RickyDnwhyc wrote:spleenworship wrote:RickyDnwhyc wrote:
I meant no offense. I'm still not familiar enough with that type of work to form a opinion.
But since you are clearly in the minority, it would be great if you could expand on what you enjoy about this type of work(that most would find unbearably mundane)?
I wasn't offended. I was joking. I should've put up a smiley.
And I have always enjoyed going through minutia. Spending hours making sure that I find every
single transaction that is fishy, maybe 200, out of 4000 documents... that's sweet. But I'm serious that you don't have to be a sociopath... I think you just have to be really anal and find joy in strange places.
Excuse my naivety, but does the bolded imply that you do mostly "transactional" work vs. Litigation? I'm looking at doing litigation so I wonder if my typical day-to-day would still be foraging through 4000 documents for minor inconsistencies.
My main goal as of now is to experience what it's like to be a lawyer(or something extremely similar) before I actually become a lawyer / go to LS. Any advice on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated.
If you had to compare the type of work you do to any other career that someone WITHOUT a JD could do straight out of undergrad, which would hold the most direct similarities? (Direct, as in not an analogy such as being a "white collar janitor")
Both transactional and litigation practice have a component that involves "foraging through . . . documents for minor inconsistencies." In transactional practice, it's called due diligence (often, "diligence"); in litigation practice, it's called document review (often, "doc review"). If one practice area is more notorious for this type of work, it's litigation.
As to experiencing
What It's Like To Be a Lawyer before becoming a lawyer, you're touching on a major catch-22 in this field. People frequently ask, "Why do you want to be a lawyer?" Just as frequently, people say, "You can't know what it's like to practice law until you do so."
Obviously, given the number of people who end up going to law school and becoming lawyers, there has to be some way out of this catch-22. The most common path is becoming a paralegal, although its efficacy is debated. Otherwise, I think you pretty much just have to do what you're doing now, which is talk to people about it and read about it.
I've enjoyed law school and legal practice (one summer with federal government, one summer in big law) pretty well. I enjoy research and technical writing, so writing memos and briefs appeals to me. I like organizing disparate and conflicting sources into a coherent argument as to what the law is and how it applies to facts. I also enjoy style--syntax, grammar, typography, etc.--so the world of citations and formatting is not repulsive to me.
Very few if any people enjoy grunt work (i.e., diligence and doc review). You just have to hope that you work at a firm where they farm a lot of this out to temp attorneys or a practice area where they farm a lot of this out to other practice areas. Further, the grunt work subsides as you become more senior.
Keep in mind that a lot of sources tend to give biased assessments. In real life, people will tend to give overly optimistic assessments. On TLS, people will tend to give overly pessimistic assessments. You'll have to try to draw your own conclusions.
