Reply to How badly do you regret having gone to law school ?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Public interest lawyers don’t regret it since their work is meaningful. [/quote]
Not necessarily true. Public interest doesn't way well and the people you may represent aren't always the nicest of people even though they may be underserved or indigent. [/quote]

I’ve been a public interest lawyer for 20 years. I literally know hundreds of public interest lawyers across the USA, and nobody regrets their career path.

Hint: we aren’t in it for the money. (Nonetheless, I currently make just under $200k.)

The trick is to go to school in state. Minimize or avoid student debt. [/quote]

I’ve been a public interest lawyer over 20 years and I regret it.  I was so smart—went to top schools and did really well.  I choose this profession thinking I could help improve people’s lives.  Meanwhile, in the last 20+ years, the world seems like it’s gotten worse in so many different ways, and I’ve been putting little pieces of puddy into tiny holes in a dam that’s cracking and over-flowing.  And the clients are generally fine, and my colleagues are great, but dealing with other lawyers is so draining.  Almost every day I have several calls with people who are just argumentative, derisive, accusatory, and often wrong.  And at least some of the work is really boring and repetitive or inane.
In retrospect, I should have gone into science, some kind of data analysis, or maybe worked for someplace like PBS.  I think any of those fields would have had more real impact on improving people’s lives.  The days when the court system was a good venue to do that are long gone.[/quote]

Your experience is so different from all the PI lawyers I know.

What field?

You aren’t a legal aid lawyer, correct?

[/quote]

I used to be a legal aid lawyer, and am now in a different type of public interest job.  I think as a legal aid lawyer, you deal less with awful other lawyers, because, if you're litigating, you're often litigating against government attorneys or more small time lawyers (like those that represent landlords in landlord-tenant disputes).  Legal aid work is hard because it tends to be very repetitive, not very intellectually stimulating, many of your clients have massive problems that you just can't fix (and a certain percentage of them will blame you for those problems), and you basically know that all you are doing is providing little stop-gap measures for a system that is fundamentally flawed.

The government public interest lawyers that do more policy oriented work (e.g., regulations that change food safety or environmental protection) may feel like their work is more meaningful on a large scale, though.[/quote]

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