How to Decide If Specializing in Health Care Is Right For You As A Lawyer

Have you ever considered specializing in health care cases in your law practice? This video is for you! After nearly 30 years as both a nurse and a lawyer I’ll give you a few tips on how you can decide what will work best for you as an attorney.

Today I want to talk to you just briefly about being an attorney and the desire to be a health care professional. This topic is important. I have had people contact me who are attorneys and who’ve said “I’m considering going into health care. I want to know if health care is right for me. I’m already an attorney and I just don’t know if I should make the switch.”

What I was able to enlighten them with were things like considering your goals. What do you want? Are you an attorney working in a stable environment, but yet you’re not being fulfilled? Are you an attorney who has always had a desire to be a healthcare professional? Are you an attorney who went to law school planning to bring it back to health care somehow?

Those are the types of things you have to consider when talking about going into any other area that’s clearly different. Yes you can mix the two, but what are your goals? Do you want to stop practicing law and get into health care?

Now that would be somebody who really needs to look at health care. Look at the different professions. A lot of them want to be nurses. Look at nursing and see if it’s right for you, and go for it, because you don’t want to practice law.

But if you want to practice law and you love law. You love the journey, but you don’t like where you are right now in the law arena, then you may want to look at other options first in law. If there’s some way you can bring health care in while practicing law, if you can find that, you need to do that.

Whatever health care discipline you choose, you need to get that education. Get those credentials in place. There are so many different things you can do with both a health care and law education.

There are attorneys that work in health care that are not health care professionals as it relates to being a nurse, doctor, therapist, or anything like that. They are working and they may not be practicing law per se.

Like there are big health care institutions and systems that have people that actually do things like review contracts all day long. Or help with some sort of transactional areas and they may not have a health care background.

Health care backgrounds help if you’re doing anything in healthcare because you understand so much about how the process works. You understand the different roles of each person because you’ve been trained and may have had some experience working in the field. You understand so much more.

So I don’t want you to forgo pursuing a healthcare profession journey just because you’re an attorney. If it’s something you’re considering, think about the things I’ve mentioned. Think about what your goals really are.

Look at what you’re doing and see if you can find that fulfillment within another area of what you’re already doing. You may find that you don’t need to go into health care to be fulfilled. But if that is what you want, because that’s a clear different decision, think about that and then start to work on it.

Certainly don’t let anyone stop you from your goals. Don’t let anyone stop you from your dreams and don’t ever think that you’re too old or too ingrained in an area to start another area or to mix the two.

You can do it. It can be done and done well. Who am I? I am dawn Grace Jones. I’m a registered nurse and I’m an attorney. I was a registered nurse first knowing I was going back to school. Did not know I would be going to law school. That was a last-minute decision and worked out really well for me.

I love what I do. I love my both of my professions. I love how they work well together. Sometimes you can be unique and find things that are needed in health care. If you have a legal background you can really do that much more.

If you’re in law full time and you have a health care background, sometimes you could see where it helps that discipline. So figure it out and go forward I wish you the very best.