"More qualified to sue us than work for us"‏

He was more qualified to sue us than petition us for employment.

This was an actual non-legal employer quote from Barron's [may be a paywall] (A newspaper that people with jobs read—some of our fourth tiers friends sadly may have not heard of it) regarding a T20 graduate who was begging for a $20/hr computer programming job. That's $40 grand a year for you non-Leiters out there. You long time pay debt back! There are two main things this brings to mind:

First, the sort of things that a law degree actually does give you do not impress non-JD hiring managers. For instance, in this case, the applicant had listed on his resume that he had already passed the state bar exam, to show that he was a success and was smart enough and hard-working enough to pass a difficult examination. But it didn't impress the hiring manager: He was more qualified to sue us than petition us for employment. It just made the manager think that this guy was even more overqualified, and more likely to leave the job after being trained, or to even sue the company itself! (If only they taught law students how to actually file suit!) Before blaming the hiring manager for not understanding the situation, know that 1) it doesn't matter what you think, but what the people with money (and the leverage to hire someone with that money) think, and 2) it is only common sense to think JD-holders are overqualified. Why else would you go to law school? The hiring manager has plenty of choices and is not going out of his way to analyze the rational possibilities of why a T20 law grad who just passed the bar is applying to a technical job that requires only a high school diploma. That's not his problem. It's your problem to show that you can offer value to the employer.

Second, based on the first principle, you will be squeezed no matter which way you go. It follows that any sort of additional investment, like taking the bar exam, can push the recent J.D. grad into more trouble. If law school on your resume makes it harder to get a non-legal job, then any addition to that JD, such as a legal internship, bar admission, doc review job, will make things even worse, showing that you are doubling down, as it were, on flaw—I mean, law. So if you try to squeeze out a career in the law, you close more escape hatches behind you; but if you hedge your bets you will have no chance to get legal employment. That is, if you don't take the bar, you have no chance in the legal profession, but if you take the bar, that is closing other opportunities.

So take your choice: Build your legal resume for the unlikely hope of getting a legitimate legal job, or abandon further hope in law, but then risk having the non-J.D. hiring manager, who presumably does real things in the real world, W-T-F your resume when he sees "Order of the Coif" as an "accomplishment". What is "coif"? Don't they sell those at Wal-Mart?

Preston Bell (premeditatedmeditations.com) is the author of the (free) eBook about the Law School situation: Smarter Than Socrates: The End of the Law School Era.