Part 1: Important things to know about Law School - Griffin Pivateau, J.D., Oklahoma State University

My name is Griffin Pivateau. Okay and where did you get your undergrad and grad school degrees and what were they in? I went to undergrad in Louisiana at McNeese State University. I graduated in history I was planning on going to get my PhD in history, that didn't happen. I wound up in law school at the University of Texas at Austin. Okay and then when did you start at Spears School of Business? I started the Spears School of Business in 2009, Fall 2009. What courses have you taught over the years? I've taught most of the legal courses that we offer starting with the introductory course, commercial transactions, international law and employment law. 

Okay and how long is law school? Law school's three years. It's quite a time commitment in the fall and it is a situation where once you've committed to going to law school, you really need to stay there for three years because there's no one who's going to pay you more for a year or two. Your added value comes once you get that degree. 

When it comes to law school obviously it's not free, so do you mind touching on the cost of it? Law school is costly and there are different factors that make up the total cost. The first being tuition. Tuition is going to be high and you cannot save yourself from high tuition by going to a public law school because at virtually every University, the law school is on a different schedule than the rest of the university. So you will pay much more per credit hour for law school than for any other graduate degree. But there are other costs that you need to consider. The first of it is that you're going to make this three-year commitment. During that three years, it's going to be very difficult to earn money. You probably should not work at all during your first year. You may be able to take on a part-time job in your second and third years, but in law school you have to learn a lot of things in a very short period of time and that simply doesn't leave time for work. 

Then finally, there's a huge opportunity cost for law school, in that three years you're giving up the salary that you would have earned but more importantly you're giving up the knowledge and experience that you would have gained during those three years. So when you graduate law school, you are going to be three years behind the peers that you graduated with in undergrad. 

Law school's very competitive. It's. competitive getting into law school and it is very competitive once you're there, because you are being ranked in your class with everyone else and in many law schools you will know your ranking from the end of the first semester grades. You will know exactly where you might be in class and the fact is is that people will rank at the top of the class are going to get access to interviews and to jobs. If the grade level is not high, just getting to that interview can be difficult. This is why I tell people that you can't really work in. your law school because your grades, they're not the only thing but they're the most important by far.