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.