What is the lawyer lifestyle really like? It is all about going into court and fighting for clients’ rights, late nights at the office poring over thousands of pages of documents and paperwork, and daytime meetings with current and potential clients wanting to hire them for help? Or are there other components to the lifestyle that most lawyers live? Of course, grouping this all together under the huge umbrella of a lawyer’s lifestyle is unfair, since every lawyer practices differently and has a unique approach to his or her work. However, for anyone wishing to understand more about legal employment, a look into this lifestyle is quite an eye opening experience.

Lots of kids want to be lawyers when they grow up, but when they enter college some decide on other career paths while others severely underestimate the work that goes into being a lawyer. For some, the lifestyle of a lawyer is just too good to pass up: the high salaries, the freedom to be in business for oneself, the knowledge that accompanies legal training. But often, the additional degree, the additional testing and the additional hours spent above the normal 40 hour work week are just too much to even think about, let alone bear in reality. So for some, legal employment is entirely unattainable, while for others legal employment is something they strive for 100 percent of the time.

For the former in this scenario, other career paths that may involve the legal world in some way are often more viable. These career paths normally do not require a law degree, though they do deal with the laws affecting a certain segment of the population or of the business world. For the former in this case, legal employment comes only after law degrees are attained and after a state bar exam has been passed. Only with both of these things completed can someone wishing to be a lawyer actually obtain legal employment.

For this segment of the population, legal employment resources are largely available both through their educational institutions and through the state’s law association. Through these resources, anyone graduating from law school and completing the state bar exam can obtain legal employment, both in a law office setting and in other settings too. Most businesses need lawyers on staff, so a lot of legal employment will involve not actually working at a law practice. However, this ultimately is up to interested individuals and recent graduates.