No LSAT Required to get your JD in Australia! :)

[BondGuy]

23 hours ago, chaboywb said:

• What is the percentage of Canadians that receive their JDs from Australian schools that are called to a Canadian bar and secure permanent Canadian employment as lawyers? How does that compare to students that study at Canadian law schools?
• What is the average annual income of Canadian lawyers that receive their law degree in Australia?
• What is the average debt load of Canadian students that receive their law degree in Australia?

 

My answers to this are all anecdotal, not data driven. But: 

1. Almost all people I graduated with are practicing. Those who are not are typically JD adjacent (e.g. contract manager). 
2. Can't speak to this, but I graduated from Australia and am making a salary above average for my year of call for Canadian trained lawyers (looking at the recent benchmark data from recruiters). I work a specialized field.  That said, many of those trained abroad come home and work for a family firm - so even if we had the number, the metric itself would be skewed. 
3. As above, this metric wouldn't be super valuable - many of those who go come back with $0 in debt as they come from money - which is what allowed them to go in the first place. I paid my own way 100% and returned with about $120k in student loans. I had about 20k in savings when I left.   Currency conversion risk is a factor and would impact debt loads. 

I, once again, posting my take on the issue: advice here. 

 

 

Edited March 13 by BondGuy

[BHC1]

2 minutes ago, BondGuy said:

 

My answers to this are all anecdotal, not data driven. But: 

1. Almost all people I graduated with are practicing. Those who are not are typically JD adjacent (e.g. contract manager). 
2. Can't speak to this, but I graduated from Australia and am making a salary above average for my year of call for Canadian trained lawyers (looking at the recent benchmark data from recruiters). I work a specialized field.  That said, many of those trained abroad come home and work for a family firm - so even if we had the number, the metric itself would be skewed. 
3. As above, this metric wouldn't be super valuable - many of those who go come back with $0 in debt as they come from money - which is what allowed them to go in the first place. I paid my own way 100% and returned with about $120k in student loans. I had about 20k in savings when I left.   Currency conversion risk is a factor and would impact debt loads. 

I, once again, posting my take on the issue: advice here. 

 

 

I appreciate you responding with a more meaningful contribution than the actual recruiter/ bot that they are using.  

[canuckfanatic]

I'm imagining some social media coordinator in Australia looking like:

[BlockedQuebecois]

2 minutes ago, canuckfanatic said:

I'm imagining some social media coordinator in Australia looking like:

If it makes you feel any better, they're probably an Australian law school grad who considers their job to be "JD adjacent".

[BondGuy]

1 hour ago, BHC1 said:

I appreciate you responding with a more meaningful contribution than the actual recruiter/ bot that they are using.  

Always happy to discuss the issue in good faith with users that have a meaningful question or contribution.  

[BlockedQuebecois]

16 minutes ago, BondGuy said:

Always happy to discuss the issue in good faith with users that have a meaningful question or contribution.  

Since you're always happy to discuss in good faith, would you mind clarifying whether you agree that if people transfer from a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is after law school (e.g. Australia) to a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is before law school (e.g. Canada), that person has avoided the process by which the wheat is separated from the chaff? 

If you want greater context to the question, you can review our exchange here, where you purposefully obfuscated your position and then refused to engage in good faith with my meaningful question 🙂

Edited March 13 by BlockedQuebecois

[Dinsdale]

30 minutes ago, BondGuy said:

Always happy to discuss the issue in good faith with users that have a meaningful question or contribution.  

Your post, and the one from 2021 that you linked to, are both excellent.  Speaking not just about Bond but NCA candidates generally, from the perspective of BigLaw recruiting, it is not impossible to end up on Bay Street, but it is very difficult.  The OCI thing (and timing of the 2L recruit generally) is a huge roadblock that cannot be underestimated. As we all know, the 2L recruit is the method by which nearly all students and junior associates join their firms (some even sooner, via 1L recruit, but the same issues apply).  So, as you rightly point out, the only way to overcome this disadvantage is to network.  In my experience, as a practical matter this means having a senior partner who is a close family friend or will go to bat for you for some other reason.  Absent that, there is really no realistic shot.  Again as you point out, many students who travel to Australia for law school come from money in the first place, and therefore are probably more likely to have the "right" connections on Bay Street when they return.  We hired NCA students to article, occasionally over the years, but they always got the interview based on the connection.  Not the job, but the interview.  And some were re-hired as associates, so just to be clear I'm not saying that NCA students are all inferior candidates.

Just my two cents.

Edited March 13 by Dinsdale

[BondGuy]

1 hour ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

Since you're always happy to discuss in good faith, would you mind clarifying whether you agree that if people transfer from a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is after law school (e.g. Australia) to a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is before law school (e.g. Canada), that person has avoided the process by which the wheat is separated from the chaff? 

If you want greater context to the question, you can review our exchange here, where you purposefully obfuscated your position and then refused to engage in good faith with my meaningful question 🙂

Respectfully, a single emoji doesn't good faith make. I find you have a pattern of  hostile tone, straw men, and weirdly argumentative responses. I don't have time for it - and I am not sure what sort of value you are trying to extract. 

I am here using my time to inform prospective students or new grads based on my experience. That includes correcting inaccuracy or misleading information where i think approriate.

Nothing else, really.   

Edited March 13 by BondGuy

[BlockedQuebecois]

@BondGuy I invite everyone to go read the prior thread, I’m sure other users can form a view on who conducted themselves in bad faith during that discussion.

Putting aside your spurious allegation of bad faith, it’s a real shame you won’t engage with the question in good faith. The question is an important one that arises directly from your previous posts, in which you’ve sought to imply that it’s not correct to say Canadian graduates from Australia don’t go through the usual weeding out process in either jurisdiction. 

The fact that you’ve attempted to make that implication whilst purposefully obfuscating your view and refusing to engage in good faith with reasonable questions about it should be a major red flag to any prospective students or new graduates who may rely on your posts. It suggests you are in denial about one of the most significant causes of the stigma against foreign graduates and accordingly calls into question your ability to effectively advise the people you say you would like to help. 

Hopefully one day you will be in a position to engage with the question in good faith. 

ETA: I’ll add that having flipped through your post history, I appear to have literally never been anything but civil towards you.

Edited March 13 by BlockedQuebecois

[BondGuy]

Tldr, tbh

Edited March 13 by BondGuy

[Dinsdale]

2 hours ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

... if people transfer from a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is after law school (e.g. Australia) to a jurisdiction in which the barrier to entry to practice is before law school (e.g. Canada), that person has avoided the process by which the wheat is separated from the chaff? 

I think the answer is obviously yes, but the fault is ours.  There really is no meaningful barrier to entry in Ontario anymore, either before or after law school.   We used to have one, called articling (combined with a bar admission exam that was more than an exercise in diligent indexing) but the Law Society, in its infinite wisdom, did away with both about ten years ago.  In particular, the Law Practice Program takes in all comers who could not otherwise obtain articles, with degrees from anywhere in the world, and turns them into Ontario lawyers in just four months (plus a short "placement").  The only pre-requisite is the NCA designation. Why would offshore law schools not take advantage of that?

Edited March 13 by Dinsdale

[ZineZ]

Hi! 

I'm going to aggressively trim any future conversations about Australian JDs into the following thread that was created for the exact purpose: 

 

FWIW, I understand general frustrations on the forum but it's helpful to have folks like @BondGuy who can talk about their experiences (and balanced by other folks where necessary who can help raise the pitfalls). I won't comment too much about the conversation above about who is engaging in GF etc unless I'm specifically asked to. I think we can self moderate a bit - but let's leave this a welcoming forum for our foreign trained students/practitioners 🙂

[CleanHands]

34 minutes ago, Dinsdale said:

Why would offshore law schools not take advantage of that?

The real question is: why would other members of the legal community (including legal employers) not stigmatize it?

[ZineZ]

4 hours ago, canuckfanatic said:

I'm imagining some social media coordinator in Australia looking like:

I can't emphasize how annoyed/frustrated I am here.  OP ignored our clearly laid out warnings about advertisement/promotion and then decided to try using bad marketing tactics on a forum which is pretty good at ripping those tactics apart.  The way in which this has backfired was entirely of their own making.

For context - here's the exact warning you get during sign-up.  OP made their post nine minutes after reading it. 

[canuckfanatic]

28 minutes ago, ZineZ said:

I can't emphasize how annoyed/frustrated I am here.  OP ignored our clearly laid out warnings about advertisement/promotion and then decided to try using bad marketing tactics on a forum which is pretty good at ripping those tactics apart.  The way in which this has backfired was entirely of their own making.

For context - here's the exact warning you get during sign-up.  OP made their post nine minutes after reading it. 

[BlockedQuebecois]

13 hours ago, Dinsdale said:

I think the answer is obviously yes, but the fault is ours.  There really is no meaningful barrier to entry in Ontario anymore, either before or after law school.   We used to have one, called articling (combined with a bar admission exam that was more than an exercise in diligent indexing) but the Law Society, in its infinite wisdom, did away with both about ten years ago.  In particular, the Law Practice Program takes in all comers who could not otherwise obtain articles, with degrees from anywhere in the world, and turns them into Ontario lawyers in just four months (plus a short "placement").  The only pre-requisite is the NCA designation. Why would offshore law schools not take advantage of that?

The fact that the answer is obvious is rather the point! 

Moving past that, I disagree that the issue is there is no barrier to entry in Ontario. The barrier is very clearly gaining law school admission. We can quibble over whether that's a meaningful barrier, given the relative ease of getting into a Canadian law school, but at the very least we should all agree that it weeds out a significant number of people interested in becoming a lawyer. 

The issue is that we let people circumvent that barrier by allowing them to attend a school where gaining entry is not a meaningful barrier (e.g. Bond, Leicester) and then come back to Canada whilst avoiding the weeding out processes that occur in those other jurisdictions (which, in both Australia and England & Wales, occurs after law school). 

That entire problem could be quite easily avoided by simply requiring people who attend law schools in other jurisdictions to take whatever steps are necessary to be allowed to practice in that jurisdiction before they apply to transfer. Those lawyers could then apply to transfer, and we could evaluate their applications to determine what additional steps to licensing should be imposed. 

Doing so would also be of massive benefit to high-performing foreign law graduates, because the single biggest reason to stigmatize those graduates would be gone. In fact, if foreign law graduates weren't able to be stigmatized on the basis they circumvented the weeding out process, it's difficult to see what legitimate stigma would attach to them. Unless we're all going to shift to pretending your LSAT score or undergraduate grades matter for practice, I would be inclined to view any foreign graduate who went through a rigorous weeding out process as vaguely equivalent to a Canadian graduate. 

Edited March 14 by BlockedQuebecois

[Dinsdale]

On 3/14/2024 at 5:30 AM, BlockedQuebecois said:

The fact that the answer is obvious is rather the point! 

Moving past that, I disagree that the issue is there is no barrier to entry in Ontario. The barrier is very clearly gaining law school admission. We can quibble over whether that's a meaningful barrier, given the relative ease of getting into a Canadian law school, but at the very least we should all agree that it weeds out a significant number of people interested in becoming a lawyer. 

The issue is that we let people circumvent that barrier by allowing them to attend a school where gaining entry is not a meaningful barrier (e.g. Bond, Leicester) and then come back to Canada whilst avoiding the weeding out processes that occur in those other jurisdictions (which, in both Australia and England & Wales, occurs after law school). 

That entire problem could be quite easily avoided by simply requiring people who attend law schools in other jurisdictions to take whatever steps are necessary to be allowed to practice in that jurisdiction before they apply to transfer. Those lawyers could then apply to transfer, and we could evaluate their applications to determine what additional steps to licensing should be imposed. 

Doing so would also be of massive benefit to high-performing foreign law graduates, because the single biggest reason to stigmatize those graduates would be gone. In fact, if foreign law graduates weren't able to be stigmatized on the basis they circumvented the weeding out process, it's difficult to see what legitimate stigma would attach to them. Unless we're all going to shift to pretending your LSAT score or undergraduate grades matter for practice, I would be inclined to view any foreign graduate who went through a rigorous weeding out process as vaguely equivalent to a Canadian graduate. 

I agree with your analysis.  I am simply saying that it was our own Law Society that dismantled the "entry into law school" barrier by making it simple for offshore grads to get accredited in Ontario (via the LPP), in the name of equity, and to thereby circumvent the barrier.  Plus the bar admission exam used to be not-multiple-choice.  

Requiring those offshore grads to first practise in their school's jurisdiction is an interesting solution.