WHAT I TELL COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO WANT TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL

A few times a year, I have the honor of meeting with a young person who is thinking about law school and someone told them they ought to talk to an actual lawyer first. I always take the meeting. I care about my profession, we need good lawyers, and I'd rather a young person hear the truth — even if the truth talks them out of it. Recently I spent an hour on the phone with a college senior and afterward I figured the advice was worth writing down. Here it is.

First, treat it as a calling

If you don't see law as a calling, you won't be able to keep doing it very long. It's a lot like being a pastor that way — you do it because you can't not do it. So when a young person asks how they'd know law is right for them, I tell them they're asking the right question, but they're looking in the wrong place. Don't go hunting for certainty in a pros-and-cons list. Notice whether you can't leave the thing alone.

I'll be honest about my own path, because it complicates the tidy version. I decided to become a lawyer about fifteen years before I came to faith. I went to law school as a non-believer, fresh out of nine years in the Army, and for my first decade I practiced as a matter of secular virtue — trying to do the right thing without God in it.

Ten years in, I came to believe. And it changed how I practice. I still go all out for my client, but now I do it knowing it's the Lord's justice system, that He loves fairness and justice, and that His rules sit on top of our secular ones. As it turns out, I'm a better lawyer following His rules than I ever was following only my own — in part because I stopped needing to treat the other lawyer or the opposing party as an enemy. They're just the adverse party. I give them the respect I expect them to show my client.

“You're so argumentative" is a compliment — if you understand it

People told me for years I should be a lawyer "because you're so argumentative." That's fair. But I don't mean “argument” as in a fight. I mean the juxtaposition of opposing viewpoints in order to learn. That's the entire system. As a litigator, your job is to zealously advocate your client's side, knowing there's someone equally committed on the other side, while the judge and jury serve as witnesses to that contest. That's how the system gets at the truth.

If you're a logical person who likes to challenge a presumption — to take what everyone treats as already settled and turn it inside out when it serves your client — that's the right temperament. Just know that people don't enjoy having their assumptions challenged. That's precisely why persuasion is the craft, not an afterthought to it.

The real decision: cost versus rank

Where you go to law school only matters for landing your first job (unless you want to be a Supreme Court Justice). Same for where you finish in your class. After that, almost no one cares. Some of the best litigators I know didn't go to famous schools and weren't anywhere near the top of their class. (Litigators tend not to be the scholarly ones anyway — plenty of the brilliant, top-of-class students can barely speak to a jury.)

So I think in terms of two axis, cost and rank, held in tension:

• Harvard, but half a million in debt? I wouldn't.

  
  

• A full ride to the 275th-ranked school in the country? I probably wouldn't either.

  
  

• In-state tuition at a solid school, walking out with less than fifty grand in debt? That's the sweet spot.

Bet on yourself — but let the debt number govern the bet. And there's a deeper reason why, which is the part nobody tells you.

Why cheap-and-good beats prestigious-and-expensive

Law has no real residency system. Doctors go to medical school, then an internship, then a residency — underpaid, but genuinely trained before they're set loose. We don't do any of that. Law school teaches you the law and teaches you to think like a lawyer, and it does both well. It does not teach you how to actually do the job. That part is entirely on-the-job training.

If you graduate owing ten thousand dollars a month, you have to take a big firm job to service it. And a big firm can be a difficult place to learn the craft. They're paying you all that money and have to earn it back — high billing, long hours, and less room for you to learn. They genuinely cannot afford to let an associate with one, three, even five years' experience stand up in court and cross-examine a witness or take a deposition. So you'll review documents and write memos, and not get much chance to grab the wheel.

You learn to litigate by getting into a courtroom and trying cases yourself

The cases where we get to do that as young lawyers are what we call “dogs” — junk cases, little money at stake, often ridiculous facts, but the client gets his day in court and you learn try a case. My first five jury trials were dogs. It is unlikely that you would get that opportunity at a big firm.

So you want to graduate with as little debt as possible, so you're free to work for someone who pays you less but will actually put you in a position to learn. All of this assumes you want to litigate. If you're drawn to transactional work — real estate, in-house counsel — the calculus might be different. I don’t know, I’ve been a litigator my entire career.

The best preparation for litigation is waiting tables

I mean this literally. When I interview a young lawyer whose résumé is wall-to-wall legal clinics , I ask whether they ever held a regular job. Often they were told to leave it off by their placement office, but that's the thing I most want to see, because it tells me whether they're the kind of person who works well in chaos.

Waiting tables is like that. Every table is a client. So you're satisfying several demanding people at once, none of whom have any idea what happens when you push through the doors into the kitchen — where the cooks are hot and furious, yelling at you for moving too slow or sending a plate back. That kitchen is the judge and opposing counsel. The tables are your clients, wanting attention now, dropping a spoon and needing a fresh one this instant. Learning to keep all of them happy at the same time, stay diplomatic, stay persuasive, and absorb everyone's idiosyncrasies — that's the job, years before you've passed the bar.

Attorney and counselor at law

My first boss handed me a business card that read “attorney and counselor at law”. I asked him to drop "counselor" — I just wanted to try cases. He told me that after five years I'd not only want counselor on there but would say it should come first: “counselor and attorney at law,” or I wouldn't be much of an attorney. He was right.

Clients ask, constantly, "What would you do if you were me?" Young lawyers are afraid to answer, because if they recommend a course and it fails, they own that failure. My advice: give the advice anyway, do your best, and take responsibility for how it turns out. That's the job. They're paying you precisely because you're better positioned than they are to say what's likely to happen — so say it. I never guarantee an outcome; the only thing I guarantee is that they'll never doubt I tried as hard as I could. But I lay it out: here are the bad facts I have to deal with, here are the good ones, here's why a jury would like you and why they might like the other side, and here's what I think happens. Past experience is the best predictor of future outcome.

It's no different from recommending the béarnaise sauce off the menu. Don't say "you've got three options" and leave the person stranded. Take ownership: “I get the béarnaise, and I love it.” For what it's worth, the number-one complaint I hear from clients about lawyers is slow responsiveness, but the number two is lawyers who won't give a straight recommendation.

If you do go, here's how to spend your law school time

• Take the skills classes. Whatever your school offers in trial practice and appellate advocacy — take it. That's where you learn the actual craft.

• Take the rock-solid core classes. Evidence (usually required anyway). Agency, because it surfaces everywhere. The bread-and-butter subjects.

• Skip the niche stuff. Environmental law, civil rights law, and the like are, for your purposes, a waste of time. You'll learn any specific area as you practice. I do a great deal of construction litigation and never took a construction course — I'm glad I didn't. Once you know how to litigate you can litigate anything.

  
  

• Don't pre-pick your specialty. Your area will find you. You end up practicing whatever you turn out to be good at, because the client you fought hard for tells his brother-in-law, and that's how the work arrives. I fell into construction law with essentially no background in it.

• Get in with local firms — beyond any official clerkship. Find a way into the door in whatever capacity they'll allow, paid or not. A few hours a week filing documents, drafting interrogatory responses, running errands, just being around lawyers — picking up the language, hearing how they talk, tagging along to court. The students I kept around doing that kind of work are all good lawyers now. I wish I'd done it myself. It builds the relationships long before you need the job.

Two things you can do this week

Go watch a trial. The courthouse is public — walk in and sit down. There's no better way to see whether this life is yours than to watch a good lawyer work a real case in a real courtroom.

And be intentional. The young man I talked to said something that struck me: that he didn't want to merely “get through” law school, but to use it well. That instinct is exactly right. Don't drift into this profession and drift through the training. Decide what you're there to get, and go get it.

One last thing.

There's no shortage of second opinions in this business — most lawyers carry two of their own on every topic. A sample size of one isn't much to go on, so talk to more real lawyers before you commit. But the fact that you're asking at all, before you sign up for three years and a pile of debt, tells me you've already got some of the judgment the work requires.