| Topic Name: |
JD/MBA |
| Message Name: |
JD/MBA |
| Date Posted: |
12/24/1999 |
| In Reply To: |
Having worked for a short time in a small corporate finance unit I get the impression that the MBA is definitely more valuable to a lawyer than the JD to an I-banker. What i'm wondering is whether it is still relatively easy to make the transition from being a lawyer to i-banker (without so much finance background) assuming all the while that one's legal experience is devoted to corporate finance??
Morgan,
London |
| Message: |
I started as a JD and added the MBA. I generally agree that an MBA adds more value to a lawyer than the JD adds to an MBA. Two years in an M&A shop will teach you much more about M&A, business and finance than two years of law school. You have to remember that law school really is a trade school. A good part of the courses you'll take are procedural and are useless (in a practical sense) for anyone other than litigators. Law school is challenging, interesting and intellectually stimulating, but the tangible benefits don't compare to what you learn in business school or what you get from working. The exception to this is probably that you can add value in an M&A context if you have a strong tax background. If you can take tax classes in the law school while in business school, you'll probably be better off. A securities law class and a general corporate law class would also be very helpful.
As far as CEO aspirations and promotion opportunities, people probably will give passing note to the fact that you have a JD, but that fact will not be given as much weight as two years of hard experience in a good job, especially if you never practice law.
The contacts you make in law school can be very good, but you have to remember that most of them will end up being lawyers. The contacts you make in business school can give you a much broader network.
It's great to have three summer internship opportunities, but summer jobs don't really show you what the job will be like. Law firms also often look warily at summer experience doing something else, like consulting, for one of their summers. If you do something other than law your first summer, many law firms will think that you really want to do something other than law, and are just looking at law internships because there are a lot of them and because they pay pretty well (this might not be as true in the great market we have right now as it was a few years ago).
There were two other people in my class who also did the JD/MBA. Both of them are with bulge-bracket I-Banks. One went straight into banking and the other practiced for two years with a big NY law firm. The one who was a lawyer first had a difficult time making the switch, despite being first in his class at an ivy-league law school (with comparable grades in business school). Part of the problem is just timing -- you can't interview for a job when other candidates for associate positions are interviewing. You generally have to wait until the summer and try to find a bank that underestimated its staffing needs.
I'm glad I did the joint program, and I do feel like it provided me with a strong background to do a number of different things. If I had been an MBA student first, I'm not sure I'd be as happy with the joint degree track.
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