Look, I’m not advocating for laughing at where people went to school or claiming it is or isn’t mature, I’m simply describing what I have actually seen in the profession. You’re making assumptions about the legal profession based on what you’ve seen in other industries and your very narrow second-hand experience, but that’s not a good basis for assessing this. If it’s immature, well, you’re still going to have to deal with it.Mantrain wrote:"But if you do intend never to be hired by anyone else then that is all probably moot. Some clients will actually care (I would never hire a lawyer who went to a non-accredited school), but many probably won't know the difference. So as long as you're sure you're never going to change your mind about what you want to do, go for it - it's your $15k and time. "
We all have that preference who we will hire for a job. I am likely going to do immigration law and my clients from south of the border will not care where I went to law school. This notion of "laughing at where you went to law school" is a completely immature concept. I have a lot of experience in the law field, not as a lawyer, but tangentially in the work I do. At most courts, and my business often ends up in an administrative law court where my wife acts as my hearing rep, there is a camaraderie on BOTH SIDES and a certain egalitarianism exists in most sectors of law. You wouldn't hire someone who went to a non-aba bc you need to justify your decision to spend booko bucks and that is all. Here is how it is: the scales of justice rest on equality of law -- a law license speaks volumes -- that is at the end of the day what matters. Now yeah if you cannot be self-employed -- if you are always going to be dependent on a paycheck and needing a boss, go to the most expensive name brand law school you can. But as far as laughing at what school you went to -- not the real world and I have been around a half a century and I have a sense of what is important in the real world. When I first graduated from college, before I made the mistake of going to chiropractic college instead of law school and when I was considering law, I remember how important that concept of a brand name law school was -- bc at that time I though in terms of being dependent on what people thought about me and where my paycheck would come from. But in any industry, people gain a reputation based on individual character, and not on the character of their alma mater.
Also keep in mind that non-accredited schools are seen as the lowest of the low. People who don’t care if you went to Thomas Jefferson may well look at a non-accredited school differently. It’s not that the education is necessarily different (though in the case of online schools I do think the experience is qualitatively different), but the concern is that someone who went to a non-accredited school did so because it was the only school they could get into, which raises some concerns about ability. Is that fair? Not always, no, but no one *has* to hire someone with a non-accredited degree.
Sure, courts/lawyers who appear in them are often fairly egalitarian and there is camaraderie and some people won’t care. I’m just telling you that some people will. And they won’t say this to your face or indicate it in their interactions with you because they’re polite grown ups.
I’m also not sure why you’re so hipped on the license thing. I’ve taken the bar, it’s a measure of minimum competence and a crappy measure of whether someone is or has the potential to be a good lawyer. I take passing the bar as a given; it’s not an equalizer. Someone is going to have to offer me more than simply passing the bar for me to hire them.