Law and Order: What Law School Fails to Teach You

Have you thought about going to law school? Have you thought about being a lawyer? Do you want to go to law school to learn all the fascinating facts about our country and legal system or do you want to be a lawyer to handle high-profile cases, drive a Lexus and be on television? Are you a bona fide Law & Order addict and think Jack McCoy is pretty much the coolest character on TV? Well, keep in mind in order to be a lawyer, there are three grueling and painstaking years of law school that lead up to that goal. After the three grueling and painstaking years of law school there is a little thing called the Bar Exam. Additionally, there are many things they don’t tell you in law school that you should be prepared for as a lawyer.

First, they don’t tell you that everything you’ve been forced to memorize in law school you will actually have access to online.

If you are prosecuting someone and need to find a past case where the judge ruled in your favor, you don’t have to remember a case from your first year of law school; you will have access to a complete database of every case ever heard of in every county by every judge. As a lawyer you will need access to statutes in past rulings, and while all this information is online, you most likely will not be the responsible party for retrieving all this information. That is what your paralegal or legal assistant is for.

Another thing they don’t tell you in law school is that when you get out into the real world as a lawyer, most of your time will be spent signing your name. You will have law clerks and legal assistants and paralegals that will write your pleadings, perform your research and make all your phone calls. You, after having earned a Juris Doctorate, will sign your name. Not once, not twice but sometimes hundreds of times a day.

One thing they don’t tell you until it’s too late is that your entire law school career is based on one test – the Bar Exam. The Bar Exam is an all-encompassing exam usually taken the summer after graduation from law school. Keep in mind, just because you have a Juris Doctorate, which is a Doctorate Degree of Law, does not mean you can practice law. You cannot practice law until you pass the Bar Exam. And, graduating from law school does not mean anything by way of passing the Bar Exam. Additionally, each semester of law school your entire semester is pass or fail and comes down to one test; your semester final. You are not graded on participation, or essays, or perfect attendance, however your entire semester grade is based on the semester final.

Law school professors don’t tell you that being a lawyer really isn’t glamorous and high profile, in fact, usually being a lawyer is spent reading, re-reading and, signing your name, and the occasional argument in court.