I came very close do doing this in the early 2000's. Though my degree was in Electrical Engineering, my professional career has been all software. (Full disclosure: I was actually a double major, but was a semester shy of finishing CS and finishing EE meant I had to graduate).
As others have noted, your degree will determine whether you can actually sit for the patent bar and be a registered patent agent. Certain degrees or showing equivalent level of training are required.
geofcline's comment covers the high level differences (+ extremely independent + lots of reading about different subjects + less time working on tooling or “chores” + admin to manage your calendar - much higher productivity expectations than tech - high intensity - varied knowledge of attorneys) so I'm going to talk about the part of the process I know about.
When I applied to college, I couldn't decide between Engineering and Law. I ended up going with Engineering, but 5 years into my career it was time to change jobs, so I figured I might as well try the law route. The path I chose was to become a Technology Specialist (or similarly worded role) at a big law firm.
A Technology Specialist was someone with an Engineering degrees who helped the actual patent attorneys evaluate and draft patents. The law firm would pay a salary (only about 5% than my Engineering salary at the time) and would both pay for law school and guarantee you a job after school. At the time, starting attorney salary was about 50% more than my current salary, so that was quite a deal.
I sent out 5 resumes, got 3 interviews, and one job offer. I joined a firm and was one of about 25 Technology Specialists. Here's where it got interesting. I was very unique in that I had a) actual experience b) a degree that wasn't biology or chemistry and c) the only one with _only_ a master's degree. Every other "tech spec" was a PhD that noped out of post-doc life of long hours and low pay for long hours and high pay. I later found out that CS/EE types were a harder sell because they typically had to take a pay cut to join.
While I saw some cool and innovative tech, and got to meet some names that anyone in tech at the time would know, I saw just as much bogus business process and software patent work. I had a beautiful office with city views and an amazing secretary (patent secretary itself is a skilled, well-paying role), and billed out at $250/hour. The job itself was fairly boring, though. I worked mostly by myself and was creating nothing. After a year I went back to tech and joined a startup.
FWIW, the life of an attorney doing patent prosecution seemed much more chill than those doing litigation. I think part of the reason is that there are only so many people with advanced engineering degrees required to be understand and write patents who also want to be lawyers. For myself, I showed up at 7am to take a couple hours to study for the LSAT, and I generally stayed until 5:30pm to take advantage of free dinner in the cafeteria. The office (and this was early 2000's, so not a ton of WFH tech) was generally empty before 9 and after 6.