No I won’t be a family lawyer

In my waning days as a crime reporter, one of my favourite things to do upon encountering a homicide detective was to tell them that I was leaving journalism to go to law school and then, when they asked me what kind of law I wanted to practice, tell them I wanted to be a defence lawyer. Some of them actually swore at me, while others managed to restrain themselves to turning purple. Oh, the fun we had.

While my response was a joke it was sort of premised on the good ol’ “cops-don’t-like-defence-lawyers” assumption, in a way, the bigger joke is asking any incoming law student what kind of lawyer they’re planning to be.

Most  incoming law students have vague notions of what kind of law we think we’re interested in: environmental, business, tax, whatever. Truthfully, in my case, I do think I want to go into criminal law of some kind, but asking someone before they even start law school what kind of lawyer they want to be is kind of like asking a kid in middle school what they want to be when they grow up, in that perceptions of an occupation are drawn not from its study or practice, but mostly from having observed it from the outside somehow.

As I was handily reminded in an e-mail today from UVic law, first-year law students have less than no choice in the courses they take. I don’t know what it’s like at other schools, but I don’t even get the tiniest say in my schedule, it’s going to be all picked out for me. In second and third year there’s more choice but by then, presumably, first-year classroom experiences will have a much bigger influence on course selection than the vague notions I currently hold about different types of law.

But then again, maybe not. If there’s one kind of law that I can’t imagine myself practicing, ever, it’s family law. One of the last stories I worked on as a reporter was a bizarre house explosion in Edmonton’s north end. The couple who lived in the house, both of whose bodies were found when the wreckage cleared, had a long and acrimonious court history, an excellent summary of which can be found here. On the day we got the hundreds of pages of court filings this couple had made against one another, I spent hours sitting at my desk reading the heinous accusations each levelled against the other over the course of months. It was literally gut wrenching to read and I found myself physically anxious and nauseated for the rest of the day, simply from reading court  transcripts. On the back of each of these, in a cute little sans-serif font, was a stamp with the words “The Family Law Centre,” with a little four-person stick figure family smiling out from the middle.

So, no family law for me. And, according to this story, even though the profession surely has noble aspects, apparently not much in law school or the real world is poised to change the mind of anyone not drawn to the field:

Lawyers who practise family law say it’s a rewarding job that helps people solve problems. But for an increasing number of lawyers, negative perceptions of the field — that it only involves squabbling spouses, bitter custody disputes, and dividing meagre assets — appear to be pushing them toward work that seems quieter, safer, and more lucrative.