There is almost no appropriate scenario for you to waste your life with law school. I'm in a top school now (T6), and I've never regretted a decision more. I wi

There is almost no appropriate scenario for you to waste your life with law school. I'm in a top school now (T6), and I've never regretted a decision more. I will owe nearly $300,000 before I'm done, having sacrificed my youth and health in pointless competition for brutal work conditions that very few of us will be lucky to have. If you win this BigLaw competition, you'll work impossible hours for as long as you can. Typically that's two to five years before you burn out/get fired and search desperately for any other line of work. Nobody makes partner anymore unless you have connections to make it rain. The traditional escape routes of government work (which is difficult and way underpaid, but at least provides a more reasonable workweek) or public interest work simply don't exist anymore. Between austerity and poverty and desperate competition by established attorneys, we no longer have a chance at a decent living over the course of a lifelong career. If you "win" at law school, you get to join BigLaw firms that consume you, body and soul, for a handful of years. Only the tiniest percentage of graduates can earn these jobs, mostly the upper tier of the best schools. The middle tier at these schools can try for second-tier firms which pay two-thirds of the salary for exactly the same brutal hours and terrible conditions of BigLaw. The bottom tier, or virtually anyone at lower schools, gets nothing at all. My local Starbucks has a staff of about eight people, two of whom are freshly minted JDs. And the future is coming for us. I strongly endorse reading this article (http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_machines-vs-lawyers.html http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_machines-vs-lawyers.ht...) to understand the future of legal practice. Important quote: "Discovering information, finding precedents, drafting documents and briefs, and predicting the outcomes of lawsuits—these tasks encompass the bulk of legal practice. The rise of machine intelligence will therefore disrupt and transform the legal profession." Don't do it. I wish I had pursued computer science instead. HN will eat law alive, and it'll do a vastly better job of it than human lawyers have. If you must get involved in the field, do it as a hacker in the fields of electronic discovery, contract databases, or intelligent query research. As it stands, most legal questions are assembled from disjointed queries into truly awful Westlaw/Lexis databases by tech-illiterate lawyers, harried by their enormous workloads and failing personal lives. The field is crying out for better data sorting and search. Fix that problem and get rich, but don't join the hopeless masses of law school graduates.