One of my first jobs in high school was working for an estate attorney here in my city.
He was helping my mother after my grandmother died and managed to get all of her affairs in order. To my luck, he took an interest in me immediately after he met me. After we spoke for an hour, he offered me a paid internship position at his firm where I would help him with whatever secondary tasks he had like filing and bank deliveries. Sometimes he’d give me the keys to his car to go and pick up food and coffee for all of his employees in the office. Although I had never really considered becoming a lawyer up to that point, my mind was slowly changing. I asked him about it one day, and he told me that I had to make sure I had the disposition to be an attorney. He said that court cases can drain people physically and emotionally, especially if I became a criminal attorney. Apparently he chose to become a family and estate lawyer after years of working as a state prosecutor for criminal cases. He was forced to fight against random citizens on behalf of the state on a daily basis. Sometimes they were true criminals with cut and dry cases with easily provable blame. But he says that sometimes he can’t sleep at night when he thinks of the ambiguous cases that resulted in convictions, simply because he was doing his job. I realized fairly quickly that I wouldn’t do well with that sort of career. Instead, I followed my path into becoming an English major before graduating and getting a job writing legal briefs for a local attorney. Now I do a mix of both without the moral quandary.