It’s undeniable that the legal education tuition is outrageous in the United States. So how do you get a top flight legal education for less than the cost of a Chevy Volt in tuition? You become a Rechtsanwalt first.
About two weeks ago, BBC News published this article about how more American students are attending German universities essentially for free. As of last year, Lower Saxony (Germany’s second largest’s state) was the final one to do away with public university tuition for all students – regardless of origin. The fees to attend the universities are nominal – about a $120 a semester for the student studying Physics in the article.
This graphic from the BBC article breaks down the costs of the different students profiled.
Using Anna’s costs as an example, I’m going to multiply her monthly costs by 48, which is four years, yielding a total of $37,391.39 after a conversion from the Euro. To keep up the student’s American-ness, we’ll send her back home twice a year at $1,500 per round trip. Her running total is now $44,928 (with most of it being from living expenses), and this will be the total costs of earning a law degree in Germany.
The total paid in tuition alone will only be $1,090.13 for the four years.
Unlike in the United States, the concept of an undergraduate education is nonexistent, and you can enter law study upon matriculation where Anna will earn an LLB as opposed to a BA or JD.
Because the end goal is to become an American lawyer, we send Anna to the most American of top law schools (not American University), the University of Texas, Austin School of Law (US News – #15) to complete their one year LLM program (24 semester hours) for those already with a foreign law degree. The breakfast tacos in Austin are amazing by the way.
Having an LLM degree qualifies a person to sit for the bar exam in any jurisdiction of the United States, which is key.
Update: It seems that this is automatically true in half of the states only, though Anna would still be able to make an appeal to the state bar, or take advantage of reciprocity after bar admission to a single jurisdiction that does allow it. But what she’ll do for sure is waive into DC off the bat after passing in Texas.
Second Update: Looks like you can waive into DC only if you have a JD or ABA recognized LLB. LLM folks may have to sit it out for five years.
The above graphic is a capture of UT’s LLM estimated budget for the school year. Because Anna developed German practicality from spending years as a student in Germany, she establishes Texas residency after working for a year at an Austin law firm as a law clerk without any visa issues, as she’s an American Citizen. This allows her to matriculate into the foreign educated LLM program as a Texas resident 1) at the age of 23, making her as young as most 1Ls coming in for their JD, 2) with her tuition only being $28,746 for the entire program.
Doing this means that Anna can bypass taking the LSAT, carrying a crushing debt from undergrad and three years of law school, which can easily top $200,000 in tuition alone during the 7 years of study (three years of law school at @50K/year, public UG @13K/year). This figure does not include living expenses. Here’s a more detailed breakdown below.
Factoring in living expenses, with the assumption of having no income during the course of pursuing the degrees, the difference in savings between the two routes for Anna is $208,164. But the reality is that Anna is actually able to save even more money because working that one year while earning her Texas residency should be enough to pay for her living expenses and potentially part of her tuition, so the difference is more in the 230K range.
Though Anna is set on remaining an American, her knowledge of German should come in handy all before the age of 24 if she wants to do international practice (though being an EU lawyer may be more difficult by way of citizenship in Germany, because they require residency of eight years, and dual citizenship is not allowed). Moreover, earning a foreign law degree, then pursuing an LLM actually gives her an advantage when it comes to law school admission. It’s no real secret that admission to LLM programs even at the most prestigious schools is not as competitive as their JDs (Harvard, Penn, you name it). It’s at no substantial cost to stick a single student into a few courses in return for tuition, and it doesn’t impact their precious rankings in US News.
Of course, the precondition to this even working is that Anna knows fluent German – sadly something like the The Everything Learning German Book won’t do. She would have to at the very least start studying German in high school in the 9th grade, then go through immersion before matriculating, which requires a bit of foresight for any 14 year old.
And that’s how you do it – an elite legal education, entitling you to practice law in the United States for less than the cost of a Chevy Volt! On second thought, this almost seems too good to be true. Anybody know if there are rules that will not allow an American to accomplish this? Or are we just hacking?
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