As a lawyer, there are few things more critical to the trajectory of your career than the area of law in which you practice. For many, their designated practice area wasn’t so much a concerted choice, but more a series of events that jettisoned them into an area of law. Regardless of the pathway to your practice area, it should ultimately be your choice, one that you make deliberately, and one that will lead you down a path of personal career fulfillment.

New lawyers and recent law school graduates start their varying legal careers with a range of different perspectives and preconceived ideas about the area in which they practice. For some, the choice of practice area was cemented from the moment they decided to go to law school. You may, for example, be one of those determined junior associates who heard Regulation S-K’s siren song as a small child and knew without a shadow of a doubt that capital markets and securities regulations were your calling. For others, the choice of practice area might have been cultivated during law school. Being exposed to a range of subject matters and skillsets, your eyes might have been opened to different areas of practice, perhaps including some more niche practice areas that you had not previously considered. It is during law school that students generally tend toward one end of the seemingly binary choice of transactional or litigation, and it is this choice that may dictate further decisions leading to an ultimate practice area. Then there are those law students who graduate without knowing exactly where they would like to end up. After wrapping up 3L classes and donning their graduation caps, this group of new lawyers start their careers with little direction as to the specific practice area they wish to pursue.