Law & Society Blog

Maya Steinitz offers useful advice to foreign lawyers who think about getting an LL.M. degree (Master of Laws) in the US.

A well known cultural fact, that often stuns non-Americans, is that tuition really pays as much for the placement services schools offer as it does for the education itself (a cynic would say: more so for the placement services). But despite paying the same tuition, LL.M.s are generally not offered the same services by the placement offices as do the JDs. And because the level of placement assistance available in the U.S. is unheard of in most other countries, foreign students don’t know to ask for it; literally, they don’t know what they’re missing. Some examples brought to my attention include: main on-campus interviewing programs that are usually JD-only with LL.M.s having segregate events, if at all, competing for a minority of the job slots that JDs have not filled earlier in the year; placement counselors who simply do not know how to advise LL.M.s; no lawyering skills trainings, of the kind that first year JDs get, make it de facto impossible to compete for jobs.

While I agree with many of her points, much of the suspected “bias against LL.M.s” is probably just a function of increased information costs. Today’s LL.M.s tend to be a much more heterogeneous group than their JD peers in at least three crucial respects:

1. Non-US academic record
2. Language abilities, and
3. Plans for the future.

Many foreign LL.M.s that I have met and interviewed simply have no comparable undergraduate (and graduate) academic record to their US peers at top law schools. Whether such foreign students should even be admitted into prestigious law school programs is another matter, but as Steinitz plausibly observes:

LL.M. programs are a huge money-maker for the schools and are regarded as such. The considerations for the number of LL.M.s admitted may be influenced by the amount of revenue expected rather than by purely scholarly concerns.

Of those foreign LL.M.s whose academic records are comparable to or better than those of their US peers, many seek only temporary employment in the US, that is, “a couple of years in New York with a top law firm.” At starting salaries north of $130,000, temporary employment — with all the added costs, e.g., for visa applications, and diminished incentives that go along with it — is an expensive proposition for any employer. That leaves us with the (much smaller!) group of highly qualified LL.M.s who want to stay and practice law in the US more or less permanently. For those, in my view, the greatest risk is to get lumped in with the less qualified or committed, so that stepping outside the traditional hiring channels might be essential for a successful job search. That involves:

• Explaining one’s foreign credentials. (For example, German law students get graded on a scale from 1 to 18, with 18 being the top score. What, without further explanation, would you do with a 13.5 candidate? Reject him if you lack context. Invite her for an interview immediately if you know that she must be among the top 0.1% of all graduates.)
• Early networking
• Reaching out to potential employers well in advance of the fall interview frenzy
• Letters of recommendation.

I cannot overemphasize the significance of serious and meaningful letters of recommendation from a respected scholar, lawyer, or judge from the applicant’s home country and, ideally in addition, from his or her US professors. The fight for talent at the leading law firms is fierce, and no firm can afford to lose top talent — LL.M or not — to the competition. But the task of identifying oneself as top talent falls pretty much entirely on the LL.M. applicant. In that sense, he or she does in fact carry a burden unknown to the JDs.[tags]llm, law, law firm, hiring, jobs[/tags]

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