As a career adviser for lawyers and law students, Shauna C. Bryce has noticed that many of her clients have a problem that could be avoided if they’d done more due diligence when they were law school applicants: They don’t know what their career paths look like.
A lot of people either go to law school when they’re not clear on what the goal is or what they’ll do with a law degree, says Bryce, who is the founder and principal of career advising company Bryce Legal and a graduate of the law school at Harvard University.
“Because they don’t know what their goal is, they don’t choose the right law school to go to,” she says.
[Weigh a law school’s location when deciding where to enroll.]
Whether it’s practicing labor law in a big city or family law in the suburbs, applicants who know what they want to do can be more savvy about picking the right school. And figuring out what type of career they want can involve researching what lawyers do and where the best area is to practice that type of law.
Prelaw students have a few options for learning about legal careers and which schools will best prepare them for the industry, experts say.
One approach they can take is doing informational interviews, says Traci Mundy Jenkins, assistant dean for the office of career and professional development at American University’s Washington College of Law. If they’re unsure whom to speak with, they can look to their immediate networks.
“Having a connection is probably the best way to start,” she says. Applicants can speak with their undergraduate institution about putting them in touch with alumni who graduated and became lawyers, or reach out to family friends whom they know work in law
They can also work in a legal setting with lawyers to get exposed to various career options.
“When I was in college, I worked at a small law firm for a couple of summers as a document coder,” says Jenkins, who graduated from the School of Law at University of Virginia. Prospective students can work or intern at government agencies that deal with the law or on Capitol Hill in Washington, she says.
[Consider practicum opportunities when choosing a law school.]
Aspiring law students can also sit in on public court proceedings to see the law at work, says Stella Boswell, assistant dean of the career and professional development center and director of the office for public interest advising at the School of Law at Duke University.
“I had not ever thought of law school and by doing a job where I ended up actually in the courtroom was kind of what ignited it for me,” says Boswell, who was premed in undergrad. Working as a nonlawyer advocate for victims of domestic violence in civil court helped her to decide that law was her path.
She encourages applicants to contact their prelaw advisers for guidance on researching legal careers.
If they’re unsure of type of law really interests them, prospective students can think about what they might want to do more broadly and then narrow their focus, says Bryce. If they like the idea of going to court a lot, for example, they can look into becoming a criminal defense attorney or working in landlord-tenant law.
They can also look at job ads to get an idea of the salary that comes with various positions, she says.
[Learn how loan repayment plans can help public interest lawyers.]
If applicants have a clear idea of what they want to do, deciding where they want to do it can be critical.
“Schools have different spheres of influence,” says Bryce. If a student wants to practice in California, for example, going to a school in Michigan may not be wise, she says.
In that case going to a California school may lead to a stronger alumni network. Even if a school is lower ranked, Bryce says, it may have stronger connections in certain communities than schools more nationally known.
Once applicants have an idea of what they want to do, they can go online to get a sense of how much a school will prepare them for the industry they want to go into.
A school’s website can show “what the school thinks its strong suits are,” Bryce says. A school will often say online what specializations, concentrations or certificates are offered, she says. Applicants can also search LinkedIn to see where graduates from certain schools end up working, or search an employer’s website to see what law schools the employees graduate from, she says.
Applicants may also find out online if a school has experiential learning opportunities, such as clinics, or how many courses are offered in a specific type of law, says Boswell from Duke.
But it’s OK if applicants aren’t entirely sure what type of legal career they want. Students often come in without knowing what type of law they want to practice, experts say. In this case, they should attend a school where they will have many different learning opportunities, says Jenkins.
“Keep your options open as much as you possibly can,” she says. “Make sure that the environment where you decide to go to school affords you opportunities that may be in the area you think you’re interested in or may be just in a variety of areas because you don’t want you want to do.”
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