Trial Lawyer Qualifications

Video Transcript

"You go to law school and get a degree, pass the Bar exam and decide what kind of law you want to practice. And, a lot of lawyers start off with criminal defense and divorce cases, and those both will get you into court. It's basically when you take a client that has that sort of a dispute, it's going to involve going to court. And, that's just the way you do it. You get experience as you go along. You have to get an undergraduate degree from a college or university, a bachelor's degree, then you have to go to a law school and get what's called a JD degree which stands for doctor of jurisprudence. And, that's either a three or four year program. Once you do that, you stand for the Bar exam, and once you pass that, you are qualified to be a lawyer, generally. There are various private organizations that will help you marshal your skills to be a trial lawyer, to improve, and get better, but basically, the education requires a bachelor's degree and a law degree. In this day and time, you have to be able to use the Internet fairly effectively for a lot of reasons, probably more reasons than we can even go into. You have to be pretty detailed-oriented; you have to be able to focus on particular projects; you have to be able to do research on the law; you have to be able to go out and interview witnesses and look at scenes of incidents and be able to figure out from that what is beneficial to your position. You have to be able to relate to people. You have to understand that when you try a lawsuit, you're in front of a judge at a minimum and also potentially a jury, and as a consequence you have to be able to relate to a jury in a way that you get your point across to them. That takes interpersonal skills, being able to have a conversation, if you will, with the jury, or for that matter with the judge. Pretty much where you go from here is to try to become a judge. I think every lawyer, especially trial lawyers, think that they would be good judges and that is sort of the acme of a career as a trial lawyer."