How to become a lawyer? A question to which we could offer two answers: the first, illustrating what are the educational qualifications, the internships, the qualifying exams, the personal conditions and, in short, the whole formal procedure to “make” the lawyer; the second, instead, explaining the motivations, the gifts, the initiative that the lawyer must have in order to really “be” a lawyer. You become a lawyer following a degree course in law and an internship period. Then there is the qualifying examination for the profession, which is both written and oral. But this is not enough.

One must know how to “stay a lawyer” by paying the professional fund, attending professional refresher courses and acquiring some indispensable tools (a telephone / fax line, a Pec, a system for accessing the telematic process). But before explaining how to become a lawyer a clarification that seems obligatory to us: is the profession always the same as it used to be and is it convenient to embrace this path? Here is our point of view about it.

The rules for becoming a lawyer change from time to time, sometimes in order to select, in a more rigorous way, the aspirants to a career that, once endowed with luster, today has lost much of charm and economic appeal: the fees are not more than in the past and the number of citizens who, in exchange for a justice that is not always fair, are willing to wait years and pay exorbitant taxes has drastically decreased. Moreover, the recent reforms have led out of the courts numerous proceedings once exclusively for lawyers,

such as separations and divorces (which today can also be done in common under certain conditions) or transactions (for many causes, today, it is mandatory to attempt a peaceful solution first with a mediation body).

Which led to a further decrease in the demand for lawyers. Nevertheless we cannot deny how the profession of lawyer continues to exercise a certain attraction, if only for the fact that – as well as with medicine – daily life has continuous need of legal knowledge, which alone – in a bureaucratic state like ours – allow, in certain situations, to “survive”. The proof is perhaps the fact that you are now wondering how to become a lawyer.