Should you apply to law school?

Last updated on Jul 14, 2024

There are several stages to applying to law school. First, you have to decide whether to go, then you write the LSAT and, if you do well enough, you write all the applications for the various schools to which you wish to apply. You must also complete at least three years of an undergraduate degree before applying. Before embarking on the major substantive steps, you must decide if law is the right career for you.

For many people, law school is the default choice when either other careers do not work out or because they simply think it will be a good career based on a layperson's understanding of the career. I fit into the latter category. Though I do not regret my choice, I would have likely benefitted from some reflection before I committed to going to law school.

Why Law School?

There are many excellent reasons to go to law school and pursue a career in law. Equally, there are several reasons why law school and a career in law may not be right for you.

There are a lot of good reasons to go to law school and pursue a career in law. If any of the listed reasons spark your interest, then it might be the right career choice for you. I’ll provide some reasons why law school itself is great, and some reasons why the practice of law is also great. This is, of course, an incomplete list and others could provide many additional reasons why they chose to attend law school and why the practice of law is so great.

I will only speak to what I can about the practice of law as a young lawyer. I encourage you to speak to some senior lawyers (and other junior lawyers) to learn about the reasons why they joined the practice of law, and still practice.

Generally speaking, those who like to read and write will probably enjoy law school and the practice of law. I spend the majority of my time – indeed, entire days – just reading and writing, and if you choose to go into law, you will too.

Reasons you might like law school

1. Law school is challenging. If you’re looking to challenge yourself, law school is a great place to do that. Not only is the material intellectually stimulating, but there’s also a lot of it. Some people are most challenged by the nature of the material, while others are more challenged by the volume of work. Either way, for those who like a challenge, law school will probably fulfill even your most masochistic tendencies.

From my perspective, I have never felt more intellectually inadequate than when I was in law school. (I don’t mean for this to sound like a bad thing.) You will be surrounded by brilliant and highly successful people. For some, that might sound awful. For others, it might sound like a challenge. Just know that for most, the intellectual superiority they put on is just a façade. They’re probably just as nervous and insecure as everyone else is about their success, and you’re probably a lot smarter than you think.

Your abilities will be well-tested.

2. Law school is great for those who love reading. A love of reading may be one reason you will enjoy law school. You will be assigned a lot of readings, every day, in nearly all your courses. Expect to have to read somewhere in the range of 100+ pages per day, every day, throughout law school. Fortunately, the class load and, consequently, the reading load, tend to lessen in the second and third year, and most learn how to read more efficiently or figure out what parts of the readings they do and do not need to read.

All of the reading will also prepare you for practicing law, as you will spend a great deal of time reading once you are practicing. The reading will be different, as you won’t be reading as much case law (if any) and academic articles, but instead a constant stream of emails, memos, letters and the like.

3. Your writing will improve. If, like me, you did an undergrad in which you were not required to write very much and you finished with mediocre writing skills, all the writing you will do in law school will improve your written product. Most schools mandate that you write at least one, and as many as three or four, major papers. Your professors will (hopefully) be willing to help you work through and improve your writing. There will be very few opportunities in life where you will be able to submit a major piece of writing and get detailed feedback from very smart people who are all very strong writers. I sought out advice on my writing for each of my major papers, and every time the professors were happy to sit down and explain where I went wrong and, more importantly, why. I saw the biggest improvements in my writing after these meetings.

And even if you are already a strong writer, you will most certainly improve during law school. There are not many opportunities like law school, where you are constantly writing and getting feedback – it will be hard not to improve.

4. You will learn a lot. If you love to learn, law school is the place for you. In each of the three years that you are in law school, you will probably learn more than you did during your entire undergrad.

Speaking for myself, I found that law school sparked a new passion for learning. There is so much about this world that we do not understand. Law school offers a glimpse into a wide variety of topics. The beauty of the law is that the basic legal topics (contracts, tort, constitutional, etc.) cover an ever-broadening expanse of subject areas. While your contract text may be about, well, contracts, the cases in your book cover a wide variety of topics. For example, you’ll learn about insurance contracts and, in that context, you’ll learn more about how insurance works. You’ll learn about the basic components of a contract through the lens of various business relationships. As a result of the nature of the law, and how it threads through everything in life, you will get to quite literally learn about everything while you learn about how the law applies to it.

5. Law school can be very fun. The non-academic side of law school is a lot of fun. You will likely meet some people who will become life-long friends. Students and schools go to great lengths to provide many opportunities for students to get to know each other and have some time away from classes and studying. Each school will have some unique ways for you to get to know your classmates (read: pubnights).

What you will likely find very early on in your law school adventure is that you will be there with some very like-minded people. Unsurprisingly, law school, like any discipline, attracts a certain kind of person. The benefit is that it will be pretty easy to get along with all of your classmates, with whom you will have a lot in common.

One of the great things about the high-stress insanity that is law school is that it, too, helps you make fast friends. Similar to surviving a near-death experience with someone, you will very quickly become close with your classmates. The shared experience of pain and stress tends to do that.

6. It will open doors for many career paths. Many people choose to go to law school knowing they do not want to be a lawyer, but to instead use the education for other endeavours. Many others end up doing the same even when they initially thought they wanted to be a lawyer. There is nothing wrong with doing so. Law school provides an invaluable education in writing and reasoning that will open many doors for you, not just the doors of a law firm. The point is that you shouldn’t go to law school just because you don’t want to practice law. You should also choose not to go to law school because you’re concerned that you may want to change career paths later in life.

Many people who go to law school end up in law-adjacent careers, such as many of those in government that involve policy and lawmaking. Law is also a great educational background for those who wish to pursue politics. Many great politicians had early careers as lawyers or an educational background in law. Browse through the Wikipedia for Prime Ministers and Presidents of various countries and you will see that many of them started in law.

Reasons you may enjoy the practice of law

1. Practicing law is very rewarding, personally and professionally. Of all the career options available to you, few will allow you to see the impact of your work so directly, and so frequently. The rewards (and challenges) are numerous and vary depending on the area of law you decide to practice.

Depending on the area in which you eventually practice, you may end up working on some of the biggest corporate transactions that make headlines in the news, stopping an unlawful eviction of a vulnerable person, advising a hospital on the implementation of certain public health regulations that impact the delivery of healthcare, or many other things. When the right result is achieved, your client of course reaps the reward, but you get to share in that success with them.

Many lawyers continue to practice well past the age of retirement. I don’t think it’s because these lawyers need the money. They just love the work.

2. You get to help people in tangible ways. Related to my first point, no matter what area of law you practice, you get to help people with their problems and challenges and create tangible results for them. Corporate lawyers get to help businesses collaborate and give effect to transactions and corporate decisions, while employment lawyers work to improve the employer-employee relationship and protect the employer or business (depending on which side they practice).

3. You will become an expert at all things (often unique things). One of the main reasons I find the practice of law so interesting is that I very frequently have the opportunity to become an expert on an entirely unfamiliar subject. When a new file hits my desk (or, more likely, my inbox) it very often involves a subject in which I have zero prior knowledge. Yet in short order, I must become an expert on the subject.

For example, when a real estate lawyer gets a new file where they need to create a commercial lease for a client who is leasing a new space, they will need to learn a lot about the business and how it works. That lawyer is going to need to know that this up-and-coming tech company wants to put in a draft system for fancy craft beer to ensure that the lease allows for it, but they will also need to learn a lot more about the business and how it operates to ensure that the lease reflects the company’s long-term plans. Maybe this is an AI computing company that needs some serious infrastructure in place to properly cool their quantum computers, which the lawyer will then need to learn about to help facilitate this.

In figuring it how to structure the lease, the lawyer will learn all about the business out of necessity. The best part is, you get to learn by doing, rather than through rote memorization and test-taking.

4. The people are great. The firms and various areas of practice attract a certain kind of person (at the very least people who are all interested in that area of law), and you will likely get along well with these people as you narrow into a certain firm and a certain practice area. You will be surrounded by hard-working and intelligent people. While some of us aren’t as socially competent as you might wish, generally everyone is kind, and compassionate and cares about the success of their colleagues (within firms and without).

5. The money is good. To be clear, you should not go into law if your dream is to make millions of dollars. It is a small portion of lawyers who make that kind of money. Statistics say that this won’t be you. Despite that, if you work hard you are likely going to make decent money. But if it is only money that you care about, you should look at other careers where you can make more money based on how hard you work.

6. Job stability. Until AI takes over the world, law is a pretty recession-proof and stable career. When things are good, people need lawyers to make mergers and acquisitions happen and prepare all the documents for the conveyance of a residential property. When things are bad, people need lawyers to help with their bankrupt company or prepare the papers for a divorce. No matter the occasion, lawyers have found a way to make ourselves an indispensable part of it. (Admittedly, it’s probably the case that lawyers should not be necessary for all these things, but that’s another problem for another time.)

7. Ever-evolving work. As the world evolves and changes, so will your work. For example, lawyers practicing family law are constantly changing their practice in accordance with the latest best practices for resolving family disputes (often, outside of the court system.) Lawyers who work in IP are often working at the forefront of new technologies, involved in things such as filing patents for new drugs and life-changing medical technologies. While you may get bored with some of the day-to-day monotony of the procedural and administrative side of the practice, at a high level your files are likely to keep you interested in your work.

Reasons law school may not be right for you

1. The workload is intense. Law school is a lot of work and will require a substantial investment of your time and energy. The few people who have found or do find law school easy are the exception – trust me. You are bound to find a few classmates who find law school a breeze, but they might just be exceptionally gifted. There will also undoubtedly be a few people who act like they are finding it to be easy, but too often it’s because these people aren’t taking it seriously or, even worse, they aren’t doing well and aren’t seeking out the help they need. Either way, these people are unlikely to be successful. You will have to consider whether the reward is worth all the stress.

Many law schools appear to recognize that law school is very stressful and a lot of work. In response, they often pile money into resources for mental health help and stress reduction. But that only treats a symptom. I haven’t yet heard much about the law schools doing anything to reduce the main stressor: the actual workload, though I'm sure some schools are working on that. If you don’t do well dealing with an overwhelming workload and seriously struggle with time management, you are unlikely to enjoy law school.

2. Law school is very competitive. One of my clearest memories from my law school experience is about a simple but ill-conceived Facebook post by one of my soon-to-be classmates. After everyone learned that they had been accepted into my school, someone created a Facebook page for people to connect and start to share their excitement for starting law school. One eager student decided to post her LSAT score and ask everyone else to post theirs. Yuck. To say the least, I was immediately turned off and concerned that I had made a terrible mistake. This is just one example of a time my classmates displayed a tendency (or maybe even a preference) for competition. I’ll admit to being a competitive person when it comes to sports and board games, but I was truly looking forward to learning and growing with my classmates, not competing against them.

Unfortunately, law school rewards competition at almost every turn. The way papers and exams are graded (on a curve) means that you are necessarily ranked against your classmates. Some schools have tried to fix this by assigning a name, rather than a letter, to the grades, but it’s easy to see right through this semantic illusion. It doesn’t change the fact that you are still graded on a curve, just with fewer categories and shiny new names.

If you’re not a competitive person and don’t thrive in those kinds of environments, law school might not be right for you.

3. Networking is essential. For some, this might sound like a good thing. For others, it might be a nightmare. The reality is that you are going to need to participate in a lot of networking events if you want to increase the likelihood that you will get a great job at the end of law school. While networking is generally helpful in getting a job in any career, it’s not always necessary in careers that are in very high demand. If you don’t want to have to deal with this, law school is probably not right for you.

4. Law school is expensive. While there are still some relatively affordable schools, the large majority of law schools are, in my view, over-priced. This is something that you will need to put some serious thought into before choosing to go to law school. As I noted above, law is not necessarily a lucrative career (you will do well, but not get crazy-rich), so you should not assume that you can afford to shoulder a significant amount of debt to pay for law school.

I get into this in more detail in the section about tuition, but the short of it is that it’s expensive, it’s not all that easy to fund, and it will take you a long time to pay off the debt, even if you are making good money. The significant debt you may need to take on will severely cut into any salary you do eventually earn.

5. It is a big time commitment. If you’ve made it this far, you undoubtedly know that it is a major time commitment to go to law school. Unlike our friends over in the UK and other places abroad, you have to first get an undergrad degree before going to law school (or at least complete three years of an undergrad degree). Now think about adding another three years of school and, in most jurisdictions, another year of articling, before you even start to practice. Add to that time in between undergrad and law school to practice for and write the LSAT (some people do this during undergrad, but it’s not easy to do so), and you’re looking at a minimum of six and maybe as many as nine years total for the whole process. You could probably do all the schooling required for two or even three other careers in that same period.

It might sound silly to add more time to this process but, if you’re unsure about going to law school, I recommend that you take some time to think about it and explore other career options first (after your undergrad and before writing the LSAT). Other law-related fields don’t require as much schooling. Certain master's programs, such as a master's in public policy, would give you a great background for pursuing a career in policymaking and politics.

6. It will be hard on your relationships. Law school will take a toll on your relationships. It’s not easy to maintain a relationship with a partner and your friends and family during this time. You likely won’t have as much time as you did before law school to keep in touch with people and give your time to people in the way you used to.

The focus of your attention will be on developing new relationships with law school friends, and any energy you have left in the day will be spent mostly on studying. You might also find that one of the only things you want to talk about is the law and law school. People are going to get sick of hearing about it.

7. You might find it extremely boring. Let’s face it, not everyone is going to enjoy the material studied in law school. TV and movies often make lawyering look like a glamorous career, but it’s not (or at least mostly not). One of the most famous quotes reads something like “Cases are won in the library, not the courtroom”, implying that you will need to read a lot of case law to do well (at least as a litigator). While criminal law is always fascinating for obvious reasons, bankruptcy and insolvency law might not be. Reading 30-page-long decisions on such a topic can be extremely painful. Speaking from my own experience, I often found the readings quite bland, though the lectures were generally stimulating. Unless you are stimulated by the idea of injustice and have some interest in law and politics, you may not find the material interesting.

Reasons you may not want to be a lawyer

1. You will work long hours. As you likely know, lawyers typically work pretty long hours. While some lawyers have found ways to maintain a work-life balance, based on my experience it seems that most lawyers at the very least work long days Monday-Friday, and often have to work at least a little bit in the evenings and on weekends. Of course, this varies widely depending on the size of the firm, the city in which you work, the area of practice, and the type of clients.

For example, if you go into criminal law you might need to be available to answer the phone at 3:00 a.m. when someone gets arrested. You may also have to answer a call at that late hour if you have a demanding corporate client. Whereas if you work doing wills and estates in a small town, it’s pretty unlikely that you are going to have to answer the phone in the middle of the night to deal with a crisis.

In any event, based on my experience, long hours are pretty common. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to improve. If anything, with changing technology and the increasing speed with which clients expect things to happen, these long hours are likely to increase further.

When you work long hours, you’re unlikely to have the energy or interest in doing much with your free time. And any free time you do have may be spent doing your weekly chores. There might not be much time left over to relax and be social.

2. You may be morally opposed to some of the work you do. In part thanks to large student loan debts, there is a decent chance that you will end up early on in your career at a firm that does work with companies with which you may not be morally aligned. Maybe you want to be a criminal prosecutor, but your only option is to get work with a criminal defence firm. Maybe you want to work for employees and unions, but the only work you can get is at a big business firm that works solely for companies. While I am not suggesting that you cannot change paths at some point, you may find that it’s not all that easy to do so right away. You may end up doing work you don’t enjoy in the early years of your career.

3. The daily practice can be tedious. Similar to what I said about law school earlier, there’s a reasonable chance that you might not find the day-to-day practice of law all that interesting. Sure, you get to work on some cool transactions and litigate some interesting issues, but the actual work that you do might not be all that interesting. In my day-to-day as a litigator, I often do a lot of writing – which I enjoy – but I also have to do a lot of tedious reading and research. Sometimes, I spend entire days just reading financial documents to try to figure out what went wrong. Solicitors, of course, also have to do a lot of tedious work. Preparing and amending agreements for transactions can be mind-numbingly boring, and very administrative. I always try to look at the bigger picture, but it can be challenging depending on what you have to do.

4. The law generally moves very slowly. On the litigation side of things, it can be frustratingly slow to get anything done. The Courts move slowly and it’s hard to keep a lot of files moving along with a busy practice. Taking a file from start to finish can take years, sometimes many years. If you’re looking for more instant gratification on the big goals, a career in litigation may not be for you.

As you will no doubt learn in law school, the advancement of legal precedent moves even slower. For lots of people, this can be a turn-off. There are lots of other ways to advance society faster than through legal precedents. While those cases that make the news and concern civil rights sometimes lead to some significant societal breakthroughs, they are not the norm.

Conclusion

There are undoubtedly a ton of reasons why any particular person may want, or not want, to pursue a career in law. I hope that those I shared at least provide a taste to help you make this decision.

I encourage you to speak to lots of people before you make this decision. Ideally, you’ll have an opportunity to speak to someone who is currently practicing, someone who used to practice and doesn’t anymore, and people in other careers who might have some insight into other career paths in which you may be interested. It is only once you’ve had an opportunity to thoroughly consider – hopefully through some meaningful conversations – that you will be well-prepared to make this decision.