A common career-day question asked by students is, "how do I become a lawyer?" The process can be broken down into seven basic steps.

Seven Steps to Launch Your Legal Career

A common career-day question asked by students is, “how do I become a lawyer?” Becoming a lawyer is not easy. It will take a minimum of four years of college and three years of law school before you are even allowed to take the test that decides whether you are allowed to practice law – and sometimes even that is not enough. The process of becoming a lawyer can be broken down into seven steps.

Step One - Obtain a bachelor’s degree from a college or university. This needs to be a four-year degree; an associates degree is not sufficient for admission into law school. Your particular choice of major does not matter much, at least not for purposes of getting into law school. However, your GPA in school is extremely important in determining whether you will get to move on to a law school.

Step Two - Take the Law School Admissions Test, better known as the LSAT. This is a test that is similar to exams such as the ACT or SAT, but this particular test is geared towards evaluating your potential to perform well in law school. This half-day test contains multiple choice questions as well as essay questions. This test is critically important, and most people serious about going to law school will purchase study materials, take practice tests, and perhaps even take an LSAT prep course to get ready for the exam.

Step Three – Get accepted to law school. Admission to law school will be based almost entirely on your college GPA and your LSAT score, and many law schools have minimum scores you must reach on each before they will even consider your application.

Step Four – Graduate from law school. It takes a minimum of three years to graduate from a full-time law school program; longer if you attend a program that has a part-time option. Law school exams are almost always essay questions, and to do well you have to learn the formula for writing a law school essay. It is not enough to know the information; you have to know the proper format for spitting it back out to the professor who is scanning your answer for the key words and phrases. The students who figure out the system early are the ones who will be on law review.

Step Five – Study for the bar exam. While you might believe that your law school education prepared you for the bar exam, what it really prepared you for was to cram three years of legal education into a few weeks of bar review time. Most law school graduates will take a bar review course to organize their test preparation and to make sure they cover everything they need to know. After all the time and money you have invested in your legal education to this point, investing in a bar review course is a small price to pay for passing the bar on your first attempt.

Step Six – Pass the bar exam for the state in which you want to practice law. The testing protocols and requirements vary from state to state, but most states utilize exam materials provided by the National Council of Bar Examiners. The required tests may include the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (MPRE), the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), and the Multistate Performance Test (MPT).

Step Seven – Pass the Character and Fitness evaluation. Those who think lawyers have no ethics may be surprised that applicants to the bar in most states must submit to a Character and Fitness Investigation, usually conducted by the National Council of Bar Examiners. This investigation is extensive and intrusive, delving not only into whether you have a criminal record, but also looking at traffic tickets, credit reports, substance abuse issues, and even medical records. The evaluation may be unpleasant to some, but it is a necessary step in order to practice law.

Once you complete these seven steps, you are ready to launch your legal career!