One Law School Class, Many Different Lawyers

I recently had the opportunity to get together with a group of my friends from law school for the weekend. With the exception of one friend’s wife, who is a nurse, everyone else graduated from Notre Dame Law School the same year as me, 2013, and is now an attorney. As we got to talking about our jobs, and the things that we face day to day, it really made me realize just how incredibly broad the opportunities can be for lawyers, and how much the job can vary depending upon the path that you choose to take with your law school degree.

Up until graduation from law school, most of our experiences were fairly similar. During the first year of law school, we all took the very same classes. We may have had a different professor, but everyone took the same three, core courses each semester, along with legal research and legal writing seminars. After the first year, people’s curriculum and involvement began to vary a bit more. Some of us began to focus more on skills courses, such as learning how to take a deposition or taking a trial advocacy class. Others began to head toward corporate studies or enrolled in various criminal law classes. But generally, we were all still attending roughly the same amount of classes, and many times we were in the same courses together. Following graduation, everyone spent the summer studying for the bar exam in the state where he or she planned to practice. Anytime I talked to my friends up until the bar exam, it still seemed like we were all in the same boat, watching our lectures online and wondering if we had done enough practice essays or multiple choice problems.

Once people began working, however, I really didn’t think much about how different our experiences would be. I know what I do at my job, and much of it is typical “lawyer things,” such as taking calls from potential clients who may need my firm’s help, writing various legal documents, answering and drafting discovery requests, and taking depositions. In many ways, I assumed that this is what all of my friends did at their jobs as well, and that any variations were simply due to the nature of their work, criminal versus civil, or corporate work versus litigation, for example. This past weekend really shed light on the fact that there really is no completely “standard” legal job, and each one of us has responsibilities at our respective jobs that may seem totally foreign to another attorney.

One of my friends works at a center that assists immigrants. In addition to helping people file paperwork for their visas or green cards and navigate the American legal system, she also teaches classes to help them learn English and aspects of American culture. Another friend recently decided to go out on his own in doing criminal defense work, and was sharing his new experiences with the business side of operating a law practice. A third friend works as a tax attorney, and will probably never see the inside of a courtroom in his work. One works at a very small firm, doing intellectual property work, and oftentimes she fills the roles of human resources representative or office administrator, in addition to working on cases. Even where my friend’s job seemed most similar to mine, working as an associate attorney at a firm doing civil litigation work, there were still many differences in her day to day assignments from what I typically find myself doing.

It was interesting to hear about each person’s job, and really think about the many different opportunities, many of them unexpected, that can present themselves within a legal career. Law school is definitely not a “one size fits all” decision, and neither is taking a job as an attorney.

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