| Since my father is a lawyer who runs his own lawfirm and has ~50 lawyers under him, I decided to ask him this question while we were on vacation and he was scanning his blackberry.
He told me that any major for law school is fine. You can be a music major, a science major, a... musical science major (lol, i don't know). He said that law schools can't be biased about your major, though they often seem like they are. He said stellar LSAT scores (+178 will get you into Yale Law) and community service/volunteering (volunteering at a legal aide clinic).
When he hires people, he doesn't even look at their major for undergrad. He'll read the name of their undergraduate program and if intrigued, he'll ask what their major was (mainly for conversation and rapport) and then he'll look at graduate school. If the gap between the undergrad school and the grad school is great (such as CSUN to Yale), he takes note of this as well.
But he stressed to me that it's about the person and the personality. Not all lawyers speak and do analysis. They read, a lot, and they have to spend countless number of hours writing depositions or "memos" that happen to be 25 pages long.
My dad is a corporate lawyer (HP, Coca-Cola, Gateway, LG, stuff like that) but does pro-bono law when he has time (NAPABA, i think it's spelled like that). He also added that the prestige of the grad school doesn't mean that the guy/girl will be a great lawyer. He only has 4 Ivy league graduates and most of the others are from USC, UCLA and UCB (all very good in their own way). But he won't meet with an applicant if they came from Pepperdine Law School or below, he told me that their writing is consistently under-par and they come to him with a sob story to appeal to his emotions.
I hope this gives you guys some insight on the future of being a lawyer. Given that this is just a slice. |