Getting an Education on Being a Lawyer, and Not Just on the Law
What is your personal conception of professional success and satisfaction for yourself as a lawyer? How will you know when (or whether) you achieve your conception of success and satisfaction? These are important existential questions for anyone working in a professional setting to reflect upon, but especially for me, as a 3L gearing up for my last semester of law school. Yet, I was struggling. I always knew I wanted to go to law school. I always knew I wanted to litigate, and I had always planned on going into criminal law. I have known these things for years. Why had I never gone a step further, and thought about how I viewed success and satisfaction, and at what point I would feel I achieved those goals?
The questions were posed to those of us in Professor Peter Rofes’ Lawyers & Life course during the Fall 2018 semester. They were the first of what would be scores of questions, each one seemingly simple in language and length, but digging deeper than many of us had ever been asked to do in our law school careers. What parts of your legal education have you found to be the most rewarding? What makes you stand out from other soon-to-be new lawyers? What do you look for in an employer’s organizational culture? What aspects of your career, disposition, or accomplishments would you want emphasized in your “career obituary”?