April is a cruel month for some law students

As we close in on law school graduation season here in the Gopher State, not everyone who will be donning a robe and mortar board next month is a happy camper. Every year at about this time we hear from a disenchanted law student or two -- and this year is no different.

In a recent post, we noted that the University of Minnesota Law School had "slipped" from 20 to 22 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the "Top 100" law schools. In response to that post, yesterday we received the following comment purportedly from a third-year law student at the U of M:

Honestly, for job placements Minnesota Law School (sic), isn't even 4th tier. We send less than 20 percent of our graduates top the top 250 firms, while most schools in the top 30 send at least a third. We have significantly lower salaries than other comparable law schools In my 3l class most students do not have jobs.

Appropriately enough, the comment was made under the nom de plume "Bitter 3L." I cannot vouch for any of the factual assertions contained in the post. In fact, I am nearly positive that, if called upon to do so, the U of M would pull up all sorts of placement statistics showing things are not nearly as dire as portrayed in this comment. But the statistics are not what interests me. Whatever the real numbers are, every year some law students head merrily off to prestigious clerkships or lucrative Big Law jobs, while others live lives of quiet desperation, facing a lot of debt and few job prospects. Schools trumpet the stories of the first group, but rarely mention the second.

I have some thoughts of my own on some of the issues implicated in 3L's remarks, but thought I'd toss it out into the blogosphere to let you comment. Do any of you more seasoned and grizzled attorneys have any words of wisdom for our bitter young friend?

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[Source: Minnesota Lawyer Blog]