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Very few clients are concerned with what law school, let alone what undergrad college their attorney attended. They are focused on what you can do for them and how much it costs.



How naive. Saying clients don't care about credentials is like saying porn producers don't care what a girls tits look like.


No, the Snowman is right for some clients. Not everyone is wrapped up in pedigrees; some take a "what have you done for me lately" view of things.

I had a job in the 1990s for a Fortune 500 company and worked a lot with the legal team, both staff and "temps" (my word for outside attorneys) - I was one of the few engineers who they they could understand and vice versa. In a decade of this I don't think I ever heard the school mentioned once, either for our people, our temps, or in briefings on the opposing attorneys. No telling what the secretaries were gossiping about, but we always focused on recent clients and cases.

And I know for fact the CEO didn't care. That's probably because he was a founder/CEO and not from a business school mill. Had he been from that environment he'd probably have cared more.

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Thats because when the case is lost, the CEO who hired the firm may lose his cushy job and wants to be able to go back to the board of directors and say "but I hired the best".



No way. That never happens. The general counsel takes the blame. The CEO isn't going to take fall when it's not his field. Look at Microsoft - Gates, Alchin & Crew were responsible for that trial mess, but the only one forced out at Microsoft was the general counsel. And in a smaller company with no full-time general counsel the board is likely to have been involved in hiring that outside counsel. (to my experience)

If losing a case is sufficiently catastrophic the CEO might go, but for the reason of having got into that situation in the first place, not because of the lawyer's pedigree.

As a client all I care about is has the guy handled similar cases, what were the outcomes, with cost being a distant third. A fancy degree will not make up for a rookie nor a losing record.

In college I happened to live in the law school dorm. I was told that some of the lower-ranked law schools in the state actually had a much better first-try pass rate at the bar exam because that was what they focused on. The higher-ranked schools usually had a lower first-try pass rate because they weren't focused on the bar exam. I was told that after graduation it was in some ways going to be like "starting over", studying a new field - the bar exam - in the months after graduation in order to pass.

A pedigree is an advantage if you can afford it no doubt, but the big bucks roll in after having a winning track record, and once you're the guy that won the big Dow Chemical environmental case or whatever nobody will ask what school you went to.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock