Yes, absolutely — if you’re smart enough to be a lawyer, are willing to work your butt off to become a lawyer, and want to be a lawyer for the right reasons. Our society needs, and will always need, excellent lawyers.
But weigh this decision very carefully, because the job market can’t absorb all the law graduates, and there’s a distressing number of unemployed people with J.D. degrees. Also, you should understand that a J.D. degree disqualifies you from most other careers. Enough people dislike lawyers, and are prejudiced against them, that if you can’t land a legal job you may find yourself “overqualified” for everything else. Once you embark on a legal career path, there’s generally no turning back.
Be realistic about your career prospects. Very few people land high-paying big-firm jobs. Those who do often hate the lifestyle, with its super-competitive pressures, brutal hours, and high attrition. Even in the legal mainstream, where most lawyers work in government jobs, small firms, or solo practices, being a lawyer is one of the hardest ways to make a living there is. It’s hard, hard, hard work, much of it mind-numbing drudgery. Most lawyers never get a chance to make a big impact on society. Over half of all lawyers eventually quit the profession.
America has too many law schools and more lawyers than the economy can comfortably support. This has happened because law schools are cash cows. They produce nearly as much revenue as a medical school at much less cost, so many colleges have piled into the legal education business, including for-profit schools, in complete disregard of limited job market for law graduates. And they haven’t been entirely honest with prospective students about how bad the legal job market is, because that would hurt their business.
Several years ago, undergraduates began wising up to the ugly realities of taking on six-figure debt to obtain an unmarketable J.D. degree, and as a result, law school applications have declined. Not precipitously, but significantly. Responsible law schools respond to this by lowering enrollments, not admission standards. But some schools have gone in the opposite direction.
That creates a trap, not an opportunity, for lesser-qualified students. If you have law school aspirations, but need weakened admission standards to get in, don’t think twice about it. In all likelihood, you’d be setting yourself up for a life-ruining mistake, especially if you have to borrow heavily to make it work. Use common sense here; when even the best are having trouble getting jobs, how will you compete in a very difficult job market, unless you’re one of the best?
Trust your instincts. Your inner self knows, can feel, whether you should become a lawyer. Listen to that voice. If you can’t imagine doing anything else, have the grades and LSAT score to get into a good law school that doesn’t compromise its admission standards, and understand what you’re getting yourself into — then go for it.
That’s what I did 45 years ago, and I have no regrets, because it was the right choice for me. Being a lawyer is who I am, whether or not I can make a living at it. The job market stank then, too, and I wound up in a modestly rewarding government job that I never left because of my dependence on a regular paycheck. So I didn’t get to do some of the things I wanted to do. But it was good enough to satisfy my ambitions. It was something no one in my family had ever done before. And I like being able to navigate my way through the world of legal-think and legal-speak, to be able to read a court decision and understand what it says, to know how to spot issues and argue a case for this or that proposition or proposal. I didn’t get rich, but it has been tremendous fun.
You don’t get rich from working, anyway. In my experience, if you want financial security, what counts isn’t how much you earn, but how you manage what you have. Don’t buy into the ego-materialism of our society; create an income surplus by being frugal, spend your consumer dollars on long-lasting quality, save and invest the surplus, and exploit the magical effects of mathematical compounding by reinvesting your returns and letting them multiply and multiply and multiply.
We had a lawyer here in Seattle named Jack MacDonald. He never made a big splash in the legal world; for over 30 years, he was employed in a salaried federal job at Seattle’s Veterans Administration doing routine legal work. He rode buses and carried sack lunches to work. No one knew how rich he was, because he wasn’t a big spender. He had inherited some money from his parents, and successfully invested it. When he died in 2011 at age 96, he gave $186 million to his three favorite charities: Childrens Hospital, the University of Washington Law School, and Salvation Army.
If you want to make money, go into business, or learn investing. If you decide to become a lawyer, do it for your heart and soul, not for money. That’s the kind of lawyer society needs, and realistically, there’s usually not much money in it. 
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/law-schools-are-admitting-students-they-would-have-rejected-years-ago/