I am considering going to law school and want your guys' opinion on some of the reasons why I want to go to law school. I want to emphasize that these are not the only reasons why I want to go to law school. These are only the ones relevant to this site.
Background:
- I just finished my junior year at the University of Kansas where I am majoring in Accounting, Finance, and Business Analytics.
- I will sit for the CPA exam next summer (summer 2020).
- I worked last summer at a 10 person convertible arbitrage hedge fund and this summer I will be working in corporate development of a mid-cap industrial company.
- I have a sufficiently high GPA and LSAT to get into schools like Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, UNC, UCLA, and UT-Austin but it would be a stretch to get into a school like Penn or Columbia and Harvard/Yale/Stanford are realistically not possible for me to get into.
I want to work on deals. M&A is the only thing that I am interested in. My first exposure to finance was when I read Barbarians at the Gate my senior year of high school. Since then, basically everything I have done has been about putting me in a position to be able to work on deals.
Questions:
(1) 1 reason that I want to go to law school is because I want better access for recruiting. No bank recruits on campus at Kansas (which should be obvious). The few banks that Kansas have any form of relationship with pretty much never hires Jayhawks for IBD roles. In law school I would be going to as many of the banks recruiting events as I would biglaw's. I would also do things like, if I go to the University of Illinois, the IB Academy (or at least apply to it) and work finance jobs such as at the Endowment. I will still continue getting finance experience and still be involved in finance even though I would be a law student. How do banks view post-undergrad non-business students? I know that I could just get an MSF and spend 1/3 the money if I only wanted better access to the recruiting so please don't comment about that.
I am more interested in what the perception would be of a student like me.
(2) Once you move beyond the excel and powerpoint jockey stage, is there a benefit to knowing the law? The way I see it, once you choose "I want to acquire company x," how it gets done is mainly a function of the law. If your the acquirer, especially in a hostile deal, your choice of actions is based on the law. So why not know what the law is? If your company x, the target, and you don't want to be acquired, how you defend yourself is dependent on the law. Put another way, are the tactics of getting a deal done dependent on the law?
(3) How do the answers the answers to those questions change across companies? While I am not necessarily asking about specific companies such as GS or MS, even though that would be ideal, but at least how does it change from BB to EB to MM?
Low key jab at UVA with that grouping.
But banks don’t heavily recruit at top law schools, aside from maybe a resume drop. Best to get some experience and go for an MBA.
I just accepted a spot at one of HYSCCN so I'll comment on this.
To be blunt, your idea is awful. No investment bank-be it BB, EB, or MM- directly recruits law students. Even if they did, it would not be at the law schools you referenced,(as an aside, UVA should not be grouped with the other schools you mentioned). Yes, Goldman will take one or two kids every year from HLS who have prior IB experience, and every once in a while someone from Columbia or NYU will manage to break in as a law student. But that's the extent of it. And while it's not unheard of for deal lawyers at top firms, (Wachtell, Cravath, SullCrom etc...) to lateral into banking, getting to law firms like these from Illinois or Indiana would be close to impossible.
Attending law school with the goal of breaking into IB is incredibly misguided. Law schools are designed to train lawyers, not finance professionals. You will learn none of the core valuation techniques that IBanks expect their associates to know, and your legal training would be irrelevant outside of the RX space.
Lastly dude-and please don't take this the wrong way- your post reeks of immaturity. You say you've spent years positioning yourself to work on deals, yet you haven't been able to secure any sort of IB internship? You say M&A is the only thing you're interested in, yet you seem to have an extremely poor grasp on what M&A bankers and lawyers actually do for a living. If you said anything like this in a Goldman or Cravath interview, your interviewers would laugh you out of the room. I'm not trying to be mean, but you need a dose of reality.
Edited, yes just listen to post above.
To expand on this slightly, a lawyer wouldn't get heavily involved in a deal until WELL after a company decides "I want to acquire company X." There are about a million other variables that come into play before the lawyers start performing diligence and nailing down the final details that, in aggregate, constitute M&A (because you don't). This serves two purposes: First, it gives the lawyer an opportunity to tell you about what they do (lawyers love this). Second, firms prefer associates who enter tabula rasa versus those who enter with a bunch of misguiding, grandiose assumptions about corporate law.
Are you in finance scholars?
Also what hedge fund? Send me a PM if you don't want to share here
This is the most direct and realistic way into IB. If "all you're interested in is deals" then this should be your path over law school. If you want to attend law school to get into big law, that's fine, but you probably aren't going to be able to go IB from there.
Incorrect in thinking that KU doesn't get students into IB roles, don't know what its called but they have a program that does very well placing students in front office roles. I would find out what that is and do everything you can to get in it. In the small sample section of people I know from KU off the top of my head there are a few at jefferies, lazard MM, citi, and piper. I see no reason why you shouldn't have sights set on breaking in out of undergrad. Do not go into debt and 3 more years of school with the goal of IB
Seriously, I knew a bunch of KU people at my MM that all went through that program. OP's plan is just awful.
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