Law As A Career – Things To Know

Recently, a high school student walked up to me and said ‘Ma’am, you are a corporate lawyer, do you have to keep a lot of company secrets?’ 😊 I am sure your impression of legal profession is derived from watching a lot of Law and Order,Crime Scene Investigation, Boston Legal, The Practice etc. There is even a thing called ‘CSI effect’. Go google it.
Well, legal profession is that and much, much more. Broadly you have three categories to pursue if you take law as your profession, in no particular order. You could go into court practice doing litigation. You could be a corporate lawyer where you will be incharge of all legal matters in a company. You could be a part of a law firm which is a field which sort of acts as a bridge between the corporate lawyer and the court litigation(broadly speaking).
Apart from these, you could go into government service as a lawyer for the government or into policy framing.
The next question that might pop up would be the areas where you can practice law. Think about it for a second. Think about your everyday life. Law is everywhere. You want to buy a house, you need a lawyer. You get a first job in a company, you sign your offer letter -that would have been drafted by a lawyer. You want to start a company- to set it up , the first person you have to go to is a lawyer. You want to go into financial markets- crypto, bitcoin, stock market, banks- at every stage there is a lawyer. You invented something and want to patent it and protect your IPR, you need a lawyer.
Whatever your core interests are, you can pursue that with a law degree added on. You like biology, you could go be a bioethics lawyer. You like environmental sciences, you could a lawyer in that field. You love to write, you could be a lawyer who drafts contracts. You like mathematics, you could be lawyer in financial markets.
So, what do you need to do now that you are in high school and want to look at law as a career. For a start, start reading newspapers every day. Take up various law courses that are freely available on Coursera. NLSIU has come up with a course called ‘Foundations in legal studies’ which is nominally priced and is done during summer. You can pursue that course to get a broad over view.
How do you get into law schools? There are various examinations like CLAT, LSAT etc. Most of the national top colleges are government owned, the number of available seats is limited versus the students taking the test. There are advantages of low fees in these colleges but then the competition is very high. On the other hand, there are many private colleges which are a bit steep however you get the advantage of studying the latest in law ex: crypto law , cyber law etc. Then there are colleges abroad UK, US etc. India is more aligned to UK law so it makes sense to pursue law in the UK if you are from India. US law is a completely different game and it works differently.
On a signing note, many of the CEOs of companies were formerly lawyers and even some of the presidents have a legal background. Law gives you a wide playing field where you can move from one area of interest to the other seamlessly.