I’ve been working feverishly on a new website, which I’ll introduce when it’s ready to go live. The date for its unveiling is heavily dependent on some factors outside my control, which leave me with not much of a clue about when it will actually be ready for polite company. I can tell you that the site is going to be a fairly comprehensive examination of the subject of law school in general.

As part of the preparation for this website, I asked my Solosez colleagues a simple question: Thinking back to your pre-law days, what questions did you have about law school? I was especially interested in questions with answers that weren’t easily found.

Solosez responded with enthusiasm, and I amassed quite a collection of questions that will help form the basis of a future “FAQ” section for the website. But also, among the lists of questions, I received the following email from Naomi Fujimoto, a Hawaii solo, and it “spoke” to me.

I decided to share it with TIS readers, with Naomi’s blessing, in hopes that it might take you back to your own pre-law days, regain a little of that youthful inspiration, and maybe even inspire some of you to find ways to help the next generation of lawyers, as Naomi has done.

My Pre-Law Journey – Naomi Fujimoto

I actually decided that I would be a lawyer in high school and didn’t think about my choices again until I was studying for the bar, at which time it seemed a little late for a change in plans especially since I had a firm waiting for me. I was focused on what I needed to do to become a lawyer. What college major would help me the most? Conventional wisdom included political science and history, but I decided being an English major would be the most practical and helpful.

Other lawyers mentioned that, prior to becoming lawyers, they thought being a lawyer meant being a litigator. Oddly, I didn’t consider myself doomed to criminal or commercial litigation ~ I actually wanted to go into family law and work in our juvenile justice system so I interned in our Department of Health to get some experience in how the DoH rules and regs were made/maintained. I wound up not going into family law (which is another long story) but that was the impetus that made me interested in being a lawyer.

When I decided to actually go to law school and I was trying to select where I would go, one of the first things I thought about was whether it would be better for me to go to The Richardson School of Law (Hawaii’s law school — I believe the only law school in the Pacific basin) and build ties to my classmates, most of whom I would be practicing law with later, or to go to a school with a wider range of programs and experiences (including experiences living outside of Hawaii not just law related experiences).

I wanted to go to law school in D.C., where the Supreme Court is located, where Congress is located, where I would have what might be my last chance to live someplace other than my home state in a semi-sheltered environment (but as my parents also pointed out, where I didn’t know anyone and where I had no relatives).

The next thing I thought about was money ~ could I afford to go away, could I afford the tuition, was there a chance at a scholarship or work study program, could I afford a reasonably safe place to live — and how would I find out where a safe place to live was since the only prior time I had been in D.C. was on a bicentennial tour in 1976?

Several years ago, after I had been a lawyer for a while, I was invited to speak at a career day at an all girls school. I had a classroom full of teenagers who said they wanted to be lawyers. Turned out, all but one of them wanted to be a lawyer based upon their viewing of popular tv shows involving lawyers ~ lawyers who were the dramatic center of attention, rich, and rarely shown to crack open a book.

That one exception wanted to be a lawyer and actually worked in a law firm for the summer doing their filing and running errands and so had a good idea about the less glamorous side of practicing law.

When I mentioned that they needed to take a test (the LSAT) to get into law school, take tests during law school, and then even if they graduated from law school, they needed to take one last whopper of a test called the Bar Exam, only that one student who had a “real” idea of being a lawyer still wanted to be a lawyer.