What Do Lawyers Do?

Most students entering law school have not yet decided what they would like to do after graduation. Those students who do have a career plan often change their minds after starting their law studies. You should not worry if you are not now ready to make this choice.

A. GENERALIST TRAINING

One of the most attractive characteristics of law study is that it is useful training for a wide variety of career paths. Indeed, a law degree might be viewed as the ultimate generalist degree. In addition to providing the professional training necessary to be admitted to the practice of law, it also is training in critical thinking and analysis, which are valuable skills for many other occupations, such as business management and elective and appointive government office. Law training also creates knowledge and expertise about process, which is why the lawyer in a group often is the one who is appointed to chair the group, lead the discussion, or write the group's report. These process skills also are important in a wide variety of occupations.

B. THE PRACTICE OF LAW

Most law school graduates do enter the practice of law and do so in a law firm setting. The firm may be very large-up to several hundred attorneys with offices in many cities and countries-or very small-as small as a solo practice. While the large (over 100 lawyers) or medium (25 to 100 lawyers) sized law firm is often the firm setting about which people think, more than half the lawyers who practice law in the United States practice in a solo practice or in a small firm of five or fewer attorneys. The firm size is often significant in determining how many resources are available to assist the lawyer's legal practice. However, many solo or small firm practitioners have access to the types of resources associated with a large firm, such as a large law library, computerized accounting and billing, and other support services, through consortiums of small firms or through electronic online services.

Most law firms are organized as a partnership or as a professional corporation that is equivalent to a partnership. Partnerships are likely to have at least two categories of lawyers in them: partners, who are the owners and share in the profit or loss of the business; and associates, who are salaried employees working for the partnership. There are several variations of these categories, such as non-equity partners and associates who receive bonus distributions of partnership profits. Most typically, a young lawyer initially will be employed by a law firm as an associate and may be promoted to part-nership after working for the firm for a number of years. For professional corporations, the categories are similar, but the owners are called shareholders.

Another common category of lawyers working in a law firm is identified by the designation as "of counsel." This title might refer to any one of several relationships. Frequently, it designates a former partner who has retired from the partnership but who still practices with the firm. The term also might refer to a lawyer associated with the firm on a part-time basis or for a particular case. For example, law professors who provide consulting advice to a law firm often are designated as being "of counsel" to the firm.

C. SPECIALIZATION

The complexities of legal practice and a desire to provide a very high quality of legal representation cause many lawyers to specialize in a particular area of law. Generally, the largest law firms have the most specific specializations. Occasionally, however, a solo or small firm practitioner may decide to specialize in a very specific subject and depend on referrals from other law firms as a source of clients. This may be referred to as a "boutique" law firm.

Even if a lawyer specializes in one area, the lawyer must remain generally knowledgeable about other areas of the law. In this way, the lawyer can provide expert services within the area of specialty and can recognize other problems that a client may have that should be referred to another lawyer. Being a lawyer requires a lifetime commitment to continuing professional education, both in the area of specialization and in broad legal developments. This lifetime learning is called continuing legal education.

The number of specialties continues to grow as new fields of practice emerge each year. Oftentimes, an area becomes a specialty area because of the enactment of new legislation. For example, since Congress enacted the Employees Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1974, it has become a significant specialty area.

There are other practice specialties in addition to subject matter specialties. For example, you might decide to be a specialist in alternative dispute resolution (ADR), in which you would assist parties to resolve a dispute without resorting to a traditional law suit. Or you might decide to practice public interest law-by working for a legal aid office that provides legal assistance to low income clients or by working for a public interest group, such as an environmental law organization or a prisoners rights group.

This brief review shows that you have an enor-mous number of choices about what kind of law you will practice. In addition, you will have to decide where to practice. You might choose to practice in a small town, a large city, or overseas in the foreign office of an American law firm. You may not be fully prepared to make these choices based upon the information you learn in law school. Studying a subject in law school may not give you a real feel for the practice of law in that area.

You should use your summer employment experiences after your first and second years of law school to examine these choices. Explore different sized firms, different geographic areas, different subject matter specialities, and any other alternatives you are considering so that you will have the maximum information available to make career practice decisions by the time you graduate.

D. CORPORATE LAW OFFICE

Many lawyers practice law within a corporation, bank, or other business as part of an in-house legal department. In the past several years, many in-house law offices have grown in size as corporations have developed more expertise in handling work that formerly was referred to outside law firms. As in a firm, an in-house law department may include many specialty areas, such as litigation, tax, international transactions, government regulation, securities law, and intellectual property law.

Please see this article to find out if litigation is right for you: Why Most Attorneys Have No Business Being Litigators: Fifteen Reasons Why You Should Not Be a Litigator
 

• See Top 10 Reasons Most Law Firms Have No Idea How to Hire and Evaluate Patent Attorneys for more information.