Young Solo Hated Law School But Likes Her Job; Stay True to Your 'Lawyering Personality,' She Urges
Sona Tatiyants hated law school, but she’s glad she got her law degree. It opened the door to a satisfying career as a sole practitioner handling estate planning matters, she says in a guest column at the Forbes blog She Negotiates.
Nonetheless, there are things she would do differently if she could dial the time machine back to her law school years, Tatiyants says, and she offers the benefit of her experience to those still struggling through their legal education.
In particular, law students should focus on developing good relationships with classmates and members of the bar who practice in areas that interest them, she says. And to find out what their areas of interest are, law students need to take courses that appeal to them and explore as many job opportunities and internships as they can.
In her own case, it was only by taking an initial legal job that involved a lot of administrative hearings and depositions that she found out this kind of adversarial work was not for her, Tatiyants recounts. “I hated stepping into a courtroom knowing that someone would win and someone would lose.”
But the job did help her realize that she needed to focus her legal career in another direction.
“Stay true to your lawyering personality and look for a job that best suits it,” Tatiyants now urges others. “Doing this may just put you in a small minority of lawyers who actually love what they do.”
