I don’t think there is answer I can give that’s both honest and satisfactory to the question of what kind of lawyer I want to be. I can’t fathom how I could honestly say what kind of lawyer I want to be after spending a year taking black letter law classes. If my classmates were able to wring some meaning into what they wanted their legal careers to look like by sitting through contracts, property, civil procedure, and torts, then I must have wholly missed the point.

I wasn’t able to find out what I want my legal career to look like while reading case after case for contracts or property; I can remember perhaps one time in this past semester where a case really resonated with me when discussing the questions it brought up and the implications of the decision- Author’s Guild v. Google. But by the next day we were already moving on to estates and trusts and other topics that were important for the examination, but not for what I wanted out of law school.

All we received was exposure; the planting of these vague notions of what an area of law COULD be should we choose to pursue it. But this doesn’t translate to what a specific day in the life actually entails. There is no choice given to experience the reality of working as a lawyer; that comes later. Right now, we must learn rules and standards and various doctrines that I am nearly positive I won’t remember when I receive my license.

This may seem like a terrible system for many of my classmates, but I found this a very comforting approach personally; it seemed almost tailormade for someone like me. That is, someone who knew nothing about the law prior to taking on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to learn about it. I was unprepared to even consider the question of what kind of law I wanted to practice, and the first year showed me WHY I wasn’t prepared to give an answer.

My knowledge of law was incredibly limited coming into law school; during a meeting at work following my acceptance to Columbia, my boss jokingly referred to me as “Counselor” while assigning one of our ongoing projects. I didn’t even realize I was in charge of the project until a colleague asked for a progress update the next day. I had never met a practicing lawyer until I came to law school. I really knew absolutely nothing about the law.

Initially I came into law school hoping to be an “entertainment” lawyer- I didn’t really know what this meant, but I came to the conclusion that if I was going to law school and was interested in the music industry, that’s what I should be doing. But what did that phrase even really mean to me? It basically boiled down to the idea that I spent too much time listening and reading about music and felt I knew too little about any other field to be competitive in them. There may have been some interest in artists’ rights to their work or other aspects of producing, but very little understanding of what exactly was being done. In retrospect, it made absolutely no sense to want to go into a field without knowing what the actual day-to-day work entails.

I was told by a professor earlier this semester that if I wanted to work in an entertainment field, I should focus on copyright and employment law. He stopped to consider whether labor law would be important but decided it wouldn’t be; that would be for a field where collective bargaining is involved. But why shouldn’t the music industry involve that? Isn’t it exactly the kind of industry that we should be concerned about public bargaining? Perhaps collective bargaining could be the solution to many problems we see in the industry, it may even be especially suited for the type of workers in that field. There’s this general perception that if we are to practice law in a certain field, there’s only one way to do it. Types of lawyers shouldn’t be set into premade categories of what type of law (or even general knowledge) is applicable in the circumstance. If music has gone digital, then how that data is transmitted is crucial. And that may require knowledge of telecommunications that lies outside the law school. It may also not be helpful at all for what I want out of career, but no real thought is going to be put in to these issues if I study only along the lines of what every lawyer before me has studied.

The bottom line is that everything that I need to know about how I want my professional career to play out can’t be learned in just the law school; the multidisciplinary approach needed to work creatively isn’t something that an institution focused on job placements can provide. Not that I have problem with that model either; it would be facetious to say there’s no value in learning to work hard for long periods of time. But there’s diminishing returns past a certain point. You have to know when to stop.

So, at the end of the first year, I still don’t believe I have a proper answer to the kind of lawyer I want to be, but I am now much better equipped to tackle that question. I’ve learned how a legal career is traditionally set up, but I have also gained a grasp of other directions I can look in to create something new for my own career. I have two years to figure this out, and this is the first time I have the knowledge to properly consider the question. I have no doubt I’ll come to a satisfactory answer in that time; I have absolutely nothing more important to do.

This draft has a point to make, which it makes pretty well. If one doesn't know anything about being a lawyer, how could a year of learning the basics tell one enough to shape a practice? The point is real, though it doesn't take 1,000 words to make it. But the draft assumes that if this point is valid—if any speculation about a future practice is necessarily uninformed for someone in your situation—it's also unproductive.

That's the difference between knowledge tests and imagination tests. Law school—I want to say again—is a challenge of the latter kind. Using your imagination on the possible futures of your practice is important regardless of the plausibility of the outcome, let alone of the accuracy of the prediction. It doesn't matter whether you are going to wind up being a labor lawyer for musicians. What matters is thinking about which musicians presently are unionized, which aren't, and why. That leads to questions about how production is funded, about what any musician could easily have called the "gig economy" a generation before Travis Kalanick, about why banks don't make loans to musicians, and other subjects directly germane to the future you are hypothesizing. What's important isn't whether that future comes true, or whether you have drawn it in correct perspective. The important thing is learning how to imagine what you then learn how to draw.

So the best route to the improvement of this draft, I think, is to keep the point you make, make it in a quarter or a third of the draft, and spend the rest thinking about the problems that interest you as though they were going to be your practice. It doesn't matter whether you're right. It matters whether you show up for the set.