Here are some steps to becoming a lawyer:
- First, make sure you want to be a lawyer! The process is a little trickier than other professions, and if you
change your mind half way through, the skills you accumulate along the way aren’t really beneficial to anything else. It’s all or nothing. - Pick your field. Different law schools have different strengths and law is a vast field. Find a specialization and find the schools that do that specialty well (or at all).
- Take pre-law courses. Most undergraduate schools have actual pre-law majors, though this is hardly necessary for getting into law school. But there are certain fields like logic, and Socratic argumentation that just don’t exists anymore outside of law schools or the process of getting into them.
- The LSAT! The dreaded exam isn’t easy and doesn’t have much to do with anything you may have taken in classes up to this point (unless you’ve already headed the previous step). If you like working in groups and tend to stress out over exams, take a LSAT seminar and/or speak to people who have taken the exam.
- Law School! Study hard… Remember that the whole process is about getting the degree of course, but also preparing for bar exams and getting jobs.
- Interview jobs. At the end of your first year, you should already be interviewing for jobs. By the end of the second year, you should know or at least narrowed down that search considerably.
- Internships. Do them, especially in firms that you would be interested in working in. Internships are a crucial part of the lawyer job-hunt.
- Write. If you can write articles for your school’s review and submit articles to academic law reviews everywhere. Being published gives you a huge leg up in the job search and also has leverage once you’re well on in your career.
- Pass that bar exam! Study!
Now you know how to become a lawyer — just do it!
