Advice for Female Law Students About to Graduate
From Feminist Law Professors:Â
My advice to law students who are about to graduate from law school, particularly female law students and law students of color, is to adopt a similar can-do attitude. You are about to enter a very select and privileged class that will open many doors for you. The fact is, despite all the lawyer jokes you hear, lawyers are respected members of society. Having a law degree means that you have the intelligence, knowledge, and skills to accomplish almost anything you set your mind to. If you want to become a partner in a large law firm, you can do it. If you want to work-part time and raise a family, you can do that too; it is up to you.
I don’t mean to suggest that achieving your goals will be easy. Like the boy in The Alchemist, you will face many obstacles that you must overcome before you achieve your goals. You will be required to constantly expand your knowledge of the law and your skill sets. You will have to learn to deal effectively with a variety of different personalities from co-workers, to clients, to judges. You will have to figure out how to deal with the stress that comes with having to solve the problems of others. As a woman who started practicing law in 1985, I know from experience that if you are a female attorney, you may experience overt discrimination or at least some form of undervaluation. None of these obstacles are insurmountable. More importantly, because you are a lawyer, you have the power to change the profession for the better.
If you need examples of what I am saying, or inspiration, you should read the profiles of attorneys posted at Ms. JD. These women faced many more obstacles than you, and they found success and fulfillment. In the process, they helped to transform the legal profession. You can do the same. If you do not think there are enough part-time employment opportunities in the legal profession, create them. Use the gift of analysis and reasoning that you have been given to convince the “powers-that-be†at your place of employment that there is value in offering part-time employment. If they don’t agree, find another place of employment. Start your own firm. In short, if you do not like the rules of the game that were established for the legal profession when there were few women or people of color in its ranks, make new rules. Re-design the legal profession.
Billy Jean King could have accepted the institution of tennis that existed when she was a young girl growing up in Southern California; an institution of the elite, white, upper-class that frowned upon tennis players who learned their skills on public tennis courts instead of at country clubs. She could have accepted the status quo and spent a lifetime lamenting the unfairness of her situation and wondering what might have been. Instead, she chose to use her gifts (her intelligence and tennis skills) to challenge the status quo and in the process she not only changed the institution of tennis, but she transformed the entire universe of women’s sports.
If Billie Jean King could transform tennis and women’s sports, just think what you as future lawyers can do. Billy Jean was (and is) talented, astute and tenacious; characteristics that all change agents seem to possess and that you will need if you want to achieve your goals. But what you as future lawyers have that she didn’t have is an education in the very subjects and skills that are needed to effect change. This ability to effect change is the very reason that lawyers are respected in society. We are trained to identify, analyze and solve problems. If you see problems with the legal profession or in society in general, you have the gifts needed to solve them; gifts that many other people in society do not have. That is why (like in A League of Their Own), “there’s no crying in law school.â€
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Thinking about doing law school after I retire from the Federal Service in four years — I would be 61 yrs old.
Hi Deborah, I also am thinking about law school – I am a few years older then you and would be interested in communicating with you on this subject.