I just enrolled in law school.

It took me decades to get here.

I can trace the idea back to junior high, when a school trip to Washington, D.C., included a visit to Georgetown University. Somewhere around then, becoming a lawyer entered the realm of things I could imagine myself doing someday.

It wasn’t just a childhood idea. In the late 1990s, I took the LSAT and seriously considered going.

But law school wasn’t my biggest dream. My real dream was marrying my true love and growing a family together. As our family grew, I didn’t want to embark on law school while we were in the middle of raising our children.

Law school could wait. And it did, for decades.

I’ve enrolled in a four-year, part-time J.D. program conducted entirely online. The paperwork is signed, the initial payment has been made and my enrollment packet is on its way. Now I’m waiting to find out when I begin.

For me, law school was never simply a matter of deciding to go. The University of Maine School of Law, known as Maine Law, is in Portland, about an hour and a half from home. The University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law is in Concord, New Hampshire, about two and a half hours away.

An hour and a half doesn’t sound terrible until you turn it into a regular commute. That’s roughly three hours of driving each time, before spending a minute in class. Concord would mean about five hours on the road. Add a Maine winter and what looks manageable on a map becomes a significant part of your life. I needed a way to add law school to my life, not dismantle my life to attend law school.

That’s where I see one of the biggest advantages of going to law school online. For people in western Maine and other places far from a law school, an online program can make law school an option when it might never have been practical before. It also opens the door to people with careers, families and established lives who can’t simply move away or reorganize everything around a campus.

Where you live no longer has to decide whether law school is even an option.

Then there is the money. I want to earn a J.D. I don’t want to take on an enormous amount of debt to do it. Four years of tuition will still require planning and some belt-tightening, but the program I’ve chosen is affordable enough that my goal is to pay for it as I go.

The cost changed the equation. So did the flexibility.

Instead of the traditional three-year J.D., mine is a four-year program considered part time. Each year is a yearlong course of study rather than the traditional fall-and-spring academic calendar. “Part time” doesn’t mean casually opening a casebook whenever I happen to have a free afternoon. There will be substantial reading, studying and coursework every week.

My first year, known in law-school shorthand as 1L, will include contracts, torts, criminal law and legal research, writing and analysis. There will be casebooks, briefs, exams and more reading than I probably want to contemplate right now. But the classroom will come to me.

Before applying, I also found someone on YouTube who had shared her experience going through the same program. Watching another student actually work her way through an entirely online law program made it seem less like an interesting possibility and more like something I could realistically do. I could see what the work looked like and how it might fit into a life that already existed.

I can study from home. I can work around writing deadlines and family life. Some studying can happen early in the morning. Even an hour on the treadmill can sometimes become review time. The flexibility doesn’t eliminate the work. It makes the work possible.

I actually had an opportunity to start this program before. I was accepted last year and decided not to enroll. A year later, I knew I was ready to do it. This time, I enrolled.

Getting accepted this time produced more suspense than I expected. College transcripts from decades ago suddenly came back into my life. My application required additional information about my educational history, followed by several days in which I spent entirely too much time checking my email.

Then the message finally arrived. “Congratulations!”

One word changed the question from whether I was going to law school to when I was starting.

So now the paperwork is finished. The payment is made. The books are almost all here. I’m enrolled.

And I’m waiting again. This time, though, I’m waiting for a start date. I’m hoping for mid-October. After that, the countdown changes completely. It becomes 1L, then 2L, 3L and 4L.

I’ll come back to this in the winter, once I have a few months of 1L behind me. By then, I should have a much better idea of what studying law from home in Maine actually looks like, rather than what I imagine it will look like before I’ve started.

For now, I have casebooks waiting, 1L approaching and four years of work ahead of me. Four years sounds like a long time. But I’ve been thinking about law school, on and off, for decades.

In between, I married my true love and we grew the family I dreamed about.

And if all goes according to plan, in 2030 our youngest will graduate from high school and I’ll graduate from law school. That sounds like a pretty good year to me.

Supporting Sponsor for Franklin Journal, Livermore Falls Advertiser, Rangeley Highlander and Rumford Falls Times.
Keeping communities informed by supporting local news. franklinsavings.bank