Why Go To Law School (At All)?

So this week the question is the general one of why you might go to law school, especially given the rotten economy and bad press (the latter of which I hope to have at least somewhat cleared up in my last posting). Next week I’ll talk about how to choose a law school, assuming that you have decided you’re interested.

The obvious reason to go to law school is that you want to be a lawyer. But what does that really mean? Based on my experience, most students applying to and entering law school have little idea of what it means to be a lawyer, the extensive variety of lawyering experiences available, and the incredibly rich and varied careers that lawyers can and do have both within and outside of legal practice. I know for myself that the only lawyer I knew when I applied to law school was my dad, who was and is a sole practitioner in suburban New York. I grew up listening to conversations about the kinds of matters in which he was involved, and spent enough time hanging around his office that I got a feeling for what a general practitioner, practicing alone in a relatively small town, did with his time.

Imagine my surprise the day I walked into law school, saw large groups of students in suits, and met some of my classmates who planned to become corporate lawyers in big firms, or maybe investment bankers after a few years of practice. I didn’t even know what these things meant. But, being perhaps a bit young for my age and rather impressionable, I soon learned, and followed the course of so many of my classmates and generations of alumni and found myself after graduation in a large, prestigious, Wall Street firm. At my law school, as at many (although perhaps especially at mine given its location in New York), much of the talk of my professors reinforced the culture of expectation that this was exactly what one would do and, more importantly, what one should do. Thus by second year I was focusing my legal education in ways that would enable me to succeed in that world.

Boy, did I miss out. At least at first. I took law school as direction, not education, and used it almost solely for the purpose of preparing myself for that type of practice. I had a few courses I took purely from intellectual interest (I still remember Conflicts of Law as the intellectual pinnacle of my law school career), but almost all of the excitement of learning I had experienced at the small liberal arts college from which I graduated was gone. That was my own fault. I was insufficiently reflective and self-critical to have done any different. Some, although few, of my classmates chose different paths. But the overwhelming majority did what I did, and the entire culture and ethic became self-reinforcing.

Fast forward ten years after graduation. Our tenth reunion book listed my classmates and what they were then doing. I remember my initial reaction as being: “Wow, I wish I knew these people when I was in law school!” Some, but relatively few, remained at the big, primarily New York, firms at which they started. Most had dispersed across the country and the world and were engaged in a remarkable variety of occupations, from engaging in business, consulting, and entrepreneurship, to entertainment and sports, to working for important not-for-profits and NGOs, to think tanks, to government and politics, higher education generally, and even legal academia, as I then had done. The people they were when they entered law school, with all the actual or inchoate imagination, creativity, ambition, and desire to serve society in some capacity, had flowered in those early years after graduation and led them to pursue rich and enviable lives. (Of course there were those who found their fulfillment in big firm practice, too. But that was easily to be expected.)

Law school is designed to make of you a lawyer. But by definition, a lawyer is someone educated in law. The term by itself doesn’t necessarily imply any particular career or career path. Rather it implies only the possession of a body of knowledge and a certain way of critical thinking that, while common to all good thinking, is intensely and effectively taught in law schools.

Legal education is a pretty complex and unusual experience. It’s often said that law school teaches you to “think like a lawyer.” And it does. But what does that phrase really mean? It means that we teach you to read actively, both in the words of the law, whether judicial opinion, rule, regulation, or administrative decision, and between the words. It teaches you to engage legal texts as if you were in conversation with their authors. It teaches you critically to look at a set of facts that present a problem and understand both the nature of the problem and its variety of solutions. It teaches you to diagnose from a set of facts what the problem really is (and often it is not the problem that it appears to be from the mere words), to wonder what other facts might not be presented and for which you have to dig in order to make this diagnosis or critique and which you’ll need to solve the problem. It teaches you to be skeptical of what appears before you, to question your assumptions and to figure out the assumptions made in what you read. It teaches you to bring the whole of your prior education, insights, and experiences to bear in understanding the social, economic, philosophical, historical, and human expressions and implications of all that you do, and to use all of them in resolving an issue. It teaches you, in short, to become a master problem solver.

That is what we lawyers are. Creative problem solvers. And it is that art of creative problem solving that had led my classmates, and so many other law graduates, to the rich and varied careers they have had, at the same time making those careers as stimulating and rewarding as they can be. Any other good education, done right, can teach you to become a good critical thinker. But law is the applied fulcrum of all of our social and intellectual experiences, a tool that allows who we are as a people and as a society to be brought to bear on the structuring, ordering, and maintenance of our society, whether in the practice of law itself or in almost any other field of your imagination. This is why lawyers are in such high demand. Just as an anecdotal observation, I’ve talked to many successful business people who hold both J.D.s and M.B.A.s. I’ve asked each what they thought their most important degree was. The universal answer was the J.D., and the universal explanation was because it taught this generalized and generalizable skill of creative problem solving. The M.B.A. was valuable to some, but in a more specific and technical way. And of course the variety of other degrees that lawyers often hold are valuable too. But law is special, and it is special precisely because education in the law allows you to enter society as a generalist in creative problem solving. What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you.

It’s especially important to think about these things when so much of the popular talk about law school is focused on jobs, because that focus almost exclusively is on your first job. Your first job is just that – a first job, a way of earning a living, beginning to pay back your debt and, most importantly, learning your craft. But a first job is not a career. In considering the decision to go to law school, it is most important, first and foremost, to focus on the kind of career you want to have over the next 40 or 50 years and the person you are and want to become.

Sure, it’s a bad economy, the biglaw model of lawyering is in flux, and finding first jobs can be quite challenging. But when you take the gift of legal education and extrapolate it over an almost infinite variety of career possibilities, legal education has a lifetime value that’s hard to find anywhere else.