How do you learn to be a lawyer?
You don’t learn it from law school, that’s for sure. As all new attorneys know, law school only teaches us how to think like a lawyer and teaches us the theory of the law. It doesn’t teach us how to practice law and it sure doesn’t teach us the business of law. Some people are trying to change that but it’s a hard and uphill process to try to change an establishment.
You need a mentor – that’s what everyone tells you when you graduate and you’re trying to learn the practice of law. You need a mentor to show you how to write a motion, how to format filings to court, how to comply with specific court rules, etc. As graceous as I found some attorneys were when I first started, it was hard to go to someone all the time and ask what I thought were silly questions.
The StartingOutSolo listserv is a great place to start in asking questions. We feel free to ask silly questions because we’ve all been in that situation. Another place that helped me immensely when I first started was Solosez. It is a listserv by the American Bar Association. You do not need to be a member of the ABA to join the listserv. Solosez is a listserv of attorneys from all over the country and they will answer any questions you might have on anything related to the practice of law. Another listserv that I subscribe to is MassForum. MassForum is very similar to Solosez but instead of attorneys from all over the US, it is confined to only members of the Massachusetts Bar. I usually post questions I have to both listservs to get more than a couple of opinions and hopefully forms to help me.
If you do sign up for Solosez and/or MassForum, it would be a good idea to create a separate email account just for the listserv because they generate hundreds of emails a day and if you don’t have it separated from your regular inbox, you will soon find it unmanageable. I recommend using Gmail for the separate email because of Gmail’s sorting and archiving features.
In lieu of having a real mentor, I turned to Solosez and MassForum when I first started. Without them, I think I would’ve been lost for far longer than I had hoped.