Why I Went to Law School

Answering the call to explain why I went to law school. I feel like I should preface this with "do as I say and not as I do" so take this for what it's worth...just my story and not an example of what anyone else should do.

Growing up, everyone always told me I should be a lawyer. I was opinionated, loved to argue and debate and I was relentless in my quest to be right and have the last word. Granted, these qualities don't have much, if anything, to do with what I do for a living now, but apparently people think these make a good lawyer. I didn't know many lawyers and unlike the rest of the population, I have never watched Law & Order, so I really had no idea what a lawyer's life is like.

Everything I did before I turned 18 was all about getting into the right college. Once I was there, I was completely directionless. No one really told me that you should still study and get good grades, so I just went out drinking every night of the week and had the time of my life. It didn't really occur to me that I may go to grad school one day. By my junior year, I realized I needed to start thinking about what I would do after, and I naturally looked for what kind of jobs I'd be qualified for with my major in political science. Turns out, not much. I interned at the Council on Foreign Relations, which was awesome, but decided that I didn't like the think tank environment enough to put up with the terrible salary. My next choice, public relations or government affairs, proved to be difficult to break into and also did not pay well. Rather than expand my job search geographically, I just applied to and got a job as a paralegal at a big law firm in New York.

I started right after the fourth of July as a corporate/bankruptcy paralegal. It was nice to work in a big, glamorous law firm with tons of other smart, recent college grads. I made good money and enjoyed a lot of the law firm perks but in New York, most people are paralegals for one or two years, so I knew it wasn't a permanent job. At the end of September, I decided that I didn't want to be a paralegal for another full year. I figured that the first year associates were basically doing the same thing I was but making triple or quadruple the money, so why not just go to law school? (can you say young and naive?). If I registered in the next few weeks, I would still be able to take the LSAT before applications were due, so I did it. I signed up for a Kaplan course too, but of course those four weeks turned out to be the busiest while I was working. Most class days, I went down to SoHo after work, took the class and came back to work until 4 am. I never got the chance to really study and am generally terrible at standardized tests, so I got the very same score on the LSAT that I got on my first practice test...which was not very good. But, it was too late. I had already sent in my applications before I got my score.

I got in to a few schools, all of which were second tier. I read the employment statistics and I knew people from these schools that ended up getting jobs they wanted (and jobs I would be happy to get), so I decided to just go. I figured I could always transfer to a higher ranked school after the first year if I wanted to. This was 2006 and pretty much everyone who got decent grades that wanted to work in BigLaw could get those jobs. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after graduation, but I figured my goal should be to get the best grades I could to keep doors open (see! I learned my lesson in college!).

When I started 1L in August 2006, I didn't know what a tort was. I had no clue why we needed to learn civil procedure and was blown away that contracts could be so complicated. But I LOVED it. Every second of it. Law school was amazing and I thoroughly enjoyed all three years. I loved learning to read cases and discussing them in class, I loved how everything clicked and made sense when I outlined, I loved putting it all together in preparation for finals and I loved the speakers that came to the school to discuss constitutional issues and hot topics.

I did well my first year of school, so I decided to just go through OCI and see what happened. I researched the firms and picked which ones to apply to. From the outset, I had a first and second choice out of the pool of 20 or so firms. I had about 8 callbacks which had varying levels of success. When I got an offer at my top choice, I jumped on it. I have never looked back.

So I think it would be fair to say that I went to law school because I had nothing else to do with my political science degree. I did think at various times in my life that I might like to be a lawyer, but that certainly wasn't the driving force behind me applying. Once I was in law school, I started formulating an answer to the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I honestly still don't really know. There are many things I love about being a lawyer, including following rules (I'm a big fan of order, rules and organization), working with very intelligent people, reading and writing, and being involved with deals that are very relevant and important to the marketplace and our society. I like that I have a professional degree so that there are less jobs closed off to me. I like dressing up in professional clothes every day and going to an office. And frankly, I like the salary I get paid.

There are less glamorous aspects, like student loan debt, long hours, sometimes boring and tedious tasks and a high stress level. But I know that I can always take a "step down" and find a job that is much less demanding (and lower paying) if it ever gets really unbearable. For about a year after I graduated, I felt a little trapped in law because I knew I would need to make my BigLaw salary to be able to afford to pay off my loans. Now that I have paid them down and the minimum monthly payment is about 20% of what it once was, I can breath easier.

Would I go back to law school if I could do it all over? I don't know. As I said, I loved law school and I got a job that I feel very lucky to have out of it. But if I went to law school today, it would never turn out the same. My firm doesn't hire from schools like mine post-economic collapse. It would be soul-crushing to have that kind of debt without the means to pay it off quickly, and none of the good things about my job would be enough to make that worth it. I guess if I could go for free to school, I would do it all over again. It's not like there was another career that I gave up to go to law school. I'm still not sure what else I would do if I wasn't a lawyer. And knowing now how ill-suited I am to being a stay-at-home mom, I'm glad that I have a career and not just a job.

My advice would be to have a very conservative approach to applying to law school. If you are reasonably convinced that you would be happy as a lawyer and you can go to law school on a full-ride or with a very good scholarship, go for it. If there is something else you have a passion for, do that. If you didn't get into schools that are offering you money, think long and hard about how much it costs and how long it will take you to pay that money back.