The legal profession today has embraced specialization to a significant extent. There are differences in workload, client contact, work environment, compensation and overall quality of life, depending upon whether one specializes in criminal law, family law, personal injury or defective product litigation, trust and estate law, business transactions and litigation, tax law, employment or labor law, environmental law, patent and trademark law, civil rights litigation, or in other specialized areas. The only meaningful way of determining whether you may want to be a lawyer is to look at the type of skills that a person must develop and ultimately become proficient at in order to be a competent lawyer in any area. Even though there are significant differences in the various practices of law, the essential skills required of any lawyer are very much the same. The main task of a lawyer is to solve a client's problem.
People come to a lawyer for help in solving their problems.
A lawyer must be able to empathize in order to properly understand the needs and concerns of his or her client, but a lawyer must develop objective, analytical skills to identify the potential legal issues that must be addressed and then to formulate a plan to reach a result that is consistent with the desires of the client as well as the requirements of the law. We live in a very complex society which has required the development of very far-reaching, technical laws. Understandably, most clients are either wholly uninformed about the existing law or have significant misunderstandings of what the law prohibits or requires. A lawyer must be able to educate competently his or her clients. The degree of comprehension will be affected by the client's vested interest, an unwillingness to hear the bad news, a strong disagreement about the goals of the law, etc.