Law School vs Law Practice: Alex Petraglia on the Key Differences

The transition from law school student to real lawyer is one that often comes with growing pains, particularly when you don’t know what to expect. As a licensed lawyer with years of experience, Alex Petraglia has a deep understanding of the differences between being a law student and truly practicing the law.

The Scope of Material and Working with Evolving Legislature

In law school, you’re often working with a narrow scope of material that focuses on the specifics of a certain part of the law, or else a specific case. As a practicing lawyer, this will seldom happen. The scope of information you’ll need to retain and understand as a lawyer is much more vast, and your tasks will never be so narrow or outlined as they are in law school.

Law school calls for general knowledge of the law itself. Once you’re a lawyer, you will have to know all the degrees and nuances in the system of written laws and know how to research them.

In other words, clients won’t come to you with questions “about the law.” They’ll come to you with facts and a problem. It is then your job to figure out which areas of the law and what fine print within subsections of legislation apply to their case. Dealing with actual agencies, issuances, department orders, and legislation that is constantly evolving in real-time is a major part of law practice.

The Need for Soft Skills as a Lawyer

You need more than legal knowledge to be a good lawyer. Conducting effective interviews, having good social skills and communication skills to use with clients and other attorneys, and understanding how to go about your legal research in a knowledgeable manner may end up being more important to your legal career than having an encyclopedia of information stored in your mind.

Personal Stakes vs. Your Client’s Stakes

When you are in law school, the “stakes” are basically your grades and your job prospects. As a practicing lawyer, the stakes reach far beyond your personal goals. Your client’s liberty, assets, livelihood, and/or business are at stake. You’re no longer playing for your future alone but the future of someone else, whether that client is facing jail time or millions in fines and damages.

This doesn’t mean there are no longer personal stakes, however. If you excel, you’ll see high-ticket profile accounts dropping on your desk. On the other hand, if you repeatedly fail to perform, you won’t see many chances for promotion or professional opportunities.

Additionally, some law firms continue to operate on “grades” even though you’re out of law school. These grades often determine salary, promotions, etc., and are public knowledge at the firm.

Paper vs. Paperless

While universities have taken major strides in recent years to go paperless, many law students are still relying on heavy case books. They’re expensive, huge, and don’t usually contain all the necessary or appropriate information. Generally, case books are meant to hold only the most important material. Instead, they usually showcase entire cases printed verbatim (cases that are usually free online).

Lawyers do not have room for additional paperwork. Thus, tablets and other technological devices are very helpful tools for them to use. While these devices can get expensive, investing in technology is worthwhile for all practitioners of the law.

As a student, you might risk using an under-performing laptop or forgo the cost of online storage. If you lose data, it may cause you lots of personal problems, but it won’t be an issue for anyone else.

Conversely, practicing lawyers have no extra time to spend on recovering information that could make or break a client’s case and must invest in solid-state drives for their laptops as well as cloud storage and security.