what to do

Over the course of job interviews for this summer, I've had lawyers ask me what I want to do. Do you want to be a litigator? A transactional attorney? Or maybe do patent work? Public interest? Government work?

To which I answer, honestly, "I don't know." My internal snotty child also adds, "How should I know after six months of law school?" Luckily I keep my internal snotty child on a very tight leash; after all, it's a fair question.

I wouldn't have thought about litigation before law school, but I've had a lot of fun sparring during mock oral arguments. Furthermore, my professors have encouraged me in that direction. When I mentioned to one of them that I wasn't sure I wanted to be combative every day for my job, she laughed and said, "It's all about negotiation these days. You'd love it."

While I'm all for public interest work in theory, in reality I am not sure I have the patience for it. Over the years I've volunteered with various non-profits. My experience has made me very cautious about non-profits as a career option: the frequent lack of connection to financial reality that I found was frustrating, and the holier-than-thou personality of some, though of course not all, of the employees was grating. I feel like I should have liked it more than I did.

I think I probably don't want to to patent work, but even with that I'm not sure. Patent work seems to involve a lot of time spent alone reading and writing patents. I prefer interaction, a lot of teamwork. However, not knowing anything about patent work, it's very hard to say.

I don't mind the lower salary for government work in comparison to firms, and the decent 9-5 hours sound appealing. Furthermore, due to the lack of deep pockets in a lot of government work, I've heard that beginning government attorneys get a tremendous amount of experience that only senior attorneys get in law firms.

I entered law school thinking that I would eventually be a transactional attorney, but now I'm not so sure about that either. I don't know much about what tranactional attorneys do.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'll graduate from law school but discover I don't want to be a lawyer at all. I don't think that will happen -- I like this too much to abandon it -- but I'm open to the possiblity.

I hope to get some clarification after this summer. It's exciting, having options, even if they're currently far away and cloudy ones.