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Hey everybody. In this episode, let's talk about whether you should work a job while also attending law school. Let's talk about it.

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Welcome to Law School Decoded, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on what it's really like to succeed in law school. Let's get started.

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So every now and then I see a law student ask, hey, I have an opportunity to work a job while also going to school as a 1L or as a 2L. And I'm thinking about taking that job opportunity. And usually they want it because it will be a little extra money at a time in their life when they need it. Usually it's not something necessarily related to their future law career. And so they are thinking, hey, it would be really, really helpful to have a job and some income at this financially vulnerable time in my life. So should I take the job? The answer to that question almost always and exclusively is no, you should not work a job and also take classes as a 1L or as a 2L. We'll get to 3L in a second. That might be different. Let's talk about why that is. First and foremost, you're not going to have much time to take a job because of the demands of being in your law school classes. Those classes are going to be in the morning, in the middle of the day, interspersed throughout the week. You may have a day off here or there, but for the most part, there's not going to be time to do a job because you're in class. So you're not going to be able to accommodate a work schedule and a job schedule and your law school schedule. And then outside of class, you're going to be doing a ton of schoolwork. You're going to be reading dozens of pages of case law every single night. You're going to be trying to understand those cases, taking notes about them, going back and reading them again, highlighting them, listening to podcast episodes about them, getting AI to explain those cases to you, reading supplements because you just don't seem to understand the school material that you're reading in your case law textbook. That is a lot of work. On top of all that, as you've heard me suggest in many other episodes, you need to be working on your exam outline throughout the semester, after every class, after every case law reading. You need to be developing that as the semester goes on from the very moment the semester starts so that at the end of the semester, you have a beautiful, well-crafted exam answer outline that you can deploy to the exam. That takes a ton of time to do the way that I am talking about. And so if you're working a job, it's going to severely get in the way of the time that you are committing to law school. You are putting three years of your life, a not insignificant amount of time in your life, to this law school journey. You are probably paying a lot of money to be there. And if you aren't, if you aren't putting all your time into maximizing your success in that law school career, you may just not get your money's worth. This is not a time to straddle different obligations that materially detract from your ability to perform as best you possibly can in law school. You don't want to look back on three years of law school and say, gosh, I could have done better if I just weren't waiting tables every night. I could have finished the readings if I just weren't working every single weekend. You want your investment to be meaningful. And in contrast, the money that you will make and whatever you will get out of that job that you take in 1L or 2L just won't be meaningful in all likelihood in comparison to the amount that you will make throughout law school or after law school when you're in your legal career. It just won't be. There's not going to be the hours in the day for you to work. A better plan, of course, financially, would be before law school to ensure that you have arranged to have the money that you need available through loans or through savings to sustain your lifestyle during law school. It will probably be, for most law students, one of the lower cost lifestyles that you ever have if you are going to succeed. You're not going to be spending money every weekend as you will later on. However, you are going to want to do that so that you aren't put in a position where you have to work and you don't have a choice. The experience that you get in whatever job you take also probably will not be meaningful or helpful in all likelihood to your law career. Most jobs that we're talking about aren't going to help advance the practice that you want to build. So as a result, those jobs aren't necessarily productive towards the goal that you should be having during those three years, which is maximizing your personal performance so that you can pursue the postgraduate career that you want to have for you and to maximize your happiness in life and your satisfaction in the jobs and career that you take on. Now, this is a very personalized decision like many others that I talk about. And so I recognize that while my default answer is that most students should not, should not take on a job, particularly their one or two L years, I realize that there are situations where because of personal circumstances, reasonable people could make the decision that is totally against what my default recommendation is. And reasonable people in certain situations could take on jobs, and even I might say, yeah, that's a good idea for them. Who might that be? Number one, third-year law students. In your third year of law student school, you've gotten in the groove. You understand how you read cases, how you study, how you prep for exams. You're going to be better at time management, you're going to be more efficient at reading those cases because they don't sound like a bunch of gibberish to you anymore. It's easier for you to distill the rule, the holding, and to put all that into your law school class notes, your case briefs, or your exam outline as you're preparing that. Because things get easier, you're going to be better, hopefully, at time management. And so if you've done that and you have extra time, a job can be a good thing. And in particular, a job as a 3L could be helpful to you advancing your career. If you can get a job at a local firm or government office as an extern or as a legal intern or as a law clerk, whatever they want to call it, that could be very productive for you because it could help you get your foot in the door to a job at that firm. Or you can leverage that experience, perhaps, to get you a job somewhere else because you've got something productive on your resume. Now, obviously, it's more helpful if that job that we're talking about in your third year is directly related to what you want to do. If you want to do family law, working in a corporate law office may not be productive. But if you want to do family law and you get in at one of the family law firms in one of your areas, you might be able to use that to springboard to another firm or that firm or to launch your own practice perhaps after graduation or to go work as a guardian at LITEM or in a family court. That's relevant experience. Getting that in your third year when you are on the cusp of really needing that job because you're about to get your diploma, that can be very productive. And again, in your third year, it's different than trying to do that in your first or second year. In all likelihood, firms and offices probably would not hire you in your first or second year because they're going to take the approach that I'm advocating for, which is you shouldn't be doing anything but working. There could be some scenarios where if a family member of yours owns a law firm or something like that, and they have an opportunity for you to help out every now and then that is productive for you, that could be another perhaps exception where you're going to take on that role. And of course, you're going to search for summer roles. Everything I'm talking about when giving this advice and this perspective is related to taking on a role during the school year. The other kind of job that I could see someone taking on would be if you are literally just paid to sit there. I had a job once where I worked in a library and my job was pretty much just to sit there. And I worked a really odd night hours, so like nobody was around. So it was some of my most productive study time that I could get and reading time that I could get because I had nothing to do. My responsibilities were to kind of monitor the building and to help anyone who came up. But at the hours I worked, that wasn't happening very often. So in essence, that would have been a job I could have done during 1L or 2L because it wasn't one where I was going to be distracted from schoolwork. I was being paid a small amount of money and I could sit there and do schoolwork. That's not a job that I worked during law school, but it would have been one that would have been okay. Now, the thing is you might think you found a job like that and you think, oh great, I can study while also doing this, something like working at a library, something very exceptional and rare like that, where you just need to be kind of on call so that you can be attentive to your customers when you need to be. But the fact is you may think that job exists and you may be wrong. You may be wrong about the job that you're applying to. You may think it's one where you're going to have all that time to study, but you don't. And so in almost all circumstances, the answer to should I work during law school when trying to study as a 1L and 2L, the answer is almost always no. The answer is almost always you need to focus on what you are there to do, which is to learn the law as being presented by your professors and maximize your success on exams so that you can maximize your chances of getting good grades and easing your path to the job that you want, so that you can set yourself up for the career that you want, and so that you can maximize your opportunity to pivot to other jobs later on. You are there to go to law school, not to work. So be very careful. If you think you have a job opportunity, assess it very carefully. Ask yourself, is this going to detract from my ability to study, to build outlines, to attend class, and to be attentive? Would I rather just have that time as free time so I can be energized to go learn and to do what I am here and paying a lot of money in most cases to do? Are you going to look back and say, gosh, I would have done better in law school if I hadn't been working? And I really wish I had just focused on what was important back then, which was maximizing law school success. If you may have that regret, if there's any chance of it, it's probably not a good idea to take that job as a 1L or 2L. The last exception I'll mention is, of course, externships where you are getting credit for the job. Those are great. Those can help you find a postgraduate career potentially, give you a good item on your early legal career resume, and you're getting credit for them. So those are essentially law school. Those are helping you get through the law school experience, and those credits are going to diminish the coursework that you're taking. So the time you would have been spending reading cases or writing briefs is instead spent in that externship. That's perfectly acceptable to do during the semester, and many, many 2L students will do that. So that's my take on whether you should work a job during law school, 1L or 2L year. But again, it is one of those questions that could be highly personalized in some scenarios. And so even though I'm saying in most cases you shouldn't do this, I do understand that there may be some questions that you have to ask about opportunities that are presented to you based on where you want to be in your law school career and beyond. So thanks for joining this episode of Law School Decoded. I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope this might help you answer the question of should I work while in law school? Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.

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That's it for today's episode of Law School Decoded. Visit us online at lawschooldecoded.com and make sure to subscribe. Until next time, keep decoding the law one step at a time.