LuminousVoid

Recently, a former roommate introduced me to someone seeking to apply to law school with a plan to focus on tech issues. They wanted some guidance with how to choose their school, and were asking me since I had a tech focus in school. I’m excerpting the answer I sent below. They were mostly curious about GW, but also were curious about general issues having to do with school.

Note: this is not to address the VERY important question of “should I go to law school?” I think the answer to that is the same as “do I want to radically alter my life?”

GW has a heavy focus on IP. It’s basically what they’re famous for, and for IP they’re usually ranked #1 or #2, along with Berkeley. At least it looked that way in 02 when I was applying. GW also hosts the AIPLA journal — thats basically the student run journal of the industry group of IP lawyers.

Besides IP, GW has profs doing privacy and computer crimes work. Also others that teach things like cyberlaw and e-commerce. There are lots of small little seminars on IP — I took a course in multinational IP taught by a former director of the patent office and former register of copyrights. These guys were teaching treaties that they helped to negotiate. I don’t think I could have gotten this anywhere else.

If you’re going to compare curricula, this is the stage you should do it: the more detail thats offered, the broader the knowledge of that faculty. Be careful to get a few semesters worth of course listings, so you find out how much is actually offered on one semester.

As for finding a law school, I have some basic pieces of advice. I don’t know how to rank schools according to these considerations, but you should be able to do some research and find out.

If you’re going into non-profit work, like policy etc…, a main consideration is cost. Getting into a lower ranked school that gives you a break on tuition is going to make your career much easier. You’ll have to work hard to shine and stand out, but its an important consideration.

One thing that I found helped a lot when trying to ’shine’ in that public interest world was the experience I got. Public interest is highly competitive, but its a different sort of competition than straight up being a lawyer in a law firm. Being in DC allows you to volunteer and do internships for credit with loads of national organizations. They’re really happy to have people during the school year, nobody is competing for the spots, and when it comes time to look for summer or other work having that on your resume helps a lot. I interned at the AAAS and CDT, as well as EPIC, where I ended up working after graduation. The bay area and NYC would probably have similar opportunities, but I don’t know about other places.

Short of that, the other possibility is looking at legal clinics. I do know that both Stanford and Berkeley have internet/tech clinics. GW didn’t have that, but, like i said, DC had an alphabet soup of acronyms you could work with, not to mention Congress / the Government.