There is a PhD boost for something

I talked to a PhD 3L a couple of days ago to get a little more background on how the PhD plays in the legal recruiting process. He has had no trouble getting interviews and offers at every stage of his legal education. The advanced degree places somebody like me in a special category for applicants that law firms really want. PhD lawyers are rare (who doesn't want to got to school for 7 or 8 years after finishing college). I may be in an even more special case as I am a PhD who has also worked in the pharmaceutical industry. This eases one of the biggest concerns that I had going into this process. There is so much bad news out there about the legal job market, I have always wondered if there are better ways for me to spend 3 years and who knows how much money than getting a degree that may not lead to that next move in my career. Assuming I don't tank as a law student, I think things will be alright now.

PhD Boost....for getting a job

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had two interesting conversations last week that provided some concrete information on what it means to have a chemistry PhD in the legal market. The PhD patent attorney I talked to gave a couple of examples of how having a PhD has been an advantage for her. Firms like having PhD's. They're good for business. On a more personal level, she mentioned that working with clients is much easier when you have a PhD. The real meat of the discovery is more obvious to somebody with a research background than somebody with a bachelor's degree. What she said is even more rare for patent lawyers, are PhD's with real research experience. Understanding how the research process works makes it much easier to work with other research scientists.

All of these advantages, while great, don't amount to much if you can't find a job. Fortunately, it sounds like technical people have a distinct advantage over the larger body of law students when it comes to finding a job. Getting a summer position after completing 1L is talked about like some kind of holy grail type of quest, but I was told that patent types are the ones who usually end up with those positions. It makes sense. If there are a decent number of positions with nobody around to fill them, it's going to be easier to find one of those positions. If there is a position that any law student can fill, the competition will be much more intense. There are also plenty of firms looking for patent attorneys. At GMU, about a third of the firms that do OCI are looking for patent associates. There seems to be more of a applicants market for patent attorneys, at least based on my initial conversation. I'm going to keep following up to get a better idea of the state of the patent job market, but I have to confess that things seem much better than I had anticipated.

Breakthrough Day?

I had two very informative conversations today. I will give more details later, but here are the juiciest nuggets from each conversation. I work with a PhD patent attorney, and I had a conversation with her today about what it means to have a PhD as a patent attorney. I asked her if having a PhD was an advantage. She went on to give me an example of how a PhD was an advantage in law school, getting a job, and working with clients. I also talked to a career services rep at Mason. While the entire conversation is worth discussing, the most telling exchange came when I asked her about OCI for IP firms. Every year people tell her that they wish they had studied science. IP is in demand, but a good number of the people in the IP program are already working and don't want to leave their job for a summer associate position.

Both conversations were very informative. I will try to distill the best insights from each and share them here in the next few days.

Job Prospects from Insiders

I've decided to use my law school admissions cycle half-time (4 decisions in, 4 more to go) to see what the job market looks like from the front lines. I have spoken to two 3Ls about the job market. Given that one was in Boston and the other in Virginia, they reported very similar situations. For the Boston market, the anxiousness that dominated the class at the end of the summer has been replaced with a grudging resignation to the reality of the economic situation. The BigLaw jobs just aren't out there for most people. A few people have offers from big firms, but many of the 2009 graduates have not started working and many of them have had their offers deferred or rescinded. Having an offer is still no guarantee that a job will be waiting after graduation. People are turning to government, JAG, and clerkships for gainful employment. The demand for these positions has made them unusually competitive.

I heard a similar story from the 3L in VA. People did not have jobs at the start of the semester, but the offers have started to trickle in. The wrinkle is that these jobs are in small or mid-sized firms and not the high paying BigLaw firms (my Boston source sent me a job posting from a small firm in Chicago looking to interview 3L's, the trend must be national).

I've read similar things about the job market online (if I find good links later I'll put them here), but I wanted to see what people in the midst of looking for a job are actually experiencing. I would like to talk to people with a background like mine. I have a plan to find somebody to supplement what I've already heard about the patent law market, especially for people with advanced degrees. Is there a PhD boost for the job market too? I would like to know before I take the plunge.

Conversation with a PhD Patent Attorney

I had a very interesting conversation with a practicing patent attorney who has a chemistry PhD. I had a few questions for him. My first was which law schools are good for patent law. I know what US News says about this, but I was curious what an insider (who has been involved in recruiting) has to say about it. He was very high on GMU (which I found surprising) and GW (which isn't too surprising). He rated GW as the best school for patent law. I thought that was an interesting wrinkle. Everybody is so high on Cal for patents. This guy is on the east coast. It's easy to forget how regional law is when looking at national rankings. If you're on the east coast and are interesting in patent law, why go all the way to Cal (if you can get in) when you can stay close to the Atlantic and go to GW or GMU?

I also asked him about the market for patent attorneys. It is no secret that law students are having a hard time finding jobs (read more about the legal job market here), but can that generalization be extended to those who have suffered through a graduate program? The way he put, if 3 or 4 of 10 people in a class have a position at graduation, it will be more like 8 or 9 of 10 people with a technical background will have an offer. That technical background is important. My take away is that there is definitely an advantage to have a PhD when it comes to finding a job. This guy was able to get a summer associate position as a 1L with a big firm in DC because he had a technical degree. Granted this was when the economy was better, but I think it illustrates that having something rare, like a technical PhD, does make it easier to separate yourself from the crowd and find a job.

From my very limited experience with studying law (mostly from conversations with my brother about his classes), it sounds like there are parallels between preparing a research paper and legal writing. In science you use other papers to build your case for a particular interpretation of some data. The law also uses citations, but previously decided cases are used as the research material. I asked if my impression of this relationship was valid. There are overlaps in this type of skill. The real advantage to the graduate degree is training in analytical thinking. Firms like that you have that background in thinking hard about a problem and finding a solution.

It was a very enlightening conversation. It was very refreshing to get an inside view of the industry rather than relying on the Internet, especially from somebody with a similar background. I'm trying to get as much information as I can to make sure that this is the right move for my career. This conversation makes me very comfortable with the decision.

My take on ratings (and why they seem to matter so much)

As several of the links on this blog profess, I spend a decent amount of time skimming through the forums on TLS. I'm always amazed at how much of the focus is on the ranking of a particular school. I know everybody on that site wants Big Law so they can make Big Money (and work Big Hours) and they think the best way to achieve that goal is to attend a T14 law school (why it's the top 14 and not the top 16 or 19 or any other random number is something that I have yet to figure out). I'm sure there is some justification for this. On campus interviews and all of that are more likely to be focused on the top schools, maybe? I do have an idea about why there is so much emphasis on rankings in law school.

The curriculum at one law school is not likely to be much different from the curriculum at another. They all teach basically the same information to students who are all about the same age who have similar backgrounds, at least in terms of professional experience. All things being equal, how else can you tell the difference between one candidate and another other than looking at where they went to law school and how well they did while they were there? Graduates from a chemistry program have several levels of differentiation, what area did they do research in? lab skills? how many publications? which journals? how involved were they in preparing the manuscripts? grades (like any one really cares about PhD grades, it's all about the research)? Grades and school are the best way to differentiate law school grades. That's also why people are so eager to make law review or do moot court of something like that. You need something like that to make you stand out in the crowd.

No matter where you attend law school, success will be a function of how much effort you put in while you are there. Simply attending Harvard, Yale, or Stanford will not write your ticket to that plush Big Law job. It might make it easier to get there, but somebody who attends a school a little down the rankings of USNWR who worked very hard and was committed to making law school a successful endeavor could out-hustle somebody from a "better" school for the same job. What you get out of anything is ultimately a product of what you put in.