Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.
This is a pretty obvious point, but I find it really hard to think about comparative advantage. Naively, if all someone know about themself is that they’re admitted to T14 but not T3, it tells them that they have less opportunities in Law. But it also tells them that they have less opportunities outside of law as well.
So it seems really hard to think about this, even in statistical aggregate.
I think it might be somewhat more complicated. As far as I know, the LSAT+GPA measure is actually a pretty strong predictor of law school performance as far as standardized tests go. But there’s some controversy in the literature about how much law school grades matter for success. Good law schools also have much higher bar passage rates, though there could be confounding factors there too.
In general, the legal market seems somewhat weird to me. E.g., it’s pretty easy for T3 students to get a BigLaw job, but often hard for students near the bottom of the T14 too. I do not understand why firms don’t just hire such students and thereby lower wages, which are very high. My best guess is, Hansonianly, that there’s a lot of signaling going on, where firms try to signal their quality by hiring only T6 law students. Also, I imagine the T6 credential is important for recruiting clients, which is very important to BigLaw success.
But query how much of this matters if you want to do a non-ETG law path.
What impactful career paths do you think law school might prepare you particularly well for, besides ETG and AI Policy? If an EA goes to law school and discovers they don’t want to do ETG or AI Policy, where should they look next?
Do these options mostly look like “find something idiosyncratic and individual that’s impactful”, or do you see any major EA pipelines that could use tons of lawyers?
Yeah, I think I’m pretty bullish on JDs more than the average EA because it’s very useful for a ton of careers. Like, a JD is an asset for pretty much any career in government, where you can work on a lot of EA problems, like:
Risks from WMDs or pandemics (or general emergency preparedness)
Does law school make sense for EAs?
I should also mention that I am generally excited to chat with EAs considering law school. PM me if interested, or join the Effective Altruism & Law Facebook Group.
The 80,000 Hours career review on UK commercial law finds that “while almost 10% of the Members of Parliament are lawyers, only around 0.6% have any background in high-end commercial law.” I have been unable to find any similar analysis for the US. Do you know of any?
I dug up a few other places 80,000 Hours mentions law careers, but I couldn’t find any article where they discuss US commercial law for earning-to-give. The other mentions I found include:
In their profile on US AI Policy, one of their recommended graduate programs is a “prestigious law JD from Yale or Harvard, or possibly another top 6 law school.”
In this article for people with existing experience in a particular field, they write “If you have experience as a lawyer in the U.S. that’s great because it’s among the best ways to get positions in government & policy, which is one of our top priority areas.”
It’s also mentioned in this article that Congress has a lot of HLS graduates.
TL;DR, I think EAs should probably use the following heuristics if they are interested in some career for which law school is a plausible path:
If you can get into a T3 law school (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), have a fairly strong prior that it’s worth going.
If you can get into a T6 law school (Columbia, Chicago, NYU), probably take it.
If you can get into a T14 law school, seriously consider it. But employment statistics at the bottom of the T14 are very different from those at the top.
Be wary of things outside the T14.
In general, definitely carefully research employment prospects for the school you’re considering.
Other notes:
The 80K UK commercial law ETG article significantly underestimates how much US-trained lawyers can make. Starting salary for commercial law firms in the US are $190K. It is pretty easy to get these jobs from T6 schools. Of course, American students will probably have higher debt burden.
Career dissatisfaction in biglaw firms is high. The hours can be very brutal. Attrition is high. Nevertheless, a solid majority of HLS lawyers (including BigLaw lawyers) are satisfied with their career and would recommend the same career to newer people. Of course, HLS lawyers are not representative of the profession as a whole.
ROI on the mean law schools is actually quite good, though should be adjusted for risk since the downside (huge debt + underemployment) is huge.
If you’re going to ETG, try to get a bunch of admissions offers and heavily negotiate downwards to get a good scholarship offer within the T6 or ~T10. Chicago, NYU, and Columbia all offer merit scholarships; if you want to ETG, these seem like good bets.
If you’re going to ETG, probably work in Texas, where you get NY salaries at a much lower cost of living and tax burden.
If you’re going into law for policy or other non-ETG reasons, go to a law school with a really good debt forgiveness program (unless you get a good scholarship elsewhere). HLS’s LIPP is quite good; Yale has an even better similar program.
You should also account for the possibility of economic downturn; many law firms stopped hiring during the ’08 crash.
If you’re an undergrad, you have a high leverage over your law school potential choices. 80% of your law school admissions decision will be based on your GPA and LSAT scores. Carefully research the quartiles for your target schools and aim for at least median, ideally >75%ile. The LSAT is very learnable with focused study. Take a formal logic course and LSAT courses if you can afford them. This will help tremendously in law school scholarship negotiations.
Thanks for this helpful comment!
Curious what you think of Thiel’s experience with law school and BigLaw (a):
Yeah, I think it’s definitely true that some lawyers feel trapped in their current career sometimes. Law is a pretty conservative profession and it’s pretty hard to find advice for non-traditional legal jobs. I myself felt this: it was a pretty big career risk to do an internship at FHI the summer after 2L.
(For context, summer after 2L is when most people work at the firm that eventually hires them right after law school. So, I would have had a much harder time finding a BigLaw job if the whole AGI policy thing didn’t work out. The fact that I worked public interest both summers would have been a serious signal to firms that I was more likely than average to leave BigLaw ASAP.)
I think EAs can hedge against this if they invest in maintaining ties to the EA community, avoiding sunk-cost and status quo biases, and careful career planning.
This is a pretty obvious point, but I find it really hard to think about comparative advantage. Naively, if all someone know about themself is that they’re admitted to T14 but not T3, it tells them that they have less opportunities in Law. But it also tells them that they have less opportunities outside of law as well.
So it seems really hard to think about this, even in statistical aggregate.
I think it might be somewhat more complicated. As far as I know, the LSAT+GPA measure is actually a pretty strong predictor of law school performance as far as standardized tests go. But there’s some controversy in the literature about how much law school grades matter for success. Good law schools also have much higher bar passage rates, though there could be confounding factors there too.
In general, the legal market seems somewhat weird to me. E.g., it’s pretty easy for T3 students to get a BigLaw job, but often hard for students near the bottom of the T14 too. I do not understand why firms don’t just hire such students and thereby lower wages, which are very high. My best guess is, Hansonianly, that there’s a lot of signaling going on, where firms try to signal their quality by hiring only T6 law students. Also, I imagine the T6 credential is important for recruiting clients, which is very important to BigLaw success.
But query how much of this matters if you want to do a non-ETG law path.
[Didn’t mean to comment this]
What impactful career paths do you think law school might prepare you particularly well for, besides ETG and AI Policy? If an EA goes to law school and discovers they don’t want to do ETG or AI Policy, where should they look next?
Do these options mostly look like “find something idiosyncratic and individual that’s impactful”, or do you see any major EA pipelines that could use tons of lawyers?
Yeah, I think I’m pretty bullish on JDs more than the average EA because it’s very useful for a ton of careers. Like, a JD is an asset for pretty much any career in government, where you can work on a lot of EA problems, like:
Risks from WMDs or pandemics (or general emergency preparedness)
Animal welfare
International cooperation and coordination
Space law and policy
Environmental policy
Land use regulation
General economic growth
Improving voting and institution design
(Of course, lawyers can usefully work on these outside of government as well.)
I think EA-relevant skills in economics might be particularly valuable in some fields, like governmental cost-benefit analysis.
Of course, people in government can have a lot of impact on problems that most EAs don’t work on due to the amount of influence they have.
I also think that there might be opportunities for lawyers to help grow/structure/improve the EA movement, like:
Estate planning (e.g., help every EA who wants one get a will or trust that will give a lot of their estate to EA charities)
Setting up nonprofits and other organizations
Tax help
Immigration help for EA employers
Creating weird entities or financial instruments that help EAs achieve their goals (e.g., 1, 2, 3)
If I was not doing AI policy, I might write up a grant proposal to spend my time doing these things in CA.