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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   27166 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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I would actually say that Law is one of the most meritocratic fields over the long run, in that while the really elite levels are gatekept behind prestigious degrees, you can still put out a shingle and work and build a base of clientele and advance. There are local lawyers pulling down excellent livings in any region of 100,000 people. Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

A good lawyer who gets bad grades at a mediocre law school probably won't reach SCOTUS, he can still end up a trial judge or a partner at a very profitable law firm. A great chemist who misses out on professional and academic opportunities teaches at the high school.

Where doing physics research requires being hired by one of a handful of institutions in the world, and if you don't meet their criteria or get unlucky early in your career, tant pis.

And your timing has to be close to perfect.

I was a young shithead in undergrad but, at the time, thought I was just going to go into the corporate world so my GPA didn't really matter. That .... turned out to be exactly true, but is beside the point! I've always wanted to go back and get a masters in something like computational linguistics, but I'd have to self-fund some sort of post-bac in math or other pseudo-re-bachelor-degree in order to be competitive for any non fly-by-night degree mill.

Academia, despite it's self-inflated perception as the "palace of ideas" is actually one of the most rigid "FOLLOW THE TRACK" career paths out there. The Marine Corps has far more flexibility in terms of self-determination.

and build a base of clientele and advance

Do you know if there are any good stats on what percent of lawyers are making excellent livings after they take some time to advance? New lawyer salaries have been scarily bimodal for decades now, but it's hard to tell the extent to which that's a career-long problem rather than something the lower half of the distribution just has to work their way out of over 5 or 10 years.

I'm trying to find data on it but I'm not succeeding quickly. Entry level wages have been bimodal, but the up-or-out nature of big law means that a lot of those highly-paid associates are gone within two to four years, and some for jobs where they (adjusting for inflation) they will never make more than they did early on at biglaw. Surveys report that 20% of associates leave their firms annually, though some are lateral to another firm. And of course a big part of the bimodalism has to do with the strong preference among elite professional degree holders for urban living; too few are willing or able to move to Cleveland, let alone Lancaster or Wyoming, to advance their careers.

But a small percentage of lawyers advancing their careers after failing at earlier prestige games doesn't necessarily mean that the system isn't meritocratic, it might tell us that a small percentage of good lawyers are being "thrown away" by the earlier screening systems.

I can't quantify it easily, but looking around at mid career lawyers, there is a definite path both down and up for lawyers based on talent. There are people I know who made big law and now aren't even practicing, and people I know who are making partner at prominent small town firms and pulling down a decent living now, which will improve considerably when the boomers have the courtesy to die off and free up a lot of work.

Even take a small city local DAs office as an example. Dauphin County, where Harrisburg is located, will hire young ADAs out of schools like Dusquesne and Penn State and Weidner with mediocre grades. The entry level wage is low, probably $60-70k these days. The experienced average is like $175k and the DA makes in the $200k range with a lot of local prestige to go with it. The Dauphin County DA went to Widener, started as an ADA thirty years ago, and now is the DA. There's obviously political elements to becoming DA, both office politics and electoral politics, but for the most part the way you become DA is by having at least some degree of talent for law.

None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science. If you're a research scientist without a university or industry affiliation, there's not a very comparable way to advance and revive your career.

If you totally fail at BigLaw, where do you go? Or, where is it common to go? Small biz corporate attorney? In house counsel for something very process driven? Leave law altogether?

Nobody totally fails at biglaw. The nature of the job is that you have to succeed quite a bit before you even get the chance to fail. Your work product will initially be so far from anything that travels outside of the firm that if you bomb right out of the gate, your work will never be seen by anyone, and no matter how bad you are the firm will probably still give you a month or so to keep your title while you look for another job, and nobody will really know you failed just that you're leaving, which a lot of people do.

People commonly go in house at various corporations or go into government work. But really over time they'll end up anywhere.

Hmmm interesting.

Would a minmax strategy be to get the BigLaw job, then intentionally poop your pants (figuratively not literally) and coast in an "Easy" 40 - 60 hour, but fairly high status and well compensated, corporate job?

None of this is perfect, there's still a ton of early career gatekeeping and prestige games, especially around the highest end jobs. But we're not comparing it to perfection, just to the example offered by OP: research science.

I was going to point out the many Striver Merit Badges you're overlooking in your analysis that are needed to approach the highest end legal jobs, but yes, by comparison, it's far more meritocratic than research science at universities.

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