Attorneys love to talk.  They are addicted to argument, storytelling, reminiscing.  The latter is especially true, both of weathered courtroom veterans, with their salt-and-pepper beards and passé suits, and of eager novices with their bright paisley ties and the slightest hint of gray around the temples.  Whether in pages of autobiographical books or over a glass of beer in a tiny Manhattan bar, lawyers always come back to one thing: what legal education and the practice of law is to them.  Most attorneys conjure up an image that is equal parts Paper Chase, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Verdict.  To me, my legal education and my nascent career are a heady brew of Dante’s Inferno and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

I entered law school in the late summer of 2009, when most people predicted that the Great Recession would soon be over (any day now!) and things would go back to the Clinton-Bush II “boom years.”  Back then, an acceptance letter from a law school (even a second- or third-tier one) was a ticket to upper-middle class prosperity, respectability, and prestige.

“Just gotta survive the first year, and then don’t worry ’bout a thing!  You’re set for life.”  That was the advice given by both lawyers and laymen, the latter laying on the optimism with a tinge of jealousy.  I still remember the beaming face of my wife and the excited voices of my parents when I reported back, enthusiastic as a first grader, on the first day of law school.  After all, my golden ticket had just been stamped.

A law student’s three-year experience can best be summed up in terms that are eerily similar to the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief.  The first stage is bewilderment at how little you actually learn of the law.  Entering law school, one expects to gain the necessary fundamentals of the major areas of legal theory—criminal, torts, contracts, constitutional law.  You have a reasonable expectation to graduate with sufficient theoretical knowledge and practical skills to advise clients, draft legal documents, and appear before judges.  But as quickly becomes apparent, legal education is nothing of the sort.

Instead, each class is the subjective creature of its professor.  By comparison, my professors in a western New York community college were paragons of knowledge and masters of pedagogy.  Our contracts professor was a disheveled Upper West Side liberal who looked like Admiral Ackbar from Return of the Jedi and made grammatical errors on the exam questions.  During most of his lectures, he engaged in rambling tirades on the evils of the recently departed Bush-Cheney administration, bragged about his degree from Columbia University, and told tedious anecdotes that only he found funny.  All this was delivered in such a stereotypically nasal tone and peppered with more Yiddishisms than a Borscht Belt routine that even my extremely politically correct classmates cringed and exchanged glances.

Bewilderment quickly turns to anger when you realize that, after tens of thousands of dollars in loans and countless hours of mind-numbing study, you do not have enough knowledge or skill to fight a traffic ticket in court.  This stage usually comes around by the end of the first year, with devastating consequences.  One classmate, the privileged son of a suburban personal-injury lawyer, started drinking away his weekends and was drummed out for failing most of his finals.  Others quickly dropped out for the seemingly greener pastures of medical school and MBA programs, instantly cutting off contact with their former law-school classmates, as if we were a bunch of plague-infested walking corpses.

The next stage is withdrawal, usually accompanied by a sense of cynical resentment.  Having realized your grade for the class is equal to the grade on the final, you quickly learn the outline racket.  You tune out for the remainder of classes, or stop attending regularly, not bothering even to take notes.  Instead, you get a detailed outline of the class material from a friend or find it online and start memorizing it a month before the exam with the fanatical devotion of a student of the Talmud.  Then, you regurgitate the outline on your final and pray that your memory and ability to jot things down was better than that of the other 70 schmoes in your class.  Trying to be intellectually honest and learning the material by meticulous notation only leaves you tired and frustrated.

The only way to get practical knowledge is to take part in summer internships after the first two years of law school.  In halcyon days, your first summer would have been an unpaid introduction to the world of legal practice, and the next summer, you interned with the firm that later hired you.  Back then, almost all law students had job offers by the time they graduated, making the tedious yet nerve-wracking bar exam easier to get through.  These days, very few people graduate knowing where they will work.  (In 2012, Forbes published an article entitled “Why Attending Law School Is the Worst Career Decision You’ll Ever Make.”)  Today, even a halfway prestigious unpaid internship is hard to come by, and you need to start racking up “legal experience” as early as high school.

Then comes the final stage: acceptance.  You realize that the only thing you can be certain of, aside from death and taxes, is student-loan debt.  The average law student graduates with over $100,000 in loans.  As that Forbes article pointed out, fewer than one in ten recent graduates work for well-paying firms, and most have to settle for a low-figure job with obscenely long hours—hardly worth the amount of loans, not to mention the stress and aggravation.  Most of my classmates still live with their parents, and I have met several practicing attorneys who tend bar or wait tables in order to make ends meet.

Attending law school was not an altogether gloomy, frustrating experience.  Devouring thousands of pages of arcane judicial decisions makes you a more disciplined and proficient reader, so after a year of law school, I breezed through Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.  And even the miniscule practical experience is enough to make you a better problem solver.

Then, of course, there was the visit of Justice Antonin Scalia to my nominally Catholic school.  I approached him with a glass of Italian red in my hand and asked his advice for traditionalist law students.  “Drink a lot, and keep fighting the good fight,” answered the great jurist in front of my astonished classmates and the disheveled liberals of the faculty.  “And remember, we will win in the end.”

Last summer I spoke to a group of students at my college alma mater.  I advised them to go to law school only if this has been their longtime dream or they do not see themselves doing anything else.  Otherwise, they will be repeating the mistakes of my numerous classmates who went to law school only after not being able to put their sociology, English, or political-science degrees to work.  I, on the other hand, wanted to be an attorney since my second semester of college.  Do I regret it?  Mostly not, although I wish I would have known what to expect.