Is a Law Degree a Liability for Nonlaw Job Seekers?
The conventional wisdom is that a law degree opens a world of job possibilities, from public relations to sales to human resources. But is it true?
Not according to Stephen Sickler, managing director in the Boston office of legal recruiting firm BCG Search. He claims the idea is a myth, the National Law Journal reports.
“Go to law school if you want to be a lawyer,” Seckler writes for the blog Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. “But don’t go if you believe it will ‘open doors’ for you. It won’t. By the end of law school you may still have no idea what you ‘want’ from your career; only now you are likely limited by huge law school debt.”
Finding a nonlaw job is even more difficult for lawyers who have practiced law, Seckler told the NLJ. “The longer you’ve been practicing, the harder it is for people to picture you in some other role,” he said. And legal training could be a negative in business because it teaches caution rather than risk-taking.
“If you want to be successful, you have to think more like an optimist,” he told the legal newspaper. “There is a change in thinking that has to go on.”
Recent Ohio State law grad Dina Allam told the newspaper she thinks her joint JD/MBA made the job search more difficult. “People don’t see the value in the joint degree. They think I’m confused,” she said.
Now a client engagement manager with Wipro Technologies, Allam thinks her business education got her more interviews than the law degree. The job search took months, and she has $85,000 in student debt. Looking back, she told the NLJ, she wishes she hadn’t gone to law school.
The publication sums up the problem this way: “With student loan debt at an all-time high and law schools churning out about 44,000 degrees each year, graduates looking for nonlawyer jobs are finding that they often are priced out, overqualified and undervalued.”
