Hi Cece, I would love to hear your thoughts on journals/ particularly whether you think it is important to try to do Law Review. My ideal career path is big law -> impact litigation. I found 1L to be very stressful, and I am dreading the extra work of being on a time intensive journal in addition to a clinic next semester. I know that some of the other journals have much lower time commitments then does law review, but am I selling myself short by not ranking law review #1 in my school's matching program? Thank you for your candid videos and for all of the great advice!
- Anonymous
So much of initial legal employment is rooted in prestige. Law Review is, at the end of the day, a prestige point. Other prestige points include your law school ranking, your college’s ranking, good grades, RAing for a prestigious professor, and federal clerkships. If you take a look at your prestige points and conclude that it’s not enough for your target job after graduation, then Law Review is one way of adding prestige points and improving your odds.
I don’t have visibility into the level of prestige points needed for biglaw from your specific school, but your school’s Career Services certainly will. Take a look at the general prestige profiles of those who went into biglaw after graduation—was it top X% of a class, or mostly everyone? Was it only Law Review members, journal members, or did that not matter? The higher-ranked your law school is, the less important Law Review is for biglaw recruitment.
My advice with respect to journals is that it’s better to work on a journal that you’re actually interested in. You’ll have a better time, make deeper connections with the other members, and also be able to network with attorneys in practices which you actually would want to pursue (unless your area of interest is constitutional, in which case your interest area likely aligns well with Law Review). However, if you’re on the edge when it comes to prestige points for biglaw from your school, and you are dead set on biglaw after graduation, then the prestige point of Law Review could have greater weight. Generally, I think it’s always better to do what you want to do, except in cases where what you really want to do requires that you do something you don’t want to do first—in which case, it’s worth it to slog through something you don’t want to do, in order to do what you want to do. Just don’t forget your “why” along the way!
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