Beyond the Billable Hour: Yale Law's Class of 2026 on What Comes Next

What do three of Yale Law School's sharpest new graduates actually think about the future of the legal profession?

I recently sat down with Sam Haddad — Student Body President at YLS, clinical fellow in both the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clinic and Community and Economic Development Clinic, Certum Group's summer fellow, and now an incoming associate at Latham & Watkins — along with Sharon Du (Executive Editor for Articles at the Yale Journal for International Law, formerly a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and now an Equal Justice Works Fellow at the ACLU of Southern California,) and Christian Aviles (Executive Editor for the Yale Law & Policy Review, Yale Journal on Regulation, Fellow in the Chae Initiative for Private Sector Leadership; Hurst Horizon Scholar, joining Simpson Thacher & Bartlett) for a candid conversation about law school, career expectations, and what comes after graduation.

We covered:
▪️ The biggest surprises and challenges of law school — academic, professional, and social
▪️ Whether the traditional firm-to-partnership path is still the "ideal legal career" in the eyes of today's graduates
▪️ Whether law schools do enough to expose students to litigation finance, insurance, legal tech, consulting, and business
▪️ What genuinely worries this class — the billable hour or the rise of artificial intelligence in the practice of law, and
▪️ The advice they'd give an undergraduate considering law school today

Sam's summer with us was a reminder of why we invest in the fellowship: the questions this generation is asking about the profession are sharper than the ones we were asking and the vast careers a law degree can provide outside the practice of law is squarely among them.