FLEP (Funded Legal Education Program) is a program for junior officers (2-5 years AFS) and NCOs (4 years service), where you get to attend law school, with tuition paid by the Army and while receiving pay and benefits during your time in law school, in return for an ADSO.

Sounds like a great deal, right? Well yeah, it is, but you shouldn’t do it.

My name is ReadGoodAndStuff, I attended law school under the FLEP, and I will tell you why doing FLEP isn’t as a great a deal as you think. Unless you are absolutely 100% certain you want to stay in the Army until retirement, I would recommend against it.

The Good

I am not a moron, before getting to the bad, I will admit the good. It was great to go to law school for free, while receiving a paycheck. I was in a much better financial spot than many of my friends. Having no debt is also great, especially compared to my friends who have debt in the six figures. You also accrue time towards retirement in law school. Overall, financially a great deal. But that’s about it.

The Bad

The good dealt with, lets discuss the negatives.

The biggest one is the six-year ADSO, that runs consecutively to all other ADSOs. It doesn’t start until you finish the bar and attend DCC. This means that if you graduate law school in May 2027, your ADSO starts in August 2027. If you had other ADSOs (ROTC, USMA, BRADSO) before FLEP that hadn’t finished, you tack those onto the end as well. PLUS, our overlords at PPTO (JAG Corps HRC) have recently decided that PCS ADSOs also get tacked onto the end of your FLEP ADSO as well (which is insane because as you’ll see below, you have no choice but to PCS.) So that “six-year” ADSO can be a lot more. You might not be getting out in 2033 like you thought, you’ll be out later.

On top of that, you are likely looking at your Major promotion board quickly as a FLEP. After promoting to Major in the JAG Corps, they want you to attend the Graduate Course, which also incurs a two-year ADSO. So tack that onto your six years. Six years rapidly becomes eight, or more. That’s also a one-year PCS to Charlottesville, followed by another PCS right after. If you’re selected for ILE, that’s another one-year PCS.

Which leads right into PCSing. The JAG Corps has an absolutely fetish for two-year assignment cycles. Unless something changes soon, you will move at least every two years, forever. You will switch jobs every two years, forever. Rumor is they’re changing this, I wouldn’t bet on it. Hope your spouse doesn’t have a professional job.

Speaking of jobs. Prepare to be jealous of your civilian peers. Just because you like a subject area, whether that is criminal or contracts or environmental law or whatever, you’ll have functionally no choice as a captain as to what you’ll do. You get input later in your career, but again, the deciding factor that trumps all is needs of the JAG Corps. And if you’re supremely unlucky, you will barely get to practice law at all, and be shuffled into a command advising position early on, due to your “army experience.” Hopefully you aren’t passionate about an area of law because it will only make it hurt worse when you become a BJA to a sustainment brigade.

The JAG Corps is about what you’d expect for an organization “led” by people who accessed directly into the Army with no pre-commissioning experience. Your average ROTC MS4 has more leadership training than many SJAs (they only recently added 40 hours of leadership training to the grad course.) Don’t get me wrong, there are good bosses out there, but I have seen a lot of bad, that I didn’t in my basic branch.

Lastly, prepare to take a major step back in autonomy. I had more authority and responsibility as a 2LT S6 than I’ve had in the JAG Corps. You’ll be micro-managed in a way that you never have before. Your SJA will edit charge sheets even though they haven’t sniffed a courtroom in 15 years. This is a defining feature for my peers and I, the JAG Corps doesn’t allow mission command in the way that our basic branches did. You are a brand-new staff officer in all the worst ways.

Conclusion

If you really want to be a lawyer, get your GI Bill, at least a percentage of it, get out, get into a good school, suck up being poor in law school, and then find an area of law you are passionate about. Don’t become a generalist beholden to the JAG Corps for some indeterminate length of time.

Law schools love veterans, all the veterans in my class did well and got great jobs and seem to be very happy now.