From wrestling with rogue printers to decoding what the partner really means, the true lessons of legal life begin after graduation
Law school is great at some things. It can teach you Latin phrases you’ll never use, give you reading lists that could crush a small animal, and make you feel extremely confident about your ability to analyse a fictional dispute about a wheelbarrow. What it doesn’t teach you is what the job actually feels like when you’re in a real firm, on a real matter, with a real client whose “urgent” email is timestamped 2:14am.
Here are eight lessons that appear nowhere in a syllabus but quietly run the profession…
1. ‘Just a quick question’ is never quick
In law school, a quick question is a clarification. In practice, it’s a doorway to a side-quest that consumes your afternoon, three brain cells and a lunch you never got to eat.
2. Printer law (the one immutable principle)
Nobody at university mentions office equipment. In a law firm, you’ll discover the oldest, most reliable law of all: the printer only jams when something is genuinely urgent. It will sit perfectly calm for hours, then sense a filing deadline and enter a spiritual crisis.
You’ll learn:
“Tray 2” is always empty.
“Low toner” appears only when a partner is standing behind you. Stapling is performance art.
Litigation often begins with pleading — with a machine
Your first real advocacy experience may be persuading a multi-function device to acknowledge your existence.
3. The billable hour breaks space-time
Law school teaches chronology. The billable hour teaches relativity. Some time entries vanish instantly: you start a research point, you blink, it’s 7pm. Others — like the six-minute unit spent on hold listening to corporate jazz — last longer than the actual Middle Ages. Soon you develop a strange instinct for exactly how long six minutes feels… and how long it feels when someone else is paying for them.
4. Partner English is its own dialect
Law students learn legal terminology. Junior lawyers learn Partner English.
A brief glossary:
“This needs a tidy” = Rewrite the entire thing
“We’re nearly there” = Your evening plans are cancelled
“Not quite what I had in mind” = You misunderstood the brief, the tone, the purpose, and possibly the laws of physics
“Pop this over when you have a moment” = Do it now
“Straightforward” = It isn’t
Nobody teaches this. You absorb it through exposure.
5. Clients do not behave like exam questions
Lectures give you clean hypothetical scenarios. Clients give you WhatsApp screenshots, rumours, half-remembered phone calls, and the unforgettable phrase: “Here’s everything you need,” followed by everything you don’t. Your job becomes half legal reasoning and half anthropological reconstruction.
6. Coffee isn’t a beverage — it’s a workload index
One mug = Admin.
Two mugs = Drafting with existential sighing.
Three mugs = Deadline.
Four mugs (including one you forgot behind the monitor) = You are learning more tonight than you learned in a month of seminars.
7. Your real education comes from the people, not the PowerPoints
Law school teaches doctrine. The profession teaches generosity.
Your early career is shaped by:
The associate who quietly fixes your formatting at midnight without making you feel small
The partner who explains why a tiny drafting choice matters
The barrister who spends ten minutes after a hearing talking through strategy instead of hierarchy
The secretary who knows every system, every process, and every workaround — and saves your career weekly
None of this appears on a curriculum. But it’s how you become a lawyer — not just someone who knows the law.
8. The absurdity isn’t a distraction — it’s part of the job
The profession is serious. The stakes are real. But you will also encounter legal nonsense that makes you question the entire concept of adulthood:
Multi-million-pound disputes fought over commas
People arguing passionately about seating plans
Emails that begin formally and unravel by paragraph three
If you can hold both truths — the seriousness and the absurdity — you’ll survive.
More than that, you’ll enjoy it.
What law school really misses: If you can hold both truths — the seriousness and the absurdity — you’ll survive. More than that, you’ll enjoy it.
What law school really misses: Lawyers help keep society honest. Every precedent, every contract, every careful argument holds together a system the public depends on — especially as the world changes faster than any textbook can keep up. But inside that seriousness, there is a funny, human side worth noticing. Because behind every dramatic legal moment there is usually:
a frantic printer,
a frantic junior,
a carefully worded email,
and at least one story that will be retold for years.
If you can learn to appreciate that side of the profession, you’ll find the law richer, kinder and far more human than anyone warned you.
Sherlock Grant is the author of True & Absurd Lawsuits That Really Happened, a collection of real courtroom stories proving the law is occasionally stranger than fiction.