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Those who dislike law school and those who are unsure of whether they are going to like practice (having not enjoyed their summer employment between years of law school) nonetheless enter practice. They console themselves in the first years of practice that the reason they dislike it is because they are simply at the bottom of the totem pole, learning necessary skills and establishing credibility. They assume that matters will improve. For those who find themselves still unhappy after three or more years, the natural instinct is to switch practice areas within the firm (if they enjoy their colleagues) or to switch firms (if they do not particularly care for their colleagues). This guarantees another few years of hoping that matters will improve.
Those who enter law are generally too goal-oriented to opt out; they will leave only when forced. It is only after half a dozen or more years that such lawyers will finally admit that they made the wrong career choice. They tell themselves that a law degree has at least prepared them to do anything. Unfortunately, they discover how untrue that notion really is. They talk with friends in other fields; headhunters who help lawyers find other employment, and so on. They learn that they will have to cut their salaries by two-thirds and be willing to start at the bottom of another field, unless they find a job closely related to law. (If they take a job closely related to law, such as being the executive director of a public interest organization, they still have to accept the salary cut.)
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Even if they are willing and able to take the massive salary cut involved in starting over—that is, they can give up their long-held professional identity (and their pride can handle no longer being a "professional"), despite their friends' and family's comments that they are wasting their degree, and their mortgage or law school loans do not require a substantial monthly payment—they find that the barriers to doing so are massive.
Nor do they find that lawyers have acquired any non-legal skills worth paying for. Indeed, employers view lawyers as overly contentious, not very team-oriented, and very narrowly focused. Employers grant that lawyers (from top schools, at least) are probably pretty smart and willing to work hard. However, they also consider them to be damaged goods. They figure that such lawyers are running away from law rather than toward something else in particular. They also figure that because lawyers have so little background of relevance to choosing another field, they are likely to make another poor career decision the next time around, just as they did in entering law.
For those lawyers who wish finally to get the true multipurpose degree, an MBA, the outlook is also discouraging. The only lawyers able to get into top business schools are those who have had very substantial business experience along the way. Business schools value experience much more highly than do law schools, but they do not value the knowledge of product liability law, federal jurisdiction, or the like. Thus, lawyers with top GPAs and GMAT scores flop in the business school admissions game because they have wasted (by business school standards) their last eight or ten years. This is not a pretty picture. The way to avoid it is simple: Learn in advance whether law and law school are for you.
It is a pity that law schools do not do what doctoral programs in other fields have long done: Give an intermediate degree along the way. If you wish to do a Ph.D. in economics, for example, but stop before completing your thesis, you will still get a master's degree. Law schools could do something similar, giving a master's in law after one or one-and-a-half years, which would be a good point at which you could assess whether law really made sense for you. Those who opted out of law would nonetheless have a fine-looking degree for their resumes, but would no doubt find it easier to leave at this point than to continue to invest heavily in a field that they might well already sense was not going to be what they had hoped.
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