Yet another career question - what is so terrible about being a lawyer?

I liked all of those things. I loved researching stories in civil court filings. I loved the idea of working for Legal Aid protecting the less fortunate. Then I got to law school and realized my reasons would have been better http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqiM_VGt1dk when there was so much more opportunity than there is now that the legal jobs sector is experiencing serious turmoil and will never be the same as it was. (Plus the atmosphere of law school, at least in my experience, felt hostile to idealism. I dropped out.) The world needs honorable lawyers and people need legal help. But the "getting paid" part is the hardest because of the combination of massive non-dischargeable student debt and the collapsing job market for attorneys. Attorneys practice a venerable profession that is strongly rooted in a pre-20th century world, when you couldn't Google. I strongly suggest you check out some of the New York Times's coverage of why LSAT applicants are rapidly dropping, before risking 21st century debt. You might also want to search the Web for the work of Paul Campos, including his book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B009D13IA6/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ I once interviewed a psychologist in New York who specialized in counseling recent law graduates with few prospects. There are some dark stories out there of debt, despair, http://www.jdunderground.com/all/, JDs living on their parents' couches, and JDs who are forced to http://www.jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=62994 and sell sports headbands to get out from under their student loans after applying for hundreds of jobs...It's a different world out there from when my dad graduated law school with bad grades and there was a job for everyone.

The job market is crap right now. There are too many lawyers. Unless you can go to a top school, or go to school for free, it's a terrible economic proposition.

I am a lawyer and I am not currently practicing law. Volumes have been written about the downsides of being a lawyer and you can find it on the internet but anecdotally I think what has disillusions many people about law is that they go to law school thinking that being a lawyer will be some kind of continuation of the academic environment that they have been accustomed to after many years in school, only to find out that it's a business just like anything else. As a lawyer the most important things are that you need to find clients, you need to bill hours, you need to work for people you don't like or agree with. There's some notion out there that you go to law school and then automatically land a high paying job where you're paid to do noble, intellectual pursuits. There's so much about being a lawyer that you don't learn in law school and I think the people who do best as lawyers tend to be street smart people, actually, not the top students with the high test scores and grades. If you really want to pursue this, be a paralegal for a year. Seriously.

I just left the legal profession. I practiced for ten years ... A short period in civil litigation and then bout eight years in criminal defense. I realize now that I was never suited to law practice because I hate conflict. And at the time I went to law school I didn't really understand that about myself. Only after practicing did I realize that. It was easier in criminal defense because I felt criminal defense was "nobler," you could go to extremes on behalf of your client and not feel bad about it ... But still, having constant conflict, deadlines, clients' expectations, and the demands of judges looming over me at all times just beat me up psychologically 24/7. When you are pondering whether to go to law school, don't focus so much on the broad-brush things like "I like research," "I like the idea of a profession." Think on a more fine grained level about what it's like to go to work every day as a lawyer. For example, can you deal with have a few dozen people seriously pissed off at you at any given time? Can you deal with having to make and receive uncomfortable phone calls every single day, from demanding clients and whip smart opposing counsel who are constantly undermining you and are basically pricks even when they are pretending to be nice? You'll have hearings/trials a month away that you dread so much that, if you're anything like me, you can't fully enjoy anything in the month leading up because you're so stressed out and full of dread. There will be minor mistakes you know you made that you're waiting for your opponent to realize and try to capitalize on. You have to consider what the daily life of a lawyer is like, before you go to law school.

If everyone who liked reading, writing, researching, and helping people while building a career were to apply to law school, there would be a terrible, terrible glut of un- and under-employed lawyers out there. Oh, wait... The thing is, there are many ways to meet those ends without going to law school--and to start tomorrow, not after three years of expensive schooling (and lost opportunity). In addition, I have found in my years of practice that I have spent significantly more time arguing what "and" means, or how to apply a poorly drafted regulation (with the author of said regulation, now in private practice, on the phone conceding that he never really gave any thought to how the regulation should or would be applied), than anything that ever looked like "law" from the outside. When I was a kid, one of the guidance counselors at school asked me and a bunch of other seventh graders what we wanted to do when we grew up. There were about 8 of us, and 3 or 4 of us confidently said we wanted to be marine biologists. I, who hate the beach, and water, and sailing, and boats, and who is actually not really jazzed about animals, was among them. None of us became marine biologists. I think "being a lawyer" is the "becoming a marine biologist" of one's early- to mid-twenties. Few know what it means, and those who actually are passionate and informed about it don't need internet strangers to validate their dream. They just make it happen because it's their real and true passion. If what you want to do is help people, help people. Only--really and truly, only--become a lawyer if being a lawyer is what you want to do (not helping people by being a lawyer, but being a lawyer itself), and no other grueling, thankless, shit-shoveling undertaking can provide the same rewards. Written from my desk, at work, staring down the barrel of a 70-point diligence project totaling $60+ million in exposure that needs to be completed by Friday.

I work with lawyers, but am not one myself. To be a lawyer, you need to be able to emotionally distance yourself. Law in particular lets you see people at some of their very lowest points. Sure, lawyers get clients as preventative measures--people make wills, lay out terms of contracts, et cetera. But just as often they're looking for lawyers after they're already embroiled in a battle and at some of the lowest points of their lives. Someone embroiled in a legal battle with their ex-spouse for custody, or suing their previous employer for back wages, or their doctor for malpractice...they're often pretty difficult customers to deal with, because so much of the case is personal for them. And because you're advocating for your clients' interests, and going as the middleman between the opposing party's legal counsel...it's hard not to get affected, and hard not to get turned into their verbal punching bag. Particularly when you juggle many legal cases a day...you're getting the concentrated effect of all that negativity at you. Lawyers have this image as some of the most high-strung people out there, and I bet it's partly because of this. And as stated above, it's a business like any other, so you have the usual pains of running a business on top of that. I agree that you're helping people, but quite a lot of law is going through the minutiae and paperwork. It's not all glamourous and exciting. Hell, in the day-to-day work, there's very little that's exciting, and a lot that's stressful and routine. Your reasons aren't bad, and the much lower amount of debt helps. But think very hard about what it takes to be a lawyer other than that fancy piece of paper.

American job market advice may not apply to you.

I'm a lawyer in Vancouver. I graduated in 2009 when the market was just starting to get bad in Canada. Here's the thing about becoming a lawyer in Canada... you don't just pass the bar exam and then poof, you're a fully licensed lawyer. You need to land an articling position with a firm and finish a year of work first. You start competing for a summer job in your second year of law school, so those first year grades do matter. In third year you compete for articling positions and firms often give preference to their previous year's summer students. If you don't land an articling position by the time you graduate, you are pretty darn screwed... by the next year's round of offers, you'll be competing with the new graduating class, and it will be painfully obvious on your applications that you were passed over the last time around. You're damaged goods. If you're fortunate enough to land an articling position, you're in for possibly the worst time of your life. Articling students are pretty much slave labour. You get paid peanuts and you're loaded down with all the worst, most tedious tasks that none of the associates want to do. And still, you're competing, because your firm might have 20 articling students and only 3 jobs available at the bitter end. So politics between the students can get ugly. The decision of who the firm hires will largely come down to who billed the most, because the ultimate goal of any law firm is money. So you will need to wave goodbye to any semblance of a personal life if you want your articling year to count for anything. It's also a bit of a popularity contest. Did you schmooze the right people? If you just put your nose down and work really hard, but never make an impression on those who matter, hello unemployment. I know people who graduated law school in the previous few years who are still looking for articles two, three years later. It's pretty much hopeless for them at this point, so they're stuck with expensive degrees they can't use because they're still ineligible to take the bar. And of those who "made it," all of my classmates hate their jobs with a fiery passion. Most are looking to move in-house to eliminate the miserable torment of billing, but as pointed out by crazycanuck, Vancouver lacks the big corporate headquarters to support much of a job market for in-house counsel. You need several years of experience in the right areas of law to even be considered for these positions, and your goal of helping people need not apply unless "helping" a huge corporation gives you the warm fuzzies. I work in-house and while it's much better than before, I still work a lot of weekends. I still lay in bed awake at night thinking about work and get cold sweats when fires erupt. I don't make great money. Until you've worked in a law firm, you really have no idea what it's like to be a lawyer. If you're serious about it, try being a paralegal or assistant at a firm first and see if that's an environment you'll enjoy.

I'm not a lawyer but my sister is and so are a few of my closest friends. I imagine that for the reasons that [banishedimmortal] and [Zelos] describe in posts above, they ALL hate being lawyers. All of them. My sister does well enough for it to be a golden cage for her. She has to put three kids through college otherwise she would change her career in a millisecond. My close friend, who worked as a lawyer on beahlf of the city of new york to prosecute abusive parents and protect children in foster care, hated it so much she quit being a lawyer forever. Out of all the professions practiced by people I meet throughout life, for some reason being an attorney seems to be the one that elicits such strong responses. I will never know exactly what they feel as i've never practiced, but I sure as hell would think twice about entering into a career like that after meeting so many disgruntled professionals.