Top 5 Majors to Prepare for Law School

On this episode of The Lawyer You Know, we're going to go through the top five recommended undergraduate majors to get into law school. And I'm going to give you my opinion as to whether or not I would advise you to have that major. So we're going to start with number five, and that's criminal justice. And to me, it's a pretty good major if you go into law school to take a criminal justice major, if you want to be a criminal defense attorney or a prosecutor, or maybe even a judge as your long-term career goals. But criminal justice is kind of pointed in a certain direction and maybe slanted a bit. And in my opinion, it's not the best major to go into in your undergrad in order to get into law school and to prepare you most for life after law school, generally as an attorney. Number four is business, just general business. And underneath this is business administration, is economics, is all sorts of business degrees that you can take in undergrad before going to law school. And while it's the number four on the list of undergraduate majors by percentage for students in law school, in my opinion, this is the best major for someone to take when going to undergrad preparing for law school, because what they don't teach you in law school is how to run a business. And if you ever start your own firm or become a partner in a law firm, you're going to have to know how to run a business. You're going to have to know how to balance the books. You're going to have to know how to deal with profits and losses, how to deal with hiring and firing employees, how to pay them, dealing with HR, potentially dealing with marketing and overhead and renting or owning a business or building. So those are things you can learn as a business major in undergrad that will really help you when you become a lawyer. Number three on the list is creative writing slash English major. This was the one that was really recommended to me a lot because in law school, you've got to write a lot of papers, write a lot of essays. Your writing skills will be put to the test. And in creative writing and English majors, they teach you how to be a well-written person and know how to explain things eloquently. So they sound really good to the person reading them. In my opinion, this is not a good major for you to take an undergrad. I had a lot of friends in law school that were English majors or creative writing majors, and they would write these long verbose answers to law school questions. When in reality, most professors are looking for very specific points to give you and award you points on a test. And if you write these long answers, sometimes you're wasting time because all these tests are timed. You're wasting time making it sound eloquent rather than just getting to the point and making sure you're stacking up points to get the best grade you can in that class. So I think creative writing and English kind of goes in the opposite direction of how law school teaches you how to think. And this would not be my recommended major. Number two, which is really interesting to me. Most of you guys probably already know what number one is, but number two, which would also be my recommendation secondarily to business as a major would be other definitely recommend other. And what I consider other is something that you're interested in specifically and something you think you can do well on because taking an easy major or a major you think will be easy personally because you like that subject will allow you to get a high GPA, which is really going to help you when you're trying to get into law schools. And some of these majors include sport management, which is what I took. I'm really into sports. It has a business element to it, and it was awesome. It was easy. It was fun. Had a high GPA really helped me get into law school. Other ones. If you're really interested in science, you can take biology. If you're interested in religion, you can take theology. If you're interested in philosophy or psychology, you can take those majors. If you're very interested in them, usually you'll do well and you get that GPA up. It'll help you get into law school. So other is definitely a major that I recommend. The number one major for most undergraduates that want to go to law school or on a pre-law track is political science. Teaches you how to think kind of like a lawyer. It's that type of world that teach you how to be savvy, how to make arguments. In my opinion, though, most people that took political science told me it was pretty tough and they had a hard time keeping their GPA up. And it was a lot of work and a lot of reading during college, which most people aren't ready for at that point. Some people aren't even ready for it when they're in law school after graduating college. But poli sci to me is not a major that I saw really benefited anybody in law school. So my two recommendations would be business or other, even though they're not number one on the list. So hopefully you guys learned something. Hopefully that'll help you. If you have any questions at all about what major you should take, feel free to leave me a comment and I'd love to have a dialogue with you.