California Attorney General Rob Bonta cleaned laundry rooms to support himself through college and still left Yale Law School with a mountain of debt.
Bonta says he’d do it all again.
“I get a lot of questions from young folks who ask me if law school’s worth it,” Bonta told Business Insider. “I still tell every person to ask me, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.'”
A law degree doesn’t come cheap. The Education Data Initiative estimates the average total cost of law school was $217,480 in 2025. That investment looks shakier in the age of artificial intelligence, as software takes on the routine work done by junior lawyers.
Still, Bonta said, the skills learned in law school allow graduates to “impact the future of our state and our nation and make a difference in society.” Those skills, he added, will continue to separate job candidates from the pack, whether they pursue roles in or out of legal.
“I couldn’t do this job,” or “a bunch of other jobs,” without a law degree, he said. “I wouldn’t think or learn or speak or write the way I do without the training.”
Bonta started his career in private practice, putting his dream of public service on hold, he said, to pay down his student loans. He went on to become a young lawyer in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office and a state legislator, before being sworn in as California’s attorney general in 2021.
That role has put him at the center of California’s crackdown on artificial intelligence. The push includes efforts to police deepfakes and harms to children, as well as a new program inside the attorney general’s office to build in-house technical expertise.
Asked whether his office is also testing AI tools to speed up work, Bonta said his team is reviewing what’s available, though he declined to name any vendors. He acknowledged that while the government is “notoriously slower” than the private sector in adopting new tech, “we can’t be too out of sync.”
Banta’s peers in the private sector tell him that they’re under pressure from clients to deploy artificial intelligence and trim legal bills. “We will need to start doing that more, as well,” he said. “I think it’ll enhance our output, our product.”
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