Con Law
(a Real Student's guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)
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Sample Chapters
About the Authors
Con Law

Sample Chapters

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The Legal Profession

Non-lawyers do not know what lawyers do. They think they do, but they don’t. Most people outside of the profession—including, most likely, your parents, friends, and even, shockingly, your law faculty and administrators—know nothing about what actually happens, each day and all day, behind the closed doors where real law is practiced. It’s as if there’s a national psychosis in which the patients (everyone) believes in a reality that is simply not true.

How can this have happened? Simple: the law is a part of a system that touches every aspect of human activity. Birth, death, and everything in between. People, companies, governments, “non-state actors”—everyone is part of a vast set of legal relationships, and every action implicates multiple connected sets of legal questions. We live our lives in it, we are governed by it, and then we go home and read about it or watch it on the news And with such continuous exposure, one is tempted to assume that understanding automatically follows. Fun, right? Well, it certainly is if you can boil it down to a one-hour episode (really, less than that minus the commercial breaks), in which the facts are laid out, the hero finds just the right evidence at just the right time, with just the right witness bursting into just the right dialogue in just the nick of time. Yes, fun.

Except that, in the real world, it’s not like that. Everyone knows this, of course, except that they don’t. Practically everything we think we know about “law” is based on some idealized, nearly entirely fictional account of what the law is and how lawyers actually work, or some fragment of the real life legal system that we have been exposed to at some point. Bought a house recently? That makes someone an expert in what real estate lawyers do all day. Divorced? Ex-spouses might swear they could easily set up their own family law offices. If the truth were told for what it is, for one thing there would be far fewer successful network executives. And conveying the reality of a law job—a fancier version of an often-tedious, often-boring, often-stressful office job—would not make for very good drama. The law is private. It is surrounded by myth, hype, wishful thinking, and misinformation—and sometimes disinformation. Most law practice takes place behind-the-scenes, in offices, conference rooms, and judges’ chambers, all far from the view of the general public. It concerns matters that outsiders don’t usually understand, or care about; the only time the legal profession becomes visible to outsiders is in the media, especially after some sensational crime or event—and even then it’s almost always conveyed in a highly misleading way. What we see is filtered through the glamour of the journalist, editor, screenwriter, author, or reality show producer (and sometimes all of them at once)—and whether they admit it or not, their own made-up world is where most of their ideas of the profession come from. Yes, even your trusted law professors, deans of admissions, and career services professionals who claim that law is still a wonderful way to spend your working life (note: your life, not theirs!), even they buy into this patently false reality. Unless they have practiced law, recently, and for a significant length of time, they simply do not know. There is no reliable source for information about what lawyers do except from those who have done it, tried to do it, or who are doing it now. And even then, the practice of law has changed so much over the past decade that a retired lawyer telling war stories stuffed with congeniality, camaraderie, and professionalism, of whiskey in the judge’s chamber after a hard-won battle, of deals and handshakes and the “good old days” when a friendly slap on the secretary’s bottom elicited a flirty remark and not a lawsuit (or even the good old days when he had a secretary), don’t understand how dramatically things have changed.

Ask yourself, do you actually know what lawyers do each day? Or do you just think you know? And how did you get that information? Until you have shadowed a real-life lawyer or two, sat by their sides for a week, and put some real effort into finding out what those besuited darlings of the television drama occupy their days with, you have absolutely no idea. So why on Earth are you thinking of spending a massive stack of money you probably don’t have and three of the best years of your life?

As far as the general public is concerned (which includes most law applicants), there are two types of lawyers: those who are smart, good-looking, classy, interesting, newsworthy, and successful, making piles of money; and those who appear on the back of phone books or bus-shelter benches hawking personal injury suits, making piles of money. Neither stereotype offers much insight into the realities of practicing law, nor represents the majority of lawyers who never see the limelight, the inside of a courtroom, the corner office, or the perks of the profession. Most lawyers perform regular office-based work for average-ish money, who like or dislike (and often hate) their jobs as much as every other office worker (who, it shouldn’t need to be restated, didn’t pay six figures and spend three years of their lives for the privilege of pushing paper all day like you’re about to). The general public is not privy to the diversity of work undertaken by most lawyers in private practice, government, or business, and has no idea that most of it is remarkably plain, form-driven, boilerplate, and mind-numbingly repetitive. What’s worse, clients are demanding, so the above is done in an unforgivingly high-stress, deadline-filled, hierarchical, dog-eat-dog environment.

Lawyers deal regularly with matters that are private, confidential, sensitive, or embarrassing for their clients (which is not to say that the matters are also interesting, although interesting and embarrassing do tend to go hand-in-hand). At the same time, lawyers are bound by professional standards (and professionalism) to keep their mouths shut about what they’re working on, and to keep their work life behind closed doors. This is neither good nor bad, but merely the way the legal system works. For prospective applicants to law school, however, it does make it rather difficult to research legal careers.

So, the law is a difficult profession to get a feel for unless one is actually a lawyer. In a way it’s akin to wondering what being a minister would be like. Sure, there are lots of movies about ministers and priests (and even a handful about rabbis), and everyone “knows” what they do…but do they? It doesn’t take long before we realize how little we really know about the realities of these hidden professions. It’s not the exciting world of long black robes, drinking wine at work on a Sunday, titillating confessions, wild exorcisms, and sex scandals that you may think it is.

Being a lawyer is not like being a teacher, or an engineer, or any one of countless other professionals, where the subject matter is open to the public, and interested students are welcomed into classes and labs to observe, and most interested students would have been fascinated in (or deterred by) numerous actual courses dealing with statistics, math, or astrophysics.

And as with those in the national-intelligence community, who can’t talk about the details of what they do for a living, secrecy makes the mind of the average citizen-on-the-street wander…and they tend to wander towards portrayals in the media. Bond, James Bond for counter-espionage (adding maybe Jason Bourne for the new set); Jack McCoy and Lt. Daniel Kaffee for law. The mundane existences of real-life lawyers will never see the light of the premiere.

This book isn’t concerned, however, about what Jane and Joe Public think or know (or think they know) about the legal profession. This book is concerned about one very specific segment of the general public: you. Or, to broaden that a bit, college students who want to become lawyers, or who might merely be toying with the idea about maybe possibly thinking about becoming a lawyer. The lack of available information about the actual, real-life practice of law and the myriad paths a legal career could and likely will take is exceedingly detrimental to these aspiring lawyers. There’s a good chance this includes you…even if you happen to be lucky enough to have personal contacts who do know the truth. Without access to real information, informed decisions cannot be made. College students are forced to turn to unreliable, biased, shallow, ill-informed, and self-serving sources. This ends now.


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