Six years ago, I was hard at work polishing up the manuscript for Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). It was a labor of love. I couldn’t be prouder every time I hear of the advice it contains working out. Even more so, I’m proud of the people who’ve used it to help them make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
Alas, as Marcus Aurelius put it nearly two millennia ago, the universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are. Six years out, some of the information in “Your Debt-Free JD” is not as useful as it once was. A few portions are even downright obsolete.
Probably the most important example has to do with the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. While these rankings were never a sacred cow to me personally, as the 2020s dawned they were extremely important to individual law schools as well as to individuals at those law schools making decisions about whom to admit — and maybe even more importantly, about which applicants merited a generous scholarship offer.
Today, as criteria modifications and the lack of opt-in from certain institutions make the U.S. News law school rankings increasingly ridiculous, fewer schools care about them. Not only does this make the U.S. News law school rankings even less useful as a standalone tool for law school applicants than they once were, it also obviates some — though not all — of the strategies outlined in my book to (let’s use the right word for it, don’t feel bad, this is the evil law school industrial complex we’re talking about) manipulate law schools into offering you a full scholarship.
That’s a big one, although there are several others. For instance, one paragraph is about buying nice suits at thrift stores, because it’s dumb to pay $1,000 for a new suit when you’re in law school, and it continues to be dumb to pay $1,000 for a suit even once you’ve become a millionaire. It’s still sound advice not to throw your money away on needlessly expensive clothing, but it’s harder advice to follow these days as thrifting has really hit the mainstream.
Despite all the changes in reality that have caused some of the words I wrote six years ago to become less relevant, I am not doing a revised edition. The idea was never to make a ton of money, it being such a niche target audience and me wanting to keep the book accessible to the poorest potential lawyers. That being said, the sum I’ve made off of “Your Debt-Free JD” amounts to something in the neighborhood of a dollar an hour for all the time I’ve put into it, so I don’t have much interest in revisiting the text.
I’ll tell you what I will do, however. If you’re in the process of applying to law schools, or are considering going to law school in the future, feel free to send me an email (you can find my email address at the bottom of the article), and we’ll set up a time for a phone call. We can talk about whatever you’d like (within reason), be it the financial calculus of going to law school, how to best set yourself up for the career you want while you are there (or how to figure out what career it is you want in the first place), or, if you’ve read the book, what has changed since it was written and what that means for you now.
This is free. I don’t expect or want anything from you in return for a few minutes of advice. Of course, I always appreciate it whenever someone buys the book (most of the information in it remains valuable) and am especially pleased when folks leave an honest five-star review of it. But that’s not a requirement to take me up on my offer by any means.
I do probably need to put a couple caveats on this. According to the ABA, 42,817 students began JD studies at accredited American law schools last fall. I have no idea what the demand is out there, but if even 1% of those of you who end up going to law school next fall want to talk to me about it, that is going to be overwhelming. So, I may have to cut it off at whatever point I deem reasonable. Additionally, if you consider yourself MAGA, don’t bother emailing me because in that case I do not want to help you achieve your goals.
Well, thank you to everyone who bought a copy of the book over the past six years. I look forward to speaking with some of you in 2026.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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