If your child is going to find prosperity and happiness in any career, they must have the aptitude for it, otherwise, things are going to get tough. There are many types of law, and that means many long term career opportunities. For example, there’s family law, personal injury law, and even more specific types of cases like DWI (incidentally, locate a local Dallas DWI lawyer if you have been affected by the laws surrounding charges for driving while impaired). But now, let’s look at what it might take for your child to be suitable for a career in law.
Academic ability
This is a hard pill to swallow for some parents, but not everybody in life has the same types of abilities, and if your child is not particularly gifted academically, law school is likely to throw up some major challenges in terms of study time and knowledge retention that may prove insurmountable. Aside from anything, the pre-requisite qualifications would typically need to be in place before a law school would consider offering a space on their course to your child.
To put things as bluntly as possible, your child is going to have a natural aptitude towards certain careers, and you should only consider a career in law as being a suitable option for your child where the academic signs are in place in terms of school grades and a natural tendency towards self-study.
Communication and organisation
Lawyers have a lot on their plates. Lawyers handle multiple clients at once. It’s not like in the movies where a lawyer has one client and they beat the system and become pals. Lawyers move fast, generally spending concentrated periods of time on tens (or hundreds) of clients per month. This takes serious organisational skills.
Lawyers also have to be able to communicate. This doesn’t mean that your child should only consider a career in law if they are a budding Shakespeare, but it does mean that they will need to be able to express ideas and concepts clearly and confidently, without confusing themselves (or others) in the process. They need to be able to get relevant points across to others in a concise, engaging manner.
People skills
This goes hand in hand with communication but people skills are developed over time – if your child isn’t currently showing that they have the seeds of the ability to adapt their tone to speak to all types of people (and to do so confidently), then the fast pace of speaking to many clients from many different walks of life and making them all feel at ease is perhaps a feature of a career in law that you child will not find suitable. Lawyers need to be adaptable to different circumstances and clients, knowing when to show empathy, when to talk facts and how to go about gathering evidence.