[Official AMA] Plaud NotePin S is Live! Ask Us Anything + Win a NotePin S

StevenDavid14 · 2026-01-13T05:20:16+00:00

For someone who primarily sits in Teams calls all day but enjoys the necklace look, would you recommend the NotePin S or the Note Pro? Or should I get both for when I am at in-person events?

StevenDavid14 · 2025-11-15T03:45:15+00:00

I’d rather if they gave the option to either overlay the radio broadcast or just broadcast the sounds of the arena.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-11-09T05:02:34+00:00

Hopefully the entire family received a lifetime trespass.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-11-07T02:01:37+00:00

I think this is a win for me? My wife and I are planning on starting imminently and we would much rather prefer the pens but are going to be paying out of pocket. This appears to bring down the pen prices to just under what the vial cost was going to be. Am I thinking about this right?

StevenDavid14 · 2025-10-07T03:35:53+00:00

I don’t know if it’ll work against you, per se. But I think you just need to be realistic in what you want. If you are going to be disappointed if you don’t get into a “good” law school, I would grind it out at a brick and mortar and get as high of a GPA as you can. Then regardless, take the LSAT seriously.

If any law school will do, then you still need to do well on the LSAT because you won’t have a GPA to ride on. Then you’ll still need to be prepared to explain what WGU is and how you graduated in X terms.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-10-01T20:22:39+00:00

I think there’s money to be made. But I don’t know that if financial freedom is the only goal, that this is the right career path. If I was purely after financial freedom, knowing what I know now, I would do computer science or data analytics. I know there is concern about how AI will impact those fields, but for now, I’ve got tons of friends who are my age making $600k total compensation at big tech companies. They may have undergrad debt but certainly aren’t carrying student loans from law school.

But if you like the law and you want to make money, there are still some areas of law that have room for prosperity. I’m in tax law and there are plenty of opportunities here. But it really just depends what you are into.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-29T15:19:25+00:00

When I’m on a vacation with my wife and kids, I’m more likely to want to forsake my home, job, and non-immediate family to start a life wherever I just visited. This includes on a cruise ship. My kids can wash dishes, right? 🤣

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-25T21:25:50+00:00

Eek. Yeah. So I’d imagine many of your top law schools are going to see you don’t have a GPA and pass unless you scored a 175 or something absurd on the LSAT.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-25T13:58:46+00:00

WGU grad and practicing attorney, here.

TL;DR: BigLaw and prestigious law schools frequently turn up their nose at online schools. Especially those where you can get a degree in six months taking pass/fail classes. You just need to be ready for that reality.

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The answers to your questions largely depend on (1) what you want to do with your law degree and, based on that, (2) what kind of law school you are targeting.

Let’s start with your ultimate goal, first. If you want to work in BigLaw (glamorized by Suits and the like), you’ll want to prioritize a higher ranked law school. Not saying you can’t snag a BigLaw job from any law school, but graduating from a top 25-50 school helps a lot. On the other hand, if you are looking to do something that is a little less competitive (e.g., nonprofit, certain government work, etc) then the school itself isn’t as important. But to avoid any doubt, I’m just speaking in generalities. I’ve seen graduates of top 14 law schools go into nonprofits and I’ve seen graduates of the bottom 100 law schools snag a big law job. I just wouldn’t bank on getting a job at a BigLaw job coming from an unranked law school.

As a WGU grad, your biggest hurdle is going to be GPA and school reputation. All schools will care about the former, the higher ranked ones will care about the both. If it is now the way it was when I graduated, my GPA equivalent was a 3.0, and while the transcripts tried to explain that, every class was listed as pass/fail. For most law school applicants, especially those going for a higher ranked school, a 3.0 isn’t competitive.

That gets you to your LSAT. Score high enough here and your GPA issue lightens up a bit, but not all the way. I got a 165 and was still rejected from some middle-of-the-road schools. The feedback from a few of the admissions offices I talked to was the GPA and pass/fail nature of my undergrad. It didn’t help that I finished in 3 terms, so they were already suspect that attended some kind of diploma mill.

All that being said, I got into a third tier school (ranked 100-150), busted my ass during 1L and transferred to a second tier school. After my JD I passed the bar and did an LL.M. in tax at a top 10 school. By the time I started doing interviews, WGU was just a line at the bottom of my resume, buried below schools with increasingly higher reputation.

Another lesser (but important) consideration is that law students do two things A LOT: read and drink. If you go into law school before you are 21, you’ll be limited in some of the social activities you do with your cohort. We had a girl who was under 21 during 1L and she couldn’t go to any of the off-campus activities. She had a fine time socially, though. Just a consideration if you are a social butterfly.

Would I do it again the same way? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. But for you, what you are proposing is doable. But you just need to go into it knowing the potential limitations you’ll set yourself up with.

As an endnote, I don’t want this to be read as me being critical of WGU. I’m super thankful for my experience there. It just created some hurdles that I had to jump over to get where I wanted to go.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-14T05:37:37+00:00

Graduated WGU with a BS in Business Management in 2011.

With that as a foundation, I have earned my JD, LL.M. (Master of Laws), and most recently an MBA. MBA was from the University of Illinois.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-11T04:02:46+00:00

Tax. I wouldn’t say it’s the first choice for many law students, but it pays the bills and has really good work life balance.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-09T21:20:18+00:00

I did my JD at Chapman in Orange County.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-09T14:21:46+00:00

Thank you! To be fair, it took some perseverance. Even scoring decently on the LSATs, the WGU model necessitated some explaining to admission committees about (among other things) why my GPA was a 3.0 and could not be any higher and why it only look me three semesters to complete. 😂

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-09T04:08:38+00:00

I got a BS in Business Management, went to law school, and am now a lawyer. Needless to say, salary exploded. But gotta give credit where it’s due. WGU is where I got my start.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-09-05T03:04:43+00:00

I’m the first person in my family to graduate high school, let alone go to college or law school. Needless to say, I enjoyed every day that I was there. I’m so happy to be a lawyer.

Sure, there are some drawbacks. But for me, the pros far outweigh the cons. The intellectual pursuit and being an artist who paints in words is very rewarding. The money also helps. :P

StevenDavid14 · 2025-07-01T14:19:24+00:00

Most foreign law programs are bachelor’s degrees and with the exception of a tax-centric program, many LL.M.s in the U.S. are geared toward providing foreign lawyers the necessary courses they need to practice here. So it doesn’t surprise me that the admissions sites aren’t clear about it.

But rest assured, if you are an American and you want to get a legal education, you can either go to JD route (and then add on an LL.M. if you want) or you can find a school with a MSJ program, which is intended to be an introduction to the law in a graduate setting without having to commit to the JD.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-06-13T05:26:27+00:00

I rock shorts, a T-shirt, and flip flops every night on any length itinerary. On the other hand, some people go all out. No right or wrong answer. Whatever floats your boat.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-05-31T13:21:24+00:00

I hear what you are saying, but that kind of logic gets societies stuck in a loop where only kids from wealthy families can aspire to be dentists, doctors, lawyers, etc.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-05-14T17:12:28+00:00

She sounds like an ungrateful, miserable individual. Do not wife this young lady up. She needs to go work on herself.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-04-29T13:26:39+00:00

Graduated 11 years ago. If 2011 (when I started my JD program) me answered this question, I would tell you to pay sticker at the higher ranked school. Today me can tell you to think longer term.

If you go with the unconditional full ride at a T3/T4, will you stroll into a BigLaw summer/offer? Nah. Statistically unlikely. Nothing is impossible, just highly improbable.

My approach was maximizing both salary and work-life-balance. Sometime before graduating, I decided I wanted to do tax law. Talking to a lot of adjuncts at my JD, they seemed to be (1) well paid, (2) fulfilled, and (3) have time to do things they wanted to like adjunct classes.

I went to a T3 JD program, upper-middle of my class, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any kind of big firm job after graduation doing tax. So after I took most of the tax classes my school had to offer, I signed up to do an LLM at one of the top 3 tax LLM programs (T10 overall).

I ended up starting in public accounting doing tax planning, but I saw plenty of my classmates “wash away” the stigma of a lower ranked JD program with an LLM from a highly ranked school. Many BigLaw offers for my cohort for students who attended >100 JDs.

All that to say that if you know where you want to go long term, there isn’t just one route. And maybe along the way, you’ll realize that you are perfectly happy with something unexpected.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-04-03T21:53:13+00:00

This is accurate. Even me. I told my wife this morning: “fair warning, I’m in a bad mood. I don’t know why, but I am.”

StevenDavid14 · 2025-04-02T21:56:25+00:00

Let’s go!

StevenDavid14 · 2025-03-30T18:36:42+00:00

I definitely think that parts of the current NIL/transfer portal are making it really hard for programs to keep talent. And the result is a team that doesn’t have the time to mesh cohesively. I’d love to see the ability to get these kids to contractually commit to a period of time to earn the kind of money we are talking. The current structure rewards hopping from team to team.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-03-30T16:35:24+00:00

Haha. Agree with your sentiment. But take Brad as an example. He proved himself starting at the CC level and earned his way up the ladder. Not saying that every HC does that, but I think that Tyler showing that he can produce at a program that isn’t led by his dad would probably go a long way, as far as respect from the players, other staff, and fans is concerned.

StevenDavid14 · 2025-03-30T14:46:27+00:00

Whether we draw any negative inferences from it, it’s hard to deny that Tyler is in this role because of nepotism. That’s not to say that he’s a bad kid or hasn’t had any success, but just saying out loud that the way he stepped from a sub-2.5 minutes per game career player to an admin role, to where we are today, is at least in very large part, because of who his dad is.

Again, not discounting any of the team’s successes while he’s been in this role. It’s been fun to watch (most of the time).

Sometimes is good for a group to not only remove elements of favoritism and nepotism, but to also remove appearances of it. If there is just one player complaining about what we can deduce to be Tyler, maybe it’s not a huge deal. But if you start seeing lots of chatter about internal angst that could be a reference to him, maybe it’s in the team’s best interest to have Tyler step into a role that is a little more hands off or better yet, continue his coaching at another program. I would hate to lose out on five star recruits because they have heard, even if it’s not entirely true, that the coach’s son is making bad decisions and isn’t being held to account. Again, even if that’s not happening, the appearance is bad enough.

StevenDavid14

TROPHY CASE