Why do you want to be a lawyer? 

It’s a question you’ll need to address if you apply to law school, and so it’s an excellent idea to be self-reflective, mindful, and articulate about your motivations.

Some people find a fascination with the law through interactions with family members or friends who are lawyers. Others have personal experiences (such as internships or work experiences) that illuminate law’s significance.  Still others start from a particular passion about an issue (immigration, technology, or similar) that leads them to understand its legal implications.

There are countless ways of being a lawyer: different areas of law and different types of workplace (private firms from the huge and international to local and single-practice, in-house corporate counsel, government, non-profit) are just some of the variables.  These can have very different bearings on what life and work as a lawyer feel like.

So, how do you begin to discern what that would look like for you and where you would want to end up?

Several possibilities:

LSAC

The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC: lsac.org) is the first stop for you to begin to explore all this.  You’ll need to register with LSAC eventually anyway in order to apply to law school; register now and begin to explore the enormous range of resources it offers. 

The section on their website called “Discover Law” is a rich source of basic how-to info and will answer a lot of your questions.

The section called “LawHub” offers a range of webinars and podcasts, some specifically aimed at decoding the many different areas of law and the professional experiences of people in them.

Catholic University Pre-Law

The pre-law program has developed several kinds of mentorship and professional experience-sharing, which we invite you to join as fully as you possibly can.  IMPORTANT: You need to sign up for the pre-law email list to receive regular notices and updates about this (see the button at the top of the front page of this site to do so).

In a given academic year this will include:

• On-campus career panels and networking events, with Catholic University “pre-law alumni” (people who were undergraduates here but went on to law school, at CUA or elsewhere, and are now practicing lawyers in the D.C. area).
• On-site visits and the opportunity to shadow a pre-law alum in his/her place of work.

For more information about this, see the Experiences and Mentoring page.