Legal Employment: Getting One BA vs Getting Two BAs

[Kismet]

Screw it, go for three. Morgan’s will be busting down your door…

[QueensDenning]

I know someone who majored in dance (maybe it was a minor with a major in Polisci?) that got a 1L spot at Davies. 

There's a reason you can you can get into law school with only three years of undergrad experience and NO bachelor's degree. Arts degrees just don't provide any additional value over a law degree. Having two (relatively) useless degrees over one doesn't add anything.

[hiccups]

Also came here to say a dance degree will be a bigger highlight on a resume than economics or another liberal arts degree. 

On 12/22/2022 at 6:40 AM, KOMODO said:

Two BAs would seem like a negative to me. 

I also agree with this. Ususally at my firm we aren't going through candidates' undergrad transcript so when I see a double degree that took extra years to complete, I think maybe they needed extra work to get their GPA higher in order to apply for law school.

[ZooBoingKnight]

Okay, so most of you clearly think that undergraduate knowledge is hardly useful and/or important to legal employers. I now clearly understand that legal employers value law school grades, law school courses, extra-curriculars, and work experience more than undergraduate majors. That makes sense.

What I still don’t understand is why legal employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge very little, if at all. I mean, if an applicant spends years learning seemingly-relevant things, like the science of identifying and understanding ambiguity and vagueness—which are important aspects of contracts—or legal and political philosophy—which are the ideas behind law—then don’t employers believe that that provides a moderate benefit to the applicant’s legal abilities? I find it especially weird that employers ignore relevant-seeming undergraduate knowledge, given that this knowledge features in law school education! For example, a jurisprudence course literally is a legal philosophy course. So why do employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge so little if at all? 

If you prefer, here’s a different way of putting my confusion: didn’t any of you think that what you spent years learning in undergrad was special to employers? Didn’t you want to tell that to employers, like, “Hi, I spent X years learning this shit about argumentation, business, or whatever, and I think that’s relevant to what you do, so you should consider me special and interview and/or hire me.”? Or maybe you thought that before law school and something big changed?

Edited December 24, 2022 by ZooBoingKnight

[easttowest]

1 hour ago, ZooBoingKnight said:

Okay, so most of you clearly think that undergraduate knowledge is hardly useful and/or important to legal employers. I now clearly understand that legal employers value law school grades, law school courses, extra-curriculars, and work experience more than undergraduate majors. That makes sense.

What I still don’t understand is why legal employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge very little, if at all. I mean, if an applicant spends years learning seemingly-relevant things, like the science of identifying and understanding ambiguity and vagueness—which are important aspects of contracts—or legal and political philosophy—which are the ideas behind law—then don’t employers believe that that provides a moderate benefit to the applicant’s legal abilities? I find it especially weird that employers ignore relevant-seeming undergraduate knowledge, given that this knowledge features in law school education! For example, a jurisprudence course literally is a legal philosophy course. So why do employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge so little if at all? 

If you prefer, here’s a different way of putting my confusion: didn’t any of you think that what you spent years learning in undergrad was special to employers? Didn’t you want to tell that to employers, like, “Hi, I spent X years learning this shit about argumentation, business, or whatever, and I think that’s relevant to what you do, so you should consider me special and interview and/or hire me.”? Or maybe you thought that before law school and something big changed?

“Seemingly-relevant” should be your clue. You try telling a judge that her interpretation of the contract is actually wrong because you understand the science of ambiguity and vagueness from your BA from seven years ago, instead of pointing to a case or two that supports your interpretation and tell me how that goes. 
 

To the second bolded sentence: no.

Actually I’ll expand on the “no”. Put yourself in their shoes. There’s a very good chance they didn’t spend X years doing whatever and weren’t considered special when getting hired, but they’re now possibly quite good at doing whatever, and have hired lots of other people who didn’t spend X years doing it and are also now good at it. So why should it matter if you spend a couple of years doing whatever in a non-law, non-firm environment? It’s just likely not transferable to the practice of law. In the vast majority of cases, they will teach you what you need to know. At the interview stage, they are trying to figure out if you meet the threshold for consideration (grades) and whatever other evaluation criteria the firm has decided on. 

 

Edited December 24, 2022 by easttowest

[Diplock]

10 hours ago, ZooBoingKnight said:

Okay, so most of you clearly think that undergraduate knowledge is hardly useful and/or important to legal employers. I now clearly understand that legal employers value law school grades, law school courses, extra-curriculars, and work experience more than undergraduate majors. That makes sense.

What I still don’t understand is why legal employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge very little, if at all. I mean, if an applicant spends years learning seemingly-relevant things, like the science of identifying and understanding ambiguity and vagueness—which are important aspects of contracts—or legal and political philosophy—which are the ideas behind law—then don’t employers believe that that provides a moderate benefit to the applicant’s legal abilities? I find it especially weird that employers ignore relevant-seeming undergraduate knowledge, given that this knowledge features in law school education! For example, a jurisprudence course literally is a legal philosophy course. So why do employers value seemingly-relevant undergraduate knowledge so little if at all? 

If you prefer, here’s a different way of putting my confusion: didn’t any of you think that what you spent years learning in undergrad was special to employers? Didn’t you want to tell that to employers, like, “Hi, I spent X years learning this shit about argumentation, business, or whatever, and I think that’s relevant to what you do, so you should consider me special and interview and/or hire me.”? Or maybe you thought that before law school and something big changed?

By the time you've been through law school, whatever high-level inquiry you think you've done into identifying ambiguity as an undergraduate will be so completely eclipsed by more recent work as to become irrelevant. To give you some idea, I think they still teach accounting in high school, right? I hope you appreciate how superficial that is. If a high school student who one day wanted to work as an auditor at one of the big four audit firms asked whether their future employer would value their high school level training in accounting what would your reply be? Hint. There's only one right answer.

The only difference between these two scenarios is that right now you have sufficient perspective to appreciate how superficial high school level training in accounting or otherwise really is, and you do not have sufficient perspective to appreciate the limitations in what you've done as an undergrad. Right now, to you, it seems like end-level training. It really, really is not.

And that's the entire answer you're missing.

Edited December 24, 2022 by Diplock

[ZukoJD]

I think OP would benefit from reading a book like Getting to Maybe which discusses the kind of writing/analysis you do in law school. Honestly OP, I would encourage you to read it. You don’t need really need that much other than your presumably already above average reasoning skills to do the work. 

Edited December 24, 2022 by ZukoJD