 Life in the law, the two o'clock block you're on a given Friday. Lisa Anderson, one of our hosts, our OC16 host is here, and Keisha King is one of our OC16 hosts and lawyers, she's here, and she's my co-host today, and Lisa is our guest today, and we're going to talk about going to law school, because everybody needs to know how to go to law school, you know, if you want to abide by the rule of law of your lawyer, or at least care about it. Well, not necessarily, no, Kim Kardashian's getting a law degree in the same year that I probably will be with no law school. She gets more hitched than Donald Trump, I'm sure he's mad at her for that reason. Andy, they're in competition. Well, anyway, she's going to law school without law, she's getting a law degree without law school, because certain states allow you to do that, like California. Are you going to a law school that's cold or something? Well, I'm wearing, this is, I'm wearing a lot of different garb from various law schools, because I wanted to exemplify the ridiculous, so I have my gloves, if you can't see, say NYU law, my sunglasses here, say Georgetown law, this is Virginia, USC, and Duke. Anyway, this is as much, as much bling as I could fit on, but the point of it, the point of it is that this, in this day and age, we've gone to a ridiculous point where people apply to too many law schools. There's so much redundancy in the American law school application process. I mean, the average student, I think, applies to about eight. Many, many people apply to more than 10. Many people actually apply to more than 40. It's ridiculous. That's expensive. It's very expensive. Yeah, it can be expensive. When you think about the applications, I say, being from Virginia, you should only consider schools in Virginia. I don't understand why you would go anywhere else. It's a very good law school, actually. They are, it is, trust me, I know. The only thing is, it's in Charlottesville. Not so great a city. Problems. Yeah, a little problematic. There's a lot of laws you can practice correcting in Charlottesville where to go. Activist law in Charlottesville. There you go. Needs a lot of help. So why you go to law school, Lisa? I need to know. So I've been out of college for 10 years now, finished that eternity ago, and I've been... It's the gap 10 years now. The gap 10 years. It used to be a one year gap. Now it's a decade gap. I feel a lot more prepared for law school now than I did just emotionally and life-wise than I would have 10 years ago. That's true. Some of the best lawyers I know entered law school after they had some time, you know, following college graduates. Yeah, I know people who go to law school in their 40s, 50s, I mean, multiple people, and they enjoy it a lot more too. And I personally think I would have gotten much too caught up in grades and test scores and maybe the social drama of law school back then. Now I feel like I'm doing it because I want to learn the law. I have worked in a variety of industries since college, and the law is the common thread going throughout them. I like, basically, I just like the thinking of a lawyer. I enjoy that sort of mathematical approach to logic and applying what we need in our society to sort of a consistent procedural framework. Was there something that happened in the last 10 years in current events that makes you more interested in the rule of law and that kind of logic that you're talking about? Well, current events definitely make me more interested in it, and it's really a tool to use towards correcting future current events. I think we're at a point where we're not thinking very sanely from either extreme politically or in many decisions. There's not one episode. I've been involved at the state legislature repeatedly. Not recently, but I've worked for a number of legislators, both parties, both chambers, gotten some exposure to elections and media nationwide, and I think the law is the common thread. So you want to do good with it or you want to do power and influence with it or you want to make money with it? What do you want with it? Ah, everything. We'll see. I'm not prescribing my limits quite yet. I mean, I'm not terribly drawn to big law and as you probably know, there's a massive gap in salaries between big law and, say, public interest. We're talking straight out of law school. You can make about $200,000 in big law, which is firms of typically over 500 people. You can't do that in Hawaii big law, but on the main line easily. And then government pays about $50,000 straight out. So there's like a four-fold disparity. Disparity has grown because that $50,000 was the same 10 years ago. Wow. The $200,000 was not the same 10 years ago. So it's like the economy in general. It's like disparity in general. Economic disparity hits the law profession, you must say. It's very... And it's hard to justify that if you want it. Yeah. Why is the graduate who goes into public interest law making 25% of what the graduate who... Yeah. And by the way, some top-of-the-line graduates go into public interest law. Yeah, for sure. And certain branches of public interest law are actually in at least as much demand, for instance. A lot of people want to work for organizations like the ACLU or federal clerkships. And that's a whole other beast because that's super competitive except you don't make much money straight off. Except oftentimes if you work for a federal judge for a couple years, or you start your first year at the big law firm, you'll be making, say, a third-year salary if you spent two years working for the federal judge. So they give you credit, but you still make pennies while you're working for the federal judge. But yet it's very competitive. Keisha, does this make you want to go to law school? It does not. But it does make me more interested and appreciative of those who go into public law. My question for you, though, is what experience did you gain over the past 10 years that now gives you kind of an insight on what you want to do? I guess, let's see, there's not one particular experience. But I think, in general, my work at the state capitol, and What did you do there? So I worked for a Democrat Senator and two, I mean, yeah, a Democrat state senator and two Republicans, one state senator, one state representative. And I noticed a lot of just factionalism. And I also worked for a conservative national radio host more recently. And that radio host was thrown off the airways because he wasn't conservative enough. He was on a conservative station. And he was replaced by a fellow who actually illegally came to work in the Trump administration because that fellow is a lot more conservative. So if you run the middle of the road, there's really no outlet, no solution. People will attack you for not being conservative enough from the conservative side. Of course, you're going to get attacked from the liberal side because you're not a liberal. And then you're just floundering. And it's a really dangerous place for our society because we need people who can entertain both sides and who can actually go to the station. Yeah, exactly. And the current climate's very, very hostile to compromises. I also worked on the campaign of a Hawaii US congressman last year who's very much about as middle of the road as you can get in Hawaii. And he's getting attacked right now from both sides for statements about the border. And about Trump. People say, oh, you're too pro-Trump. Oh, you're too anti-Trump. And there's no room for dialogue. And I think that's very important. So I'm going to be going to law school in Washington, DC. And I think that that political angle interests me. But it's not the be-all and all. I'm also interested in the state law and potentially entertainment law, international law, which of course is like that. Some people are pointed directly at running for office. No, I'm not. OK, good to hear that. On the other hand, your political awareness, your political consciousness is important, and will undoubtedly be enhanced. And you will come out of there feeling maybe more on the rule of law than you would otherwise. Yeah, I'll hopefully have a more pooled approach to it. I think that we get too easily heated when we talk about politics. And I think a lawyer's job is to step back a little bit and look at the objectives. And that's something I hope to gain. Yeah, well, Jim Duffy made a comment at a bar association meeting. I won't forget. He said, doctors, they heal the body. Men of the cloth, women of the cloth, they heal the spirit. And lawyers, they heal the controversy. Well, that's the goal. You want to say that's the goal. You want to say that's the goal. Not really convinced. What school have you chosen in DC? Ah, Georgetown. Very good school. I have five lawyers in our family who went to Georgetown. All five went to Georgetown. Five. There are others who went other places. Georgetown Law School or undergraduate or both? Both. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a good school. It's a very good school. Yeah, I was not in that number of people. What was your experience like, Elise? Well, I thought about law school straight out of college. I didn't apply, and I'm glad that I didn't. And this was my first year applying. But one thing that helped me apply this year was the fact that I got seriously injured. I had an ACL injury. I was playing tennis one day, and my leg just buckled. So like an ACLU injury? Nah. Womp, womp, womp. Yeah. My ACL, the anterior cruciate ligament, just snapped all of a sudden, so I couldn't walk. I had to get knee surgery. I used to be an avid runner. I used to run for about 30 minutes to an hour every single day. It was a very, very important part of my life. All of a sudden, I couldn't walk much less run. I haven't run now in about eight months, maybe nine months. Jay knows this. We live on the same neighborhood. I know, they're watching week to week out in recovery here. Oh, my goodness. So yeah, my life changed. I didn't have certain activities I could do anymore. And that gave me the focus and the discipline to finally apply to law school. And I did, so I injured my knee in October. And I had already gotten the recommendations going. I hadn't actually filled out any applications yet. I'd taken one LSAT, but I can't say for sure that I would have had the focus to go through the process if I hadn't hurt my knee. Because once I did that, I couldn't do anything. I was lying in bed all day long. I actually had the ambulance come on Thanksgiving because there was something. It was very serious an incident. And I mean, I was, people don't like me to call myself a cripple because they think that's insulting to actual cripples. But I really was crippled for many, I still am, but because I couldn't do much actively. I couldn't hike. I couldn't play tennis. Couldn't travel like I would have liked to. I was forced to focus. So you had to focus and maybe refocus your life. It was a silver lining, for sure. I got those applications done for about a three-week period. I did absolutely nothing, but applications. I applied to 15 law schools, which I think was overkill. Yeah. It's not 40, but it was too many. See, what they do, if you do pretty well on the LSAT, a lot of the schools are going to give you application fee waivers. So most applications cost about $120 each per application because you have a $45 processing fee for the central organization, and the school itself charges anywhere between usually $60 and $90 for its fee. So the waivers waive the school side of the fee, but you still pay the $45 portion. So if you apply to 15 schools without any waivers, multiply that by $120, and that's about as much money as you're spending just on the application. Yeah, it's just similar, though. You said before they were redundant. They are similar, but they're different enough that you have to read everyone. You can't just, like, copy-paste. You've got to be careful. Yeah, because they have different word limits. They have slightly different questions, different focuses, different rules sometimes. Some will ask you for sections that others don't. Some care, say, where your family went to school or how much money your parents make or those kinds of things. Is there anything on there that sticks in your mind as being damn stupid? A lot is on there that I think is damn stupid. And I have some charts here that we can show later. Let's look at them. Let's look at the charts, yeah. So take a critical look at all of this. So the charts all kind of look the same. And this is from LawSchoolNumbers.com. I don't know how much you can see. I'm very bad near-sighted. So you can see green dots in the upper right corner, then a line of yellow, then a C of red. And that indicates that on the horizontal axis, you have LSAT score. On the vertical axis, you have GPA. So that indicates how people get accepted, wait-listed, or rejected from law school, green, yellow, red, respectively. And it's very, very cut and dry. They put so much emphasis on essays and the factors of what you've been doing with your life. But in the end, you can see that the dots are pretty conformed to your grades and your test scores, with one exception. And that's URM. So they have URM, underrepresented minority. So they give significant preferences to people based on race. And if you see the charts, I highlighted certain dots. So you can get in. If race, and it's ambiguous whether sexual orientation comes into that, because many claim that that's also a URM. How about religion? No, I'm quite sure that's not a URM. I mean, yeah, I don't think that's a problem. But they ask you questions about that. Do they? I'm not so sure about that. How can they measure URM if they don't know? Well, I don't think they ask about religion. They ask you, they do ask you about race, yes. They absolutely ask you about race. And so you can see that it does really help. If you go to one of my charts, I have it on all of them. So which one? Which one? Can you see what that one is at Harvard? So I have one of the, you can see one of them has URM, one of the green dots that's way into the red field. And that gives you a sense. If you scroll forward, I have Harvard, and Georgetown, and NYU, I believe, all different charts. And so it's almost every dot, every person that gets in with a test score and grade combination there has that URM boost. What do you think made you appealing on these applications? What were your strong suits here? Well, if you look at, I didn't put where my dot is, but I got a pretty strong LSAT score. So I mean, I was pretty safely. I took it three times. Three times? You're, see, they all make? Is that some kind of old time record? No, no, the all time record would be about eight times. So the first time I took it, I got in the 94th percentile. And that's not good, actually, for law school applications. Yeah, you can get into law school with a score in the 94th percentile, but not a great law school, unless you have other factors going in. What were they? What were the other factors in play? Well, I don't have them. Race, sexual orientation, poverty status, that can help a lot. Basically, the URM factors. But so anyway, I took it again. I had a problem during that first LSAT. If you ever take the LSAT, you have to know you don't. This is going to be on the final exam. You cannot. I hope you're writing this down. It's important. After checking in, if you check in 45 minutes before the test starts, you walk in the room, you cannot leave to use the bathroom until after the time starts. I didn't understand that when I first took the test. So I had to. You carry in some script notes or something. Exactly. You can't even bring a racer back into the testing room. Modern technology. Yeah, but anyway, I used the bathroom in the middle of the test and got a 94th percentile score, which again, sounds pretty good, but it's not. So I took it again, got a 98th percentile score, which is quite good. And that can get you in. That got a lot of fevers that gets you into most every school. But then there are a few schools that it might not get you into. So I took it again and got the 9th percentile. And that did improve. There's a big difference. And that was only one point difference. It was 98 and 99 on the raw score. It was. It raised the scholarships by a significant amount. What are your grades? I mean, what were your grades? Were they a big factor here? Not only your grades, but your preparation time to prepare for the exam. Having been on break for 10 years. Yeah, but the LSAT isn't really an academic exam. It doesn't test material that you would have learned in school. It tests like reading. It's a standardized test. Yeah, what can help, though, with the preparation is taking multiple exams. Because when you first go in, you have to put all your bags and all your stuff in a clear plastic bag. It's just very institutional. And the first time I took it for someone out of law school, it was weird. It was really strange. It was an alien experience. Then by the second, third time, it was like coming home. When I asked you about the grades, I meant your grades in college. In college. So this is something that I think is yes and not well. I went to Princeton for undergrad during the grade deflation policy. So I graduated in the top quarter of my class at Princeton or so, 26%ile to be precise. So I can't lie and say I was in the top quarter. But 26%ile or 74th on the good side of that at Princeton should be pretty good. But because they had a grade deflation policy, my GPA was a 3.68, which is below the 25th percentile for most law schools, for most elite law schools. I'm so sorry for you. It's a real sad story. Yeah, it's a sad story. I'm sure all you people out there are probably sorry for you. Don't you feel bad for her. I mean, she's really having a tough moment of concern. But anyway, the 3.68, yeah, it's not good. Most have like an average of about 3.85. That's kind of the mean average for law school applications. And they don't care that much where you went to school or even if it had a grade deflation policy at the time. So yeah, that worked against me. And actually, I was told directly by an admissions officer at one law school that after I got in, I cannot expect much scholarship aid with that GPA. So some people might think I'm just being hyperbolic about that. But an admissions officer literally told me that no matter what the LSAT score, if you have a GPA that's like under 3.7, then you're kind of in tough water with the scholarship. What happened then? That sounds like you were in trouble with that. Well, the LSAT score rescued it. I mean, it wasn't like a horrible, horrible GPA. It just wasn't a GPA that would help. And what I think is really strange about this, see, this is the thing about law school applications now is the US News and World Report is the king. They have one ranking system. Unlike undergraduate schools where they have 10 different ranking lists that kind of average each other out a little bit, this one has one. Law schools have one ranking list. And they have a formula. And the formula takes into account LSAT score and GPA. But GPA is a raw number. They don't care where you went to school for their formula. So the law schools get graded by your GPA. So it makes sense that they only care about the raw number, regardless of where you got it or what classes you took. They don't factor in the school or this reduction thing you talked about at Princeton. Yeah, they also don't factor in the fact that you might have been out of school for a long time. And so I took a whole lot of pre-med classes after college in like 2014, 2015. None of those science classes go into my GPA because it was all learned after the official undergraduate diploma. So it feels a little silly being 32 and being evaluated based on your schoolwork at age 20 when you did a whole load of schoolwork at age 27. I hope somebody considered that. My experience is that those gap years are really beneficial to an applicant. And for a law firm, hiring in a law firm, that would be a really big positive point. But one thing is clear. I'm not going to try myself. Did all the applicants around you, were they as analytical as you are here today? Not all, but a lot. There's a forum called, you might have heard of it, Reddit. So Reddit is like a discussion forum. And there's a platform on Reddit called Law School Admissions, which has about, I think, 32,000 people on it. So these are all law school applicants talking about various factors in the admissions process and the depth and the level of response you get if you post something on there is really extraordinary. I mean, there are a lot of people who make this sort of a part-time job for about six months. And some people, even like the LSAT, some people spend thousands of dollars on prep classes or tutors and many, many years of preparation. I didn't do that, but a lot of people do. And it's a big deal, this law school admissions process. And I mean, it takes so much time and energy, not to mention money. Well, now we've had a scandal about college admissions in the last few months. Got my U.S. Seagull shirt on. Do you have to pay any money on the side here? Do you have to build any buildings for them or anything? Well, the T-shirt came in the mail, but. Right size anyway. Yeah, so you're strictly on merit. And I suppose the problem that was happening, that has been happening in the schools, really retains more to the undergraduate schools rather than the graduate school. At U.S. Seagull, that's what they said. So Gould is the law school. And people did ask that question. I went on a couple tours there. And of course U.S. Seagull accounts for the vast majority of this cheating scandal. Not U.S. Seagull, U.S. Seagull. They made a very important point that the law school has nothing to do with it, that it is all the undergraduate facility that's at risk here. OK, so ultimately you got into the, what do I call it? The scholarship practice. The practice of finding where the money is. Negotiating scholarships. Negotiating. It's not as simple as taking it off the tree. You have to engage and actively put it. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so I negotiated a lot. You can take, say you apply to 15 schools and you get into 11 of them. You can take the, say one school offers you 135,000. Another offers you 105,000. If they're similarly ranked, you can say, well, this school offered this. And they might not match it. Sometimes they will. 105 will raise their scholarship to 135. Sometimes maybe just to 120. You can do it that way. Or, and they have to be peer schools. You can't take a school ranked, like number 50, and show it to a school ranked number 10 and expect them to match the scholarship. It sounds like a price match at Best Buy. So yeah, there's the matching the scholarships. Then you can make other deals with them. Like for instance, you can raise your LSAT score and then boost the scholarship maybe. Or you can tell them all withdraw from this wait list and then they might boost the scholarship. There's lots of things to trade off on. There are, there are many different tactics and I found that a lot of them worked. So you have, so you have 15 schools. Did you get into all 15? I did not. Oh, okay. Okay, I guess the show is over now. What? You want to ask her which one she didn't get into? Seriously, it's true. No, I don't, I don't, I don't. I don't want to. It's more important to share what you did too. Well, let's just say I found that the results were quite correlated with the ranking. I mean, and very much with my GPA and LSAT score. And I wasn't as disappointed by the, I got wait listed at two of the 15 and rejected at two of the 15. And one of the wait listed schools, they tell you what quartile you're ranked in. So that eased the blow a little bit. I was in the top quartile of the wait list. But the- Guess what, mom? I'm in the top quartile of the wait list. Well, it was a slight ease of the blow, whatever. Jay. So anyway, yeah, they, I wasn't disappointed because I saw those charts that I pointed out earlier and my combination of scores fell firmly within the yellow or red regions for those schools. So I didn't take it personally really. Okay, so now you have the ones that accepted you. Did they come in? One other point for the law school admissions process is it's all rolling admissions now, except for maybe one or two schools, but almost everything's rolling. So you want to apply early in the process because A, you find out earlier, but B, they have more money and more spots left. So there's a serious boost to apply early. Okay. Now you have a certain number to pick from and you want to negotiate scholarships and you negotiate and now do you wind up accepting, assuming they're all top tier schools, the one that offers you most money? That's a personal choice for a lot of people. I took a sort of, I kind of did. Georgetown offered me a lot more money than the other top schools. There were some schools that are not ranked very high that offered me a little more than Georgetown, but when you take all the factors into consideration, it was a fairly obvious choice, I think, because they did offer me a very generous scholarship compared to the others. Aside from that, it's in Georgetown, which is a very pleasant place to be. No, it's not. It's not. You spent time in Kesha. I did. I spent a lot of time in Northern Virginia and Georgetown is beautiful, a very beautiful campus. But at least doesn't think so. Well, no, what I don't think is that the law school's on the Georgetown campus. So the law school is a separate campus on the other side of D.C. But yeah, you can go to the campus, they have a commuter train and you can take classes there, but you're pretty much living and working on Capitol Hill next to the White House. Well, Capitol Hill, I mean. That's not a bad landscape either. I mean, it's pretty. Well, there's a homeless shelter across the street, but aside from that, yeah. Is your family, all the graduates in your family, they work in government? Did they go to Capitol Hill? We have actually a few entertainment lawyers and the most famous that you'll probably know is Marshawn Daniels or Marshawn Evans. She was on, you'll love this. She was on Trump's show, The Apprentice. No, she get fired? She did eventually. She was in there for a long time. Yeah, I think it is a badge of honor now. One of those things. Cool. So she lives in L.A. now or D.C.? Oh no, no, Atlanta. Oh, okay. Yeah, Hollywood's not. Yeah, yeah. So at least when you're actually going, when are you leaving for school? It's coming soon now. About six weeks from now. I actually just got my section assignment today. Congratulations. Oh, that means you know what classes you're going to be in? My internet was down at home, so I haven't checked. I'm not sure about that. Okay, that's exciting. But the first-year curriculum, as you probably know, because Jay went to law school, is very set. So you kind of know what classes you're going to be taking regardless of. That's very separate. It's very important. The first year is most important because that's when you show your stuff and get on lower review or not. Get on lower review, your life, your career is made. Keisha knows that. But it's a lot of work. Yes, well, I know. Okay, well, we wish you well. We hope you do the right thing with this new weapon you are building in law school. It's a social weapon, call it. It's an economic weapon. It's a political weapon. It's an enabler in many, so many ways and you want to make the use of it, yeah. Good for you, congratulations, Elise. Thank you. We'll miss you. Well, I'll be back. I'll be back for Christmas, be back for summer. You could phone in. Maybe. No problem. She's got to steady. She's got to steady. Thank you for sharing your experiences and getting in. I think anybody watching this would benefit by knowing your experiences. Thanks. Well, the process is so crazy and dynamic. It's such a game that we've talked about it for a long time. Yeah, I only want to close with one thing. Property is a big first year course. Less the whole year, it's lots of credits. And our teacher, his name is Elmer Millian. At NYU, he spoke about Oklahoma. Oklahoma has lots of Indians. You know, it's the end of the Trail of Tears, is that what we call it? And, you know, Indian law defined the place in many ways, defined his property course anyway. And in the final exam, he asked us what a Pony was. And Pony's a very important property, a personal property, not real property, because it's got to a pawn shop, all that stuff. And he spelled the word Pony with a capital P. And everybody got it wrong. Because the right answer was a Pony is an Indian. I'll leave you with that. Watch out for the trick questions, Elise. Good to know. Stay vigilant. Thank you. Being my co-host, Kisha. It's always a pleasure. Thank you for coming down, Elise. And we'll see you guys very soon. Sounds good. Aloha. Aloha.