JD/MBA Programs? Work Experience, Intensity, Admissions?

purely anecdotally, it's easy to sneak in to a top program through the back door if you're already in at one of the other professional or grad schools. for example, if you can score decently on the gmat, and have business-related internships or some other indicator of interest, you should be fairly well-positioned. relatedly, i know people who are doing this right out of college, no work experience. no position on questions 3 and 4, except to the extent that 1L will suck anywhere. if you tire of the advice here you might consider cross-referencing a specialty forum like lawschooldiscussion.org.

These would be excellent questions for the admission department at the schools you're applying to.

Many of those I know who are doing JD/MBA did it one of three ways:

1) They are smart and had a lot of work experience, and got in by applying to both at the same time.
2) One got into the law school but weren't accepted to the MBA program because he lacked the requisite work experience (~2 years I believe). So what he said was, "I'll go to law school here if you get me into the MBA program as well. This doesn't really work. Generally, admissions will tell you to do this:
3) Most of the people I know applied for the MBA program during their 1L year and everyone got in. I'm guessing they had good GMAT scores, but from what I hear, unless you absolutely bomb it, you will get in if you have a good academic record.

As I'm not doing the JD/MBA thing, it doesn't seem like a bad deal at all. To me, you get a great price per credit. Some of the credits overlap and to complete the program, it takes 4 years, I think. One of my good friends tells me that it is really easy. B-school is a joke he says. He took the third route. First year of law school sucks and is intense. However, his second year was ridiculous. He took like 3-4 classes a semsester (1 law/2 business) and only had one exam each semester). He has so much free time he has no idea what to do with himself.

Re-worded sure.

Everything here mirrors exactly what I've heard.

At my school, the difficult part for a lot of students was the MBA admissions. Many JD students are fresh out of undergrad, but MBA programs don't usually like that, focusing mostly on work experience than anything else (depending on the area you want to go into). They made exceptions for some students that were particularly bright, but that was rare.

However, I think the programs at my school had a 1 year period where you could apply to the other program to get the joint degree. So lots of admits to one program did the first year, and then got accepted into the other program. That door swung both ways, JDs going into the MBA and MBAs going into the JD. I considered it, but the starting salaries were, on average, no better for an MBA, JD, or JD/MBA. Path of least resistance was 2 years for that salary...

That said, I find it dubious that anyone had an easy time in the MBA portion of the JD/MBA. The ones I knew had worked as accountants for several years and were now getting the degrees to have a high power career as experts in SOX. Their opinion was basically that without knowing the real mechanics behind how SOX changed finance and accounting, what good would they be as lawyers in that field. Major banks were pretty eager to get these folks in the door.

I suppose if someone was doing the MBA thinking it would help them start their own law firm, then maybe it would be easier. Entrepreneurship type courses aren't necessarily the most difficult.