How To Become A Lawyer

Since I passed the California bar exam and began my legal practice, many people from my hometown have been quite impressed by my climb from humble origins. They ask me “how long does it take to become a lawyer,” or any number of other questions about how to become a lawyer, and you know what I tell them? There are no easy paths to how to become a lawyer. It's not like you can really just study from home and then take the bar exam like those ads on the internet would have you believe. The only way to become a lawyer is to work for it.

You will never figure out how to become a lawyer in the first place unless it is something that you want more than anything. Becoming a lawyer is one of the most demanding career paths that there are. First, there is undergraduate education. You must get good grades to get into a good law school, and anyone who knows anything about how to become a lawyer will tell you: the law school makes all the difference.

But good grades aren't all that you will need to get into a good law school. You will need good scores on the LSAT as well. This means taking an LSAT preparation course, or at least hours and hours of studying on your own. If you don't get a good LSAT, you don't get into a good school. Period. And the LSAT isn't like the SATs back in high school. This is a hard test we're talking about here.

But with the LSATs and the good college grades, you've barely started learning how to become a lawyer. Because this is the part where the work gets difficult. Your first year of law school will be nightmarish, almost guaranteed. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the professors make it this way on purpose. A lot of kids come in thinking that they know how to become a lawyer because they did good in debate class, or studied some nauseating nonsense like political science or economics in college.

The professors want to show you that you know nothing. But the other reason why the first year of law school is so difficult is that, simply put, law work is really difficult, and is twice as difficult if you've never done it before. It doesn't get easy – not for years – but it gets easier once your in the swing of things.