http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cult ... annot.html
“In my experience hunting for a nonlegal job, your J.D. hurts more than it help,” says Andre LaMorgia, a Brooklyn Law School graduate and trade compliance analyst in Philadelphia. In its employment stats, the American Bar Association considers jobs like LaMorgia’s to be “J.D. Advantage” positions, meaning a law degree should give you a boost. But LaMorgia says that if he didn’t have a friend who worked at the company, “my résumé would have gone right into the garbage can.”
That’s sensible, considering that human resource managers outside the legal world treat a J.D. as the scarlet acronym. “Generally, I imagine they’re going to be too expensive with not enough relevant experience to justify the salary,” says Maureen Chu, an HR and operations manager in D.C. She believes that law school gives candidates a competitive disadvantage. “It’s lost time. Whatever you learned in law school is not useful to what we need. So every other candidate has three years on you.”
Since I've gotten my JD, I've been instantly rejected for jobs for which I would have been highly competitive before law school.In the last few months, I’ve interviewed for jobs at a nonprofit, a think tank, and a PR firm among other places of business. I know from personal experience that the first question a lawyer will hear in a nonlegal job interview is, “Why don’t you want to practice law?” My answer to that question always elicits, “Well, you know we don’t pay as much as a law firm, right?” A law degree makes an otherwise qualified candidate look expensive, and often carries a rotten whiff of failure. And other than the New York Mets, no employer wants to hire an expensive failure.
