Originally published in Student Lawyer magazine, December 2002 (Vol. 31, No. 4). All rights reserved.

A Degree of Specialization

Meet some lawyers who earned an LL.M. and find out what they gained from the experience

by Barry E. Katz

Andy Adams was so bored and disillusioned during his first year as a University of Arkansas law student that he thought about dropping out. But a second-year internship at a Little Rock firm with a large environmental practice changed everything.

Adams was assigned to research a Clean Water Act case involving a landowner who wanted to build a dam despite the bitter opposition of neighbors. Adams found the social, scientific, and political ramifications of the case fascinating. By the end of the internship, he wanted to specialize in environmental law.

Problem was, he had no environmental, or even scientific, background. His bachelor's degree was in English. He knew that many lawyers in the field had an LL.M.-a master of laws degree-or a master's degree in something like environmental engineering or environmental science. The graduate programs gave them enough technical experience to understand the complex geological, chemical, and biological issues that often underpin environmental cases.

So after getting his J.D. in 2001, Adams headed off to New Orleans, where he enrolled in Tulane University's LL.M. program in energy and environmental law.

The next year, LL.M. in hand, Adams landed a job at the 35-lawyer Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. On his first day, he walked in a little before 8 a.m. and saw a note waiting for him from one of the lawyers. Sorry to do this, the note read, but we need an opinion for a client on an industrial wastewater discharge permit by 10 a.m.

"Fortunately, I was familiar with the Clean Water Act issues and things like that from my LL.M. program," Adams says. The degree, he says, "paid off on the first day, within two hours of being at work."

Thousands of students are betting an extra year of school will pay off for them, too. Last year, 3,721 students received LL.M.s, according to the American Bar Association. That's a far cry from 1981, when 669 students were awarded the graduate degree, and almost double the number just a decade ago.

Many areas of practice, like tax law, intellectual property law, or-as Adams discovered-environmental law, have become increasingly complex. Lawyers entering these fields often need the kind of specialized knowledge only a graduate degree, or many years of practice, can give if they want to remain competitive.

Indeed, most LL.M. programs focus on a specialty. According to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, at least 25 law schools offer an LL.M. in taxation. Ten have programs in energy and environmental law. Seven offer the degree in health law. Only one, Loyola University Chicago, has an LL.M. program in child and family law, and only the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville focuses on agricultural law.

So what kinds of people forgo a year in the "real world" to get an LL.M.?

Like Adams, some people enter LL.M. programs after their interests or expectations change while they're in law school. Others find or anticipate little luck in the job market and look to graduate programs as their best hope. Many are experienced lawyers looking to make a mid-career change or bone up in a specialty to accommodate their current practice.

A year ago, Laurie Sholtis wanted to hit the job market with an advantage over the roughly 38,000 other new law school grads she'd be competing with after graduation. What better way to get a leg up, she thought, than to get an LL.M.? But the 2L at Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire still hadn't finished her J.D. So she made school administrators a proposal: she would earn her J.D. and LL.M. in intellectual property law at the same time. No one at Pierce had ever done that before, but the school's rules didn't specifically forbid it.

"There was a part of me that just wondered if it could be done," Sholtis says. "Obviously, when you go into something like that, you kind of wonder if you can hack it because it's so many courses in so few semesters."

It took some persuading, but school officials, who at first rejected her plan, eventually relented. "She was a real go-getter," says William Hennessey, head of Franklin Pierce's graduate program. "She's very organized…. She also was very foresighted; she was thinking ahead."

Sholtis took the regular 30-credit course load the first year but attended school both summers. While most of her classmates took the minimum course load, she piled on the work: 33 credits in the second year, 34 in the third.

In her second summer, Sholtis even juggled an internship with Silverberg, Goldman & Bikoff, a Washington, D.C., firm that represented three governing bodies of the Olympics seeking to block "cyber squatters" in 56 countries from using the trademark Olympics name on web sites. She worked on the case in the D.C. office at the beginning of the summer and continued to monitor different domain-name registration sites for the firm once she was back in summer school.

Sholtis managed it all by drawing up a schedule and sticking to it. That meant putting limits on the weekend party scene and spending less time relaxing with her favorite Patricia Cornwell whodunits.

"I thought it would be a lot worse, but it really wasn't," she says. "I blocked out a certain number of hours for studying and then headed out and goofed off the rest of the time. You just can't always study."

Even with an LL.M. degree, getting a job isn't always automatic. Sholtis learned that the hard way-three months after getting her two law degrees and sending out about 200 résumés, Sholtis had yet to find a job.

That wasn't a problem for Cynthia Bryant, who expects to complete her LL.M. in international legal studies at American University this month. Bryant already has a full-time job, working in the Federal Communications Commission's International Bureau. She decided to enroll in the LL.M. program to enhance her work and to explore other international issues such as human rights law. Bryant goes to school part time, at night.

"The demand is quite heavy," the 1994 University of Kansas Law School graduate says of the double burdens of job and school. "There is no free time, period."

Bryant registered for three courses when she began the LL.M. program in fall 2001. But with an especially time-consuming case at the FCC then, Bryant found the school-job workload a bit too much. She felt she didn't have enough time to keep up with the course work. There was no time to read for pleasure, go to the movies, or even get together with friends.

"Cooking became ordering Chinese food and pizza," she says. "I could just pick up the phone, order, and keep on studying."

The next semester, Bryant cut back to two courses and extended her expected graduation date.

Despite the workload, Bryant says she didn't feel the kind of pressure that she experienced as a J.D. student.

"As a J.D. student, you're trying to establish your rank to get employment," she says. "There is a lot more competition with your peers and a lot more competition with yourself, quite honestly.
"There is, on the flip side, not the camaraderie … that I had as a J.D. student, involvement in the organizations and the student life and all of that. I have not been able to, as one who goes at nighttime."

At the FCC, Bryant often deals with merging companies seeking to transfer or assign telecommunications licenses. She researches any foreign ownership involved and determines whether the foreign ownership would run afoul of statutory provisions. She says her LL.M. work has given her a deeper understanding of the international issues she deals with every day.

"When I took international telecom (at American University), there was a lot that I didn't know and that I now know and can appreciate when it comes up at work," she says. "We always talk about the World Trade Organization when we discuss things (at the FCC) in terms of our statutes and the work that I do. To have a broader understanding of that type of organization has helped when I deal with it very narrowly here, because a lot of that was kind of foreign to me for a while."

Many of the students in Bryant's LL.M. classes come from other countries. In fact, about half of all people enrolled in LL.M. programs are graduates of foreign law schools, according to the ABA.

"It's enriching, because it's not just the American point of view," Bryant says. "You have viewpoints from all around the world and viewpoints from developing countries….

"We were speaking one day about child labor and developing countries and how they are trying to rid them of child labor, and there were really both standpoints in the room. Someone made the point that it was a source of income for the family and … sometimes that's the only source that comes in. It was just a way of looking at child labor that I hadn't looked at."

After graduating, many foreign LL.M. students return to practice law in their home countries, although more and more are staying in the United States and seeking admission to a state bar, according to the ABA.

That's what Chinese lawyer David Wei Chen did after getting his LL.M. in U.S. legal studies in 2001 at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. In China, Chen didn't go to law school, but he learned the profession working in the law department of a large corporation. He drafted contracts, researched laws, and generally helped out in litigation. He took the bar exam in China in 1996 and started as a lawyer in a firm the next year.

An English major in college, Chen wanted to come to the United States to practice, but he felt he needed more background in U.S. law. A friend told him about Golden Gate's LL.M. program. He started there in January 2000.

About 60 students from nearly 30 nations are enrolled in the U.S. legal studies program at Golden Gate, says Christine Pagano, the program's associate director. The LL.M. allows foreign law graduates to understand the basics of U.S. law and prepares them to take a state bar exam. Eleven states, including California and New York, permit Golden Gate's LL.M. U.S. legal studies graduates to sit for the bar exam.

Chen passed the California bar exam in February and is now a lawyer at the San Francisco office of Vaughn Dekirby, where he sometimes represents people from China. He's thinking about returning to China, where, he says, there is a major need for lawyers.

"I hope I can find some U.S. firms that want to recruit people to go to China," Chen says. "The LL.M. enriched my understanding of legal concepts. I have to admit that Chinese law is not so advanced."

At Golden Gate, Chen found many students who held misperceptions about China because of the different cultures and media reports at the time. He didn't hesitate to offer his views, even in class. He got the feeling that a few students thought some of the things he said were outlandish.
"I would just feel that some students felt I was inferior or something like that," says Chen, who shared many classes with J.D. students. "But after some time, I proved myself, I'm a good student, and I can do things well…. In one of my classes, I gave a presentation on the status of China's law so that people have some understanding of the country."

At Tulane, Adams attended LL.M. classes with experienced lawyers from countries such as France, Liberia, Chile, Germany, and South Africa. One day, during a class discussion of the practice of U.S. companies selling pollution credits, a student from Liberia-an experienced lawyer who was an environmental activist in his country-passed Adams a note. You Americans, the note read, you sell everything; next you're going to be selling God.

"He was shocked about what he had learned about America in the course of study there and wanted to tell me that the environment is something that is very, very important, let's try to look at it in a different way," Adams says.

Adams says exposure to students from different cultural and career backgrounds has only expanded his view of the world in general and the law in particular.

"The classroom discussion is at a different level, and I felt like sometimes I wasn't able to add to that because I was just right out of law school and didn't have a lot of that on-the-job training," Adams says. "But I was glad to be a part of that and soak it up because I think it put me ahead. I was able to hear from experienced practitioners from the government, from the corporate side, and from the activist side. I really assimilated all those points of view to take it to my own practice."