So Your Teenager Wants to Study Law
This one is not for the students. This one is for the mums, dads, guardians and grandparents sitting across the kitchen table from a Year 11 or 12 kid who has just announced they want to be a lawyer. You are about to co-sign a significant investment of time, money and energy.
Consider this the product disclosure statement nobody hands you at the open day.
First, who am I to tell you anything?
I was your kid. First in my family to go to university, let alone law school. Country kid from Townsville, eldest daughter, perfectionist, professional overthinker, the sort of child who had been measuring her worth in external validation since she first heard the words "pleasure to have in class" on a report card. In 2005 I won a scholarship to Bond University through a program supporting regional kids, quite the discount on quite the price tag, under a tagline promising to bring my ambition to life.
Dear Reader, my ambition did not need the encouragement.
I then spent fifteen years in the legal profession. In-house corporate counsel across infrastructure, aviation, telco and B2B tech, finishing as Head of Legal for the Asia Pacific region of a global software company. I started as a graduate in a national commercial law firm, Corrs Chambers Westgarth, worked in Brisbane and Sydney, was employed for every one of those fifteen years, won awards and sat at tables I once could not have named. I also watched the gap between what law school promises and what legal careers actually look like swallow talented people whole. I left corporate life in 2025 to build Counsel Media and fill that gap, because the people currently advising your teenager mostly cannot.
My own parents, Marc and Kerry, learned all of this the hard way, watching from a regional city as two of their five children moved through the legal profession in the CBD, with all the highs and lows that came with it. Nobody handed them a map either.
The advice gap is real
Your high school's careers counsellor is doing their best with a laminated brochure. The universities are running a business and the firms who sponsor the on-campus networking evenings are overwhelmingly the big CBD outfits, because they are the ones with the marketing budgets.
Everyone your teenager will hear from before enrolling has a commercial incentive.
The result is that young people are sold one shiny pathway, the golden doughnut of the top-tier law firm clerkship, when there is an entire bakery of legal careers nobody puts on the table.
You cannot be what you cannot see, which is exactly why I do my law school tour on my own dime and why I make content, daily, where young people actually are, to show them the full menu.
Today, I am bringing the message to you as well.
The numbers, because they matter
Australia produces somewhere between eight and fifteen thousand law graduates every single year depending on whose counting you trust, and the universities do argue about the counting.
What is not argued is the demand side.
One mid-sized commercial firm reported around 500 applications for four or five graduate positions, with application volumes rising year on year, and only a very small percentage of students who apply through formal clerkship programs will start their careers that way.
I have written a whole briefing on how that formal recruitment circus actually operates, The Clerkship Hunger Games, and I recommend it as pre-reading before your teenager fills in a single application form. I call the period after graduation the “graduate trench of despair”. It is documented, it is known and it is rarely mentioned at open days. It is a supply and demand situation, like any other, and your kid deserves to enter it with eyes open, not because they should not go, but because getting the degree and getting the job are two entirely separate missions.
How the degree actually works
A quick translation service, because this is where the jargon starts. Every Australian law degree is built around the “Priestley 11”, the eleven compulsory subjects (contracts, torts, criminal law, property, equity, company law, constitutional law, administrative law, civil procedure, evidence and professional ethics) required for admission anywhere in the country. Beyond those, the electives and the culture vary enormously between schools.
An LLB is the undergraduate version, usually studied straight out of school and often as a double degree over five or so years. A JD is the postgraduate version, a three year degree for people who already hold a bachelor degree, typically at a much higher price point. Same destination, different on-ramps, very different invoices.
Then comes the part nobody mentions in the brochure. A law degree does not make your child a lawyer.
To be admitted as a solicitor they must also complete Practical Legal Training (PLT), a separate post-degree qualification that commonly costs somewhere in the range of twelve thousand dollars on top of everything else. Yes, it can be added on to their HECS, if there is enough left in the kitty. The big firms usually foot the bill for their Law Graduate’s PLT, making those positions all the more competitive.
The current law students I speak with call it “bonus study” and nobody tells you about at enrolment. It is also currently being rebuilt in real time. A NSW review found the current model no longer fit for purpose, with only 43 per cent of recent graduates finding their assignments practical and nearly half saying their unpaid placements did not lead to a job.
NSW is currently trialling a reformed model including compulsory face-to-face skills training and a dramatic reduction of the old 75-day work experience requirement to 15 days, and if adopted more broadly the NSW approach could become the national benchmark.
Translation for parents: the finish line your teenager is running toward will look probably different by the time they reach it. That is not a reason to panic but it is a reason to choose a law school that is paying attention.
The AI factor
The tasks that traditionally filled a junior lawyer's first years, the document review, the first-draft research memos, are exactly the tasks AI now does fastest.
This does not mean the profession is dying. It means the entry-level rung is being resanded while your kid climbs toward it. The graduates who thrive will be the ones with judgement, commercial sense and human skills layered over their technical training, which is precisely what most law schools are slowest to teach.
I have unpacked this shift properly in The AI Legal Playbook and I researched how prepared Australian law schools actually are for it, with results that vary wildly. Even the destination itself is moving.
The traditional prize at the end of the pathway, partnership in a big commercial law firm, is being restructured underneath this generation of students, which I covered in Partnership Is Changing Faster Than You Think.
Your teenager is not just entering a competitive profession. They are entering one mid-renovation.
Ask about all of this at the open day and watch how quickly the smile tightens.
The wellbeing piece
Law consistently ranks among the worst professions for psychological distress and it starts at law school, where perfectionist high-achievers are placed in a ranked, curved, competitive environment and then handed a job market like the one above. If your teenager is the bright-eyed overthinking type who has attached their identity to their marks, and I say this with so much love because I was her, this matters more than their ATAR does.
The kids who survive well are the ones with an identity outside of their transcript.
Protect that fiercely until they can do it for themselves.
Remind them that a career is a marathon, not a sprint.
What the degree is genuinely good for
None of this is full warning off studying law.
Oscar Wilde once said you can never be overdressed or overeducated and I agree with him.
A law degree will teach your child to think in structures, argue on their feet, read the fine print of the world and hold their own in any room. It opens doors in government, business, media, startups, policy and about forty careers nobody mentions at school. It is an incredible privilege and I probably would do it again (maybe?).
I would simply do it with the information you are now holding.
A word on phoning a friend
Please do sanity check everything in this briefing of mine.
After all, you don’t yet know me from a bar of soap. So if you know a lawyer, a family friend, the parent from netball, someone from your work, absolutely ask them.
Then take their answer with a grain of salt, offered with genuine compassion for my colleagues. Many practising lawyers are deep in the weeds of their own practice area and have not looked up at the wider profession in years.
Plenty are quietly disillusioned and will hand your teenager their own unprocessed career grief dressed up as advice. Almost none of them were ever taught to manage their own wellbeing, because the structural issues I have described did a number on my entire generation of practitioners before anyone thought to name them.
A conveyancer in Cairns, a barrister in Melbourne and an in-house lawyer at a bank will describe three completely different professions and every one of them will be telling the truth about their corner of it.
Gather the perspectives but just remember that each one is a data point, not the whole map.
Action steps: the open day questions the brochure will not answer
Send your teenager in with these and stand nearby looking supportive:
What percentage of your law graduates are in full-time legal employment within twelve months and how do you measure that?
Which employers, beyond the big CBD firms, actually recruit on this campus?
Is PLT built into the degree or is it a separate cost and how are you responding to the reforms underway?
How is AI being taught inside the law curriculum, not as an elective bolted on but inside the core subjects? What is your position on emerging technology and modern legal practice?
What structured wellbeing support exists specifically for law students, not just the university-wide counselling line? At what cost?
When do students get their first exposure to real legal work and is it facilitated or are they on their own?
What happens to the students who do not land a BigLaw clerkship, because most will not, and what does the school do to help them, if anything?
Send your kid my way, my TikTok & Instagram content, the podcast, the guides, the tour, all of it is built for exactly this moment and with them in mind.
Then encourage them to start asking their own questions too, because that is the actual job. Lawyers research, gather the evidence, apply rational judgement, weigh every side of an argument and then land somewhere that serves their client best.
If your teenager can do that for their own future before they ever set foot in a lecture theatre, they are already thinking like the lawyer they want to become.
That client is them and this is the best first brief they will ever run.
Mel
