What is something you wish law school taught you about the practice of law/firm life/being an associate?

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Being a lawyer isn’t worth the student debt. I wish I just took a finance or high end sales job out of undergrad. Fuck my life. O not too mention, being a lawyer is so fucking boring.

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Law school is just three additional years to land a shittier financial service gig lmao. I never ever hear this kind of complaints from all levels of seniority from consultants or bankers.

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How crushingly boring it can be. I work in biglaw capital markets and am so bored I'm going to leave my v50 and join a small local firm.

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Idk about others but I assumed law was going to be boring

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How to network, bring in clients, start your own firm, and know what to expect as to work and pay of common areas of law (e.g., insurance defense).

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Literally everything. Law school doesn’t teach you shit about what an actual lawyer does. Biggest scam in higher ed.

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I wish law school taught anything at all about being a transactional attorney. My school was so heavily litigation focused that it was just a 3 year hazing ritual. I could’ve gone straight to work without ever having to go to school, considering the nothing they taught me that applies to my day to day life.

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Is it Baylor? lol

Wish law school taught us how to litigate cases, write motions, build your own practice, market clients, what to say and do in court as a very junior attorney, prep for and take depositions… i could go on for days.

Can’t help but think law school/bar exam is a way to weed out the weak and prepare us for immense stress, anxiety, high work loads and expectation of perfection or close to it.

If you can do all that while in school, you can pretty much handle anything you are thrown into once you are out.

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Agreed. It's just a test of whether you can jump through hoops.

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For clients that come to the office, have a fake baby picture to place up if they come in at 4:30pm. If they call close to 5pm, have a YouTube video playing in the background so that they know we have a life, we’ve answered their questions, and now we gotta go!

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Doing this

How much the practice of law would mess with my mental health. Have been on meds since the bar exam and in therapy. This profession is so boring and awful. I’ve done several different roles and don’t like any of them. In house now and most days am bored out of my mind, jiggling mouse to keep from going idle, or spend most of my time dealing with the “trouble makers” who are always causing most of my work by bringing liability upon us for making bad decisions.

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I wish law school had a “creative bill writing” class

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Everyone always bad reps the ID firms but a lot of peeps do this

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Getting business so you have control over your life.

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A lot to unpack with this comment… but agreed

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How everyone would act like practicing law is a hobby (I.e. expecting us to schedule around their job like what we do is for leisure and not our job)

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Amen

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Billing

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The business side of the law instead of being a worker bee

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I wish law schools taught students how to do investigations. A big part of trial practice is investigation. Incredibly, almost none teach this important set of skills. Source: Criminal defense trial lawyer, 15 years in.

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Law school can only teach you so much people. We were taught how to read and write with a purpose…to think like a lawyer - that was the goal. It’s called the practice of law for a reason. Everyone on here acting like law school should encompass teaching you every aspect of a lawyer’s day to day is just unrealistic.

I will say, there should be more classes offered on fundamental economic/business/accounting principles.

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Partner 1 - this is the unique thing about law school. While colleagues of mine who went into finance uses almost all of their undergraduate knowledge to some extent in their day-to-day, I wouldn’t touch a legal brief with a ten foot barge pole. I am still to be made aware of any profession that requires 7(!) years of training to enter just for those 7 years to never matter ever again. I’m pretty confident that most semi-confident bankers/engineers/MBB consultants could do corporate law with a couple of weeks’ onboarding. Yet, the entire legal profession is gate-kept by bar exams and made-up jurisdictional hurdles for transition to overseas markets. It’s borderline fraudulent.

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Everything? Lol. But on a more targeted note: would have loved to have had more opportunities in law school to actually learn the nuts and bolts of trying cases in GDC and in circuit, the basics of what to literally say at your first appearance and procedural things like that, and at least some insight into basic trial strategy. Unless you were able to participate on a competition team or get into a trial advocacy class or be a part of a clinic - all of which are selective and limited - there really wasn't much opportunity for experiential learning on this stuff.

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Seriously though. If you are in transactional law your work could be done by most semi-competent bankers/engineers/MBB consultants. It’s all a scam so that corporations won’t figure out that they don’t need outside counsel.

That you have to be ok with executing other people’s ideas. There is little room for decision making/ strategy input, unless you are a partner

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That I should have quit while I was only in the first semester because I would hate this job.

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I hear you my man.

The business side of the law

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