Law as a career switch?

I've discussed this before on this blog - I'm not sure how well law works as the destination of a career switch. The traditional path of going to law school is a tough, expensive educational campaign, even tougher if you're trying to do it part-time while full-time employed.

The campaign to become a lawyer doesn't end with finishing law school and passing the bar exam somewhere. The people who become superstar lawyers seem to have started young in a big law firm - not old and by themselves. I'm told that environment is pretty cutthroat - most of them don't last at those firms. But that seems to be the beginning of how they "make their bones" and establish credibility in the field.

Does law ever work as part of an interdisciplinary mix of credentials or as an off-label credential (e.g. get the law degree but use it as an entree to do something else, as can happen with e.g. advanced science, engineering or business credentials)?

I'm hard put to say. While cases can be found where people seem to have done this (e.g. policy analyst who has a law degree), those jobs can usually also be accessed by someone without a law degree. I don't think it would make sense to get a law degree and take the bar exam to get one of those kinds of jobs - there might be other, easier ways of accessing them.

An exception to all of the above, viewing law purely as a credential investment, might be patent law. One way to approach that, also discussed previously, is for a person with the necessary science or engineering background to start out by becoming a patent agent, which doesn't require a law degree.

Law seems to be a field where correct credentials are taken very seriously.

That all said: here is an amusing website which seems to have identified some loopholes for online paths to law degrees: ttp://www.lawschoolbible.com/dc_bar_option.htm.

There are also several states which still allow "apprenticeship" or "reading law" in law offices as a non-law-school pathway to becoming a lawyer: see

http://www.lawyersatisfactionblog.com/2009/04/becoming-a-lawyer-without-need.html
or

http://www.lawschool.com/noneed.htm

I think it's great that these pathways exist, but they sound impossible for already-employed people. And most shortcut websites end up pointing you back to Concord Law School.

So if you want to get a law degree as a way of opening a door to something else, generally there seem to be more efficient ways to do it.

But law is not impossible as a career switch.

Brain Rules - interesting book...

...that I haven't actually read yet, but hope to soon.


See http://www.brainrules.net/

or

the NPR show Parents' Journal, where I first heard of it:

http://www.parentsjournal.com/radioshow

Here's a quick summary from the Brain Rules website:

The brain is an amazing thing. Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget—and so important to repeat new knowledge?

More on Life Coaching - podcast

Interesting interview of one David Wood on Michael Senoff's Hard to Find Seminars website:
http://find.hardtofindseminars.com/category/experts/david-wood/.

Actually, the interview was pretty hard to find on that website, too. I found it through iTunes searching against "coach".

The audio was also pretty marginal. If Michael Senoff wants attract people to those podcasts, he should invest a bit in improving that.

David Wood also has a visually appealing website at http://www.life-coaching-resource.com/.

With an unregulated, not heavily-credentialed, subjectively evaluated field, there's a lot of potential for fraud in life coaching, so I don't know if this guy was on the level or not. But he gave at least one interesting response to a question: What is the difference between psychotherapy and life coaching? Answer: Psychotherapy is like getting someone with broken legs to where they can walk. Life coaching is like getting a person who can walk to where they can run a four-minute mile.

So David Wood thinks the two are related. An obvious corollary, which they never pursued, would be that a person with some background in psychotherapy should be off to a good start if they wanted to consider life coaching. They did claim that "psychotherapists" generally need a license, whereas "life coaches" generally don't in most or all US states.

In fact, as mentioned in earlier posts, "psychotherapists" generally don't need a license either.

David Wood did mention that there were now university programs in life coaching. That's a new one - it will have to be the subject of a later post.

Jargon alert: something that seemed to come up a lot on the Senoff website was "HMA" consulting. HMA stands for Hidden Marketing Asset. Hadn't heard that one before today.

Health Care Career Switch - Physician's Assistant

Physician's assistant is a possible pathway to a career switch if you have a science undergraduate degree. Kettering is one example of a school offering a career switch path:

http://www.kcma.edu/academics/pa/index.html

"Whether you’re a high school student exploring your health care career options, or you’re a college graduate seeking a career change, Kettering College’s PA program can work for you. Through Kettering College’s bachelor’s degree in human biology, non-degree holders can take the necessary prerequisite courses both to earn an undergraduate degree and to advance seamlessly into KCMA’s Master of Physician Assistant Studies. Students already possessing a bachelor’s degree in any basic science or any health care-related field can jump right in to the master’s program, provided they have the appropriate prerequisites."

This link gives a real-life case study:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/04/pf/career_switch.moneymag/index.htm

And for those of you who, like I was, were wondering just what the final difference between a PA and a nurse practitioner is, these links may or may not help you. From the viewpoint of someone who has encountered them both as a patient, it doesn't seem like much, but they reach similar roles through different educational pathways with different cultures - a NP starts out with a BSN in nursing and gets more training; a PA typically goes straight to PA school for a bachelor's or master's degree.

It's interesting that health care has such stovepiped, parallel, mutually hostile pedagogical pathways for being licensed to work on patients.

I didn't even try to get at some of the other credentialed terms like paramedic, EMT, etc. - those are probably different yet again.

https://career.berkeley.edu/Article/070209a-jv.stm

http://medinfo.ufl.edu/pa/program/faq.htm

http://www.ultimatenurse.com/forum/f14/physician-assistant-nurse-practitioner-1190/ [some gut reactions from the field, not written by college deans selling their programs]

http://www.wapa.org/pdfs/np-pa_chart.pdf

Pros and cons questions:
-Would this be a $100000 credential for a $50000 job? (It seems like an MD or OD degree is a $1m credential for a $10m job.) Of course, money isn't everything. I don't think PA studies can be a part-time pursuit and it sounds like real work. Full-time school can be very expensive for midcareer people, both with school costs and with foregone income.

-After all this, you're forever professionally defined as an "assistant" to someone. Of course, we all have bosses, superiors, etc. But it seems like having it in the credential's name would rankle. No way a physician will ever consider you as an equal on any level - professional or social - I would think. Doctors and nurses have had generations to work out their respective roles and mixture of deference and dominance, like officers and enlisted persons in the Army - and even then, there's friction. This is newer and the respective roles are even less clear.

-Also, how will near-peers like the nurses - and NP's - regard you?

-Helping heal people - wonderful!

-Regular hours - if you get them.

-Not the same legal liability as a physician (though anyone anywhere can be sued - I would carry professional liability insurance if I were in this field).

-Also not the same money as a physician.