How did going to law school help?

[deleted]

Passing the BAR exam allowed her to pursue the DNA evidence much faster than having to rely on the Innocence Project to do it for her - that's how / why it helped.

Still, the whole point of the movie was to show her unyielding determination and love for her brother ... the 'becoming a lawyer' part was just a part of the overall theme.

I think the point of her becoming a lawyer was made in the film: Kenny said no lawyer is going to be interested in my case, Betty Anne is the only one who cared that he may be innocent. So she wanted to make sure that he had a lawyer looking out for him. When she began her law degree she had no idea about the DNA stuff, she just wanted to prove him innocent. No one else would have taken his case.

You're right, it didn't really show how it helped, and she could have done a lot of the things without the law degree. I think the main thing is that it made people take her more seriously. She repeatedly alluded to the fact that she was an attorney when seeking the evidence box. In real life, she apparently used that excuse to find out information about the case (using her friend's name and saying she was doing a paper on this case). She did also hear about DNA testing/the Innocence Project through law school, and as they told her on the phone, was able to progress the work faster because she was a lawyer and able to help out, rather than relying on them to do everything and having to wait months for them to consider her case.

I heard that in real life she did have to request an injunction or something in Court, but it wasn't shown.

Most importantly, like others have said, she was doing what she thought was necessary at the time and what her brother asked her to do.

I thought the film made it pretty clear that the law degree allowed her to have some clout when pursuing the DNA evidence. I don't know whether she would have been able to make any progress without having it, but it certainly helped that she was able to go to the courthouse and have them let her search through the box. Granted, it only sped up the process slightly if anything, versus just waiting for Innocence Project to have the time to do the same. But it can always be argued that they (or another attorney that she could have hired) wouldn't have been so dogged in pursuing the evidence that records show was destroyed.

Had she not gone to law school she would not have known about all of the case law that had taken place since her brother's conviction. When she and Abra and the others were preparing their case for moot court, or whatever they were doing, she discovered that there had been more than 40 cases that established that the availability of DNA evidence could be used in some cases to overturn a conviction even where the defendant had exhausted all of his previous appeals. What she then ran into happens frequently with the sitting DA arguing that the fact that the DNA evidence in the prosecution's possession is not that of the defendant does not mean he was not a participant. In addition sitting DA's do not like allowing the old DNA evidence to even be tested for the same reason. Only a very good attorney is able to argue convincingly that the testing of the evidence could provide sufficient proof of innocence to gain a new trial. They weren't able to do that but were able to convince the witnesses to recant once they realized that they had to be lying. Do you think a non-lawyer could have accomplished that? Do you think a non-lawyer could have persuaded Barry Sheck to take the case simply because she "knew" her brother was innocent? Also as others have said, she would never have been able to convince the woman in charge of the evidence storage to look again had she been only a sister of the defendant.