<p>I heard from my friend, who heard from some other people, that the typical daily life for a lawyer is nothing like the ones featured in 'Boston Legal' or any of those crime/law shows. Instead, lawyers do mostly paperwork. Is this true? Little of it is about shining in the court and most of it is about paperwork?</p>
<p>I have another friend who's taken all humanities classes for the first two years of college. He plans to go to law school. I'm thinking. What background do you need to go to law school? A math professor told me that you need math, since math prepares you for problem solving. I'm really confused.</p>
<p>I'm not Planning to go into law. Right now, I'm on the path to become an engineer. I'm just exploring the possibilities.</p>
<p>When I hear the word “paperwork,” I think about I think about characters on cop shows grousing about filling out reports by hand.</p>
<p>Legal work is extremely varied, but the lion’s share of almost any lawyer’s workday consists of reading and writing, mostly in front of a computer. </p>
<p>Legal work, like math, consists of problem solving. Mathematicians and lawyers both employ logic, but legal problems are not math problems. I’ve known lawyers who majored in math, but most of us went to law school as a culmination of a long pattern of math avoidance. I personally haven’t taken a math class since the tenth grade.</p>
<p>In big firms, there are people who specifically work on “paperwork” such as contracts and court briefs and such, and those who specifically litigate (actually argue in court). However, in smaller firms, an individual will do all of these things.</p>
<p>In addition to actually appearing in court, litigation also consists of drafting briefs and memoranda (and doing related legal research) as well as drafting discovery requests and responses. The mix of paperwork and courtroom time may change with seniority, but I’ve never met a litigator who doesn’t spend the majority of his/her work time in the office.</p>
<p>Yes, very little of practicing law is about shining in court. Cases are won and lost in preparation and doing the right “paperwork.” If there are any surprises in the court room, it usually means that someone has not done a good job in preparing the case. The vast majority of what Alan Shore says on Boston Legal would never be allowed in the court room. There is a lot of research and writing and the vast majority of cases settle.</p>
<p>Don’t forget about the phone calls. I remember when I took my first law job, how surprised and sad I was to find that I spent so much time on the phone - something I never saw Perry Mason doing. Now a lot of that communication is done by email, which to me is similarly boring.</p>
<p>The time sheets were the bane of my existence. I was terrible about keeping them up to date and would try to go back to remember what I had done and I always lost a huge amount of time. I remember when the firm moved form billing in 1/4 hour intervals to 6 minute intervals. I know there are no paper time sheets these days, but I’m sure I would still hate the process.</p>
<p>That’s the great thing about being in-house: no time tracking.</p>
<p>I spent about twelve years litigating in small-firm settings. There was a fair amount of face-to-face client time, and a fair number of hours spent taking or defending depositions. There was a lot of time spent on the telephone.</p>
<p>I’ve worked in-house for another dozen years. A typical work week, I might spend five hours in meetings, ten hours on the phone, and another thirty-five reading and writing. Maybe half of the writing time is spent responding to email, and half of it is producing iterations of contracts. </p>
<p>The math involved in the contracts I work on is almost never anything a fifth grader couldn’t do. (I work for a software company. Derivative contracts and other complex financial instruments presumably require more sophosticated math.)</p>
<p>Jeez this all sounds tedious and time consuming and deplorable, so I’m guessing you are at the whim and caprice of your client? I want to go to law school but am not sure about the practice. I want to work and make decisions that involve planning; i.e., working on a project and make big bucks out of it. What is better for this? Entrepreneurship? Is lawyering all about catering to clients’ needs?</p>