welcome to the secrets of college planning on the whole state of the new though and today we're going to get some insight into college information my guest today is jackie lazaro she's an attorney and welcome to the show thank you no problem so u sually i start my guests and weather with a cold so when you go to school i went to university of maryland college park a fantastic so let's just go back in time how did you go about the process of picking the university of maryland so my college taking was a little different because i ran across country in track so i was more looking at what schools i was getting recruited for and what area i wanted to be a what type of school so i was drawn to maryland one because i thought i wanted to get into politics and had an incredible athletic program and i was a fortunately able to run there so i ran cross country track indoor track and outdoor track so did it start freshman year of high school senior high school when did the whole process start i was mildly obsessive over college applications and looking into schools and visiting schools so i would say it started freshman year i would i brought this giant book of through hundred sixty five colleges in america would like study it and look at where i wanted to be and what type of school i wanted so a little strange in that sense but  it started early so how did how did you end up picking university in maryland i wanted to be far from home but also close enough where it was a bus or train ride away so maryland was perfect for that i wanted to be near a big city so i got bored on campus i could go into the city so washington d c is only nine miles away from maryland and i wanted to run so i talked to the coach and got a position on the team and did you get recruited by other schools or is it just little i allot of division three schools i got letters from and talk to the coaches i visited a couple de one schools as well like george washington other schools in like the d c area but  maryland sold me and had the big campus the sports teams and and the proximity to d c as well did your mom and dad get involved as well as part of the whole process yeah yeah definitely they took me to every school they came to every  ay they helped me talk to coaches and they were very much involved in the process so no you graduated university of maryland how do you go from there to becoming an attorney so my path was a little different i actually only ended up spending a year and a half at university of maryland so i started freshman year in two thousand and twelve and then completed that first year then i started first semester software yet maryland then i decided that i wanted to go out and see the world so i studied abroad in a room for my second semester software year and then fortunately i found out about this program where you could start law  school a year early and that credits double counts so i after my so off more year i started at the university of baltimore law school so upon completion of my first year of law school there i  the credits counted towards my undergraduate degree and i was able to graduate your early on top of that i had a p credits and i took some community college classes to take a shot another year off of that so normally with the program you go after your junior year you start and the credits transfer back but i was able to do it after my sophomore year at maryland ok and then so how long does it take to go from to become an attorney because there's just the bar exam and right now the schooling that you have to do ye was three years so i started i think in two thousand and fourteen or two thousand and fifteen and then i just recently graduated in may i talked took the summer off to study for the bar which is a full time job in itself took the bar in july then what to europe for five weeks on a backpacking trip and then i started work in september and didn't find out until about two or three weeks ago in october that i in fact passed the bar so for that said yeah it's a very long and difficult process but it's finally over so what is the process of it the studying what what what is it entailed because there's probably a lot of girls and boys out there that you know or interested in becoming lawyers right if you want to be a lawyer you have to love to read because that's ninety nine percent of it is reading cases learning how months then a bunch of practice problems so and it was online so i was able to kind of i came to princeton every day to coffee shops to starbucks and study for it but it was definitely a long summer and g lot twenty areas and fortunately this year and years past you would have to in order to be to pass the to be an attorney in both new york and new jersey you have to take the new jersey bar as well as the new york bar starting this year the new so let's go into some consulting as well because you said that there's a lot of hope that you you want to give to the high school students that are out there right i think that the biggest disservice to high school students today is the fact that no one talks about these options to graduate early to take classes at community college you could spend days and hours writing essays for scholarships and maybe get a thousand dollars out of it but if you take two or three classes at your local community college you could shed twenty thousand dollars thirty thousand dollars off of your college degree in my case i was able to save seventy five thousand dollars just by what i did plus the extra money i'm making by graduating early it's over two hundred thousand dollars in in positive income because because of what i did you know so give it a little example of how else one can actually do that ok so the first thing is go on your perspective college or whatever college you choose is website usually there is a list of the credit transfers so you can see you can plug in mercer county community college middlesex county college any community college and see what classes from those schools transfer over to your college so it's not worth taking a class that you know is not going to transfer over also with a p s to find out the a p classes that you are confident that you can get a high score and not necessarily oh i'm going to take a peek out because it'll look good on my college resume to take that a p or history class that no one else is really taking but it's not as difficult and you could storage or college degree because you're more likely to get a higher score on one of those easier exams and so what's the average cost that the community college is just a few hundred dollars oh yeah it is yeah it's about four or five hundred dollars for class verses most universities you're spending three thousand dollars per class and that's all a credit basis so on right right yeah yeah so so that's what you did while you were going to school and then what did you do when you went to law school was this something that you had to do there as well was no no no i i went to law school started just as so when i started law school i didn't even have a college degree which is a little risky because if i didn't do well i would not graduate from from undergrad but once you're there you i just took regular classes i didn't i didn't say i didn't try to speed that process up because law school is a little more difficult if you want to take your time and  i did it in the normal three how many quoted shaadi could you be to actually start school so a lot of schools including i did it through university of maryland university of baltimore i ended up transferring to records law school after my first year  a lot of schools including rocker's law school has programs with records camden and other undergrad institutions where after ninety credits at your undergrad you could start law school and then once you complete your first year of law school the credits double count towards your undergrad and your you graduate with your required hundred twenty credits wow so no so you cut the cost and you utilize that with consulting students found these programs and i thought it was strange that they weren't advertised this is thirty thousand dollars by shaving one year off your college degree that you're saving thirty forty fifty depending on what school you go to so i started talking to students in the area i did some advertising and and help some students out in the law who went to my school and in the area helped on the just fine programs like this and make sure that they graduated on time and that's another thing that people don't think about colleges for years but a lot of times it takes four and a half five years and that's tens of thousands of dollars that they're wasting you know so you can pick community colleges  on my transcript but never stepped on the campus i took all my classes so i was taking them in maryland or i was taking them home over the summer but i was taking them online so i never actually had to go there interesting so  no students that don't do that they can they can do there with any community college across the country that has online classmate exactly as long as they're transferable right and i think that if you use your home county they're going to  process i think the biggest advantage is obviously the cost savings i go to school i work with people that have two hundred thousand two hundred fifty thousand dollars of loans just because of undergrad in law school law school is very expensive and i don't have that burning on me i don't have basically a mortgage in student debt as i start my career so the monetary savings are definitely definitely a key point to to what i did it's also it's quote to be like the youngest in your class it's cool to be twenty one years old and studying law school or i can even have a drink and i'm in class with people who have kids and and are married and it's  interesting it has its challenges because you're at a different stage of life at that point but it was cool is it i felt special i guess because i was i was always the youngest one there sure there are so is there any other types of consulting that you do to help students out or is it really just cost effective consult yeah it's basically a class taking and making sure that you have your requirements and a lot of these programs have very particular requirements like you have to complete all of your general education requirements before you could do one of these programs so just making sure that you're heading all the classes that you need to in order to graduate early or do a one of these special programs or even to graduate on time so is this something that students do while go unused to college or can they start as early as high school yeah if you if you know where you want to go to school all of all major universities every major university has  the course requirements are the major requirements listed on line and these programs are usually less that on line so you can see what you need to do and what you need to accomplish by by what point on then you could start taking community colleges  college classes in the summer before you begin college or even in the spring before you begin college there's a lot of programs out there and same with a p s if you know where you want to go take the a p cost is that your school except because a lot of schools don't counselors do that in high school no i think guidance counselors has that have their hands full with just getting kids into college that they're not really i mean there's probably spectacular guidance counselors out there who do understand this process but for the most part i think that they're just says uninformed as most college students are most parents when it comes to this and and the biggest issue is college advisors are telling students this college advisors have every incentive to make students stay at the school as long as possible so you'll have a kid to go in there who is a straight a student in high school  a almost perfect score on their s a t and college and by well tell them to only take twelve credits your first semester because college could be overwhelming when these kids can handle it they know they know what they're doing they've been successful in high school they should be process and especially if you want to go to grad school for a law school you could be a music major and go to law school there's not any requirements that you need so this is there is test to take to get into law yes you have to take the  because law schools are basically begging people to come these days because enrollment slow because people don't want to get into debt so the higher you score on the else sat the more money you'll get for a law school so it's it's worth investing in one of these expensive prep courses and it's three parts there's the critical critical thinking there's logic games which are the most difficult part and then there is i think reading comprehension as well one so it's a little bit different than the oh say two yeah there's no math that's  always the joke with lawyers that we go to law school because we can't do math but it's true you don't you don't need any math for it and then is there practical things that you do a law school as well do you actually go into the courtroom and things like that or there are programs and then you also as there's a new court programs there's journals and there's clinics so clinics are you actually have real clients that are it's basically a pro bono system where you provide free legal services before you're at an actual attorney so law school does have a lot of of programs but the classes themselves that law school are more teaching you legal theory rather than practical law so i would recommend to any current law soon or a prospective law student to work while you're in law school at a law firm and actually see the day to day of is a of a lawyer because that's the best way to get experience and what you learn at the law firm at your job will transfer over to what you're learning in school and you'll have a real practical view of how a type of law is actually practice so now there's many different types of law all right so how does a student pick up from the different types of law that are out there because is the voice lawyers rights lawyer and lawyers and criminal lawyers and so on right yes so law school is interesting the fact that you don't have to pick a major you just kind of go in and you can if you if you know what you want to do you can take  a bunch of classes specialized in criminal law or in personal injury or any of the other major fields but what i didn't know what i wanted to do when i when i got there i learned what i wanted to do by working in an employment law firm but you could just take classes over a wide span of practice areas and see what you're interested in and interesting so so picking a particular field how do you h that when do you figure that out is it the first year law school the last year law school for ninety nine percent of people it's whenever they get their first job whatever their law firm needs them to do really yeah it's it's unless you go in there knowing what you want to do and you take all these classes and you apply to to firms that specialize in a specific area people do that but most people generally don't know what they want to practice they get their first job at a large law firm in whatever area they need the they they practice and working in that field now law becomes more like a sales approaches as well because the firm is asking to find billable hours right how does that work within the the the law structure right so fortunately i'm a plaintiff's attorney so the employment law we work off contingency basis so say it's a sexual harassment or discrimination suit and we collect five hundred thousand dollars for a we get thirty three percent of whatever we collect so we don't have to worry about billable hours fortunately which doesn't mean that we don't work a million hours but it's it's an interesting dichotomy between the fence firms and their clients because a lot of times i see as a plaintiff so terry that a case could be settled initially for a small amount but because these defense firms have every incentive to bill every billable hour out of it they drag these cases on and then end up settling it for a lot larger amount at the end when they could have just paid something in the beginning and then and and it would have gone away so that does hurt a lot of the industry of the law industry because you have people like that that are out there just trying to create billable hours or something that could could end pretty quickly yeah it seems to be the culture at a lot of the defense firms and that's and that's only in certain sectors right there so if you were to let's say the state department and you just handled cases that came into the state that it's not really bilbo hours because the state is just giving you what what is being a government entity or even a in the employment contacts an employer work will contract with a large the sense firm for the litigation aspect of of an issue so they end up spending  having to spend hundred thousand dollars in litigation and lawyer fees anyway and then you have built those corporate lawyers that are doing that as well right so that they're on the books for some big corporation and there would they work as the attorney of the corporation correct right exactly so every every every different part of laws is very different yeah it's theirs that's the cool thing about law is there's so many things you could do you could you don't even have to be a lawyer but there's there's a whole category of jobs called j d preferred where in finance in business in travel in anything there's there's law is necessary there you need someone to interpret contracts you need someone to to understand documents and it's it's a very interesting it's a great degree to get even if you don't want to be a lawyer now to be a lawyer is that something where you have to argue  case all the time or is it something where you don't even have to be in court is it is it where the other lawyers out there that don't ever go to court yeah there is a there is transactional lawyers who interpret contracts or work in house or just write brief they there's a lot yeah definitely a lot of fields where you're not arguing in court if you do want to the traditional like t v lawyer there's there's a lot of litigation positions out as well and  like employment large personal injury or any of the major fields what's interesting though is ninety eight percent of cases settle before trial so what you see on t v is all these lawyers and case and trials and they're all dramatic  into the college room so what is what are the type of grades that schools look for to become a lawyer to even get into college and to get into law school do you need a school which obviously are looking for nearly perfect scores on the else g p s but there's also mid level and lower level lower tier law schools that average students could can easily get into and especially today law schools have low roman rates these during this time so it's easier to get into them than ever before when we come in the end of our show and usually it's my guess what type of advice you want to give to families out there that their sons and daughters are interested in going to war and trying to save money and things what can you tell me my biggest piece of advice is just it's cliche but think outside the box like college isn't four years law school isn't three years there is there's other ways there's other paths and just keep your eye out for them and they're not going to be easy to find they're not going to be highly advertised but keep your eyes open and you could save a ton of money well thank you very much