Education
Need help deciding if law school and a legal career are right for YOU? [Show summary] Christopher Melcher, a celebrity family lawyer and teacher of law, offers an unvarnished look at a lawyer’s day-to-day and what a career in law can look like. Considering law school? Read on to learn what a career as a lawyer can look like. [Show notes] What's being a lawyer truly like? Our guest today, a divorce attorney to the stars, is going to tell us. Some of you may wonder, what does celebrity family law (which almost seems like an oxymoron) have to do with admissions? That's a very good question. Listeners considering a JD may want to learn what lawyers really do, what the career is really like. Christopher Melcher got his JD in 1993 at Pepperdine Law, went initially into criminal law and personal injury litigation, and has been with the family law firm of Walzer & Melcher since 2002. He's also an adjunct professor at Pepperdine Law. How did you decide that a career in law is for you? [1:55] That was easy for me because my dad was a lawyer. He was a deputy district attorney in the early 1970s, and when I was really young, he would come home and talk to me about his cases. These were serious cases. I might've been six or seven years old when he started talking to me about his cases. He would explain what he was working on, and then he would ask me, "What do you think?" That got my legal mind started because he was genuinely interested in my opinion. I don't know what I had to share at that age, but we would have these conversations. As I got older, they, I'm sure, got better, but I remembered that he really wanted to know what I thought. I had the feeling like he would maybe use some of that input for his cases and arguments and trials that he was in. That helped form this legal, analytical mind. As I got older, I got into some trouble in grade school, and I remember being in the principal's office and my buddy, Don, was there too for some unrelated offense. He would ask me like, "I got in trouble. What should I do?" I would give him advice. I was like a little jailhouse lawyer there as a kid, helping my buddies craft their stories for the principal. That's how it started in getting those legal juices going in my brain. hbspt.cta.load(58291, 'c5572014-0b54-4e12-acd9-91a66e31a013', {}); Did you test that thesis as you got older? [3:38] I wanted to be a lawyer from that early age, but I really didn't want to do the work. I wanted to grow up too fast, and that really was a mistake. I had a lot of fun, but I didn't want to put the work in, and that held me back. I think back then it was easier to slack in school and still survive. I don't know what I would do now. I feel the pressure on students now is so much greater than it was. I'm talking about in the 80s, for me, because I could get by as a C student without studying or reading or doing anything and somehow got into college and somehow got into law school. I had it easy because, I think, of the times. Things really clicked for me probably in the second or third year of college when I decided, "Okay. I have to actually do this and take it seriously." Then I kicked it into high gear and finished off college and got into law school. You initially started out in criminal law and then switched to family law. Why the switch? [4:54] When I was in law school, I had my whole future mapped out. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a corporate securities lawyer because I had met somebody doing that, and they made a ton of money. I was like, "Wow, this is for me." I like corporate law. I liked all this with the investing angle. Some of these lawyers were taking a piece of the action, basically, for these companies that they were helping to form and getting paid quite a bit of money if the company was successful. That was my goal, and I figured I was going to go out of law school, work at the Securities and Exchange Commission,