<p>Its sounds like an obvious question, but I still wonder: aren't all jobs tedious to one degree or another? So is it simply a matter of having unrealistic expectations about what a lawyer actually does, or is law actually more tedious than most jobs?</p>
<p>I haven't done most jobs, so I can't say with any degree of certainty.</p>
<p>In my own experience, though, practicing law is less tedious than working as a garbage man, more tedious than playing in a good band, and less tedious than playing in a bad one.</p>
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I haven't done most jobs, so I can't say with any degree of certainty.</p>
<p>In my own experience, though, practicing law is less tedious than working as a garbage man, more tedious than playing in a good band, and less tedious than playing in a bad one.
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<p>*Applaudes</p>
<p>Greybeard is wise, beyond his years. The long grey hairs hanging candidly off his stubble chin are evidence to his infinite knowledge.</p>
<p>I keep the hairs on my chin rather closely cropped. It's the ones sprouting from my ears that tend to get out of hand.</p>
<p>The number of hours some attorneys have to work, and the inability to have complete control over your own schedule are definitely unfavorable. The expectations is another factor. Some people expect to earn 6 figure paychecks coming from the bottom half of their class, at a bottom tier law school. Who can be content coming out of law school with $100,000 in debt, and working at a job that paid you 1/3 of what you thought you should be making? I am constantly surprised by how many pre-law students who are planning to take the LSAT and going to law school, yet have no realistic picture of the law school experience and the life after it.</p>
<p>I don't think many college students have a realistic view of life after school, whether they end up practicing law, teaching, practing medicine, or whatever.</p>
<p>The reality is that any job that pays well will require an enormous amount of work, particularly in the early years. </p>
<p>Those of us who didn't go the big law route still had to become proficient practitioners. We may have been spared some of the hundred hour weeks. But I've slogged through my share of them.</p>
<p>Sure, practicing law is tedious at times. But it strikingly less tedious than most of the other jobs I've done, including (seriously) garbage collection and operating a machine in a factory. </p>
<p>I've had other jobs that were a little more glamorous than collecting garbage, like editing a newspaper, teaching at the university level, and playing music, and one day each of television and moving acting. All of them have their share of tedium. (My movie career consisted of waiting around all day, watching the crew film two or three scenes about over and over again, while waiting for my own scene, which consisted of standing at attention at the end of a long line of soldiers. That's way more tedious than preparing discovery responses, or summarizing deposition transcripts.)</p>
<p>No job that I've ever had is intrisically interesting all of the time. Even the most fun job I've ever had (playing with a good band) involved long drives, moving heavy equipment, and wrapping and unwrapping electrical cables.</p>
<p>i think part of the problem is that people who are encouraged to go to law school are generally very bright people who have been commended throughout their academic career for going above and beyond and seeing issues that others may not. they get to law school where they spend hours upon hours discussing not only what the law is, but why and under what circumstances a court might hold otherwise. </p>
<p>then they get to the actual practice of law. a client rarely wants to know what novel constitutional argument they can make -- they want to know what the law is and whether they can do what they want to do. and they generally don't like paying for more work than is necessary to do that for them. the luxury of spending hours researching an interesting point of law just often isn't there. i can't tell you the number of time i saw situations where a senior attorney returned a lengthy detailed memo to a new associate only to tell the associate he/she missed the point which was to just come up with the answer of whether the client could do what he wanted and if so how.</p>
<p>which is not to say that creative thinking is a wasted attribute for lawyers -- quite the contrary. i saw many cases in which the ability to think outside the box and look beyond the norm was of immense value to the client. but i think one of the things a lawyer needs to learn is WHEN the client wants and needs that and WHEN the client just needs the clear cut answer -- and its not always simply a matter of what the clients says it thinks it wants. you have to judge how risk adverse the client is, how willing it is to pay for extra hours, how willing it is to hear what it may not want to hear. this is why those decisions are usually made by senior attorneys. it can seem confusing to a new attorney -- i recall numerous times i saw new associates befuddled at being told they'd done too much, only to then wonder the next time why they were told they'd not done enough. </p>
<p>i think this can lead to frustration on the part of a new attorney. i think it can lead to a feeling that their work is tedious -- an actual client's needs simply are generally not as interesting as the cases you studied in law school.</p>
<p>the biggest thing i think prospective lawyers need to understand about being a lawyer is the degree to which it is client driven. they determine your hours. they determine how routine or novel the work is. they determine what outcome you seek to achieve. it is the lawyer's job to meet the needs of the client -- all else flows from that.</p>
<p>Unbelievablem's description of law school is accurate, and reminded me of why I found law school to be far more tedious than I have ever found the actual practice of law. The people most prone to participate in class always seemed anxious to go on at great length about their precious, idiosynchratic views. </p>
<p>Reading a case to support an argument you're going to make before an actual judge in a few days in order to keep a case alive for a real human being is much more powerful motivation for me than it was to read a case in preparation for a final exam weeks or months away, in hopes of impressing a professor enough to award a high grade, with the ultimate goal of impressing a prospective employer even further down the road.</p>
<p>law school can be very self indulgent.
the practice of law is by definition, i think, NOT self indulgent. the needs of the client are first and foremost. whether the lawyer finds that tedious or rewarding probably depends to some extent on how comfortable the attorney feels subjugating his interests to those of the client.</p>
<p>(in this regard i am dealing with the issue of "tedious" beyond the issue of doing work such as proof reading documents or cite checking, which i think are probably inherently tedious no matter how you feel about you clients and which often fall upon low level associates.)</p>