Quiz: Do you have what it takes to be an in-house lawyer, or should you open up a beach bar?
A set of 10 questions that will help prospective law students, recent law grads, even established lawyers, decide if they were born to be a lawyer, or whether they should open up that beach bar in the Caribbean.
June 11, 2012 at 07:53 AM
8 minute read
The original version of this story was published on Law.com
People choose to go to law school for a lot of reasons. If you are “book smart” (as they used to say) and you don't know what you want to do, but you want the comfortable life of a well-paid, urban professional something-or-other, law school has historically been the go-to career path. If you graduated in the top 10 percent of your class at an accredited law school, you were practically guaranteed a job with a firm or a government agency.
When I think about it, half of the in-house lawyers I've known over my career fit that description: goal-oriented, found law school to be a lot of work but not overly difficult, never completely sure what they wanted to do. Some of them were very good lawyers. Others were just O.K.
I was not one of those people. I wish I had been. I am a practicing lawyer today only because I made up my mind early on that I wanted to go through life as a lawyer. Over time, I learned that there are many skills and attributes critical to success as a lawyer that you can't teach in law school. Some of these skills and attributes I already possessed, passed on to me by my mother and father. Others I had to work at mastering.
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