Impactful careers for law degree graduates

Considering a law degree, currently studying, or already graduated? This guide will take you through some of the most promising career paths you could enter with a background in law.

These aren’t just any careers. At Probably Good, we believe your career is one of the most significant opportunities you have to make a positive difference. With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explore some of the most impactful careers where a law degree or major can open doors and potentially offer unique advantages.

Operations

Every organization relies on a substantial amount of essential behind-the-scenes effort to achieve its goals. This is where operations professionals come in. They are the individuals responsible for ensuring everything functions smoothly and effectively. 

The exact tasks an operations professional handles can vary significantly. However, common responsibilities often include: 

• Internal systems tasks that involve managing and improving internal processes and workflows.This can include anything from setting up CRM systems to keep track of donors and donations, to managing vacation request and approval systems.
• Legal tasks such as securing an organization’s legal status and ensuring regulatory compliance.
• Financial tasks like managing payroll, invoices, and budgets. Some operations staff can even take on fundraising for their organization.
• Project management responsibilities to keep projects on schedule and within budget.
• Logistics responsibilities like organizing real-world activities, including events or office space. 
• Human resources tasks such as assisting with hiring and handling workplace conflicts.

Law is an excellent background for operations roles. On top of this, with a background in law you’ll be qualified for some of the more specialized legal operations roles, meaning you could play an important part in an organization’s legal functions.

How much impact could you have?

Overall, we think operations can be a highly impactful career for someone who’s a great fit. An operations specialist can effectively multiply the impact of the rest of their organization. By making internal processes more efficient, helping to make good hires, and guiding projects to completion, good operations can help an organization to meet their goals better and quicker.

For instance, in a research organization like a think tank, an operations specialist can take on needed administrative work, freeing up researchers to spend more time doing valuable research. In a health nonprofit, an operations professional might organize the procurement and distribution of health products – getting this right could save the organization money and time.

So, although operations staff are rarely helping other people directly, they often perform an instrumental role in helping others to help others more effectively.

Operations professionals can also play a hugely important role in protecting their organization from risks–whether these be legal, financial, or reputational. These kinds of risks (for instance, a nonprofit failing an audit) can have disastrous consequences for an organization, preventing them from performing their valuable work. 

All this comes with a caveat: because operations is a supporting role, to have a positive impact, it’s vital to work in an organization that’s performing effective work in a high-priority cause area. If you help an organization that doesn’t stand a good chance of having an impact, then neither will you.

Operations salaries

In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an average salary of $91,290 for operations research analysts. For operations managers, builtin reports an salary of over $95,000. We couldn’t find better data for more “standard” operations roles, so take these numbers with a pinch of salt.

Getting started in operations

Here are a few practical ideas for actions you can take now to test your personal fit and upskill for operations careers.

• Find low-stakes opportunities to test your fit. Find a local volunteer group that needs some help with logistics or legal work. If they need it, helping to officially register them as a charity could be both a great learning experience for you and genuinely helpful for them, too. 
• Take on measurable projects that can bolster your CV when applying for jobs. Providing concrete examples of improvements you’ve made in ways that organizations care about will give you an advantage in the hiring process. Examples like I helped scale a volunteer organization from 3 to 50 members or I ran a successful event with half the budget are great for demonstrating operations experience and competence.
• Develop more specialized skills. Though you’ll have a strong skill set for the legal side of operations, there are other specialist skills that can help you be more of a generalist. For instance, learning project management, human resources, and people management can all make you a more well-rounded operations specialist.

Practicing law for good

Practicing law for good means finding impactful opportunities to exercise your legal skills, whether as a solicitor, barrister, prosecutor, counsel, or other kind of professional lawyer (with specific names depending on your location). There are many roles within nonprofit organizations for this kind of work, but you can also work independently or even pro bono.

How much impact could you have?

As a lawyer working to improve the world, we think there are some great opportunities to make a positive impact.

However, if you want to have the most impact practicing law, it’s important to look outside the usual routes. A lot of social impact law positions are highly competitive – these are positions that are surprisingly in demand. This is true particularly of human rights law, a field that’s both highly specialized and competitive. 

Thankfully, this means that these positions are easily filled–but it also means that you’ll be less likely to have a positive counterfactual impact in these roles, since other talented lawyers would fill these positions if you didn’t. Our sense is also that some of the most common focus areas for lawyers wanting to have an impact might not offer impact on a very large scale. 

To have even more impact, we’d recommend finding opportunities to use your legal skills in a problem that’s both pressing and neglected by many other lawyers looking to have an impactful career. These opportunities can offer strong leverage–the ability to affect the lives of many others at once. Here are just a few suggestions:

• AI law and governance. Artificial intelligence could be transformatively positive, but it also comes with tremendous risks. As a fairly new field, setting effective legal standards for how AI companies operate and how AI models are allowed to function could be highly effective in mitigating some of these risks down the line. Organizations working in this area include the Institute for Law and AI and EqualAI.
• Animal advocacy. As we’ve covered elsewhere, billions of animals are raised and killed each year under often horrendous conditions. Increasingly, animal rights organizations are making legal challenges to make improvements, like Legal Impact for Chickens and Advocates for Animals. Successful legal challenges can improve the lives of thousands, even millions of animals at once. On top of this, very few lawyers specialize in animal law, meaning there might be a real chance of making a meaningful difference as an individual.
• Global health policy. The world’s poorest people disproportionately suffer from health problems that are often highly treatable or preventable. Thankfully, there are many impactful organizations trying to use policy to address these issues. For instance, the Lead Exposure Elimination Project has had great success advocating for laws that limit lead paint. In such organizations, lawyers are sometimes needed to help with the legal technicalities of policy work. Our sense is that most roles available here are more advisory–you’ll be helping organizations to understand the relevant legal frameworks that they want to change.

Our full list of cause areas might give you some other ideas of problems that you can help solve with your legal experience.

Law for good salaries

In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports an average salary of $151,160 for lawyers as of 2024. Bear in mind, however, that impact-focused law roles are likely to pay less than comparable corporate jobs–especially for roles within nonprofits. And, naturally, any pro bono work you do won’t be remunerated.

Getting started in law for good

Here are a few practical ideas for actions you can take now to test your personal fit and upskill for impactful law positions.

• Consider further qualifications. Assuming you’ll have completed law school and attained the relevant credential (e.g., an LLB in the UK, or a JD in the US). Our sense is that most law for good roles in promising cause areas are solicitor roles, but because there are also relevant barrister jobs, consider whether you’ll also need to pass the bar examination in your jurisdiction.
• Gain cause area knowledge. On top of your formal credentials, it’ll help hugely to know about the cause you want to help using the legal profession. For instance, if you want to work in animal law, becoming familiar with both broad animal welfare issues and specific knowledge about animal law will be essential for knowing both where to have the most impact and for giving you credibility.

Earning to Give

One way to have a great positive impact, whatever career you’re in, is to give money to effective charities, which can do impressive work with your donations. 

Going further than this, you can seek higher-paying jobs just to give more away, known as earning to give. This might not be the most intuitive way to have an impact – but we think it could actually be one of the best ways to help others, provided you’re well-placed to earn a significant salary.

We highlight earning to give here because law offers among the best earning potential of any degree subject. In the US, lawyers earn an average salary of $151,160 as of 2024, with the top 10% of earners receiving over $239,000. These salaries are much higher than the US median salary of around $56,000. In fact, the average lawyer’s salary is nearly 45 times higher than the median global salary.

We point this out because of the enormous capacity for good these salaries can achieve if used in the right way. Pursuing a high-paying law job might seem an odd way to make a positive impact, 

In other regions, salaries may be lower than in the US, but these kinds of roles are still likely to offer much higher salaries than the national average, wherever you are.

How much impact could you have?

In short, your impact in this path will be determined by how much you’re able to give and where you give.

One part of this is obvious – the more money you have, the more money you can give away to great causes (and the more impact you can have!).

The second part might be less obvious, but it’s no less important. In fact, deciding which charity to give your money to will often be more important than how much you give. The truth is, some charities can do much more good with the money you give them than others. The most effective charities can achieve many times more positive impact per dollar spent than an average charity.

But how much good could you actually do? Let’s say you earn a salary of $50,000 – close to the median US salary – and you want to give away 10% of your income to great causes. Here are just a few things you could achieve with a $5,000 donation:

• Save a child’s life through funding Evidence Action’s chlorine dispenser program that helps sanitize water in regions without easy access to clean water. 
• Double the annual household income for five families through GiveDirectly, who provide direct cash transfers for people in extreme poverty.
• Fund a highly effective climate organization like the Clean Air Task Force, who have influenced the uptake of significant climate action by the US and members of the COP. 
• Fund important research and advocacy to combat the most important risks from emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, through an expert-managed fund that finds the most promising recipients for the money.
• Prevent 3,000 children from experiencing lead poisoning through the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, which helps governments reduce the prevalence of toxic lead paint.

Naturally, these are simplified estimates – but they’re a good indicator of what the best charities can achieve with your money. Because of this, choosing the organizations you want to donate to is a crucial part of your impact within earning to give; get it right, and you can do a huge amount of good.

Added to this, most of the impact you’ll have through earning to give is counterfactual; if you land a high-paying job, it’s unlikely the next-best candidate would have similar altruistic intentions, meaning the money you give wouldn’t have been donated otherwise. This makes this a very promising path for people who can sustain their altruistic motivation over the long term while pursuing a high-paying career.

Other relevant careers

The careers explored above are ones that may be particularly advantageous or impactful to explore for people with degrees in law. Here, we’ll give a few quick extra examples of careers that may also be a good fit.

Policymaker or policy researcher

Want to have an influence on some of the most important decisions that can be made? Careers in policy research can let you do this. Policy researchers analyze social, economic, and political issues to inform decision-making and legislation. This kind of research is often used to positively shape policies implemented by governments, as well as other powerful organizations, like multinational institutions (such as the UN or World Bank). 

Policy jobs are available in government, think tanks, advocacy organizations, or academic institutions. A law degree is a solid background for roles in this field. It’ll give you an understanding of how the law (and potentially policymaking) operates, giving you the ability to dig into the details of laws and policies that others may have to develop outside of their degree. What’s more, some impactful law positions (such as some within government) even prefer to hire law graduates. 

If the idea of shaping the law (rather than practicing it) appeals to you, this could be a career path with very high leverage and potential for impact.

Roles that build career capital

Regardless of the exact career path you go down, often the best way to have an impactful career over the long term is to focus on building skills and experience, known as career capital, while you’re still early in your career. Counterintuitively, this can mean taking jobs that aren’t directly impactful, but that might put you in a better place to take highly impactful jobs later on. 

Here are a few guidelines for opportunities that can offer strong career capital:

• Jobs that offer strong development. Some roles will let you develop skills more quickly than others. For instance, graduate schemes are often focused on professional development. Small, early-stage organizations can often offer more personal mentorship and opportunities to contribute. 
• Jobs in prestigious organizations. Roles in organizations with strong reputations for excellence will look impressive on your CV; they’ll also often give you experience in a high-performing environment, developing your general professional skills.

How does law compare to other degrees?

For almost everyone considering a law degree, it’s because you want to enter the legal profession. If this is true, then there’s not much else to be said – a law degree is the way to go.

But even if you’re open to other careers, there’s a lot to be said in favor of a law degree. It’s a highly respected degree that can open up a lot of options. And as we highlighted above, there are some careers where you might have a unique advantage, like operations.

However, there are also some potential drawbacks. For one, it’s a famously demanding subject to study, so you may have less time to spend on developing other skills or exploring interests outside of your degree – something that can be helpful for testing your personal fit for potential careers. And if you’re interested in careers outside of law, your specialist legal knowledge may not be relevant.

The country in which you study law also makes a difference. In many countries, law is an undergraduate subject that takes a similar time to complete to other degree subjects – three years in the UK, for instance.

However, in the US (and some other countries), you enter law school after completing an undergraduate degree. This means you’ll spend at least 7 years studying before getting your Juris Doctor (JD) degree. 

In these cases, studying law is a much more significant financial and time investment. If you want to become a lawyer, there’s not much other choice (beyond studying in a country that offers undergraduate law degrees). But, if you’re not totally set on law, it may be worth thinking about more direct routes to an impactful and fulfilling career.

Expanding your options

It’s important to note that this is just a small selection of the careers that you’ll be in a good position to pursue with a law degree. These are careers that we think have a potential for high positive impact and personal fulfillment, and your degree will put you in a good place to pursue these kinds of jobs.

However, don’t feel limited by these options. Careers are flexible and often take unexpected directions. Your degree will provide a great first step for the jobs discussed in this article, but your true list of options is much larger than it might seem. 

In fact, most graduates (as many as 74%) go into careers unrelated to their degree subject or major. Because of this, it’s well worth keeping an open mind and exploring other paths, too, even if they don’t immediately seem relevant to your education.

What should you do next?

Here are a few suggestions for steps you can take next to plan your career and find great opportunities.

• Read our career advice series for a step-by-step guide on building a career that’s good for you and the world.
• Find great job opportunities on our high-impact job board and explore great internships and fellowships.
• See our career profiles for a full list of impactful careers that we’ve researched.
• Consider applying to our free 1-1 advising service, where we can give you helpful, tailored career advice.