What, in your opinion, is the toughest part of carving out a living as an attorney? Assuming one gets admitted to a decent law school and doesn’t sink like a rock–what’s the hard part once you’re standing there with a degree in hand? Or is getting the degree the hard part?
It depends. In this economy, I would say getting your first job.
After that, assuming you go into private practice in an already established firm (of any size), building a client base that is profitable enough that you (1) are left alone by the other people in your firm or (2) can walk out the door when you get fed up with all the bullshit (by bullshit, I mean the hours, the egos, the petty jealousies, the territorial approach to work, the grind of developing new clients, the tedium of the work, etc., etc.).
Getting the degree is the easy part. The really painful part is the bar exam. The hardest part is actually making a living–either finding a job or hanging a shingle and making enough to pay student loans and eat occasionally.
IANAL, but I was married to one (we met in college, so I saw the whole process from the beginning) and I have other relatives who are lawyers. It seemed that getting established and building a reputation was difficult. My ex was paid a base salary plus commissions on the work he did, but in the beginning, he was mostly doing work that the partners couldn’t be bothered with, that didn’t have the huge commissions attached (they kept those cases for themselves). You know, he’d have to appear in traffic court and get a couple hundred dollars (that is, if the client actually paid the fee - the commissions weren’t paid until the money had been received from the client/settlement had been received).
The senior attorneys already had their reputations established, so they were bringing in clients by word of mouth (and getting a part of the commission for bringing in the case, even though they may have just gotten the referral fee and not have actually done the work). But it is slow going in the beginning.
I’m not sure what you are asking about exactly. IMHO, every stage of becoming a lawyer and being a lawyer is hard for different reasons (but then also easy in retrospect because what is now hard has changed). Also, I’m not positing any lawyer specialness here–I assume it’s much the same for other educated types with careers.
Also, there are lots of ways to be a lawyer–hang out a shingle, work for a large firm, work for a small firm, work for the government. Sometimes people answer these types of questions based on their own experience without realizing how non-generalizable it is to other types of practices.
Is there something specific you are worried about? Are you about to go to law school and want to get a feel for how people think their careers are going? Or what?
Neither am I, really. I’ve been kicking it around as a career change and am still trying to figure out what I don’t know. I currently work in auto claims and participate fairly heavily in the litigation process to defend my insured’s. I like my job well enough but I am far more intrigued by the attorney’s role.
I didn’t think it was super hard academically, but I adapted to the teaching style and exam format very easily. It’s almost like it was designed for the way I learn bst. The job thing wasn’t as difficult because I went in during a recession and came out when the economy was good. I went into the bar exam with an offer.
What was hard:
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The social scene in law school is lame. It felt like high school all over again and the study of law can be a very solitary affair, esp. when you’re interested in a good grade. At my school those study groups but they deteriorated very quickly after people figured out you don’t get very much work done (more gossiping).
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Switching focus after you’ve been practicing in an area for a while is ridiculously difficult. At 4 years of practice, I had topped out on the grade advancement level for my agency (hit GS-14) and wanted to try something more challenging and maybe work for an agency or do something that I was more interested in. I could have switched to private sector law firms that had practice groups in the area of law I was practicing-but switching to something entirely different would have been near impossible, even within government agencies. As an example, I had the requisite experience necessary to transfer somewhere like the FDIC, but even with contacts and repeated applications, it was like pulling teeth to even get them to send me a rejection letter. The only option left would have been to switch into the private sector working on the same public-private transactions, but that would have only left me with slightly improved cashflow but in the same area of law that I had more or less memorized.
After weighing the cost and effort required to switch areas of law, it turned out that switching careers and pursuing something like investment banking or consulting would be easier.
I don’t regret it at all and I remember my interviewer for one business school actually told me that every penny I spent on the law degree was well worth it because I was the most convincing candidate he’d met that whole year ;), but to a lot of people I’m sure it seems crazy to spend 8 years on something only to quit. Also, while it did not impact me financially due to taking a full ride for undergrad and paying off a third of law school upfront, I’m sure for many people getting the degree and deciding to quit later would be financially difficult.
What do you mean by “what is now hard has changed”? Do you mean it’s easier to practise law now? Easier to pass the bar?
From the temp work I’ve done in the last 2 and a half years, I’d say the hardest part of being an attorney is getting your clients to pay their fees. 
(no seriously I was hired to do collections)
I think you have to ask yourself, however hard or easy it all might be, is not doing it going to be harder, in the long run, than doing it?
When I was in law school I thought it was pretty hard, but I had been working in another field for several years and it had been a long time since I had to discipline myself to study and write papers and take tests and what-not. But while it was harder than what I had been doing, I knew that down the road things would be easier, so overall I felt my life would be easier once I was done.
Then when I graduated and was studying for the bar (actually, two- for two different states), THAT was harder than school. But I knew it would only last a few months then it would be all over.
Then finding a job was tough- I temped for almost a year before I got an offer from a place where I thought I would want to work. I never worked for a firm, though (except during law school)- I went right into an in-house counsel position. The first few years were challenging- law school does not actually prepare you to practice, so it was a whole new world of learning. The hours were long (but not as long as in a firm) and it was nice to finally have some money coming in (but again, not as much as if I was in a firm). After a few years I got settled in and earned the respect of my coworkers and other industry professionals.
Looking back, I can say that the whole process was hard, but the payoff is so worth it. I could have taken it easier on myself but I wouldn’t have the life I have today, which I wouldn’t trade for anything.
The pros;
- Lots of Independence, even as an employed/salried lawyer, you are given work and you decide the best way to do it. You are not a slave to a clock
2)Every case is different, it NEVER gets boring and you learn; a lot, about law as well as about the area you are working on.
The cons
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Hours are insane, 14 hour days are routine and weekends? Forget it. If there is a High Court case Monday morning, you work Sundays. I have worked Saturdays as a routine for most of my career and I have worked Sundays for the past 3 Sundays in a row.
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Dog eat dog, you are often in direct competition with everyone at the Bar, it gets to you
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Client are a pain, they can be rude, condecending and won’t pay up. In addition they think cause they have paid you a brief fee, they own you and they ask inane questions, one woman called me at 2 at night last week asking me if it was okay to sack her babysitter and if said sitter could sue her.
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When you are making your reputuation it is often a disheatening experience a lot of work for little gain, but it does pay off. Having Senior Counsel of your back is worth it too, one bloody phone call and I’ll be writing a memo on fifty years of Australian trademark law for a week.
The toughest part right now is getting a job. The bottom dropped out of the legal hiring market in 2009 (the year I graduated – that was fun) and there is at the moment a bit of an oversupply of young lawyers.
So I would not at this time advise anyone to go to law school unless they are a)on scholarship or b)independently wealthy c)can convince their employer to pay d)have a formal contract guaranteeing employment on graduation (ha!)
Law school was pretty fun for me. I guess I just found what I’m good at. Its difficult not because individual tasks are so difficult, but because it’s one damn thing after another, and it takes away a lot from your family life if you have one – and makes it hard to find a family life if you want one. I met a lot of great people, I’m not a big socializer in terms of parties or whatever, but I have a pretty fair circle of good friends from law school.
Personally I think the best attribute a lawyer can have is to be a student of human nature. If you are interested by the crazy shit people do, you will never be bored in the law.
I like thinking and writing about the law, but I’m not brainy or abstract enough to be a professor. I found that the worst part of my job was dealing with clients, with their constant needs and worries. I was able to find a government job where I am working for some notion of the public good while being largely clientless.
Agreed, except that I actually didn’t find the bar exam to be that bad. And I don’t think I’m that unusual - you don’t get to go to law school (at least, not a good law school) if you don’t have good test-taking skills. Studying for the bar is a full-time job the summer after graduation for most people, myself included - expect to take out loans both for prep-course tuition and living expenses. But I rather enjoyed much of it - it was interesting to focus intensely upon just one jurisdiction, and the fact that I was free to take as much or as little of the prep program as I wished was neat. Much easier than law school.
That said, for some people the bar exam is difficult - brutally so. I have smart, talented friends who’ve failed the bar twice - it’s hard to overstate the impact of that. Unless you’ve got someone who’s really working hard as your cheering section, you find yourself suspecting that you wasted three years of your life. That isn’t fun.
Law school is a lot like high school in some ways - you’ll probably have a locker again! - but the social scene can be pretty darned good. I made some amazing friends in law school, and we spent a lot of time hanging out both in school and afterwards. As a rule of thumb, I’d suspect that the social scene would be better at larger urban law schools, just because there are more people and more things to do. This is absolutely something you can check out when you’re looking at law schools, by the way - you should feel free to ask students how people spend their off-hours.
One thing to watch for, though, is that even a large-ish law school isn’t much bigger than a decent-sized high school. If you do something stupid - get in a fight at a party, have a messy breakup, whatever - that does get fed into the rumor mill.
Regarding the difficulty of changing focus: very true, and I suspect it’s especially true for government work. In my job, I work with a very very small area of law, and I don’t litigate. I will never get exposed to anything outside this very small area of law in my current gig, and I will never get litigation experience - which means I will not get much more attractive to other employers as time goes by. Which is why I’m trying to get out.
The faster you do it, the better off you are. The people I know who have been able to switch and bounce around are either 1) leveraging personal connections 2) come from ultra-pedigreed law firms (not that difficult if you were at Cravath or Skadden, even if they tossed you out for incompetence…my old employers hired one of these and is now looking to how to fire him) 3) or switched within the first two years.
I had a friend who jumped from Deloitte to Seyfarth Shaw to working as city counsel (she now does what I did at the federal level at the local level since the industry has moved to multi-tiered financing) within 3 years. Basically she was really smart about moving before she got pigeonholed.
For government attorneys-I found that people were really impressed with the calibre of work I did. I was structuring 20 million dollar deals within months. The bigger issue was that my experience, while it touched on various areas of corporate law/secured transactions/FOIA, was highly regulatory and even though it involved a private sector client base, people wouldn’t assume that based on the agency’s name. That, combined with the fact that I was used to a really amazing work-life balance schedule from the very beginning was a really huge issue.
Also, like you said, if you don’t do litigation from the very beginning, they don’t want to talk to you. Ditto transactions. I met a number of litigators at networking events who wanted to move into transactional law but weren’t getting anywhere.
Dude, go to law school. It’s fun. And being a lawyer is fun. (Disclaimer: My wife, who is also a lawyer, describes me as the only lawyer she knows who likes his/her job.)
Law school IS like high school, but in a good way. And everyone I went to school with is now making a decent living (some better than others), although some had a tough go of it at first and some hit the wall and down-sized a few years later.
If you can arrange the financing and your other affairs to be able to take off work for 3 years and go to law school, I highly recommend you do.
Law is medieval. More money in finance for less demanding work over fewer hours.
Now you tell me!
Yes, but be honest: can you think of any aspect of finance that’s actually interesting, besides “spending money”?