<p>How many years does it take? Is it very competitive? Do u think it's worth it? And what is it like being a lawyer afterwards?</p>
<p>Law school is three years, typically you have to complete 90 semester hours or a number close to that. It is very competitive to get in and very competitive once in. What is needed to get in varies according to the ranking and prestige of the law school. LSAT score is very important along with the need for a high college GPA. What law school you attend is also important because those from the high rank law schools have the easier road to being employed particularly in positions that start at high salaries like the $160,000 a year that many sometimes hear. The thing is only about 10% of all law school grads get those jobs and many, particularly from lower ranked law schools, end up with positions paying $50,000 a year or less, or find nothing particularly in the current law employment market which is weak. Moreover even for the high rank law schools, your employment opportunities can be affected by how high you are in the graduating class. In additon many come out of law school with a lot of debt, often over $100,000 and, without the high paying jobs, they find their lives are limited because of the enormous debt.</p>
<p>Getting through law school is not like getting through college. Memorizing information to spit out on an exam doesn’t work. Many classes use the socratic method which essentially means you have to go learn everything yourself and then get hammered with questions including hypotheticals from the prof to see if you understand anything you have read. Moreover learning the law through what are called Casebooks is itself an exercise in confusion. Freshman year, you can find yourself studying 70 hours a week and very often spending hours reading just 15 pages of cases from one casebook over and over just trying to figure out what it actually says. Then when you think you have it you go to class, get called on, get ripped and find out you didn’t understand a thing you read. And note this is happenning to you despite that in college you were close to the top of your class. Eventually several weeks into law school, if you are one of those who will make it, you actually start understanding what you were supposed to learn in the first couple weeks of law school and then you spend the rest of the first semester catching up on the learning curve. Then, unlike college, you have only one exam per course, the final at the end of the semester and it determines your entire grade. An exception to that is a writing class in which you learn how to do legal research and start to write legal papers analyzing issues and you are graded on each paper. It is a class for which you spend an enormous amount of time researching and writing and rewriting papers before turning them in, and in fact you can sometimes spend more time during a week doing that exercise than studying any other classes and your award at the end of the semester is only one or two credit hours.</p>
<p>Freshman year, you take required courses. There are often also some required thereafter. Moreover there are a number of upper level courses you should take even if they are electives because you will need them for the bar exam and for real life, e.g, an evidence course.</p>
<p>Once you are out of law school, you have the ultimate stress test, the bar exam, which you must pass to be a lawyer. It covers what it considers are all the basic courses it believes any law school student should have learned. And don’t get sick. If you can’t make the exact days of the test, you have to wait another six months until the next bar exam.</p>
<p>Being a lawyer afterwards depends on what kind of employment you get. Perhaps you qualified for one of those $160,000 per year jobs in a large firm in a large city. Prepare yourself to work 80 hours or more a week doing research, writing papers, motions and briefs, doing discovery, reviewing a warehouse full of documents and trying to find any that are important. As time progresses in such firms you move up to doing more case direct things as depositions, court hearings, and maybe even get to be a third chair on a trial. Note, if you actually go to trial be prepared to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, beginning a month before the trial and continuing until post trial briefs are submitted a month or more afterwards. Spend many years as an associate in the firm and you come up for partner and may make it or may be told to go pound sand and look for something else. Once you are a partner in a large firm, prepare yourself to continue to work 60 to 70 hour weeks.</p>
<p>You can end up in smaller firms, government jobs, in-house corporate departments where the work week is less but even then you find many devoting huge hours to their career. </p>
<p>Is it worth it? For many it is. For many it is not.</p>