Imposter Syndrome: Who Made You Feel Like One?

You didn't get into law school by accident. So why do your surroundings sometimes make you feel like you don't belong?

Most conversations about imposter syndrome in law don’t begin until after graduation. These  conversations tend to focus on a female-identifying person walking into their first client meeting, or the person of colour sitting at a partners' table wondering if they were hired to fill a quota rather than because they earned their seat. While these are very important conversations to be had, there also exists a fundamental gap in these discussions. 

For a lot of us, imposter syndrome doesn't begin the day we get admitted to practice. 

It begins in the first year of law school.

The Classroom Before the Career

Amidst all the excitement in a first-year classroom, one might notice that conversations can sometimes be a little exclusive. These conversations often circle which school (often private) people went to, or who already knows someone in the profession. It's small talk to most people in the room, but to someone without that shared reference point, it's a quiet reminder that you're starting from a different place. Nobody genuinely means to exclude you. But the exclusion happens anyway, in the gaps of a conversation you can't quite join.

The Cost of Belonging

Beyond the classroom, belonging often comes with a price tag. 

Dinners, trips, and the kind of casual socialising that builds friendships start as an accessible way to build networks. Eventually, these networks become more costly to maintain, and for students without the means to keep up, that has a way of quietly limiting who you can get close to. 

This is a familiar dynamic for international students in particular, who arrive without a local network and are often adjusting to a new financial reality at the same time. However, this isn't only an international student experience. Anyone who enters law school without a very strong support network or an existing professional network are often subject to the same realities. 

The Widening Gap

Although one might think that the gap closes as time goes on, this is often not true. In the later years, the realisation begins to set in that your peers have long already had a foot in the door through a family friend at a firm, a parent who’s a lawyer. These backings were established long before they even entered university and opened a textbook. And while these connections were being strengthened, you might still have been figuring out what a clerkship even is. 

It is important to remember that this is  not a failure of effort on your behalf. Rather, it's a difference in starting position, and no amount of hard work erases a head start that began before law school did.

An Institutional Problem, Not a Personal One

Research in legal education has shown an important point about all of this. 

Imposter syndrome is too often thought of as if there is something wrong with the person experiencing it. Students are told to "fake it until they make it", creating the illusion that  confidence is the missing ingredient. But recent research on working-class law students found that imposter syndrome is rarely just personal. It's produced by environments that were never built with these students in mind. Treating it as an individual flaw allows institutions to avoid addressing the problem of why some students have to work so much harder just to feel like they belong.

The Merit That Got You Here

It's worth remembering that imposter syndrome tends to show up in people with a track record of achievement, not people who lack one. 

Once you're accepted into law school, you belong there. That doesn't stop being true just because someone else's path looked easier.

So when the feeling hits, and it will, it's worth pausing to actually trace your own path here. The version where the effort, the decisions and the setbacks you worked through to arrive at this point are seen in a positive light. You belong in that room, not as a matter of benevolence, but because you have already proven, more than once, that you can meet what's asked of you. That's worth carrying with you the next time the feeling creeps back in – whether that's in a classroom, an interview, or a room full of people who seem to have it all figured out.

Reflection

Imposter syndrome in law school is rarely about ability. It's about proximity to networks, wealth, and a sense of belonging that was built long before university started. Recognising this shifts the conversation from "how do I fix myself" to "how do we build a legal culture where belonging isn't a function of who your parents know?" 

In saying that, all legal students have a responsibility to help cultivate this environment. Every student who has felt out of place in a lecture theatre has a role to play in making sure the next student does not feel alone.

Written by Vishnu Bhat