Chances? Should I give up and go to the UK?

[Rashabon]

1 hour ago, CheeseToast said:

Yes, obviously it doesn’t matter if you somehow manage to article at blake’s after going to cooley, but good luck getting that position in the first place. 
How many people at your firm (I think you’re on Bay) went to Leeds/Bond/Leicester/whatever?

Reread my post and you'll see I'd have no clue because I don't pay attention to that. I do know my first mentor in my practice area (who is now and has been at a large financial institution for the better part of a decade) went to the University of Buckingham, whatever the fuck that is.

Edited July 7, 2021 by Rashabon

[BlockedQuebecois]

To answer @CheeseToast’s question, more people at my old firm went to random international schools than your choice of law school. 

[Rashabon]

25 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

@Rashabon @BlockedQuebecois

Something occurred to me to add regarding the difference between BigLaw and small firm retail law here. A difference that I think really strikes to the core of why the perspectives on this vary between those contexts and the stigma would be greater in the latter context, and why that actually makes sense and isn't a reflection of either camp being irrational.

In BigLaw, not only is there a higher barrier to entry, but there are nepotism policies. These don't stop nepotism from happening in BigLaw but they prevent the more blatant examples of the kind that are not uncommon in small firms. Also, perhaps most importantly, in a BigLaw firm I am sure there would be more supervision and management and quality control over work. And you're dealing with institutional clients on business matters. Basically, the worst BigLaw lawyer is not going to be as incompetent as the worst sole practitioner criminal lawyer, and is not going to be able to inflict as much damage with their incompetence. There are going to be fewer foreign grads and people who were barely capable of getting called, as well.

In the small firm retail law context, there are going to be more blatantly obvious nepotism hires, more foreign graduates, less supervision and reigning in and correction of incompetence. So lawyers in this context are going to get far more exposure to these qualities in opposing counsel than BigLaw lawyers will. And while it's not nice or completely accurate to generalize, certain patterns will and do present themselves in terms of what the profiles of incompetent vs competent lawyers look like (and it shouldn't surprise anyone that being a foreign degree holder with the same name as the firm's founding partner tends to correlate with incompetence). And when peoples' liberty is at stake, incompetence is a huge deal and people working in these areas will rightfully be very judgmental and intolerant of incompetence.

So anyways, when people who have exclusively worked in BigLaw think it's stupid to care where someone went to school or who they are related to, this is something to keep in mind. There will definitely be examples where it's not a fair assumption to make, but there is a reason it does end up being made in some circles.

Sure, though some would disagree as I recall from the prior nepotism thread on the old forum. And to your other post, yeah, you find the incompetent lawyer and they went to a foreign school and they worked at their parent's firm, and you tie it all together. But do you actually know where every lawyer you come across went to school? You likely look it up when you run into one, find a couple that went to a foreign school and then you've got your confirmation bias going.

There's a giant dipshit that wasn't hired back at my firm but managed to steal a bunch of precedents on his way out the door and is now a partner at his own firm he started and he apparently graduated with distinction from Western. Incompetent lawyers exist from all schools.

I'm not saying that going to a foreign school is the right approach, but that advice is usually for the students that are both terrible candidates and have no safety net. If someone is going to give you that first job, it becomes less important and then you're only dealing with this stigma, which likely only exists at the lawyer level, and only a subset of lawyers - mostly younger ones that have the energy and patience to google. Your clients aren't sophisticated enough to know whether the lawyer is well educated or not. If small retail clients knew that, we wouldn't have incompetent lawyers in the first place.

But to sum it all up, I agree incompetence is an issue, but that's not really what this thread started talking about it - it started talking about the appearance of incompetence based on a heuristic of "foreign grade + family name", and that's assuming the connections even are "same name". 

[Mountebank]

2 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

To answer @CheeseToast’s question, more people at my old firm went to random international schools than your choice of law school. 

Yeah, your old dustbag firm.

[CleanHands]

2 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

-Snip-

Sure; now I don't think we disagree all that much (except to some minor extent about how reasonable and how pervasive these assumptions are). I explicitly acknowledged that this assumption is not going to be accurate all the time. And I of course have been exposed to some extreme incompetence from some people with some serious blue blood credentials (in the sense of looking good on paper, rather than in the sense of nepotism) too. I don't think the foreign grad and/or nepotism stigma is entirely inaccurate, irrational or unfair either though. In my world even very senior lawyers will go "who the fuck is this clown?" and look them up after another lawyer essentially convicts their own client, and a clearly disproportionate amount of the time said clown is a foreign grad (relative to the amount of foreign grads vs Canadian school grads in the market).

This is a competence issue but it's also a stigma/appearance issue for those who aren't incompetent but have profiles that resemble those of a disproportionate amount of incompetent lawyers. 🤷‍♂️

[ZineZ]

Just popping in here to ask that we keep it civil 🙂. I'm usually in favour of letting thing things run their course (to an extent), but did want to agree with @Pendragon's sentiment as mentioned below:  

20 hours ago, Pendragon said:

On another note, OP came here asking for advice and should be treated with respect and not be piled on for the fact that they come from a privileged background. This forum doesn't exist just to assist people with Canadian law school admissions, but Canadians that are seeking law advice in general, too. 

 

[y2199]

Hey, I had very similar stats to you and a lower LSAT score. I got accepted into 4/8 i applied to, rejected from 1/8, and waitlisted at the remaining 3. The reason being is that i had a very strong personal statement and a lot of extracurricular accomplishments. If you have something else to show for yourself other than your GPA and LSAT, you have an extremely good chance