Reinventing The Law Business: What Courses To Take In Law School To Get A Job And Build A Career

This is a perennial question. What courses should I take in law school that will help me get a job and, as much as possible, also prepare me for a career? Here are my thoughts.

Your future employer will care about three basic things. There are probably a bunch of other things, but these are usually the key issues for an employer at the interview stage:

• Are you smart?
• Are you an eager hard worker?
• Do you have a skill set that matches what they need?

As far as proving you are smart, you can exemplify this best by getting good grades. So – and this may not sound “good” or “admirable” – you should logically take courses you will get good grades in.

As far as proving you are an eager hard worker, it is the exact same thing; namely, make sure you get good grades.

As far as having a matching skill set, it gets more interesting, as there is a contradiction between learning what is most useful for your career and marketing yourself to get a job. Indeed, I think these two goals directly conflict but then coexist in a subtle manner that I will try to explain.

On the one hand, if your future employer is a law firm that specializes in, say, real estate, then they will really like the fact that you have taken a ton of real estate courses, that you read real estate books in your spare time, that you took shop and carpentry in high school, and that your dad is a real estate developer. In other words, your future employer will love that you have a concentration in a particular area.

On the other hand, what is really best for your career is that you do the opposite of this! What you “should” do in law school in order to set the predicate for becoming a great lawyer is to take a wide variety of super-hard courses that challenge your mind and give you a diversity of knowledge throughout the business and legal worlds. The reason for this is that if you narrow your focus too early, you will, as time goes on, become narrow in your thinking and in your ability to create outside-the-box solutions. This is because you haven’t been outside the box in the first place. Also, if you have taken easy courses – as I outlined and semi-suggested above – you won’t have gotten used to really stretching your mind.

If however you have had exposure to multiple disciplines and you have taught your brain to love attacking difficult and unsolvable problems, you will be a lean and mean fighting machine (“intellectually fearless” is my phrase) to be able to do what the best lawyers are called upon to do; namely, to solve cutting-edge problems that have never been solved before. You will be trained to be a truly great lawyer.

So there you have it:

You can niche yourself early and take easy courses to get good grades and get a good job out of law school;

Or, you can do the exact opposite, take all sorts of courses and train your brain to think by taking courses that are too hard, get probably not as good grades, and have a lot of trouble finding a job.

What a Hobson’s choice! What should you do?

You could lament that there is no way out of this box or just accept reality for what it is and make the most logical and practical judgments as are possible. If it were me, I would:

Take courses that were hard but not so hard I couldn’t get good grades and work super-duper-hard to make sure I ended up with the good grades after all.

Pick an area to niche myself just enough that I could sell it to a future employer as an area I have concentrated on, but otherwise take the diversity of courses I otherwise advocate.

This isn’t perfect, but as I think on it I don’t think there is a perfect answer to this dilemma, so the best way out is thinking through the middle as I have suggested.

Finally, once you have a job offer, which many people get before their last year of law school, it is perfectly okay to spend the last year taking a diversified curriculum of super-hard courses.

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Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With more than 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at [email protected].