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[00:00:07] Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here. How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from law school student into your professional career as an attorney, a bona fide, fully licensed attorney, and where we make the practice of law fun. And today we’re going to answer the question of what happens when I start my first job.
[00:00:27] Scott Benton: What happens when I start my first job?
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[00:01:18] Scott Benton: There’s a lot that happens when you start your first job, but mostly where they’re going to be just an enormous amount of adjustments and changes that you’re going to be going through and that you’re going to be making. One of the more difficult adjustments that we’re going to be talking about here on this episode is your need to basically throw away everything you’ve been preparing for your whole life.
[00:01:41] Scott Benton: That sounds pretty drastic. What do you mean throw away everything that you’ve been preparing for your whole life? Essentially, yes, if you’re going to succeed in your job as a first time attorney. You have to throw away law school, in a matter of speaking. Here’s what I mean by that.
[00:01:59] Scott Benton: Up [00:02:00] to this point in your life, you’ve been in school and you’ve been entrenched in passive activity as a student. You’ve been firmly occupied with and inside the theory of law, but you haven’t practiced as an attorney yet. Now you will. Maybe you’ve done some work for an attorney during an internship or summer associate program or maybe you did some law clerk work. But all of that is largely still passive in nature. Now don’t get me wrong, internships and law clerk positions, all of that, those are a necessary step in the right direction.
[00:02:34] Scott Benton: That eventually is going to get you to the point of actively practicing as an attorney. You want to be in that place, that active practicing attorney place. That’s what you’re trying to reach. But in order to get there, it mostly requires that you throw away everything you learned in law school. However, keep in mind that law school is extremely valuable.
[00:02:57] Scott Benton: We’re not arguing that. It forms the [00:03:00] foundation of the work in the legal field that you’re going to do. And that never goes away. That never leaves you. But it’s a stepping stone to the place that you’re trying to reach, that you want to reach, that you’re going to reach, when you start your first job. And that’s when everything suddenly changes.
[00:03:17] Scott Benton: So it doesn’t help if you hang on to your law school experience. You’ve got to shed the law school mindset, which is passive. It’s only going to hold you down. Instead, you have to almost immediately, like on day one, you have to adopt an active mindset. That you’ve frankly had little or even no experience with up to this point because you’ve been in school for so long.
[00:03:44] Scott Benton: That’s why we’re saying your whole life. Consider that, in the United States anyway. You go to preschool, what are you like 5 years old when you go to preschool? Then eventually you graduate to kindergarten. And then there’s grade school, then there’s high school. So by [00:04:00] the time you graduate high school, you’ve been in a passive mindset.
[00:04:04] Scott Benton: That means student listening to the teacher. You’ve been in a passive mindset for 12 years minimum. Then from high school, you graduate high school, so you’re an attorney now. So that meant you graduated high school. You went to undergraduate for usually four years. Sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s longer.
[00:04:24] Scott Benton: Sometimes you’re there for five years, maybe even six years if you’re doing like a double major or something. So that now gets us to 16, we’re saying four years. So that gets a 12 plus four. So we’re at 16 years in the passive mindset. Then on top of it, you go for another three years in law school and you probably don’t stop.
[00:04:43] Scott Benton: You don’t start your job immediately. Once you graduate law school, there’s this whole bar exam that you’ve got to study for and take and maybe take it more than once. So that is another year of time that you’re spending in terms of passing the [00:05:00] bar. So that gets you, that’s a total of 20 years stuck in that passive mindset.
[00:05:05] Scott Benton: That’s 20 years. So that’s your whole life, pretty much. Then all of a sudden you’re going into an environment where the requirements are exactly the opposite, where you must quickly get up to speed in an active mindset that you largely haven’t had to use as far as school is concerned, or really almost your entire school experience, and why we’re saying you need to throw away everything you’ve been preparing for your whole life.
[00:05:36] Scott Benton: And the sooner you’re able to do that, the faster you learn how to practice law with abandon. It’s one of the reasons, just one really, why it generally takes around 5 years for attorneys to get really good at performing their legal work. After 20 years of living in a more passive student mindset, it’s a whole new active professional mindset that you have to [00:06:00] adopt and you have to incorporate 100 percent of the time.
[00:06:04] Scott Benton: Sometimes new attorneys start their first job and sometimes it’s just not the right fit or the right focus of law for them, which is that’s understandable that’s going to happen. And those people definitely need to go back out there and find the right focus and they’re going to get in the right position that they belong into.
[00:06:20] Scott Benton: However, for other first time attorneys, when the job doesn’t quite stick, it can often include a difficulty in switching from that more passive student mindset to the active professional mindset.
[00:06:34] Scott Benton: And sometimes that takes a couple of jobs before they successfully make the switch. As you listen to the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast episodes as a law student, by the time you get into your first job, not only will you know about switching into the active mindset, and that’s important, you just, you need to know that you’re going to have to do that, but if you’ve learned about our success cycle, you’re going to have all the necessary framework in which to [00:07:00] practice law, and that’s a subject, practicing law, that’s not taught in law school. Again, with the success cycle, there are three parts. So after you’ve switched into an active mindset and out of the student mindset, and you do that as fast as possible, for each of your cases, you’re going to put together a to do list.
[00:07:18] Scott Benton: Then from the to do list, you’re going to perform the legal services. And then finally, you’re going to bill for your legal services once you’re done. For your time, you’re going to bill for your time, you’re going to get paid, you’re going to then go back to your to do list and start all over again. And you’re just going to do that throughout your entire career.
[00:07:34] Scott Benton: So I hope that’s a helpful overview on why you’ve got to throw away everything you’ve learned in law school when you begin your first job as an attorney. And hopefully, this will help you make that critical adjustment as early as possible. I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast.
[00:07:50] Scott Benton: If you’re finding this to be valuable information and you’d like to get an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website. Our website is classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the [00:08:00] number 2, courtroom. com. You can leave us your contact information. You’ll get an alert whenever we put out a new episode, and if this is valuable information for you, of course, don’t forget to share, and subscribe.
[00:08:11] Scott Benton: That’ll also help you stay on top of all of our newest episodes. And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one client at a time. Thank you so much.
