If I Had It To Do Over Again....

Mother In Law requests a post on the following:

whether or not, knowing what you now know, you would do it all again the same way. Would you go to law school when you did? Earlier? Later? Would you go at all? Would you choose to practice the same type of law?

Hmmm, interesting. I almost never look back and do this kind of thinking (water under the bridge and all that) so it's a bit uncomfortable and strange to do so. And where do you stop? What's the "it all" in "do it all again"? Would I still have been engaged to the schooner captain? Because that had a lot to do with me restricting my law school choice to Maine. I'll assume no. And I'll avoid the whole slippery slope of other questions that I could pose....like maybe I might decide I should have gone to Harvard, not Yale, as an undergrad, and then I would have likely have majored in English, not geology, and might have squandered less of my time on drinking and boys and sailing and probably would have become a better sailor too. But then I wouldn't have met Tony, and could never have fixed him up with Autumn, and it becomes a whole twisted Back To The Future kind of game pretty fast. So let's limit this to law school....

I wouldn't have gone to law school sooner, no way. See this post. I had a lot of figuring out to do. I might have chosen to have gone later, or have chosen to have gone to business school instead. Business school never occurred to me (Coming from hippie parents and a sort of nonprofit mindset, I thought business was just for greedy corporate fatcat bastards, and didn't realize how fun and cool and interesting it is), but is a real temptation in retrospect.

But I LOVED law school, and I love how it's sharpened my thinking and the fun exposure to the great machinery of dispute resolution and public safety we have in this country (this sounds ironic and cynical but I really do think it's a wonderful, if flawed, machine). So I'm reluctant to trade my JD for an MBA. I might have done well to have pursued a joint degree somewhere. If I could have jettisoned the schooner captain and his geographic restrictions earlier I might have considered picking a law school in another place that would have been a fun temporary home. Like University of Texas in Austin. (And then I would have fallen for some kind of cool musician and who knows where I'd be.)

Re: type of law? I think there's lots of kinds of law I could really like practicing. Admiralty would be fun, I think, even though it made my head hurt. But could there be anything more fascinating than bankruptcy? I really think no. You get federal vs. state law issues; contract law is turned on its head; it requires an understanding of business imperatives; it's fast-moving; you negotiate deals in the hallways of the bankruptcy court; there are many parties, all with different and sometimes overlapping incentives; you watch a variety of risk-takers coming to grips with the fact that their risks didn't work out and study different aspects of human failure and resilience; you have the chance to make a profound difference in the lives of individuals who need you; you are dealing, at core, with fights about money so you don't generally lose sleep or feel steeped in emotional pain or the ugly tragedy of domestic or criminal law; electronic filing is great; and there a zillion other reasons I love it. It is the best practice area I could imagine for myself, although there are lots that are beyond my ability to imagine and I bet I would like lots of them.

Remember, don't take my advice.

Comments

[LawMom]

Thanks for your very thoughtful response to my question. I was asking about law school and the law specifically, not the rest of your life. :) In contemplating this huge life change that I'm about to make, I have frequently wondered if I could have/should have/would have done it sooner, and how that might have happened. I just wondered what your view was from the other side.

Thanks also for posting about billable hours. Like others have said, it's always been a bit of a mystery to me how you get to a certain number of hours. Reading what you wrote confirms my reluctance to consider BIGLAW as a possible future path for my law career.

[Scheherazade]

There was a woman in my class who was about 10 years older than me (36 or 37 in our first year). She had a 14 year old and a 16 year old -- high school aged kids. One day we were talking and she said something about me being so much further along than she was at my age -- already in law school. And I told her I thought she was so much further along than I was, having put the job of mothering small children behind her already, something I couldn't even imagine.