@mfvonh just curious, which law school do/did you go to?

@seismatica I'm at Northwestern -- one semester left thank god

@mfvonh No offence taken , thank you for the reply.

@mfvonh I heard that at some law school (even the top ones), a high LSAT score (172+?) could mean a full ride/tuition? Is that true? I heard Northwestern is very generous with early decision (not sure what the term is and too lazy to look up).

btw did you get matched with any firm your L2 summer?

@seismatica You pretty much need a 172+ just to be admitted to a top law school; that won't get you any sort of tuition break. (Nearly all of our class is in that range.)

The admissions process is pretty stupid, frankly. There are hardly any credentials you can demonstrate that would suggest that you would/would not be a good lawyer, so they basically take their applications, sort them by LSAT score, and go down the list in order, and when they reach an application they more or less just look for red flags, and if there aren't any they will admit.

Some less competitive schools will give you money for a high LSAT score, though, but even that is getting more rare. A lot of those schools are in the process of/on the verge of collapse, and their students are getting fucked hard. In my opinion it is not worth going to law school at this point unless you are admitted to a tier-1 school, or if can you go somewhere else for free it might make sense.

The market is obscenely oversaturated, and there are major shifts in the industry that are about to hurt lawyers' incomes really hard in the coming years.

It is possible to get money from a top school, but pretty unlikely because most of the applicants are fungible on paper. If you have something really remarkable on your CV you might get lucky.

Northwestern is fairly unique because they have an interest in applicants with quantitative skills, and also they strongly prefer applicants with previous work experience and not straight out of college (I think that is one of the best parts of the program).

I managed to get some money out of them by agreeing to do a JD/MBA but then I realized I didn't want to be double-surrounded by douchebags as law school was bad enough, so I jumped ship on the MBA but still did some technical work for the business school and was able to keep the money. But that was only because I can do math unlike most everyone in this field.

I interviewed at big firms and got some offers but I ended up taking a position at an economic consultancy that specializes in econometric analysis for antitrust litigation, which is what I was interested in all along. But at this point I'm over it -- I think the legal profession is a complete joke as it currently operates, and I am much more interested in digitizing legal data/working in the area of legal informatics.

I would honestly say that 60-70% of billable hours in the legal system can be completely automated. Lawyers know this too deep down which is why they instantly declare war on anybody who tries to introduce modernizing reforms.

But they are losing very slowly, and I think over the next 15-20 years we will see most big law firms crumble or at least get much smaller.

(All of this is a good thing. It means the law will be more rational and it means low-income people will actually have access to the legal system, as they are currently priced out of it largely due to really basic things like access to information, which is gross.)

Oh and yes, everyone I know that got money from Northwestern (besides me, and my money technically came from the business school not the law school so I don't think it counts) applied early decision.

End[Rant];

Oh I just looked and actually our median LSAT is a 168 this year.

That's a 3-point slip from when I was admitted. Even we are on the ropes lol

@Searke Give version 10 a few more weeks and I bet that graph will flip

The first release after making significant changes can be rough.

@Searke No doubt, I was just being silly. On the whole I'm very happy with v10 despite the rough patches.

I prefer to think we are just a more decorous club

I have just noticed the some questions the main question page are being highlighted with same yellowish background as the chat input field. Is a new feature, or have I been inattentive? Also, what does it signify.

@m_goldberg Those indicate questions with your favorite tags

@Pickett Indeed that was what I was looking for. Deleted question. Thanks :)

@mfvonh Great, np.

@Pickett on that note do you happen to know offhand whether one can drop a column by name?

@mfvonh I'm afraid not, I have yet to learn most the Dataset-stuff.

Always worth trying the lazy approach first :) I'll go digging. Drop will drop columns by position at least.

@mfvonh I thought for sure that if nothing else worked we could do something like: Query[All, Complement[Keys@#, {"b"}] &]@data but apparently not.

Instead we have to do: Query[All, #[[Complement[Keys@#, {"b"}]]] &]@data

Well, there has to be a better way. Tell me if you find it.

@Pickett Insha'allah. I still have basically 0 intuition about when to use [] versus [[]] with datasets

Other than when the examples tell me to do it one way or the other

@mfvonh Yeah, I don't understand that either.

There is a list: "the op can be any of the following..." so I guess the thing to do is memorize that list.

@Pickett Hot. I love memorizing.

@mfvonh btw: dataset[All, KeyDrop["a"]]

YES

I knew there had to be a way to do that

:)