Law Degree Useful in Finance?
I’m a student at a target school studying business administration. After graduation, I’m planning to get a JD at a law school. However, recently I’ve been doubting the usefulness of a JD in the finance industry and have been worrying that I’ll be wasting 3 years of life pursuing a degree that is not very relevant to my career plan.
Would you guys say that having a JD would be useful in finance? Like would that allow me to get roles in financial institutions that deals with the legal side of things (ex: signing deals in M&A transactions)?
Or alternatively, would you say pursuing an LLM would be more useful?
I’d love to have all of your inputs. Thanks in advance.
Short answer. No.
Long answer. T6+, ideally HYS. I went to a non T6 T14 and recruited into non legal jobs. I tried my hand at both MBB and BB and only landed one of the MBB. But even that is hard and they weight heavily to T6 and more so HYS.No one really landed finance roles like BB associate.Looking historically through LinkedIn, there have been a couple at our T14 in the past few years, but they had solid prior work experience somewhere financial, so this isn't a path in per se. Seems like a small number exist from places like Columbia though.If you want to keep this path open, get a T6 admission and be ok with going biglaw if this doesn't work out. A few people make the swap after working, but pretty much only from V10-V20 firms with solid brand names on the street.
Also, get some work experience. 1-2 years is plenty and they recruit better, both for biglaw jobs and almost all who get the non biglaw top tier jobs have some.
Forgot to mention if you want to work for financial institutions in a legal capacity, they usually hire former V10-20 associates whose firms hired them before. So go T14+ and get good grades if you want to work as a lawyer at a major bank.
How about LLM? Would you say getting an LLM at a T14/T6 law school would be more worth it as it takes less time? Though I do understand that you can’t really be an attorney in biglaw with only an LLM, but would an LLM be useful if I want to work for financial institutions in a legal capacity?
Thanks btw for answering my previous question in such detail.
I see a ton of lawyers in project finance/ infra, where commercial and legal matters are a huge deal. Most of them seem to come in at VP or higher in order to skip out on the modeling.
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