Prospective law school applicants often spend hours researching which careers they can pursue after getting a J.D. and which schools can help them reach these careers. But it’s almost impossible to thoroughly investigate every possible law job. From labor law to human rights work to health care, there’s an endless number of options.

” I Am The Law,” a new podcast on what life in the legal profession is really like, may help with some of this legwork.

The podcast lets legal professionals in areas such as family law, patent law and real estate law describe what their jobs are like and how they started their careers. The show debuted in January, and each episode is about 20 minutes long.

Kyle McEntee, a 2011 graduate of the law school at Vanderbilt University, is part of the team behind “I Am The Law.” It’s in line with another of McEntee’s ventures, Law School Transparency, an organization that provides detailed employment data from law schools and tools that help prospective students project their cost of attendance.

Find out [which law admissions trends 2015 applicants should know about.]

“We focus on quantitative information so much that we wanted to add more qualitative information to the mix, to help people make that informed decision about pursuing a particular career,” says McEntee. “The law is about so much more than what you can glean from statistics. And also more than you can glean from news articles and TV shows and movies and those sorts of things.”

The podcast, McEntee says, is for prospective and current law students, as well as law school alumni. He hopes the show will more accurately portray what law is like and go beyond the big-firm life so often seen on television.

“Our task here is public education,” McEntee says. “We’re doing it through the lens of journalism.”

We spoke with McEntee about how the show is produced and how prospective and current students can make smart decisions about their legal careers. An edited excerpt of our conversation, and an episode of “I Am the Law,” is below.

How do you select guests for the show?

Every episode is a different law school graduate. The vast majority of them are and will be lawyers. We are making our selections based on trying to provide a fair cross-section of what the profession is. That means gender diversity, racial diversity, practice area diversity, employer type and employer size diversity.

We have a lot of small-firm attorneys on the show, and that will always be the case because that’s what the legal profession is like. That’s what people end up doing. We’ll never have more than 10 to 15 percent of our shows being people from big firms.

Take [this quiz to see if you’re ready to apply for law school.]

Why? Are lawyers at big firms not a huge representation of the market?

Exactly. That’s the story that’s usually told both on TV and through the articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

You hear about what’s happening at the big firms, and it’s sexy. I get it. But our goal is to help people make informed decisions that are applicable to them. And the vast majority of people will never work at firms like that. Largely because they don’t want to, but also because those jobs are very difficult to get unless you’re at a very prestigious law school.

What do you hope prospective law students learn from the podcast?

I hope they learn more about themselves and what they actually want to do and then use that information to make smarter choices about where they go to law school and how much they’re willing to pay.

Consider [four things when selecting a cost-efficient law school.]

Why present this information in podcast form?

I think podcasts are growing in popularity. With so many people obsessing over ” Serial“, that could not have happened at a better time.

People interact in such a specific way with podcasts. It’s deeply engaging. You can’t watch a video when you’re driving, or you can’t watch a video when you’re in the shower. But you can play a podcast when you’re in the shower or when you’re driving.

Podcasts are on demand. When you’re ready to listen, you listen — you control it entirely. You can rewind.

What else can prospective law students do to learn more about legal careers?

Listen to some of our episodes and then mimic our hosts anytime you can. Ask questions of lawyers to demand that the people you talk to go beyond the surface.

Searching for a law school? Get our complete rankings of Best Law Schools.

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New Podcast Shows Aspiring Lawyers What Law Is Really About originally appeared on usnews.com