Griffin Pivateau (J.D., University of Texas) is Associate Professor of Legal Studies in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. His research explores employment law and its impact on business environment. His work addresses issues of employee mobility, discrimination, and dispute resolution. Numerous legal treatises and journal articles, as well as state and federal courts, have cited his research. Want to know more about our department? Go to
https://business.okstate.edu/departments_programs/management/index.html for more information!
Transcript:
When it comes time to choosing on law school, there are a lot of factors to consider. Foremost among those is rankings. Rankings matter they matter because from now on whenever you send out a resume the first thing on that resume is going to be your education and where you went to school. That's going to send the signal to whoever is reading that resume but of course geography is also important. The fact is every law school is going to provide quality education.
Whether you go to a first-tier law school or a fourth tier, you're probably going to get a good education. However when it comes time to getting a job, if you want to work in Oklahoma City and say then people who go to Oklahoma City University, OCU, they'll be able to get a job in Oklahoma City because there's an Alumni network, people are familiar with the school, they know that they turn out quality lawyers. However, if you want to take that OCU. degree to Dallas or Houston or Seattle or Philadelphia, it's going to be much more difficult to find a job there. So rankings matter, geography matters as well.
One of the big advantages of law school is that it is in many ways a meritocracy. What that means is that when you go to law school no one knows anything, so the people that you go to law school will have a very different background. So when you go to law school , you are going to be in a group of people none of whom know much about the law. So you all start at the same level zero. All of the grading in law school is blind grading, meaning the professor does not know who you are when they are creating a test. So what this means is that everyone has an equal opportunity to shine. It does not matter where you went to undergrad or what your previous educational background was.
One thing that people may not know about law school is that grading especially in your first year is all done on a curve. What that means is they will select a midpoint for each class and 50% of the students will finish above that midpoint and 50 % will finish below. This has the effect of you never being quite sure how you did in the class, because it is highly dependent on how everyone else has done.
You can choose various specialties within Law School. You can focus on intellectual property. You can focus on transactional work. You can focus on litigation. But, when you get out it's really where you go to work, that's. going to determine what you want to be doing, because that's going to establish your own special and so much of the decision of what kind of law to practice will wait until after you graduate.
