Originally posted by bat21
I have always liked the law - I guess it is in my genes as I have three brothers who are attorneys. One of whom is the senior counsel for the NEA (2 million strong teacher association) and he makes a very good living. After my radiology residency, I got bored with private practice and went to a top 15 law school. In my school, there was a neurosurgeon two years ahead and an OBGyn one year ahead. So board-certified MD/JDs are not rare.
I just have a few things to add to the above posters:
The law field is very competitive as there are more than three hundred law schools in the country and a few hundred more without full accreditation by the ABA. Just about anyone can get into law school because so many schools are mediocre. These graduates fail to pass the bar, and when passed end up making about $40-50,000 a year. Very few attorneys make the kind of money that we hear about (eg. class action suits). To join a prestigious firm, you MUST graduate from a top tier law school (Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Boalt Hall, Chicago, Penn, Duke, NYU, Columbia, Michigan, Virginia, Texas and several others). You MUST make Law Review (top 5%) to be offered a summer internship with a prominent law firm and if it worked out, asked to join them as an associate. It takes as much as 8 years to be considered for partnership with the big money ($200-300K). But often, associates are let go when they are not rain maker caliber, having wasted many years working like a dog, logging inflated billable hours. Having done prestigious clerkships with federal court judges helps in getting partnership. But again, it takes Law Review credentials to get these jobs.
The number of graduating attorneys are astounding. My school had a class size of 500 (my med sch class had 200), Harvard has about 1,000 per year. Yale Law School, considered the best in the country, accepts only 6% of the applicants so getting into a National school is much tougher than getting into med sch. For Yale, GPA must be close to 4.0 and LSAT score in the 99%. Much more so than in medicine, where you attended law school matters. The above are what you would need for a successful legal career.
There are already a lot of health professionals in the law. Many are nurses, pharmacists, etc. These people work for insurance companies, malpractice defense firms or in-house counsel to hospitals and health care plans. They don't make much money, but what they make is more than what they earned before. Their knowledge of medicine is about what most firms need so the MD doesn't carry that much weight. And if you never did residency, you wouldn't know enough about the practice of medicine to bring insights above those of allied health JDs. Many allied health people and physicians attend Regional schools which are non-competitve and earn their degrees part-time. These are not great credentials if one aspires to one day becoming a partner in a known firm.
Law school is challenging and the skills to do well is different from the scientific mind set we all have. The Socratic teaching method is sometimes rough and you have to think on your feet. There is an incredible amount of writing involved. Searching the law is also tedious as our judicial system is based on precedence, inherited from the English. France on the other hand, has a legal code so judges don't change the law. Law books, court opinions etc can be very boring to read. While in school, the students still have an idealized view of the way the law is practiced, but this goes away fast in the real world. It can be monotonous and many many lawyers leave the law (more than doctors leaving medicine) or never practiced law at all.
There are two great programs offering graduate degrees in Health Law (University of Houston because of the proximity to the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, and Loyola in Chicago). An LLM degree from these institutions should help if one did not go to a National school.
If I had to choose law or medicine alone, I would choose medicine. There is the prestige, the trust of the patients and the satisfaction of helping others. The financial reward is also great, a level that will never be reached by an average attorney.
Unless your wife really, really hates medicine and intends to never practice medicine, then perhaps she should switch but she must get into a National school to attain the kind of lifestyle that a medical career can bring. If she does not do a residency now, she most likely will not be able to apply for one if she ever decides to come back. She would also have a hard time paying off both medical and law school loans with an associate's salary ofclose to $60,000 a year. My final suggestion is to do residency now and law later, after having paid off the loans and saved enough to afford the low incomes of all new attorneys.
Tell her good luck!
I don't think a single sentence that this guy posted was correct; except, possibly, that he has 3 brothers that are attorneys. So much misinformation it's scary.
