When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts:
- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers
- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]
For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.
This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.
I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.
[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106
- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law
- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers
- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]
For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.
This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.
I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.
[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106