Leaving the Law

Help: I’m a lawyer and I can’t get out!

You may find this funny–or more likely, sad–but I’ve been trying to leave the law since my first semester of law school

After my first semester in law school, I was certain I didn’t want to be a lawyer. So, you may ask, why did I stay? Earning a JD is very expensive, at least at a private university. But the advice at the time was, go to the best school to which you are accepted. For me, that was George Washington University School of Law, in Washington, D.C.

At the time, it was ranked close to 20th and tuition was around $30,000 per year. With room and board, books, and fees, the three-year total came out to over $100,000. And that was 20 years ago! So, after paying for one year of law school, I was already in debt for around 1/3 of what the degree would cost and I had no real marketable skills. That meant that if I dropped out, I’d have no way to pay off that $30 K. It seemed a reasonable thing to do to stick it out, finish the degree, and find a job where I could use my degree to pay off my debt. After all, everyone told me that a JD “opens all sorts of doors!” and I’d have “so many options” for work once I completed the program. I’m here to tell you, dear reader, that is absolutely not the case.

“It always rankled me – in law school and the legal profession – when lawyers would speak to each other in their own exclusive language.” Ari Melber

What Job Can You Get With a Law Degree? A Lawyer Job.

For any of you who are reading this because you are considering going to law school, I have one question for you: Are you sure you want to practice law?

If you think you will be able to go farther with your career with a JD behind your name, please do your homework. Do you want to go into work as a diplomat? Maybe you’d be better off getting foreign language and culture studies on your resume. You think you’d like to be a politician? Any higher degree and respect for the law and your constituents will give you at least as much respect as a lawyer. Maybe you just want some more letters behind your name to help you climb the corporate ladder or or run a successful business? Nope. You don’t need a JD for those things. The only good reason to go to law school is that you want to practice law.

*Women are not only less likely to earn as much as their male counterparts, but they are far less likely to be promoted into an equity share in their firms, but I digress.

For some reason, our society has this odd dichotomy of feelings about lawyers. We love to villainize them and tell nasty lawyer jokes. So many lawyer jokes. But when you have family trying to figure out how to divide up a loved one’s estate, or the insurance company is declining to cover your life-or-death cancer treatment, or your neighbor’s obviously dead tree falls over and crushes your car–you need a lawyer. Lawyers are there during the worst times in people’s lives to help pick up the pieces.

Further, with a move toward more transparent billing and tightened research procedures, lawyers can help improve some of the ill will. As explained by this ABA Journal article, people see lawyers as shady and expensive because much of their work goes on behind the scenes. But in recent years, billing practices and research techniques are changing rapidly. Research companies like LexisNexis have started creating AI-powered tools that vastly simplify and speed up research and verification. For instance, the Ravel data analytics integrated into search results creates a much faster way to weed through case results.

Regardless of the increased trust in the legal profession, you should check your motivations for wanting to attend law school before you plunk down 6-figures to earn that Juris Doctorate. If you want to do work like that described above (or writing legislation, or for the EPA/IRS/DOJ, or be an in-house counsel at a corporation), then yes, you should become an attorney. But please, take my word for it that once you complete law school, people will have certain expectations about your motivations and personality.

In my experience, journals and newspapers don’t want to hire a JD to be a writer, schools don’t want to hire a lawyer to be a teacher (other than law schools, of course), and companies don’t want to hire an attorney to be a marketing person. Our society has all the feels about lawyers and lots of opinions about what it means to become one. We also like to keep people inside the boxes where they’ve completed a degree or started a career. For example, JD = attorney = power-loving, argumentative, arrogant, unsympathetic, and whatever other characteristics people have assumed about lawyers.

What’s an Unfulfilled JD to Do?

Take note of the professionals and creatives in your city and neighborhood. I’ll bet if you ask around you’ll find more than one former attorney. We ex-lawyers are hiding in plain sight as authors, journalists, business owners, and stay at home parents. We fought through the hurricane of competition and self-doubt commonly known as law school and lived to tell the tale. But then, we decided not to continue devoting our lives to a profession that places people in boxes and forces them into a system we don’t support. Since passing the bar, I’ve been a legal editor, a law school career counselor, a marketing/salesperson, and an author. It has not been a straight line, or an easy path.

Are you skeptical that many lawyers are unhappy, or maybe it’s too late and you already have that J.D. debt to repay? Just take a peek at this LawCrossing article about 60 Nontraditional Jobs You Can Do With A Law Degree and note the over 800,000 views on this post! Clearly, disaffected attorneys are not a small group.

Keep checking back here for more on how to break out of the law and keep your sense of humor. I’ll be writing on when law school is a good choice, when it isn’t, and how you can figure out if it’s right for you.

Go where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson