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.