Many years ago, I knew a young couple who were very much in love. The young lady loved the idea of pleasing her parents and impressing her friends by marrying a good-looking boy with a promising career. The young man was in love with the idea of having a pretty girl on his arm who would respect and adore him. They were both in love with the idea of moving on to the stage of life that today’s young people call “adulting.”
And so the young couple got married, and stayed married for quite a while, until they got divorced.
You see, this young couple never understood, until it was much too late, that while they had both been deeply and truly in love, they had been in love with the idea of being in love, but not so much with each other.
We too often ask young people to make important decisions before they have the maturity or life experience required to make good decisions. Selecting a life partner is a good example, especially back in the day when people got married in their twenties, usually without having lived together first.
Our education system provides another example. Young people are asked to make career decisions before they have an opportunity to learn what is involved in doing a particular job. When the decision involves a professional school like law school, where annual tuition costs in Canada can range from $20,000 to $35,000, it is easy for people to become trapped by decisions made before they were ready to make them.
Which brings me to the decision that newly qualified lawyers are required to make as to what they want to do with their law degree. Since they often do not have much of an understanding as to what is involved in working as a lawyer, it should not be surprising that they may make poor decisions when they select a career path.
I meet many young lawyers who are in love with the idea of working at Big Law for Big Money and enjoying Big Prestige. But, like the unfortunate lovers mentioned above, they do not have a very deep understanding of what they are getting into. I also meet young lawyers who are in love with the idea of working in-house based on things that they have heard about healthier lifestyles, but without understanding that many in-house jobs are just as demanding as private practice jobs.
The fact of the matter is that young lawyers do not know nearly enough about the legal profession to expect them to easily make good career decisions. In the absence of hard facts, it is not surprising that many of them will get an idea in their heads (often planted there by people with a financial incentive to plant it) and fall in love with it.
May I humbly suggest that it would be really nifty if Law Schools provided a mandatory course that provided law students with the information that they need to help them make good career decisions.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.