Sure. My law school usually ranks at around #15 depending on whose survey you are reading. I’m in a firm with around 100 lawyers locally and several hundred nationally. FYI, very few firms would expect you to bill 2400 hours as an associate. If you bill 2100 (or even 2000 depending on the firm), and do excellent work, that’s usually plenty of hours to advance within the firm. You can typically bill 80%-90% of your hours. So if you are in the office for 10 hours, you should be able to bill at least 8-9 hours of that (with the rest consisting of your lunch break, time goofing off, doing administrative tasks, attending meetings, etc.). If you are assigned to write a law review article for a partner to sign his/her name to, that’s non-billable and you would not get credit for it (so you might have to do that over a weekend, for example). If you treat law school like a job, i.e., work at it consistently during working hours, you should be able to manage even with a wife and child. I was single, but I had several friends with families who took it seriously and did extremely well in law school.
