When Paul Ray woke up one morning and decided to be a lawyer, he had no idea he would one day clerk for an associate Supreme Court justice and serve in former President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I didn’t start thinking about law school before my senior year. I was going to teach English and I suddenly, quite literally, woke up one morning and said to myself, ‘You should go to law school,’” Ray told students at a Federalist Society event on Sept. 29. “My decision was substantively sound but procedurally unreasonable.”
Ray’s epiphany led him to Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review and later earned clerkships for Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2018, Former President Donald Trump appointed Ray to administrative positions in both the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. He is now the director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Ray discussed careers in law and how one should decide to attend and succeed in law school at the event, encouraging students to discern their reasons for wanting to be a lawyer well before getting a law degree.
“People will tell you that you can do many things with a law degree and you can and people do, but you shouldn’t go to law school to do any other things,” Ray said. “If you go to law school, you want to be a lawyer. The one reason to go is to become a lawyer.”
Ray proposed an experiment to help students determine if law school is right for them.
“Imagine yourself and all your friends doing good for families, friends, communities in all kinds of different ways. Would you want your way to be a lawyerly way? If the answer is no, I wouldn’t go to law school,” he said. “There are an unbelievable number of things that you can do to serve and in which you will be successful. Don’t think you have to become a lawyer to be good.”
About 22% of law students don’t practice law within 10 months of graduation, according to recent data from the American Bar Association.
“I really enjoyed how he was honest and straightforward about determining your personal motivations for law school,” junior and prospective law student Phoebe Johnston said. “He brought up some good questions to consider whether law school is the right path, and they were also helpful for brainstorming answers for personal statements and applications.”
Senior Gabriel Powell, who plans to attend law school next year, said Ray’s categorization of different kinds of law was helpful.
“He made a very good distinction between law lawyers, fact lawyers, and transaction lawyers,” Powell said. “Splitting attorneys up into categories is a helpful metric.”
Ray told students only three things matter in law school: getting good grades, good recommendations, and writing for a law review.
He also advised students to go to the best law school possible as long as it is financially viable. If Ray had a choice to attend the #3 ranked school and acquire $300,000 of debt or the #15 ranked school and acquire $50,000 in debt, he said he would choose the top-ranked school. Starting salary at firms that hire from highly ranked schools can be $100,000, which offsets debt significantly, he added.
“Launching your legal career is like getting onto a highway. You need to get on the highway, but there are some ways to do that. It’s not essential that it’s this onramp or the later one — the important thing to do is to get on one,” he said. “There are all kinds of opportunities to launch yourself. Focus on becoming a really excellent lawyer and the rest of it will follow.”
