Carolina Criminal Defense & DUI Lawyer UpdatesLately, TikTok seems to be peddling two very different versions of law school and practicing law, which leaves me wondering whether anyone is telling aspiring lawyers the truth. In 2026, the content trends because people want to know whether law school is still worth it.
The first type of day-in-the-life-of-a-lawyer video comes from the newly minted law student who has attended six classes and already mastered the influencer version of legal education. The video begins before sunrise. There is a workout, a carefully prepared chai latte, an immaculate apartment, color-coded notes, an expensive outfit, a walk across a beautiful campus, and some false modesty about how demanding the day will be. Somewhere along the way, there is usually a little virtue signaling and a fair amount of bragging disguised as vulnerability.
The message is that law school is glamorous, manageable, important, and aesthetically pleasing. The student appears to have time for exercise, skin care, meal preparation, perfect notes, social media production, and eight hours of sleep. Apparently, law school is just another lifestyle brand.
The second type comes from the new associate who passed the July bar, began work in the fall, and has practiced law for approximately fifteen minutes. The videos explain that practicing law is suboptimal, the hours are terrible, the clients are difficult, the partners are unreasonable, and going to law school was the worst decision ever made.
The truth is somewhere in between and, unfortunately, there is a lot of horse manure in both versions.
Law school is not a chai-latte montage. Practicing law is not automatically a life sentence of misery. The profession can provide purpose, intellectual challenge, financial security, lifelong friendships, and the privilege of helping clients when something important is at stake. It can also be exhausting, unfair, financially disappointing, lonely, and far harder than the people selling law school tend to admit.
Before Someone Says “OK, Boomer”
I am not a boomer. I am Gen X. Very Gen X.
Consistent with my generation, I prefer straight talk. We are not especially interested in wrapping every difficult truth in six layers of affirmation. That does not mean I dislike young people. It means I do not believe false comfort helps anyone make a $100,000+ going-into-debt decision.
These are also things I wish someone had told me back in 1988, when I first started applying for law school.
Before dismissing what follows as an older lawyer being a jerk, protecting his business, or trying to hold younger lawyers down, ask what my motivation would be.
I am 60 years old. I have practiced law for 34 years. I have tried cases, taught lawyers, written legal materials, chaired continuing legal education programs, served as President of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice, and spent much of my career promoting professionalism and helping other lawyers improve their work. I probably have five active years left in full-time, in-the-trenches courtroom practice.
I am not worried that a newly licensed lawyer will steal my clients. Clients who contact me generally want experience. They want a lawyer who has handled serious cases, fought in court, made mistakes, learned from them, and developed judgment over time. Keeping young lawyers ignorant does nothing to protect my practice.
My record should answer the larger question. Have I spent my career selfishly guarding information, or have I spent it teaching, writing, serving the profession, and helping lawyers become more capable? I think you’ll find the latter is true.
I am sharing this because I care about the profession and the people entering it. It comes from love, not from a desire to be a braying jackass.
Here are the truths TikTok leaves out.
1. Law Schools Are Selling Law School
Law schools make and charge a LOT of money. They have faculty salaries, administrative salaries, buildings, programs, marketing budgets, and seats to fill. They are not neutral observers helping you decide whether law school makes financial and personal sense.
They are selling law school.
That does not make every law school dishonest. It does mean you should understand the relationship. A glossy website, an impressive campus, a smiling student ambassador, and a scholarship offer do not tell you what your debt payment will be, what graduates actually earn, how many leave the profession, or whether you will enjoy practicing law.
The law school wants you to focus on admission. You need to focus on what happens after graduation.
2. Examine Why You Want to Become a Lawyer
Before borrowing $100,000 or more, be honest about why you want a law degree.
Are you trying to help clients? Are you drawn to advocacy, constitutional rights, business, public service, or courtroom work? Are you trying to prove something to your parents, former classmates, or yourself? Do you like the status associated with being called a lawyer? Are you avoiding another career decision? Do you simply want to make a lot of money?
Wanting to make money is an honest answer. Law is a profession and a business. You will have bills. There is nothing noble about pretending money does not matter.
The problem is assuming that a law degree guarantees money. It does not.
Do not borrow six figures based on a vague belief that everything will work out because lawyers are rich. Calculate the monthly payment. Look at realistic salaries in the city and practice area you are considering. Think about rent, health insurance, transportation, bar expenses, and the years of income you surrendered while attending school.
Ego is an expensive reason to attend law school.
3. A Lot of Lawyers Do Not Make a Lot of Money
Some lawyers make extraordinary money. They tend to be concentrated in large firms, corporate practices, highly profitable niches, and positions available to graduates with remarkable credentials or access to established hiring pipelines.
Big money is real in big city markets for a very small percentage of the legal population. It is by no means the entire legal profession, particularly in North Carolina.
I know criminal defense lawyers who have practiced for fifteen or twenty years and still do not consistently make six figures. I know a very good, long-time-licensed lawyer who drives for Uber on weekends. I also know lawyers who appear successful but are buried under debt, overhead, advertising expenses, unpaid receivables, and the cost of keeping a practice alive. By the way, they’re miserable.
Do not confuse a suit, a professional photograph, and a law-firm website with wealth or personal happiness. A lot of that is a mirage.
4. Criminal Defense Is Exciting but Not Reliably Profitable
Criminal defense and DUI charges can be fascinating. They put you in the mix and in court nearly every day. They involve constitutional rights, witnesses, forensic evidence, cross-examination, negotiation, and moments when your work can affect the rest of a client’s life.
It can also be a hard way to make money. Indeed, it’s a tough way to make a living.
Most clients do not have unlimited funds. Many need immediate help but cannot pay the fee. Court schedules consume hours that cannot be billed, as most (not all) criminal defense lawyers in North Carolina charge flat fees. Trials require enormous preparation and may prevent you from accepting other work or enjoying much of a personal life and social schedule. Advertising is expensive. Employees, rent, technology, insurance, and outside professionals must be paid whether the month was profitable or not.
Some criminal defense lawyers develop profitable niche practices. Even then, there are good months and bad months. Cases resolve. Referral sources change. Search rankings change. Competitors enter the market. A practice that looks stable from the outside may feel very different to the lawyer signing the checks.
Loving courtroom work and making money from courtroom work are separate subjects. A busy law office should not be conflated with profitability. Some lawyers are extremely busy through and including the day they go out of business and/or file for bankruptcy.
5. Practicing Law Is Emotionally Hard
The practice of law can be a difficult way to live, particularly in litigation.
The work does not stay at the office. Try as you might, you take it home with you. You worry about what you missed. You reconsider the advice you gave. You wake up thinking about a witness, a deadline, a ruling, a client, or an argument you should have framed differently. You replay hearings in your head and anticipate problems that may never occur.
And before I hear one more new lawyer ask about “work-life balance,” let me disabuse you of that notion. There is no such thing as work-life balance in criminal defense. Anyone who says otherwise is full of it. If they disagree with me, they’re either not being honest with you or themselves. And if they want to argue the point with me, give them my number. I’m right, and they’re wrong. Just sayin’.
You can prepare thoroughly and still lose. In criminal defense, you will lose more than you win. If you need to win all the time, criminal defense is not for you.
The legal system should not favor the State, but it does. That is not what the Founders intended. It is, however, the system we have, and criminal defense lawyers must be prepared to fight within it.
You can tell a client the truth and have the client resent you for it. You can do excellent work and receive no thanks. You can carry responsibility for consequences you did not create and cannot control.
The emotional burden is not proof that you chose the wrong profession. It is part of the profession. If you require complete separation between work and thought, litigation will be a poor fit.
And, for the record, our firm also handles personal injury matters, civil litigation, and family law. Nothing in those practice areas changes what I think about courtroom litigation and taking it home with you.
6. Some Clients Will Test Your Patience and Challenge Your Professional Judgment
The change I have disliked most during my career is the growing entitlement of some clients.
Clients are frequently in a terrible place when they contact a lawyer. They may be frightened, angry, accused of a crime, facing financial loss, dealing with family problems, or watching their reputation collapse. Good lawyers understand that and try to respond with patience.
That does not mean every demand is reasonable.
Some clients expect immediate responses at all hours. They ignore advice and blame the lawyer for the result. They withhold facts, miss appointments, fail to pay, and demand guarantees no lawyer can provide. They may treat every disagreement as poor service and every unfavorable development as proof that the lawyer failed.
Search engines and generative AI have added another layer to the problem. Clients now regularly bring lawyers AI-generated answers based on unknown sources and incomplete facts, then challenge the advice of someone who has practiced for decades because ChatGPT or Claude produced a different response.
The client does not know what the AI answer omitted. The model does not know the judge, the local practice, the witness, the prosecutor, the evidentiary problem, or the fact the client forgot or chose not to disclose.
Instant access to information has not produced instant judgment. It has produced increasingly unreasonable expectations. When frightened clients are searching for a way out of consequences they may not be ready to accept, the lawyer can quickly become the target of their frustration.
If you practice law, you will sometimes be criticized by people relying on incomplete facts, unreliable information, or advice generated by a machine. That is part of the job.
7. A Trade Career Often Pays More Money and Provides a Better Life
If your primary goals are income, stability, and quality of life, law school may not be the strongest financial choice.
A capable electrician, welder, mechanic, HVAC technician, plumber, equipment operator, or construction professional can easily out-earn many practicing lawyers. A tradesperson may begin earning years earlier, avoid six figures of educational debt, build a business, and develop an ability that customers immediately understand and value.
Some tradespeople make extraordinary money. Many lawyers do not.
Working with your hands is not beneath you. Repairing an electrical system, welding a pipeline, maintaining an aircraft, or operating heavy equipment requires intelligence, discipline, training, and judgment. My cousin works with cranes and is in charge of heavy lifts. He makes several hundred thousand dollars a year. A law degree does not place you on a higher moral or social level.
If you would be happier doing that work, do it. The title “lawyer” is poor compensation for a career you hate.
8. Getting Into Law School Is Only the First Step
One of my early shocks was discovering that I was not God’s gift to the academic world.
You may have been one of the smartest students in high school and college. Law school collects people who were also among the smartest students in their schools. Everyone has credentials. Everyone has been praised. Everyone expects to perform well.
Then the grades arrive.
Not everyone can be at the top of the class. Not everyone will receive the interview, clerkship, journal position, or job offer they expected. Some students who were accustomed to effortless success encounter serious academic competition for the first time.
Admission means the school believes you can complete the program. It does not mean you will excel in law school, pass the bar on the first attempt, obtain the job you expected, or succeed in practice.
Get used to proving yourself at every stage.
9. You May Not Have a Job When You Graduate
A meaningful number of law students graduate without a legal job. Some receive offers after graduation. Some are hired after passing the bar. Smaller firms and litigation practices may not realize they need another lawyer until the need is urgent.
That does not make you a failure. It does mean you need to keep working.
Do not assume a smaller litigation firm will hire you months before bar results. From the firm’s perspective, a first-year associate is initially a financial drain, not a profit center. The firm must pay you, train you, review your work, introduce you to clients, correct your mistakes, and absorb time that an experienced lawyer could have devoted to billable work.
You may be bright, energetic, and eager. You are still expensive to train.
The firm is not punishing you by waiting until you pass the bar or until it has enough work to justify another salary. It is operating a business.
10. Will AI Replace Lawyers?
Anyone weighing whether it makes sense to go to law school in 2026 has probably at least wondered if artificial intelligence will eliminate the profession before the loan is paid off. That’s a fair question. For the litigator set, fear not.
Artificial intelligence is pretty good at the work (by no means perfect or reliable) that used to fill the first few years of a new lawyer’s career. Reviewing thousands of documents for relevance. Summarizing depositions. Producing a first-draft research memo. Pulling the standard of review. Assembling a chronology from a medical file.
That work was never glamorous, but sometimes it paid for your training or, in the long term, made the exercise worthwhile for the firm.
Some hourly-based practices could bill it; a client would understand paying for it, and while you were doing the work, you were learning how a case fits together. That likely will not be as relevant with AI in the very near future. When APPs perform the same task in seconds for almost nothing, the firm has less reason to carry an associate through the learning period.
The realistic risk is not that lawyers and lawyering will disappear because of AI. It is that the traditional on-ramp gets narrower, and the years you spend becoming useful are years the firm has to fund.
Now the positive news.
The things that make a lawyer valuable in a courtroom are not the things a computer or application can perform.
A large language model does not know that a particular judge in Mecklenburg County will not grant a motion to continue after a certain point in the case. It does not know which assistant district attorney will consent to deferred prosecution or entertain a certain type of plea bargain or deal. It cannot read a jury. It cannot know when to stop asking questions on cross-examination because you’ve either made your point or lost the jury’s patience. Judgment is built from repetition and consequence, and no one has found a way to download that skill set.
Learning to write clearly still matters, because you have to know whether the draft in front of you is any good or an AI hallucination. Learning to read a client, meet them at their point of need, while also managing expectations, matters more. Knowing how to actually try a case matters most because persuasion and standing up in front of a judge and jury are functions nobody can ever automate.
If you go to law school expecting to be paid for producing documents, you might have a problem. If you go to law school intending to become the lawyer who decides what the document should say or stands next to a client in court facing serious criminal charges, AI technology is a tool you might use on occasion. It shouldn’t be a major concern or something you should stress about. AI will never make courtroom lawyers obsolete. You can quote me on that.
11. Work Outside the Law Can Make You a Better Lawyer
I tend to prefer hiring lawyers who have held real jobs outside the legal profession or those who have a decade or more of real-world lawyering experience. Actually, both are preferred.
I poured concrete. I worked as a bouncer. I bartended. Those jobs taught me how to read people, handle conflict, work with a team, absorb complaints, stay composed, and deal with customers who were not always reasonable.
Food service may teach you more about working with clients than another academic credential. A server learns urgency, memory, organization, teamwork, and how to remain polite when someone is blaming the wrong person. A construction job teaches reliability, physical effort, hierarchy, safety, and the simple fact that other people cannot complete their work until you complete yours.
Those lessons translate directly into practicing law.
Reading Prosser on Torts has value. So does learning how to work a double shift, eighty-sixing a drunk and kindly escorting them off the premises without incident, while maintaining a friendly disposition when the week has already worn you out.
12. You May Need to Volunteer Before Someone Pays You
Volunteer work may be part of entering the profession. A district attorney’s office, Public Defender’s Office, or litigation firm can provide exposure, instruction, and relationships before it can provide a salary.
Before saying, “But Bill, I cannot afford to work without pay,” understand why I am raising this before you enroll in law school. Do not accumulate every available dollar of debt, build a lifestyle that requires immediate income, and then discover that the first stage of your career may not follow your preferred schedule.
Plan for the possibility that you will need time after graduation. Live modestly. Work another job if necessary. Volunteer during the hours you can offer. Place yourself near lawyers doing the work you want to learn.
No firm owes you a position because your debt payment is due.
13. Most Litigation Firms Care More About Ability Than Pedigree
There are firms where your law school, class rank, journal membership, and clerkship determine whether your résumé receives consideration. Large firms and certain competitive positions care deeply about those credentials.
Most smaller litigation firms in North Carolina I know do not give a flip where you went to law school after you have practiced long enough to establish what you can do.
We care whether you can prepare a case, write clearly, work with clients, accept correction, get along with staff, make a sound decision, handle pressure, and try a case. We care whether you show up when you say you will. We care whether you treat the practice as a craft or merely as a platform for self-promotion.
Pedigree may open the first door. Performance determines how long the door stays open.
14. Get Off the Booze and Drugs
Get off the booze and drugs early.
Some students squeak through college and even law school while treating every weekend like a party at the SAE house. They assume professional life will accommodate the same habits.
It will not.
Clients do not think it’s cool if you’re hungover. Judges do not care that you stayed out late. Filing deadlines do not move because you had a rough night. A witness still needs preparation. A trial still begins Monday morning.
The practice already provides enough stress, anxiety, irregular sleep, and opportunities for bad decisions. Building your method of coping around alcohol or drugs is a poor foundation for a legal career.
Grow up before the profession does it for you. Don’t believe me? There is a reason the North Carolina State Bar has the NC LAP program. I’ve seen many, many lawyers crash and burn.
15. Build a Life Outside the Law | Don’t Expect Constant Affirmation
You need activities outside the law. Exercise. Spend time with family. Develop friendships with people who do not care what happened in court. Read something other than legal opinions. Work with your hands. Go outside. Find a part of your identity that does not depend on winning the next case.
You also need to accept that law school stinks at times. Practicing law stinks at times. You will work hard without praise. You will solve a problem no one else understood and receive a complaint about how long it took. You will sacrifice a weekend and have the client ask why you did not respond sooner.
If you are looking for constant affirmation and gratitude for doing your job, this profession will disappoint you.
The boomers are now largely out of the daily management of firms and legal organizations. In many offices, Gen X lawyers are the decision makers, supervising and managing partners, and who bring in the cases and generate the revenue. We tend to value work ethic, self-direction, humor, low drama, self-deprication, and the ability to receive a direct answer without requiring a wellness meeting.
If you want to saddle up and work with us, learn the craft. Show up prepared. Do not make every correction a referendum on your worth. Doing your job doesn’t deserve a pat on the back. If you need that, GenX isn’t going to provide it. Get over it.
Learning a few 1980s movies and songs would not hurt either.
The Point Is Not to Keep You Out of the Profession
I am not telling you to avoid law school. I am telling you to stop relying on people who profit from your enrollment, influencers selling an image, and first-year associates who have not practiced long enough to understand the full profession.
Go to law school if you understand the debt, the financial possibilities, the work, the clients, the competition, and the emotional burden, and you still believe the profession fits you.
Do not enroll because the lifestyle looks impressive on TikTok. Do not quit because a first-year associate had a bad week and recorded it from the firm bathroom.
The law can provide a meaningful career. It demands far more than intelligence and a degree. It requires endurance, judgment, humility, discipline, and the ability to keep working when no one is applauding.
That is not negativity. It is the information I wish someone had given me before I began.
About the Author, Bill Powers
Bill Powers has practiced law in North Carolina since 1992 and founded Powers Law Firm in Charlotte. His practice has centered on criminal defense, impaired driving, serious felony charges, vehicular homicide, and courtroom litigation where preparation and judgment carry real consequences.
His work has extended well beyond representing clients. Bill is a former President of the North Carolina Advocates for Justice, author of the North Carolina DWI Quick Reference Guide, and the NCAJ representative on the Governor’s DWI Task Force. He enjoys teaching and hosting continuing legal education programs, writing practice materials, and helping lawyers develop as courtroom advocates.
The North Carolina State Bar has recognized Bill with the John B. McMillan Distinguished Service Award.
The advice in this article comes from trying cases, training lawyers and staff, operating a law firm, making payroll, dealing with difficult clients, and working through the rewarding and punishing parts of legal practice at the Powers Law Firm.