I did not grow up around lawyers. I grew up around people who needed them and couldn’t afford them.
I was raised in working-class Baltimore, the kind of neighborhood where your father’s handshake meant more than any contract, where people settled disputes on the front porch before anyone thought about a courtroom and where the law was something that happened to you rather than something you used. I attended Eastern Technical High School. Not a prep school, not a magnet program, a vocational-technical school where the expectation was that you would graduate and go to work. And I did.
For more than twenty years, I built a career. First in corporate mortgage banking, navigating the machinery of institutional lending, regulatory compliance and the thousands of small decisions that determine whether a family gets the keys to a house or a rejection letter. Then in nonprofit development, where I served as a director of planned giving, work that put me across the table from donors, attorneys and financial advisors as we structured gifts that would outlast all of us. I raised over $6,000,000 in planned gifts. I drafted proposals, negotiated terms and managed relationships at every level of organizational life.
And now, at the age of 45, I am an evening law student at Wilmington University Farnan School of Law. I sit in class after working a full day. I read cases during my lunch break. I outline on weekends while my three kids do homework at the same table. I am the oldest person in most of my classes, and I am the only person in my family who has ever attempted this.
I am telling you all of this not because my story is unusual, but because it is invisible. The legal profession has a class problem, and almost nobody talks about it.
Walk into any law school orientation and listen to the introductions. You will hear about undergraduate degrees from well-known universities, parents who practice law, internships secured through family connections and gap years spent abroad. You will hear the language of a professional class that has been preparing for this moment since high school. What you will rarely hear is someone say they went to a vocational school, worked in mortgage banking for fifteen years and decided to go to law school in their 40s because they finally had the financial stability to try.
The silence is not accidental. The legal profession, despite its stated commitment to justice and equity, operates within a culture that rewards a specific kind of background. The assumptions are baked into the structure. Law school admissions favor applicants with high GPAs from selective undergraduate institutions. Hiring timelines favor students who can dedicate summers to unpaid or low-paid internships. Networking events assume you already know how to navigate rooms full of people who went to the same schools, joined the same organizations and share the same frame of reference. If you come from a different world, nobody hands you the playbook. You figure it out or you fall behind.
I want to be clear about something. This is not a grievance. I am not asking for sympathy and I am not suggesting that people from privileged backgrounds are less capable or less deserving. Many of the sharpest legal minds I have encountered come from every kind of background imaginable. What I am saying is that the profession loses something when it draws from too narrow a well, and it gains something real when people like me walk through the door.
Here is what a blue-collar background gives you that no casebook can teach. It gives you the ability to sit across from a client who is terrified, overwhelmed and convinced that the system was not built for them, and to say with complete honesty, “I understand, because I have been in rooms where I felt the same way.” It gives you a tolerance for hard work that is not performative. When you have spent years doing genuinely difficult labor, the grind of law school is not a revelation. It is another Tuesday. It gives you fluency in the language of ordinary life that makes you a better communicator, a better listener and ultimately a better advocate. You do not have to translate your client’s experience into something you can understand because you have lived a version of it yourself.
I am choosing employment litigation as an intended practice area for exactly this reason. I have spent my entire career as an employee. I have watched people lose jobs unfairly, face discrimination quietly and accept mistreatment because they believed they had no options. I know what it feels like to depend on a paycheck, to weigh the cost of speaking up against the cost of staying silent and to wonder whether the system has any room for someone like you. When I represent workers, I will not be guessing about what they are going through. I will be remembering.
The legal profession in Pennsylvania and everywhere else needs lawyers who come from the communities they serve. It needs lawyers who understand what it means to worry about rent, to negotiate with a landlord from a position of weakness, to sit in a waiting room at a government office and feel the weight of bureaucracy pressing down on you. It needs lawyers who chose this path not because it was expected but because they fought for it.
I am not the youngest person in my class. I am not the most credentialed. My first-semester GPA will not be printed on a banner. But I bring something to this profession that twenty-two years of living and working in the real world built, and no three-year program can replicate: I know what it is like to be the person who needs a lawyer and does not know how to find one, cannot afford one and does not trust one. That knowledge is not a disadvantage. It is the foundation of everything I intend to build.
The legal world does not need fewer people from prestigious backgrounds. It needs more people from mine.
Rick Metzgar is an evening law student at Wilmington University Farnan School of Law (Class of 2029) and a paralegal at Sanctuary Title, a Maryland title and settlement company. He lives in Maryland with his wife Sarah and their three children.