Alternative Careers with a Joint Degree in Law

You have carefully decided law school is for you. You still wonder, however, what else you might do with your legal degree besides practice law. Stories about lawyers turned medical doctors, play-wrights, or ice cream entrepreneurs abound, but these isolated anecdotes are not typical examples of the vast majority of lawyers who move out of the established bounds of practice. There are entirely different disciplines in which legal training is clearly an asset. But there are not ten easy steps to retool a law degree.

The process of becoming a lawyer really involves the shaping of many skills. Some of these are clearly associated with the actual practice of law and include skills in oral advocacy, written argument, and negotiation. Others are much more general and therefore applicable to many disciplines. These include analysis, communication, discipline, thoroughness, and attention to detail.


Law school itself is the process of helping you develop this range of skills. As such, it is an academic means to a practical end. So diverse are these skills and their applicability so broad that a lawyer really fulfills many roles rather than just the one usually designated "attorney." Louis Schwartz, professor of law at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, has summarized these various functions:

The lawyer is a planner, a negotiator, a peacemaker. Despite the popular stereotype of the lawyer as contentious adversary, the peaceful ordering of human relations overwhelmingly predominates in his or her activities. In the drafting of commercial and labor contracts, treaties, wills, and constitutions, he or she is concerned with achieving orderly arrangements and with avoiding or settling controversy. This requires imaginative anticipation of contingencies, changes of fortune, tragedies, betrayals, and social change.

The lawyer is a counselor, advising individuals in their varied and complex relationships with one another and the state. Similarly, the lawyer advises groups, corporations, unions, ethnic communities, cities, states, federal departments and agencies and international organizations. In giving advice, he or she brings into play the lawyer's specialized understanding of the formal structure of society and law as an instrument of social control and betterment.

The lawyer is an advocate, representing the views, needs, and aspirations of others more effectively than they, uncounseled, could do by themselves.

The lawyer is a defender of the rights of the individual against the conformist pressures of society.

The lawyer is an architect of social structure, responding creatively to the needs of a rapidly changing society.

The lawyer is a social scientist, drawing upon economics, history, sociology, psychology, political science, and anthropology to deal with the problems of individuals, organizations, and communities.

The lawyer is an educator, especially a self-educator. The process of educating a lawyer never ends. In every controversy he or she must refresh expertise or acquire expertise in a new factual domain.

The lawyer is a humanist. To study law is to look through the greatest window on life. Here one sees the passions, the frailties, the aspirations, the baseness and nobility of the human condition.

The lawyer is a leader. All other qualifications converge in thrusting upon the lawyer leadership and responsibility in community life.

Certainly, all of the skills necessary for these roles are not developed in a mere three years of law school. The skills, attitudes, and intellect that got you to and through undergraduate school are important assets in refining your abilities while in law school. What law school will add to your own lifelong process of skills development, however, is a method of thinking and approaching facts or problems in a way different from your friends who do not attend law school.

This newly learned method of problem solving will allow you to construct more orderly arrangements of ideas as you become a better architect of intellectual structures. It will also enable you to think more broadly about alternative perspectives and outcome, which in turn may make you a better planner. Finally, the oral practice with this problem-solving method will facilitate your functioning as an advocate for yourself, others, or causes in which you believe. While these skills better enable you to fulfill the many roles of a lawyer, they also broaden your base of skills for disciplines outside the practice of law.

A recent study conducted by the Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession in conjunction with a group of seven northeastern law schools attempted to analyze the career patterns of law school graduates both within and outside of traditional practice. This Career Path Study confirms what law teachers, prelaw advisers, and parents have been saying for years: law can lead to a range of careers, many of which do not fall under the rubric of traditional law practice but are law-related or non-legal. Of the respondents to the Career Path Study, from law school classes spanning twenty-two years, only 79 percent were in traditional law practice positions with private law firms, government bodies, public service organizations, and legal departments in business, industrial, educational, and financial institutions. Eight percent were in law-related positions and the remaining 13 percent in positions unrelated to law. In short, more than 20 percent of those individuals trained to be lawyers have chosen not to be lawyers. Why?

The American Bar Association, several state bars, and numerous law school placement offices have attempted to answer this question. While the responses differ depending on who has surveyed whom and when, several generalizations have emerged. Lawyers who choose not to practice law do so for a host of reasons, all of which may be reduced to issues of job satisfaction or self-concept. The most frequently cited reasons for leaving the law include these:
 

• Traditional law is employment that does not utilize the range of skills developed by an individual in twenty-four-plus years of life and education.
   
• Salaries offered in such employment, for most lawyers, are not proportional to the quantity of work expected and the amount of time required to produce it.
   
• The limited utilization of skills and the extraordinarily high expectations for amount of work produced both contribute to a work environment characterized by a lack of intellectual stimulation and an abundance of tedium interspersed with excessive pressure.
   
• Law is a jealous master or mistress and allows no time for other interests or relationships.