I went part time for all 4 years of law school. I graduated 10 years ago. Currently working in house as the chief legal officer of a small/medium company.
What I did might not work for everyone. I had a senior professional job before I went to law school with a ton of good will at the job, generous vacation time, and a role that allowed/required me to work flexible hours. I used all of my vacation time for the 4 years of law school to create flexibility. During law school, I took vacation time from my professional job to make time to work internships and part time legal jobs. I managed to graduated with latin honors and at the top of my class (ranked with the full time students), but I also went to what was a T3/T4 school at the time. Your experience is going to be different.
I tried doing on campus interviews, but it was during the great recession, so the job market for attorneys (especially new attorneys) was kind of screwy. Getting a OCI for any student was very hard. I managed to get two. Both were terrible.
1L fall, I did not get any OCI. Very few people did. I did extremely well my 1L year. I tried without success to find a 1L summer job. Gave up and took 2 courses that summer to reduce work load during the normal semester.
In 2L fall, I managed to get two interviews. One, the person seemed very open to me, but then got weird when they asked how I would be able to work full time as a summer associate. I told them I would quit my job to do a summer associate program, and that seemed to spoke them.
The other interview, I ended up interviewing with a substitute interviewer from the firm. He was very nice when I walked into the room. Three minutes later when he realized I was a part time student, it started going down hill. He clearly did not realize I was a part time student, and clearly would not have chosen to interview me if he had been doing the resume reviews. The interview slowly denigrated into him quizzing me about my daily schedule, because he could not believe someone could work a full time job and do well in law school. I literally was explaining how i managed to drive to school and manage the impact of rush hour traffic.
I gave up on looking for traditional summer associate for the 2L-3L summer after that. I switched to focusing on part time jobs during the school year. My school had a paid fellowship to work in clerks offices of civil courts working with pro se parties completing paperwork. I did that for a semester.
In the summer, I took 2 courses, so I could reduce my work load during the regular semester. During the 2L-3L summer I got a job as a research assistant for one of the professors who I got along with well. He never had research assistants before, but turned out my law school gave every professor a budget to hire one, and he was willing to hire me as his first research assistant.
2L-3L summer, I also got a jump start on my law review responsibilities. I tried to do as much of the law review work before the fall semester started as I could, so I could reduce the law review work required to be done during the semester 3L year. (3L year was the the first year I was on law review).
In 3L Fall, I did a judicial internship for credit with a trial judge. After that I did a for credit judicial internship with an appellate judge during the spring semester. Both where arranged through the internship coordinator that was part of the schools legal clinic,so I got credit for both.
3L-4L summer I was able to get a part time internship with legal aid. The managing attorney for the family law unit was an part-time professor at my school, and I got to know her through extra curricular activities. And she let me work 3 days a week instead of 5 days for the summer. That summer I also took one course, and I asked for the least desirable role on the editorial board of law review because it required doing a lot of work during the summer 3L-4L summer.
4L year was pretty light. I had gotten enough credits from law review, internships, and summer courses, that if I had taken the normal part time load of 11 credits in the fall, I would have only had to take 2 credits in the spring semester. I spread my courses out. I focused on trying to network to find a job. It went poorly. In February of 4L, I found a nonprofit law firm hiring for summer internships. I pestered them for several weeks until I got them to understand that I wanted to intern with them during the spring semester and I could start right away.
The reason I got the job was because of my background in pre-law school job. I had a lot of non-legal experience with the industries that the firms clients often came from. I could explain and understand the client business issues, better than the experienced attorney' at the firm. I did not realize how much this mattered until several years later. I knew I was the only person at the firm that did not go to a T14 firm, but when I ended up being the internship coordinator, I was strongly discouraged by the managing partner to even interview, let alone higher, interns who were not at T14 schools.
The firm was in a major city about 4 hours from me. So I interned with them two days a week. It was two consecutive days, so I would commute to the city one morning, find a last minute cheap hotel the same day, stay over night, do the internship the next day, and then travel home that night.
After the bar exam they invited me back as a unpaid fellow. I did that part time for a year. I commuted to that city every other day for the fellowship for a year, while working my paying job on a modified schedule.
Then they found funding to hire me as paid counsel. I was out of the back log of vacation time that I had been burning down to work at internships during law school at this point. I negotiated a 3/4 schedule for the paid counsel role, and 50% reduced schedule at my pre-law school job. I was able to keep my benefits at my pre-law school, so the law firm was happy to give me a reduced schedule in exchange for not having to pay for my health insurance.
I did this for 3 years. At some point I moved so that I was closer to the law firm and had a longer commute to my pre-law school job. During that time I took every chance I could to present at conferences or other events the law firm was involved in. In this time I was invited to a few informal conversations about going in house at some Fortune 1000 companies. Pretty much all of those interviews ended when they found either: (a) that I went to a T4 school or (b) that I had gone part time.
I ended up being as the primary out side counsel for a key client, largely based on networking with clients. In addition to other networking relationships, I ended up with a non-legal job offer at a company in my industry. I made a couple of non-legal job changes but continued to do pro bono work. That led to the company I am at now about a year after I left the firm. Initially I was hired into a hybrid legal/non-legal role, but became full time legal role as the company grew. As the company continued to grow my portfolio expanded until I was the chief legal officer (i.e. I ended up managing all outside counsel, even when I had not experience in that area of law).
Everyone's path is different. But what worked for me was leaning into the fact that I had a non-legal expertise that let me add value even as a junior attorney, that senior lawyers appreciated. That opened up a lot of doors for me. I definitely had a lot of doors closed to me because of stigma against part time programs and lower ranked schools, but the further you get from law school the more that fades. At this point, I would say my T4 law school is only a minor limitation. It is not uncommon for me to work lawyers with 10-20 years of experience who worked their way into prestigious firms even though they started at lower ranked schools. But no one cares or even realizes that I went to law school part time anymore. They do not even look at my resume closely enough to realize that it clearly shows I was working full time while in law school.