Types of law: what practice areas actually involve

People usually come to this question having seen lawyers on television, where essentially everyone is a criminal trial lawyer. That is a small and unrepresentative slice of the profession, and the difference matters if you are deciding whether to spend three years and a lot of money entering it.

The core doctrinal subjects

That list is a decent map of the foundation, because it is what every licensed lawyer is expected to have. Practice areas are built on top of it: employment law leans on contracts and torts, corporate work on business associations and contracts, criminal defense on criminal law and evidence.

The split that matters most

Before any practice area, there is a more fundamental division, and it predicts your daily life better than the subject does.

• Litigation — disputes that have already happened. Written argument, discovery, motions, negotiation, and occasionally trial. Adversarial by construction, and driven by court deadlines you do not control.
• Transactional — building things that have not happened yet. Contracts, deals, financings, structures. Collaborative rather than adversarial, and driven by closing dates.

Both are overwhelmingly reading and writing. The dramatic version of litigation is a small fraction of a litigator's year; most of it is documents. If that sounds unappealing, that is worth knowing now rather than in year two.

Where lawyers actually work

• Private firms, from very large to solo. The size changes the work more than the practice area does — bigger firms mean larger matters and narrower roles.
• Government — prosecutors, public defenders, agency lawyers, legislative work.
• In-house, as counsel to a single company, usually after some years elsewhere.
• Public interest and nonprofit — legal aid, advocacy organizations, impact litigation.
• Clerkships, immediately after graduation, working for a judge.

How to find out what you would like

Not by reading lists like this one. Talk to people doing the work and ask what they did yesterday, in detail — not what they find meaningful, what they actually did between nine and six. The gap between those two answers is where most disillusionment comes from.

That data also tells you something career advice will not: schools place heavily into particular sectors and particular regions. If you want a specific kind of practice, the school you attend narrows or widens that considerably.