Not top law schools, not good GPA. Is getting another degree, e.g. LLM, with a good GPA help to get into a large law firm? What steps can be taken to recover from this?
There's nothing that says you should be on recovery. And I don't like the idea of believing that people should not have to recover from a bad GPA and that sort of thing and you shouldn't have to recover from a bad law school and you shouldn't have to make up for it with an LLM or something. If it's important for you to be with a big law firm, then you certainly can do all this stuff. But the big thing is if you need to be in a big law firm, then you should get your LLM and something where there are not a lot of attorneys.
So healthcare laws for example, or ERISA and employee benefits or something along those lines where there's just not a lot of people doing it that you're interested in, but I don't believe in trying to change what you are, to work in a large law firm. So the thing when we're working in a large law firm is if you work in a large law firm, you're going to be working with people that have good GPAs and that did go to top law schools.
And so those people are going to be smart, smarter than you in different ways. Like you may have very good business smart, so you may have very good people skills, but they're going to have a certain type of smarts you don't necessarily have. And you can certainly develop those smarts. I'm not saying that people don't and people become very proficient and good attorneys all the time, but, it's not fair to put yourself in a position where you're not going to succeed and to keep pushing yourself into a role where you may not do well.
An example would be I would make a horrible dentist. I know plenty of people that I went to. I knew people that I went to school was when I was younger who became dentists and they're doing fantastically well financially. But I could do whatever I wanted to try to be a good dentist.
And I certainly don't enjoy science. I don't enjoy being meticulous with my hands. I would not enjoy standing on my feet all day long, but I certainly, for a period of my life, though these dentists were very special. The same thing with doctors. But you shouldn't be pushing yourself into a position where you don't have some sort of natural talent. You can certainly do other things with your law degree and become very successful doing other types of practice areas or not working in large law terms. I've worked in large law firms and I've had three that I can think of where I was in a room with people that were so fricking smart that I realized that there's no way. One of the guys was from Stanford. The other was from Harvard. The other guy was I don't know, first in the class at UCLA and the way they were able to take apart legal issues. Compared to my skills was just, wow. Like I just knew that there was no way. Now, I would lose probably against those people in any type of case. Now, if I was to try to put myself in competition with a firm composed entirely of people like that, that were much smarter than me.
And when I say smarter, they're just like five or six steps ahead of you. That's dangerous. Why would I want to be, in someone like that? Now, I'm not saying that I wasn't a lot smarter than other people that I worked with, but there were a couple of people you are so freaking smart.
Two of them were partners. Another one was a very senior associate. And I just remember that. If the entire legal practice in a big firm is like that, it would be very scary for me. If everybody had those types of skills.
I just don't know that it's a good idea if you're not doing well if you don't have great grades, you haven't done well, and, so forth. Why would you want to keep trying to get into a big firm like that? You can compete with people in other things like the work that I do, like doing this, or other types of practice areas than other attorneys do, they don't have that same understanding.
Years ago I was talking to an attorney in a big firm and he's one of the best-known attorneys in the country. And he had a divorce attorney working for him and this divorce attorney could hardly put together a coherent document and he just wasn't that type of attorney and didn't know what to look for.
So it just depends, but you don't necessarily want to put yourself in the competition of situations where you're not guaranteed to do as well as you can or be happy. I would not be happy working with a group of attorneys that were all much smarter and more accomplished because I don't think I would do well. That's my opinion. I'm not trying to discourage you. I guess that is a little bit discouraging, but I would just tell you, the large law firm does not represent anything that great. They should be willing to put themselves in a position where they're not going to do well at it.
