-: For people who want to become lawyers,
the first thing I tell them is
don't go straight to law school.
Having a job after college and getting some work experience,
particularly in a field
that you think you might be interested in law,
is very helpful.
If you wanna do corporate law, you know,
be a paralegal at a firm.
If you wanna, you know, represent the government
or do work at like district attorney's offices,
work with partner agencies that frequently, you know,
couple with those kind of government offices.
And if you wanna do public interest work,
work in social service organizations
and within the communities that you will likely
want to serve one day, even if it's not as a lawyer.
So I think that work experience is really important.
The second thing I tell young law students
is that rather than deciding if you wanna be
a public interest lawyer or corporate lawyer,
try to decide do I wanna be a litigator or not.
Because that's a very distinct set of skills
that if you don't start to learn early in your career,
it's very hard to get yourself into a courtroom,
you know, half way through your career
and try to learn that.
It's kind of like learning to swim as an adult.
It can be very scary.
You kind of have a lot less fear early into your career.
And so I would explore that.
I really encourage first year law students,
when they're looking at their first summer internship,
to look at internships that give them an opportunity
to either interact with clients one-on-one
or to speak in a courtroom
or some kind of mock courtroom setting.
You don't know whether you like it until you've tried it,
and one way or the other, you will know pretty quickly
if it's something you want to do.
And then I think with your second year internship,
you can kind of adjust a little bit
based on your experience with that.