<p>Agree with everyone else. You don’t want to skip the steps that it takes to actually become a lawyer. First it would be great to excel in high school, including doing some volunteering, possibly having a job, finding good activities, potentially holding a leadership position, etc. With a strong application, you will be able to get into a good college and potentially get scholarships so that you don’t have to borrow a lot of money (with law school costing nearly $200,000 in some cases, avoiding undergraduate debt is something to think about).</p>
<p>Then you get to do the same thing all over again in college, studying hard to get a good GPA, making relationships with professors to get good recommendations, and building up your soft factors (volunteering, leadership roles, internships, employment, mock trial, or whatever other activities will strengthen your applications).</p>
<p>You will take the LSAT (hopefully only once, keeping in mind that anything more than twice can be viewed negatively), collect your references, and apply to law schools. You’ll do the research on law student profiles at the time that you’re applying, to determine which schools are likely to admit you. Since admissions are so dependent on your grades and on your LSAT score, you need to work hard to get those criteria strong. It doesn’t matter how much you want something if you don’t do the groundwork to get there.</p>
<p>Then you go off to law school, and work hard for three years. You have to decide what kind of lawyer you want to be, and try to pursue jobs in that area. I’m a lawyer, but I am completely unqualified to do criminal work like Gardna. Except in limited cases like patent law, you don’t specialize in law school. You learn your specialty in practice and continuing education.</p>
<p>After you graduate with a J.D., you’re still not a lawyer. The next step is to spend months studying to take a bar exam…</p>
<p>Anyway, you get the point. Becoming a lawyer is not about studying the law in the 9th grade, and wanting it really badly. This is a field in which there are many, many building blocks. The building blocks need you to do well academically for four years of high school, four years of college and potentially – to get the job you want – three years of law school. Through this process, you should develop interests that strengthen your applications to college and law school. </p>
<p>You should work on being well spoken, and have decent manners so you can carry yourself well in business/client settings. (I actually encouraged my kids to take golf lessons and ballroom dancing lessons so they’d be prepared for anything.) You should avoid getting into any kind of trouble, or posting controversial positions on Facebook, Myspace or any other electronic media that might come back to haunt you someday. You should develop friendships. Not only can they turn into client networks someday, but dealing well with people is an essential component of most legal jobs. You should develop your abilities to deal with stress and adversity, since legal jobs are typically adversarial by the nature of the job.</p>
<p>I also recommend that you read available fiction and biographies about law school, and try out old movies such as Paper Chase. There are some really good books about going to law school, such as “1L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School” and “Ivy Briefs: True Tales of a Neurotic Law Student” that you can find on Amazon for not too much $. They’re actually fun to read (at least for lawyers) and you’ll start to see the same themes. If you can read those books and watch Paper Chase and still want to be a lawyer, I say go for it. One of my kids knew he wanted to be a lawyer in grammar school. Yup, he’s the one who is now in law school.</p>