I shadowed an attorney recently and was interested by her work. I enjoyed the shadowing experience. However, I am still not sure if I should go into law. When I was younger I always used to say that I was going to go to Harvard Law School. Although I said this often, I still had other things I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t know if I should be an attorney and I am entering my second year of school. Since I enjoyed the shadow so much should I do it? How did you personally decide? I don’t know if this is just my lack of decisiveness when it comes to big decisions or something else…
Well, you have plenty of time to decide. Keep your grades up. That will help regardless of what you do.
To my mind the best way to find out if you love a job is to do more of it. Law careers vary. You could look at volunteering in the courts or with a local judge; working in a law firm for a summer; contacting a company and seeing if you could work with their in-house counsel. Or you could do advocacy work for a social issues, like domestic violence, the environment, gender issues, public health, immigration, labor, prisoners’ legal issues, homelessness, education. You could see if you like to work abroad by taking time away from college in another country, and learn another language. Law covers all of these areas and more. There’s also nursing and medicine, biological research, engineering. There’s no timeline for you to decide to go into law. People often start law school well into their 20s and sometimes later.
Be aware that law incomes are bimodal. There’s a group at around the $70K range and another that starts at around the $140K+ range. To go into publc interest or government work, be sure that the law school you attend has a great student loan forgiveness program. Aim for a top 10 law school to find either the loan-forgiveness program or the path to the big law firms that pay the big bucks. To do that you will need high grades in college, your passion (in some category as described above) and an LSAT score that’s above about 170.
Other possible passions that work for law school are along the corporate line: finance degree and finance work, negotiations, corporate governance, etc. In other words, go work for a corporation shadowing someone doing deals or finance.
LSAT is a skill set that you can master. You can start at any time practicing.
I figured it would be a guaranteed paycheck as long as you can generate clients, which is true.
I would take a lot of personality tests and think about how you naturally like to study. If your personality tests show that your personality is a lawyerly personality (creative, but a scheduler–I’m an ISTJ and that is a good match for being a lawyer), and if you naturally work in ways that match how lawyers work (in college, I’d spend all day in a classroom by myself, studying, and now I spend all day in an office by myself, working), then it’ll work well for you.
Go to the bookstore and read some legal books. If you find those interesting and you can get excited, that’s a start. In addition, if you love reading fine prints of any user manual, medication inserts, credit card booklets etc, that’s good too.
Rising sophomore is too early to lose sleep. You have yet to dig into the challenging sort of work that parallels the challenges of law school. And look at the job outlook and projected salaries. Lots of people want to be lawyers.