MSN recently ran an article about people getting laptop burns on their legs.  I scrolled through the article comments and came across this gem:

“There are way too many sleazy lawyers out there. It is too easy and too profitable to become a lawyer in this country and the payouts are like winning the lotto.”

Having graduated from law school this past May, this comment struck a nerve.  First, becoming a lawyer starts with graduating from college with good grades.  Then you must undertake the LSAT–a three-hour ordeal that allegedly tests your reading comprehension and logical reasoning.  After you’ve finished the test and received your scores, you put together an application for each school you hope to attend.  This includes the perfect personal essay and a $100 application fee.

Then you wait anxiously to be accepted.  You quit your job, borrow a ton of money, and maybe move to a new city.  The first year, you take 30 hours of core classes–things like constitutional law, civil procedure, torts and contracts.  These are not easy concepts to grasp.  You work like a dog.  You don’t see your friends or your family that much.  You are poor.  You read hundreds of pages each day in order to be prepared in the classroom.  Your professors embarrass you.  Your grade is one final exam at the end of 13 weeks.  You go into a room and write about the law for three hours.  When that exam is finished, it is compared to the exams 79 other people wrote and graded on a brutal curve.  Because of that curve, everyone around you is hoping you’ll tank.  Almost every day, someone reminds you that the only people getting jobs are those in the top ten percent.

That’s what law school is like.  Once you’ve completed those three years of hard work, the $3000 bar review course begins the day after graduation.  For the next 13 weeks, you eat, sleep, and breathe the law.  You go to bar review for three hours each morning.  You study, you read, you take practice exams in the afternoon.  You take more practice exams.  You again work like a dog, and you live in constant fear that you will fail.  In Texas, you know that the bar exam is one of the top three most difficult in the entire country.  The test lasts two and a half days.  You write short answers for an hour and a half about procedure. You answer 200 multiple choice questions.  You answer twelve essay questions.  When you’ve completed this endurance test, you wait anxiously again–for four months–for results.

Doesn’t that sound easy?

The second part of that statement claims: “It is…too profitable to become a lawyer in this country.”  Remember—the top ten percent are the only ones getting gigantic paychecks, and even those jobs are disappearing in this economy.  To get that fat paycheck, you work 80 hours a week and you don’t have a life.  If you aren’t in the top ten percent, then you are fortunate to get a job and you’re certainly not making the big bucks.  I have two part-time jobs right now, and I’m getting paid for both of them, and I’m the lucky one.  Still, I drive a 12-year-old car.  I owe more than $100,000 in student loans.

Easy and profitable?  Definitely not easy, and profitable is questionable.  Becoming a lawyer in this country requires discipline, patience and determination.  Sure, there are sleazy lawyers.  But if and when lawyers get that big payout, most of us deserve it.  I know I do.

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