What Law Actually Looks Like: A Family Attorney Answers 7 Honest Questions
12 years in family law. The hardest part isn't the law — it's the humans. An attorney's unfiltered answers to the questions students actually want to ask.
12 years in family law. The hardest part isn't the law — it's the humans. An attorney's unfiltered answers to the questions students actually want to ask.
I'm Dustin Vorsatz, an attorney at the Law Offices of Vorsatz & Vorsatz in San Mateo, CA. I've been practicing family law for 12 years. Ethan at Mentino asked me seven questions about my career — and I answered them the way I'd want someone to have answered them when I was getting started.
Don't stress out about where you want to land later in life.
There's a ton of pressure on kids to "figure out what you want to do when you're older," and that's ridiculous. Kids should be supported in pursuing reasonable interests regardless of where they may end up. Telling a kid "be a doctor, engineer, lawyer" puts a lot of stress on them.
If a kid really likes biology, maybe they learn later in life they want to work with animals instead of humans, or work on habitat preservation. There are literally thousands of options in each field — you don't need to know where you want to end up when you start.
The interest matters. The specific destination can wait.
What's interesting about law is there's no typical day.
There's always some paperwork to do at the office, but there may be a client meeting, phone calls, a Zoom, a court appearance, research you can do, or work on marketing your business. Any given day can include all of those or none of them.
All of the law remains largely the same — the statutes don't change that often — but each client is completely different. So each problem is completely unique. You're applying a consistent framework to an endless variety of human situations. That's what makes it genuinely interesting after 12 years.
The most challenging part is honestly the nature of humans.
I work 100% in family law, so the people I'm helping are emotionally charged and genuinely hurt. A lot of them want to actively harm the person they claimed they loved for years. The divorce process or custody dispute doesn't just surface their pain — it amplifies it.
Getting around or through the emotional wall people put up is challenging. It's not what you'd expect if you're thinking about law as a purely technical career.
The law part I can handle. The human part is what keeps it hard — and what keeps it meaningful.
Six months? Sheesh. Okay.
I'd start with the fundamentals that help you understand how the system actually works — not just what the rules say on paper.
Beyond the reading: spend time in a courtroom. Watch real cases. The fastest way to understand how something actually works is to watch people do it in real conditions — not read about it.
That being a lawyer is anything like what you see on TV.
There's maybe 1% of practicing attorneys that have careers like Suits or Lincoln Lawyer. Most lawyers are honest, ethical grinders who help clients move through a broken system.
Some attorneys are unscrupulous — but those are rarer than TV would have you believe, too. The work is unglamorous most of the time. And I'd argue that's exactly what makes it meaningful: clients genuinely need you.
Disconnecting from tech and learning how to problem-solve with your own skills.
So many attorneys are becoming reliant on AI or auto-research and aren't understanding why cases are decided the way they are. I don't have an issue with people who aren't strong writers using AI to check their work. But too much reliance on tech doing all of the heavy lifting means you simply don't understand why the system functions the way it does.
If you can't reason through a problem without a tool, you can't catch it when the tool is wrong. And tools are wrong more than people realize — especially on nuanced, jurisdiction-specific legal questions. The baseline has to be your own understanding. This isn't an AI-specific point; it applies to every shortcut in every field.
I'd take more time to explore other topics. High school now is so much different than when I was in school — we didn't have elective classes. I'd take classes that give me life skills: shop class, home ec, statistics, tax classes.
These are all issues that crop up as a normal adult, and not everyone gets the luxury of saying "I make enough money to pay someone to do this for me."
I think adults should know how to function basically — check your oil and change a tire, cook a healthy meal, understand how to budget your finances and figure out basic taxes.
High school as a system was built to acclimate humans to work an 8–9 hour day — working on 6–8 different tasks for approximately 50 minutes each. That's what it is. So you don't need to worry that "I didn't take AP Government, I'm never going to be a lawyer." That's not how any of this works. High school isn't the time to lock in your path. It's the time to learn how to show up consistently.
If you're considering a career in law — or any field where you work directly with people — know that the human side of the job will be just as demanding as the technical side. The law itself is learnable. Understanding people is what you'll work on your whole career.
If you have questions about what life in law actually looks like, I'm on Mentino for exactly this reason.
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