If I solo out of school, do I pick the cheaper law school?

I do not necessarily agree with my good friend, Carolyn. I am a skinflint at heart. My position is that debt (and the amount of debt) affords you fewer options and opportunties.
I graduated from a law school in Houston, Texas. I went back to my home town on the other side of Texas, which had no law school. I started from scratch and it was not an problem that could not be overcome.
Relationships are important in law school. However, for the typical person these work primarily to help you decide what you want to do or practice when you get out. It helps you better define your interest.
Here is the truth of the matter. Unless you have a parent with an established law practice or you are working for a corporation, very few people come out of school doing what they thought they would do going in. Law School, for better or worse, is a a giant survey course. Your interest is law. Your interest is private practice. You will find different areas you like and do not like in law school. I doubt very seriously that one law school over another in this catagory is going to offer you much help.
I doubt you will have many problems finding work during law school even if the law school is not in a major city. The area has to be big enough to support a law school. A smaller town might not support some more specialized fields, like Carolyn’s practices. But, we have law schools in smaller areas in Texas and all of them do well in placing summer internships, for example, in larger cities if needed. UH, where my daughter will be attending, has a special program for placing summer internships in Washington, D.C. for those who are interested.
I guess it goes without saying that you need to make sure your law school is ABA approved (at least provisionally). There will be many opportunities denied to you if it is not. You will have very limited options if it is not. If it is not ABA approved but is seeking approval, make sure the school is associated with a larger institution. However, this is still a gamble.
I practice throughout the State of Texas, and run into lawyers with law degrees from all around the Country. Despite 9 (and soon to be 10 law schools) in Texas many students go out of state to school. I noticed, for example, that Susan Cartier-Liebel school of choice, Quinnipiac, has ads in the Texas Bar Journal offering substantial scholarships to Texas students who have certain grades and LSAT scores.
I want to tell you it does not matter where you go to law school. This is especially true if you intend to go into some type of consumer or retail related type of solo practice. Consumers, especially, do not judge the law school. They judge the person and what that lawyer can do for them.
This said, before making your final decision, I would seriously look at and track the bar passage rate of the law school you are attending. If the more expensive school has a much better bar passage rate over the lower priced school, I would agree with Carolyn. Any amount of money you spend is going to be too much if you have difficulty passing the bar exam when you get out. (And, do not trust the law schools statistics. Check the statistics from the Bar in the state in which both the law school exisit and the state you intend to practice). Third and fourth tier school sometimes do not have the best bar passage rates and that is why they are third and fourth tier. Some do and they are lower ranked for a other reasons. DO NOT go to a school that cannot properly prepare you for the taking the bar exam.
You are doing right. Carolyn and I agree on this point. You are looking for information. That is good. Information is very important to making your decision.
Lastly, you need to feel comfortable with the law school you attending. Please, go visit the law school. Take the tour. Mill around without a tour. Talk to the graduates. You should apply to both schools. If you get accepted to both, go to the meetings or tours held for the accepted students. So what if it costs you $100.00 or so to hold the seats until you can make the best decision. Believe me, you will get a feel for your situation in a very true sense doing this.
Best of luck to you.

I don’t think I can compete with the advice from Carolyn and Chuck, but I’ll give it a stab.
Perhaps my story will provide a little insight into your choice.
I grew up in North Texas, went to undergrad in Dallas, and planned to practice there. I came to law school here at UVa, but I always planned to go back to Dallas to practice.
Now I’m a 3L, and I’ve accepted a job here in Virginia! I’ve gone from the big firm track to public interest. I’m excited as heck about my job.
What’s the point? I wouldn’t have gotten this awesome job if I had gone to law school in Texas. I’d probably be going to work for Big Law, sifting through piles of documents.
I hope that helps. Good luck in your decision!

Carolyn,
(While I posted your response and this on my blog, I thought I would do so here as well.)
You and I will have to agree to disagree on this one. I appreciate the journey you took, the value of your degree from Cornell and the opportunities it has provided to you, especially in your practice area, energy regulation. However, I work with solos everyday and listen to the obstacles they believe will prevent them from succeeding. Never has one of my clients or students said, “if only I went to a better law school” or “I lost out on a great client because I didn’t go to a top tier school.”
They do however, bemoan their debt service and the incredible strain it has placed upon them in all manner of their existence, not just opening a solo practice. Yes, law school loans are the price of admission as are loans in any business one would choose to open. But there is no harm, only good, that can come from having less debt especially when the advantages you suggest exist by going to a more expensive higher ranked law school do not necessarily play out for the majority the way you seem to believe..even in this particular student’s area of interest. Again this opinion is based upon my experiences. If starting a solo law practice right out of law school is your chosen career path, best to start this career path with less debt, not more. (Also, and “cheap” doesn’t always translate to lower ranked.)

Success is much more dependent on your ability to be persistent than where you went to school, etc. (David Maister has a great podcast on the subject–see http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/5/47/ .)
Having said that, it is pretty clear to me after 10 years in the search business that strong academics gives you a big head start professionally. Of course, what you end up doing with those advantages in the long run will rest on your drive. But why not give yourself every advantage possible and choose the school where you will develop a better network, etc. I think the additional money spent in the short run will pay itself back quicker than you might think.
I also question why anyone would want to go directly into solo practice without spending at least a couple of years working for someone else. There is so much you learn in the first few years of practice from working at a firm. While it is certainly possible to learn what you need to know about capturing your time, managing client expectations, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting paid, etc. (including the substance of what you need to know to adequately represent clients)working for someone else is a much more efficient way to get this foundation.

Is one choice of law school really in the “middle of nowhere”? Or is the student accustomed to a major metropolitan area and underestimating a smaller metropolitan area? I’m a 2L at the University of Georgia in Athens, and while I admit the difference in kinds of opportunities between this medium-sized city and Atlanta are like night and day — no IP botiques, numerous nonprofits, or biglaw in Athens — there are still opportunities here. The big cities are good precisely because of all the opportunities OUTSIDE of solo or small firm practice.
The price of the metropolitan law school will not be compensated by working a job. How many hours can you work while going to school fulltime anyway? (If fulltime studies are the case.)

I basically agree with Ms. Liebel. I went to a top 5 law school and now I’m a solo. Nobody ever asks me where I went to law school.
It does intimidate my adversaries a bit, but frankly that works against me sometimes. Often it’s better if your adversary thinks you’re a bumbling fool.

From reading these posts you would think that the cost of law school is all about the same, and not about the quality of education. I went to UVa and after my clerkship this year in Colorado, I intend to start a solo practice out here. Nobody cares about UVa here and for starting out I would have been much better off going to C CU or DU. But the intellectual experience of UVa was worth the price, even if in the end it does not pay off financially. You should go to a law school where you will learn to love the profession. And for most people that means studying with the best students and professors they can find. If it were all about the money, then why go into solo practice in the first place.

For future applicants making this choice, they should take into account any aid or tuition discounts each law school is offering to determine the total cost of attending. They also must take into account income and self-employment taxes in how much more they will need to earn to pay back these loans. When they take into account taxes, the benefit of going to the lower-priced law school becomes more apparent – possibly enough to sway the decision that way.

The principal amount of the loan (tuition + living expenses) will have to be paid back with after-tax income, meaning a person will have to pay income and self-employment or FICA taxes on the money used to pay down their loans. The interest on some loans is tax-deductible for income tax, but not self-employment or FICA.

How it plays out:

A single lawyer earning between roughly $40k to $80k would be in the 25% marginal income tax bracket, an is subject to the 15.3% self-employment tax. So the combined marginal rate of taxation is around 40%. 60% of each additional dollar of earnings is left over after taxes. So to pay back $50k of additional loan balance, the total cost would be $83,300 in pre-tax income. To pay back $100k of loan principal, the total cost would be $166,600 in pre-tax income.

Interest:

For interest that is tax deductible for income, only self-employment tax will be paid. So approximately 100% -15.3% = about 85% of the pre-tax income will pay back interest. So if someone pays $100k of interest over the lifetime of the loan – which is not unusual at all, the total cost would be $117k. There are many interest calculators online that will compute the total cost of the loan.

Also remember that most tax deductions only apply if one itemizes, which means they give up the $6k standard deduction in that tax year. So for someone who doesn’t own a home – and thus has few other deductions – student loan interest will only be deductible to the extent it exceeds the $6k standard deduction.

Why Pre-tax Income?

The reason I’m focusing on the pre-tax cost is because in comparing employment options, people usually look at pre-tax salaries. So therefore, people need to look at the pre-tax cost of the loans that pay for law school. If one looks at things in after-tax terms, the cost of the loans and especially the interest look smaller, but so does the additional earnings used to pay for those loans.

Obviously, the loans will not be repaid in one year, so the best calculation may be to divide the annual payment by (100 – marginal tax rate) to determine how much additional income will be needed each year to make loan payments.

It may be that it makes more sense to save on tuition, and simply have to do more networking to make up for being in an out-of-the-way location. Carolyn has very good points about being located close to the action, versus in a remote area – the question is whether these additional internship or networking opportunities justify the additional long-term financial strain, or whether there are other ways to network.

My personal view is that alot of people overestimate the importance of where they went to law school, especially when it comes to rankings. Higher ranked law schools do send more people to more competitive employers, but that may largely just reflect that their students on average were already very academically talented and motivated to begin with. Ultimately each applicant will have to decide whether a higher rank or better location justify extra loan payments for many years.