SoFi Blog

If you’re a young lawyer working at a law firm, you probably envision being named partner someday. But, as you know, the road to partnership can be tough to traverse, even for the most prepared associate—and it’s only gotten more rigorous in recent years. Consider this: The number of equity partners at firms has increased by only 27% over the past 15 years, while the number of all other attorneys has increased by nearly 86%. Additionally, the demand for law firm services has been fairly stagnant for the past eight years, with the exception of a brief rise in 2011, according to the 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market. The increasing competitiveness among firms has resulted in a thinning of the ranks for equity partners, which means a much longer timeline to being named one, if at all.

While you can’t predict whether you’ll be named partner, you still have significant ability as an associate to steer your career in the right direction. Because it’s now more difficult than ever to make partner, you’ll want to know if you are on the right track, so you can come up with a game plan to reach that goal more quickly—or decide whether you want to pursue other options.

Law careers are traditionally viewed as lucrative and enviable. Yet, many attorneys are saddled with mortgage-sized law school debt after graduation.

About five years ago, Harvard Law School left one law school grad and blogger, DebtFreeJD, with nearly $150,000 in student loan debt. After a few years of payments, she’d made a $25,000 dent in that total. Then, she and her husband made an ambitious vow to tackle her remaining law school debt in one year and two months—about the same amount of time it took to build the Empire State Building. Today, thanks to diligence and a refinance, she has earned her DebtFreeJD moniker.

When choosing a law school, your decision is most certainly based on the prestige of the faculty, the academic qualifications of the student body, and the institution’s success in placing graduates in satisfying careers. But what about the big money unknowns—the salary you’re likely to earn upon graduation and how much of your rookie attorney paycheck will go toward paying for your education?

To help take some of the guesswork out of your legal education strategy, we analyzed more than 60,000 student loan refinancing applications submitted to us from January 2014 to December 2016 to formulate SoFi’s Return on Education (ROED) Law School Rankings. After taking a long, hard look at the average salary and student debt load of law school graduates three years out of school, we compiled objective data that can’t be found anywhere else—verified income and debt, not just reported figures. The result: Rankings of how the top (and bottom) JD programs stack up when it comes to how your financial future will fare.

Earlier this month, we shared results from our 2017 Millennials and Financial Resolutions survey. We discovered several trends and recent events that impact how millennials are thinking about forward-thinking financial topics. This week, we review the results of a second survey we conducted to learn why these young professionals aren’t reaching their financial goals, and how they compare to other generations.

For many Americans, the beginning of a new year is a time for self-reflection and personal goal-setting — losing those holiday pounds, learning a new language, or maybe getting to a better place with their finances.

As a personal finance company devoted to helping a new generation achieve prosperity, we decided we’d dive into the financial aspect of these resolutions, especially among younger Americans. We also wanted to see how recent events might have shaped those resolutions. So we surveyed more than 500 college-educated Americans ages 25-34 — the older cohort of U.S. Millennials — to find out their attitudes on a variety of forward-looking finance topics.