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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 19 - 13 Jan 2012 - Main.IanSullivan
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Sacrificing Relationships | |
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< | ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm. | >
> | ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm. | | | Few people would willingly sign up for a lifetime of work, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just be like this until IL is over; then, until law school is over; then, until I make partner. Young lawyers become ingrained in choosing work over relationships before they realize what is happening. |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 17 - 23 May 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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> | Ready for grading | | | From the Classroom to the Firm | | | One thing driving the masses to Big Law is three years of acculturation. From the first day of law school students are assimilated into firm culture. Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations that “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in terms both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” (350) So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture. | |
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< | What follows is a functional analysis of law school. For simplicity’s sake I have broken the study into two discrete categories (actions and beliefs), although I realize in practice these categories often have overlapping effects.
Actions
Law school is adept at shaping the way students act. Those actions will become habits that students continue once they reach Big Law. | >
> | What follows is a functional analysis of law school. | | | The Curve | |
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< | The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing so you may decrease your own odds of success. | >
> | The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others.
Qualitative and quantitative studies (with an admittedly small sample size) of this phenomenon yield interesting results. The qualitative data reveals that most people do think the curve influences behavior. Most students perceive others as sharing information more readily when their grade is not in danger, and withholding help when their grade seems threatened. | | | | |
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- I am extremely interested in this argument. It is almost certainly wrong to conclude that the normalizing of grades has the slightest effect on the real costs and benefits of collaboration, for reasons one could give pretty simply (though some of the details are more complex than they look). But to the extent that students believe this argument, it has an absolutely awful social effect whether it is true or false. I would be very eager to hear from people on the subject of the incentive effects of the grading curve.
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> | But interestingly, practically every single person who responded maintained that the curve never influenced his/her own behavior. Part of that might have come from fear of peer disapproval, but 95% of participants who filled out an anonymous survey also indicated that their willingness to help another would not be affected by how competitive the other student was for a good grade. If respondents are lying, they are also lying to themselves. | | | | |
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< | The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will also play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. | >
> | The truth about the curve seems to be that it doesn’t stop students from helping each other – but many people think it does. If anything, then, the curve’s real influence is on what people think, not what people do. Students believe that others are refraining from helping them, and the qualitative data indicates they are reacting with no small amount of bitterness. Even if the curve does not increase competitiveness, if it makes students feel alienated from each other, it is an ineffective learning tool. | | | | |
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- I think this is unestablished, and in my experience quite wrong. As an employer of lawyers can say it bears no relationship to how I promote. It's not the culture of any law firm I can think of, and it certainly doesn't represent the nature of in-house or small-partnership practice. Nor does it seem to me how government agencies promote lawyers. Is there a sector left in which it might be true. Sure. But I can't quite make myself believe it, and certainly not without some evidence.
| | | Sacrificing Relationships
ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm.
Few people would willingly sign up for a lifetime of work, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just be like this until IL is over; then, until law school is over; then, until I make partner. Young lawyers become ingrained in choosing work over relationships before they realize what is happening. | |
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- Maybe. But wouldn't it be truthful to say that pretty much no matter how lawyers work, they are either selling hours or foregoing autonomy or both? If the first, the economic incentive is to work long hours in order to maximize the value of one's skills. If the second, isn't the criticism of law firms that they are really the third, leveraging the hours while determining the client, and that the party trading autonomy for time should be an in-house lawyer, which is pretty much what the firms do make it possible to transition to after a "while"? Wouldn't that make the firm job paying by contributing heavy hours to a leveraged law firm for the high-level introduction to the corporate clients whose in-house counsel jobs would go far to returning you to regular hours at a comfortable but not exorbitant wage in return for the complete surrender of your law license into their keeping?
Beliefs
In order to fully assimilate to firm life, it is necessary to not only change student’s actions, but also the beliefs that inform those actions. The indoctrination begins early, even before the first class is held.
The Application Process
In my experience, many students choose law schools based in large part on the US News rankings. Picking a law school based on ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work for you. US News has complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective, so why would anyone pick the #10 school when #5 is clearly better?
- When you think about it, this is a remarkable mistake, a category error, equivalent to assuming that the way for a teacher to pick a spouse is to marry the person with the highest grade in the class. An education is not a commodity, but a series of relationships amounting to a life-altering experience. To assume that a news magazine's questionnaire-backed formula and echo-chamber can tell you anything about a personal choice is self-evident rubbish. If US News & World Report rated dresses, would you rush right out and choose the top-rated one without trying it on? Once again, I'm not attributing the idiocy to you: it's a madness of crowds, and its study reveals pearls of wisdom that you don't dive for here. But you could have asked how people were sold this delusion: it would have led you in interesting directions.
But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this indoctrination starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT. Firms will later reinforce that identification with numbers, since firms mainly care about the applicant’s GPA. All the things that used to define a person (hobbies, etc) no longer matter.
- Only if you think cognitive distortion is irremediable. You are identifying a situation, which may or may not be widespread but is certainly not inevitable. One will only think of oneself as a number if one isn't otherwise treated as a human being. You are actually identifying a condition of social disorientation owing to the peculiar and psychologically unhelpful procedure called "law school." It can be changed, and if existing ways of doing things are slightly modified, so that students feel acknowledged as individuals, rather than as numeric components of the class with the best numbers on record, the cognitive distortion you refer to would clear up swiftly.
This belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks.
- Maybe. This might be true, but few law firms seem to me to put their stress on the money alone. A real analysis of law firm come ons might be productive, but that isn't what you're doing here.
The Culture of Spending
Students are willing to endure the drudgery of the week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget their lives. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget their troubles.
The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys. | >
> | There’s always the possibility, of course, that law firms don’t actually set one up for a lifetime of work. There are cushier law firm jobs out there, such as in-house counsel, which pays less but has better hours. Still, such jobs are not an option for everyone who decides they are tired of being overworked. The in-house counsel market is a relatively small one. Furthermore legal outsourcing has placed many more lawyers in search of work, and the slow economy could potentially soon leave even more lawyers looking for a job. The truth is that many people may not be able to find alternative work, even if they want to. What’s more, since in-house counsel often pays less than firm work, people who become accustomed to a certain lifestyle may feel as if they (and those dependent upon them) can't afford to make the switch. | | | Concluding Thoughts
While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | |
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- The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.
- So where does that leave us overall? Your goal is to show that the structure of experience in law school is designed to normalize the structure of experience in law firm employment. Sometimes your arguments in support seem to me to conflict with reality: you don't prove your facts, you simply assert them, and it occasionally seems to me you have not yet enough experience to know that you are asserting non-facts. Even so, your arguments have validity to the extent that the beliefs represented are widely-enough shared to constitute an alternate reality that affects social behavior. You don't follow that approach, but it seems to me that you might redraft to make use of the voting plugin of this wiki to assemble a questionnaire for your colleagues in order to gather some public opinion data if you can't find any already available.
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- I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).
All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 16 - 20 Feb 2008 - Main.JustinColannino
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- I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).
All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you. | |
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- Amanda, thanks for bringing up this topic. I have some thoughts/questions that I believe are relevant. A reason I keep hearing as to why I should work at a firm is that they provide the training that I will need to be able to use our degree in future practice. Common wisdom is that law school does not train you to be an attorney. I wonder why that is? Why don't law schools make more of an effort to train us? Why do they rely on employers to fulfill that goal? The only school I know of that makes a strong effort to give their graduates the work-training they need is Northeastern with its co-op program. I think that the lack of concrete, practical training may be another reason that students go from the classroom to the firm. -- JustinColannino - 20 Feb 2008
That is an interesting question Justin. Why isn’t law school more “practical”? I don’t know. I think I will respond with another question: should it be? What are we supposed to get out of law school?
I already feel like I am in trade school. (this is my law school complaint) I came here straight out of college. As an undergrad, I was a theory hound. Sophomore year I decided college should give me a framework, some analytical tools to help me think about the world around me. The professor throws some theory at me, and I apply it in some 25 page paper at the end of the semester. It’s a wonderful system.
I am sort of hoping to get the same out of law school: a law specific tool kit. I am not sure practicums are the way to achieve this goal. The LAW is already a narrow category of study. I, for one, do not know what kind of law I will be practicing, so I do not want my studies narrowed by learning a specific way to study the law.
I hope I haven’t misunderstood your point, Justin. What do you mean by “practical”? What should law schools train us in? Should we have more research courses? Less case study more statutory analysis? Externships? When I hear “practical” I have images of document review and brief after brief, and networking skills workshops (the horror!).
Waiver: This is not to say that I approve of our current curriculum. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 15 - 20 Feb 2008 - Main.ThaliaJulme
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| | | All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you.
- Amanda, thanks for bringing up this topic. I have some thoughts/questions that I believe are relevant. A reason I keep hearing as to why I should work at a firm is that they provide the training that I will need to be able to use our degree in future practice. Common wisdom is that law school does not train you to be an attorney. I wonder why that is? Why don't law schools make more of an effort to train us? Why do they rely on employers to fulfill that goal? The only school I know of that makes a strong effort to give their graduates the work-training they need is Northeastern with its co-op program. I think that the lack of concrete, practical training may be another reason that students go from the classroom to the firm. -- JustinColannino - 20 Feb 2008
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> | That is an interesting question Justin. Why isn’t law school more “practical”? I don’t know. I think I will respond with another question: should it be? What are we supposed to get out of law school?
I already feel like I am in trade school. (this is my law school complaint) I came here straight out of college. As an undergrad, I was a theory hound. Sophomore year I decided college should give me a framework, some analytical tools to help me think about the world around me. The professor throws some theory at me, and I apply it in some 25 page paper at the end of the semester. It’s a wonderful system.
I am sort of hoping to get the same out of law school: a law specific tool kit. I am not sure practicums are the way to achieve this goal. The LAW is already a narrow category of study. I, for one, do not know what kind of law I will be practicing, so I do not want my studies narrowed by learning a specific way to study the law.
I hope I haven’t misunderstood your point, Justin. What do you mean by “practical”? What should law schools train us in? Should we have more research courses? Less case study more statutory analysis? Externships? When I hear “practical” I have images of document review and brief after brief, and networking skills workshops (the horror!).
Waiver: This is not to say that I approve of our current curriculum. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 14 - 20 Feb 2008 - Main.JustinColannino
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- I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).
All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you.
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- Amanda, thanks for bringing up this topic. I have some thoughts/questions that I believe are relevant. A reason I keep hearing as to why I should work at a firm is that they provide the training that I will need to be able to use our degree in future practice. Common wisdom is that law school does not train you to be an attorney. I wonder why that is? Why don't law schools make more of an effort to train us? Why do they rely on employers to fulfill that goal? The only school I know of that makes a strong effort to give their graduates the work-training they need is Northeastern with its co-op program. I think that the lack of concrete, practical training may be another reason that students go from the classroom to the firm. -- JustinColannino - 20 Feb 2008
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 13 - 19 Feb 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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- So where does that leave us overall? Your goal is to show that the structure of experience in law school is designed to normalize the structure of experience in law firm employment. Sometimes your arguments in support seem to me to conflict with reality: you don't prove your facts, you simply assert them, and it occasionally seems to me you have not yet enough experience to know that you are asserting non-facts. Even so, your arguments have validity to the extent that the beliefs represented are widely-enough shared to constitute an alternate reality that affects social behavior. You don't follow that approach, but it seems to me that you might redraft to make use of the voting plugin of this wiki to assemble a questionnaire for your colleagues in order to gather some public opinion data if you can't find any already available.
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- I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).
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> | All votes are anonymous. Look at the documentation of the Vote Plugin. If you need help constructing a questionnaire, my assistant, IanSullivan or I can help you. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 12 - 18 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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- The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.
- So where does that leave us overall? Your goal is to show that the structure of experience in law school is designed to normalize the structure of experience in law firm employment. Sometimes your arguments in support seem to me to conflict with reality: you don't prove your facts, you simply assert them, and it occasionally seems to me you have not yet enough experience to know that you are asserting non-facts. Even so, your arguments have validity to the extent that the beliefs represented are widely-enough shared to constitute an alternate reality that affects social behavior. You don't follow that approach, but it seems to me that you might redraft to make use of the voting plugin of this wiki to assemble a questionnaire for your colleagues in order to gather some public opinion data if you can't find any already available.
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- I'm very interested in doing such a questionnaire. Is there a way for people to answer anonymously not just to other wiki users, but to you as well? I don't think I'll get very honest answers otherwise (e.g. everyone [myself included] talking on the wiki about how the curve affects behavior says that they've seen it in others, but never in themselves).
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 11 - 18 Feb 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | |
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- The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.
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- The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.
- So where does that leave us overall? Your goal is to show that the structure of experience in law school is designed to normalize the structure of experience in law firm employment. Sometimes your arguments in support seem to me to conflict with reality: you don't prove your facts, you simply assert them, and it occasionally seems to me you have not yet enough experience to know that you are asserting non-facts. Even so, your arguments have validity to the extent that the beliefs represented are widely-enough shared to constitute an alternate reality that affects social behavior. You don't follow that approach, but it seems to me that you might redraft to make use of the voting plugin of this wiki to assemble a questionnaire for your colleagues in order to gather some public opinion data if you can't find any already available.
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 10 - 18 Feb 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | The Curve
The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing so you may decrease your own odds of success. | |
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- I am extremely interested in this argument. It is almost certainly wrong to conclude that the normalizing of grades has the slightest effect on the real costs and benefits of collaboration, for reasons one could give pretty simply (though some of the details are more complex than they look). But to the extent that students believe this argument, it has an absolutely awful social effect whether it is true or false. I would be very eager to hear from people on the subject of the incentive effects of the grading curve.
| | | The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will also play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. | |
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- I think this is unestablished, and in my experience quite wrong. As an employer of lawyers can say it bears no relationship to how I promote. It's not the culture of any law firm I can think of, and it certainly doesn't represent the nature of in-house or small-partnership practice. Nor does it seem to me how government agencies promote lawyers. Is there a sector left in which it might be true. Sure. But I can't quite make myself believe it, and certainly not without some evidence.
| | | Sacrificing Relationships
ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm.
Few people would willingly sign up for a lifetime of work, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just be like this until IL is over; then, until law school is over; then, until I make partner. Young lawyers become ingrained in choosing work over relationships before they realize what is happening. | |
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- Maybe. But wouldn't it be truthful to say that pretty much no matter how lawyers work, they are either selling hours or foregoing autonomy or both? If the first, the economic incentive is to work long hours in order to maximize the value of one's skills. If the second, isn't the criticism of law firms that they are really the third, leveraging the hours while determining the client, and that the party trading autonomy for time should be an in-house lawyer, which is pretty much what the firms do make it possible to transition to after a "while"? Wouldn't that make the firm job paying by contributing heavy hours to a leveraged law firm for the high-level introduction to the corporate clients whose in-house counsel jobs would go far to returning you to regular hours at a comfortable but not exorbitant wage in return for the complete surrender of your law license into their keeping?
| | | Beliefs | |
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> | | | | In order to fully assimilate to firm life, it is necessary to not only change student’s actions, but also the beliefs that inform those actions. The indoctrination begins early, even before the first class is held.
The Application Process | | | In order to fully assimilate to firm life, it is necessary to not only change student’s actions, but also the beliefs that inform those actions. The indoctrination begins early, even before the first class is held.
The Application Process | |
>
> | | | | In my experience, many students choose law schools based in large part on the US News rankings. Picking a law school based on ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work for you. US News has complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective, so why would anyone pick the #10 school when #5 is clearly better? | |
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- When you think about it, this is a remarkable mistake, a category error, equivalent to assuming that the way for a teacher to pick a spouse is to marry the person with the highest grade in the class. An education is not a commodity, but a series of relationships amounting to a life-altering experience. To assume that a news magazine's questionnaire-backed formula and echo-chamber can tell you anything about a personal choice is self-evident rubbish. If US News & World Report rated dresses, would you rush right out and choose the top-rated one without trying it on? Once again, I'm not attributing the idiocy to you: it's a madness of crowds, and its study reveals pearls of wisdom that you don't dive for here. But you could have asked how people were sold this delusion: it would have led you in interesting directions.
| | | But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this indoctrination starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT. Firms will later reinforce that identification with numbers, since firms mainly care about the applicant’s GPA. All the things that used to define a person (hobbies, etc) no longer matter. | |
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- Only if you think cognitive distortion is irremediable. You are identifying a situation, which may or may not be widespread but is certainly not inevitable. One will only think of oneself as a number if one isn't otherwise treated as a human being. You are actually identifying a condition of social disorientation owing to the peculiar and psychologically unhelpful procedure called "law school." It can be changed, and if existing ways of doing things are slightly modified, so that students feel acknowledged as individuals, rather than as numeric components of the class with the best numbers on record, the cognitive distortion you refer to would clear up swiftly.
| | | This belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks. | |
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- Maybe. This might be true, but few law firms seem to me to put their stress on the money alone. A real analysis of law firm come ons might be productive, but that isn't what you're doing here.
| | | The Culture of Spending | |
>
> | | | | Students are willing to endure the drudgery of the week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget their lives. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget their troubles.
The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys. | | | The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys.
Concluding Thoughts | |
<
< | While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | | | | |
>
> | While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | | | | |
<
< |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:
# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, AmandaHungerford
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of that line. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated list | >
> |
- The prevailing impression one gets from the last sections is how low the fences are that seem to you to comprise the prison house. If only people would find some better balance between work and life, and would refrain from cocktail parties, things would be so much better. And whatever one may say about the badness of law school--and I yield to no one in finding fault with it--it doesn't make you go to cocktail parties.
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 9 - 14 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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| | | Introduction
Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students are employed by a law firm, while only 4.3% work in public interest. But why such dramatic flocking to the firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse, the work is more tedious, and it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom. | |
<
< | One thing driving the masses to Big Law is three years of acculturation. From the first day of law school, students are assimilated into firm culture. Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in terms both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” (350) So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture. | >
> | One thing driving the masses to Big Law is three years of acculturation. From the first day of law school students are assimilated into firm culture. Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations that “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in terms both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” (350) So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture. | | | What follows is a functional analysis of law school. For simplicity’s sake I have broken the study into two discrete categories (actions and beliefs), although I realize in practice these categories often have overlapping effects. | | | Law school is adept at shaping the way students act. Those actions will become habits that students continue once they reach Big Law.
The Curve | |
<
< | The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing you may decrease your own odds of success. | >
> | The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing so you may decrease your own odds of success. | | | | |
<
< | The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. | >
> | The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will also play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. | | | Sacrificing Relationships
ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm. | | | The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys.
Concluding Thoughts | |
<
< | While some law students do legitimately enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | >
> | While some law students do enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | | |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 8 - 14 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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<
< | Rough draft #1. Comments welcome. | >
> | From the Classroom to the Firm | | | -- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008
Introduction | |
<
< | Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. So why such dramatic flocking to law firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse. The work is more tedious. And it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom. | >
> | Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students are employed by a law firm, while only 4.3% work in public interest. But why such dramatic flocking to the firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse, the work is more tedious, and it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom. | | | | |
<
< | What seems to be driving the masses to the law firms are years of acculturation. From the first day of law school (or even before), law students are assimilated into firm culture. The incentive for law schools to do so is clear: a partner at Cravath can donate much more money than a public defender in the Bronx. | >
> | One thing driving the masses to Big Law is three years of acculturation. From the first day of law school, students are assimilated into firm culture. Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in terms both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” (350) So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture. | | | | |
<
< | Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture, both in their actions and in their beliefs.* | >
> | What follows is a functional analysis of law school. For simplicity’s sake I have broken the study into two discrete categories (actions and beliefs), although I realize in practice these categories often have overlapping effects. | | | | |
<
< | Practical Results | >
> | Actions
Law school is adept at shaping the way students act. Those actions will become habits that students continue once they reach Big Law. | | | The Curve | |
<
< | The curve is one of the first big shocks of coming to law school. With it, we are effectively told that we won’t just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve thus affects our interactions with others. Suddenly, helping others becomes much less attractive, because by doing so we are decreasing our own odds of success. This mode of thinking (self before others) will seem normal by the time we reach the law firm, where (since only a fraction of people can make partner) we will once again be measured as against other people. | >
> | The curve is one of the first mechanisms to influence new students’ thoughts and behavior. Through it, students are effectively told they will no longer be measured by merely their own merits, but also by the merits of others. In subtle ways the curve thus affects students’ interactions with others. Suddenly, helping fellow students becomes much less attractive, because by doing you may decrease your own odds of success. | | | | |
<
< | I doubt the you-against-the-world mentality is accidental. It is helpful to firms, since in the legal world, lawyers will be judge not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. There are other ways of practicing law, but the adversarial system is the one Big Law uses, and so it is the one law students (and associates) are socialized into. | >
> | The you-against-others mode of behavior will become a large part of firm culture, too. With only a few partner positions available, associates have an incentive to look out for themselves. This mentality will play a role in associates’ legal practice, since lawyers are judged not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. | | | Sacrificing Relationships | |
<
< | ILs entering law school quickly find that the pace is frenetic, and the work is all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Ever since law schools added a (notoriously undemanding) third year, it seems more than likely that the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly throughout all years. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the standard. | >
> | ILs quickly find that law school’s pace is frenetic, and the work all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Given that law schools must have a (notoriously undemanding) third year, the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By then, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the norm. | | | | |
<
< | No person would willingly sign up for a lifetime of sacrifice, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just e like this until IL is over; then, it’ll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus people lose sight of how large a sacrifice they are actually making. The practice of choosing work over family becomes ingrained without us realizing what is happening. | >
> | Few people would willingly sign up for a lifetime of work, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just be like this until IL is over; then, until law school is over; then, until I make partner. Young lawyers become ingrained in choosing work over relationships before they realize what is happening. | | | | |
<
< | Ideals | >
> | Beliefs
In order to fully assimilate to firm life, it is necessary to not only change student’s actions, but also the beliefs that inform those actions. The indoctrination begins early, even before the first class is held. | | | The Application Process | |
<
< | While colleges have unique personalities that lead students to pick one over the other, in my experience many students choose law schools based in large part on their ranking. Picking a law school based on it’s ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work of compiling information for you. They have complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective; given all this, why would anyone pick the #10 school when the #5 is clearly better? | >
> | In my experience, many students choose law schools based in large part on the US News rankings. Picking a law school based on ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work for you. US News has complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective, so why would anyone pick the #10 school when #5 is clearly better? | | | | |
<
< | But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this process starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT score. Firms will come to reinforce that identification with numbers, since when apply to firms, the only relevant factor is the applicant’s GPA. All the factors that used to be important (hobbies, skills, etc) in defining the person no longer matter. | >
> | But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this indoctrination starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT. Firms will later reinforce that identification with numbers, since firms mainly care about the applicant’s GPA. All the things that used to define a person (hobbies, etc) no longer matter. | | | | |
<
< | This new belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks. | >
> | This belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks. | | | The Culture of Spending | |
<
< | Students are willing to endure the drudgery of every week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget how horrible their lives have seemed. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget about their troubles. The cycle of drudgery-indulgence-drudgery is a self-perpetuating one: associates feel they can only survive the monotony of the week by indulging in excess on the weekend, but they can only afford to indulge their habits if they continue to put up with the monotony of the workweek. | >
> | Students are willing to endure the drudgery of the week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget their lives. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget their troubles. | | | | |
<
< | The belief law students take away from their experiences is that things – food, alcohol, and fancy toys – can make up for all that is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because (a) their friends are going and (b) they will get things (again, food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many people’s career decisions. While they recognize that working for a firm will be dull, they choose to do so anyway because (a) their friends are going to and (b) because doing so will get them lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys. | >
> | The lesson students take away is that things can make up for what is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because they will get things (food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many students’ career choice. While working for a firm will be dull, people choose to do so anyway because they will get lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys. | | | Concluding Thoughts | |
<
< | While some law students do legitimately enter law school planning to go work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their entire law school experience was designed to have them do. | >
> | While some law students do legitimately enter CLS planning to work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their law school experience was designed to have them do. | | | | |
<
< | *Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I have broken the processes used to socialize law students into discrete categories (practical results and ideals). I do, however, realize that in practice these processes often have overlapping effects: the curve, for instance, changes both students’ behavior and their beliefs. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 7 - 14 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
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<
< | New and Improved(?) Outline | >
> | Rough draft #1. Comments welcome. | | | -- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008 | |
<
< | Here is my very rough outline. A caveat: I don't really know anything about firm life, and I haven't been to any firm receptions, so a lot of this is conjecture. Please let me know if I am wrong!/you have any suggestions. Thanks. | >
> | | | | Introduction | |
<
< | Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the whopping 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. That means that, out of 400 bright young minds, only 17 choose to go into a public interest career. So why such dramatic flocking to law firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse. The work is more tedious. And it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom. | >
> | Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. So why such dramatic flocking to law firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse. The work is more tedious. And it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom. | | | | |
<
< | What is driving the masses to the law firms seems to be not so much a series of well-reasoned decisions, but instead the result of years of acculturation. From the first day of law school (or even before), law students are assimilated into firm culture. The incentive for law schools to do so is clear: a partner at Cravath can donate much more money than a public defender in the Bronx. | >
> | What seems to be driving the masses to the law firms are years of acculturation. From the first day of law school (or even before), law students are assimilated into firm culture. The incentive for law schools to do so is clear: a partner at Cravath can donate much more money than a public defender in the Bronx. | | | Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture, both in their actions and in their beliefs.*
Practical Results | |
<
< | The Application Process
Thinking in Numbers
The fact that law schools are ranked, and that decisions about which law school to attend are in large part based on those rankings, introduce us to a way of thinking will become more and more dominant in both law school and law firms. When others assign a number to everything, you don't have to do the thinking - someone else has already done it for you.
Numbers as Identity to Selves
Numbers will also come to reflect how we think of ourselves. First it is identification with the ranking of the school we attend. Then it is our GPA. Finally, it is how much money we make.
Numbers as Identity to Others
Law school begins the make us think of us as numbers. The two most important things to a law school is our GPA and our LSAT -- all the rest is fluff. Firms reinforce our identification with numbers. All those factors that used to be important (hobbies, interests, etc) don't matter to firms. They don't want to know whether we play the oboe; they want to know what our GPA is. | >
> | The Curve
The curve is one of the first big shocks of coming to law school. With it, we are effectively told that we won’t just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve thus affects our interactions with others. Suddenly, helping others becomes much less attractive, because by doing so we are decreasing our own odds of success. This mode of thinking (self before others) will seem normal by the time we reach the law firm, where (since only a fraction of people can make partner) we will once again be measured as against other people. | | | | |
<
< | Decision in Numbers
Law firms, like law schools, are ranked. Again, we can make our decision based on someone else's arbitrary numerical assignment. The fact that we make a life decision (where to work) based on numbers reinforces their value in our own lives: they aren't arbitrary, they are meaningful. And if they are meaningful when describing a firm, they must be meaningful when describing me, too. | >
> | I doubt the you-against-the-world mentality is accidental. It is helpful to firms, since in the legal world, lawyers will be judge not only on the strengths of their own case, but also on the weaknesses of their opponents’. There are other ways of practicing law, but the adversarial system is the one Big Law uses, and so it is the one law students (and associates) are socialized into. | | | Sacrificing Relationships | |
<
< | Unnecessary Pace
Law school doesn't need to be so time-consuming. Do we really need to read that many cases on personal jurisdiction? But having so little free time in law school gets us used to having little free time when we go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for The Law will be standard.
I'll Do It Tomorrow
The sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it'll just be like this until IL is over; then, it'll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus we lose sight of how big a sacrifice we are actually making.
Forced Bonding
The pace forces us to spend time with our law students, inside and outside of the classroom. Because of the large workload, even when we're not in class, we're often thinking about law school. Because most of our experiences involve law school, the people we relate best to are other law students. We hang out more and more with law students, and then really only relate to other law students. We forget there are other lifestyles out there, and that it doesn't have to be this crazy. | >
> | ILs entering law school quickly find that the pace is frenetic, and the work is all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be that way. Ever since law schools added a (notoriously undemanding) third year, it seems more than likely that the IL year could be relaxed, and the workload spread out more evenly throughout all years. Yet, as suggested by Adam Carlis, having little free time in law school gets students accustomed to having little free time when they go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for Big Law will be the standard. | | | | |
>
> | No person would willingly sign up for a lifetime of sacrifice, so the sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it’ll just e like this until IL is over; then, it’ll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus people lose sight of how large a sacrifice they are actually making. The practice of choosing work over family becomes ingrained without us realizing what is happening. | | | Ideals | |
<
< | The Curve
We Can't All Be Winners
The curve is our first indication that we aren't in college anymore, Toto. We won't just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. (We got our first taste of this with the application process. The LSAT is designed to be a bell curve. And it's a curve that can't be beaten; no one will care if I get a 175 if by some freak accident everyone else that year gets a 176). | | | | |
<
< | The Sociology of the Curve
In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve affects our interactions with others. In the back of our minds, helping others seems more risky, since if Classmate X gets an A, my odds of getting an A decrease. The same will be true when we get to a law firm, since only a fraction of people can make partner. | >
> | The Application Process
While colleges have unique personalities that lead students to pick one over the other, in my experience many students choose law schools based in large part on their ranking. Picking a law school based on it’s ranking is easy: someone has already done all the work of compiling information for you. They have complex mathematical formulas to prove their work is objective; given all this, why would anyone pick the #10 school when the #5 is clearly better? | | | | |
<
< | The Culture of Spending
Cycle of Spending
We go through the drudgery of every week looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. We put up with boredom and tedium, and then reward ourselves by spending lots of money and getting drunk (thus forcefully forgetting how much our lives suck). | >
> | But just as students identify schools via their relevant numbers, so, too, will they come to identify themselves by those numbers. Again, this process starts with the application process. When applying to law schools, only two numbers matter: GPA and LSAT score. Firms will come to reinforce that identification with numbers, since when apply to firms, the only relevant factor is the applicant’s GPA. All the factors that used to be important (hobbies, skills, etc) in defining the person no longer matter. | | | | |
<
< | The Law School Helps
Bar Review encourages this cycle absolutely | >
> | This new belief – that numbers define us – is crucial to being integrated into firm life. That is because the one thing firms hold over many graduating students is another number: salary. If firms can get students to judge their self-worth by how much money they make, then they have a crucial advantage in getting those students to work for them despite all of the obvious drawbacks. | | | | |
<
< | Working for the Weekend
This practice is just short-term delayed gratification. And is it even that gratifying? It must be; everyone else is doing it. Besides, it's better than thinking about Con Law. This gets us ready for our post-CLS life, where we will do boring, intensive work every week, and then spend lots of money and get drunk every weekend to avoid thinking about it. | >
> | The Culture of Spending
Students are willing to endure the drudgery of every week by looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. Come Thursday, students flock to Bar Review (conveniently sponsored by CLS) to spend their money, get drunk, and forget how horrible their lives have seemed. This ritual becomes habit, and when new associates finish their first horrible week at Big Law, they know exactly how to forget about their troubles. The cycle of drudgery-indulgence-drudgery is a self-perpetuating one: associates feel they can only survive the monotony of the week by indulging in excess on the weekend, but they can only afford to indulge their habits if they continue to put up with the monotony of the workweek. | | | | |
<
< | Firm Receptions
Firm receptions also prepare us for this cycle. They're boring, but we go to them anyway because:
- There's free stuff (food, booze, toys)
- Everyone else is doing it | >
> | The belief law students take away from their experiences is that things – food, alcohol, and fancy toys – can make up for all that is missing in their life. We can already see the beginning of this with student attendance at firm receptions. While these receptions are boring, people go anyway because (a) their friends are going and (b) they will get things (again, food, alcohol, and toys). This reasoning will eventually carry itself into many people’s career decisions. While they recognize that working for a firm will be dull, they choose to do so anyway because (a) their friends are going to and (b) because doing so will get them lots of money, which they can use to buy even more food, alcohol, and toys. | | | Concluding Thoughts | |
<
< | | >
> | While some law students do legitimately enter law school planning to go work for a big firm and never look back, many more come in with vague plans about “doing good” while “supporting themselves.” By the end of law school, however, the vast majority of people will have agreed to work for a firm. Many will likely find they have ended up in Big Law not because of some purposeful path they set out on, but rather because they got swept along in the tide of CLS. It was easy; moreover, it was what their entire law school experience was designed to have them do. | | |
*Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I have broken the processes used to socialize law students into discrete categories (practical results and ideals). I do, however, realize that in practice these processes often have overlapping effects: the curve, for instance, changes both students’ behavior and their beliefs. |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 6 - 14 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | | |
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< | Paper Title | >
> | New and Improved(?) Outline | | | -- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008
Here is my very rough outline. A caveat: I don't really know anything about firm life, and I haven't been to any firm receptions, so a lot of this is conjecture. Please let me know if I am wrong!/you have any suggestions. Thanks.
Introduction | |
<
< | Arnold quote about how people become acculturated into an organization. Brief discussion on how this is not about how law school acculturates us to the Law, but instead how it acculturates us to Law Firm Culture. | >
> | Nine months after graduating from CLS, 78.3% of students find themselves employed in law firms, vs. the whopping 4.3% of students who find themselves employed in public interest. That means that, out of 400 bright young minds, only 17 choose to go into a public interest career. So why such dramatic flocking to law firms? The pay is better, but the hours are worse. The work is more tedious. And it could be years before young associates see the inside of a courtroom.
What is driving the masses to the law firms seems to be not so much a series of well-reasoned decisions, but instead the result of years of acculturation. From the first day of law school (or even before), law students are assimilated into firm culture. The incentive for law schools to do so is clear: a partner at Cravath can donate much more money than a public defender in the Bronx. | | | | |
>
> | Thurman Arnold wrote of organizations “the environment puts great pressure on [] individuals to conform to what is expected of them in both of practical results and the representation of sentimental ideals.” So, too, do law schools put pressure on students to conform to firm culture, both in their actions and in their beliefs.* | | | | |
<
< | The Application Process | | | | |
>
> | Practical Results | | | | |
<
< | Thinking in Numbers | >
> | The Application Process
Thinking in Numbers | | | The fact that law schools are ranked, and that decisions about which law school to attend are in large part based on those rankings, introduce us to a way of thinking will become more and more dominant in both law school and law firms. When others assign a number to everything, you don't have to do the thinking - someone else has already done it for you. | |
<
< | Numbers as Identity to Selves | >
> | Numbers as Identity to Selves | | | Numbers will also come to reflect how we think of ourselves. First it is identification with the ranking of the school we attend. Then it is our GPA. Finally, it is how much money we make. | |
<
< | Numbers as Identity to Others | >
> | Numbers as Identity to Others | | | Law school begins the make us think of us as numbers. The two most important things to a law school is our GPA and our LSAT -- all the rest is fluff. Firms reinforce our identification with numbers. All those factors that used to be important (hobbies, interests, etc) don't matter to firms. They don't want to know whether we play the oboe; they want to know what our GPA is. | |
<
< | Decision in Numbers | >
> | Decision in Numbers | | | Law firms, like law schools, are ranked. Again, we can make our decision based on someone else's arbitrary numerical assignment. The fact that we make a life decision (where to work) based on numbers reinforces their value in our own lives: they aren't arbitrary, they are meaningful. And if they are meaningful when describing a firm, they must be meaningful when describing me, too. | |
<
< |
The Curve
We Can't All Be Winners
The curve is our first indication that we aren't in college anymore, Toto. We won't just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. (We got our first taste of this with the application process. The LSAT is designed to be a bell curve. And it's a curve that can't be beaten; no one will care if I get a 175 if by some freak accident everyone else that year gets a 176).
The Sociology of the Curve
In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve affects our interactions with others. In the back of our minds, helping others seems more risky, since if Classmate X gets an A, my odds of getting an A decrease. The same will be true when we get to a law firm, since only a fraction of people can make partner.
Side Thoughts
Why would law firms want to discourage collaboration in this way? Is any of this how firms "want" us to behave? Or is it just a self-perpetuating cycle, that doesn't help/hurt the firm?
Sacrificing Relationships
Unnecessary Pace | >
> | Sacrificing Relationships
Unnecessary Pace | | | Law school doesn't need to be so time-consuming. Do we really need to read that many cases on personal jurisdiction? But having so little free time in law school gets us used to having little free time when we go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for The Law will be standard. | |
<
< | I'll Do It Tomorrow | >
> | I'll Do It Tomorrow | | | The sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it'll just be like this until IL is over; then, it'll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus we lose sight of how big a sacrifice we are actually making. | |
<
< | Forced Bonding
The pace forces us to spend time with our law students, inside and outside of the classroom. Because of the large workload, even when we're not in class, we're often thinking about law school. Because most of our experiences involve law school, the people we relate best to are other law students. We hang out more and more with law students, and then really only relate to other law students. We forget there are other lifestyles out there, and that it doesn't have to be this crazy. | >
> | Forced Bonding
The pace forces us to spend time with our law students, inside and outside of the classroom. Because of the large workload, even when we're not in class, we're often thinking about law school. Because most of our experiences involve law school, the people we relate best to are other law students. We hang out more and more with law students, and then really only relate to other law students. We forget there are other lifestyles out there, and that it doesn't have to be this crazy. | | | | |
>
> | Ideals
The Curve
We Can't All Be Winners
The curve is our first indication that we aren't in college anymore, Toto. We won't just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. (We got our first taste of this with the application process. The LSAT is designed to be a bell curve. And it's a curve that can't be beaten; no one will care if I get a 175 if by some freak accident everyone else that year gets a 176). | | | | |
<
< | Culture of Spending | >
> | The Sociology of the Curve
In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve affects our interactions with others. In the back of our minds, helping others seems more risky, since if Classmate X gets an A, my odds of getting an A decrease. The same will be true when we get to a law firm, since only a fraction of people can make partner. | | | | |
<
< | Cycle of Spending | >
> | The Culture of Spending
Cycle of Spending | | | We go through the drudgery of every week looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. We put up with boredom and tedium, and then reward ourselves by spending lots of money and getting drunk (thus forcefully forgetting how much our lives suck). | |
<
< | The Law School Helps | >
> | The Law School Helps | | | Bar Review encourages this cycle absolutely | |
<
< | Working for the Weekend | >
> | Working for the Weekend | | | This practice is just short-term delayed gratification. And is it even that gratifying? It must be; everyone else is doing it. Besides, it's better than thinking about Con Law. This gets us ready for our post-CLS life, where we will do boring, intensive work every week, and then spend lots of money and get drunk every weekend to avoid thinking about it. | |
<
< | Firm Receptions | >
> | Firm Receptions | | | Firm receptions also prepare us for this cycle. They're boring, but we go to them anyway because:
- There's free stuff (food, booze, toys)
- Everyone else is doing it | |
>
> | Concluding Thoughts | | | | |
<
< | Help me, Classmates!
I'm trying to decide between two potential paper topics, and if anyone has an opinion, it would be much appreciated.
Paper Topic 1
Transcendental Nonsense and Creeds -- While I was reading last week's assignment, it occurred to me that many (all?) of the times the law breaks down into the most egregious transcendental nonsense correlates with those times when the law as an organization needs a creed of its own. I was thinking about writing a paper that analyzed a few of those moments, and ended with a brief discussion of how the law uses transcendental nonsense to create a creed that means nothing, and thus allows most everyone to identify with it. A potential variation on that form would be a paper that discusses how law and crime reinforce each other (in the same way the reading talked about prostitution).
Paper Topic 2
From the Class Room to the Firm -- The second topic I had in mind was a more straight-up sociological analysis of the way the law school structure socializes students to firm life. Potential subsections I was thinking about include the curve, the socratic method, and the culture of spending.
- I thought about writing on a similar topic. One consideration is how the schedule and pace of law school force students to sacrifice relatioships with friends and family, acclimating them to continued sacrifices while working for firms. -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
- This is an excellent point. If I do this topic, do you mind if I incorporate this idea into my paper? Eben, is that ethical (I would cite Adam if I did so)?
- No one has ever had a completely original idea. Anyone is free to appropriate anything I say (not that it is always a good idea). -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
So... thoughts, anyone? | >
> | *Disclaimer: For the sake of simplicity, I have broken the processes used to socialize law students into discrete categories (practical results and ideals). I do, however, realize that in practice these processes often have overlapping effects: the curve, for instance, changes both students’ behavior and their beliefs. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 5 - 12 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | -- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008 | |
>
> | Here is my very rough outline. A caveat: I don't really know anything about firm life, and I haven't been to any firm receptions, so a lot of this is conjecture. Please let me know if I am wrong!/you have any suggestions. Thanks. | | | | |
<
< | Section I | >
> | Introduction
Arnold quote about how people become acculturated into an organization. Brief discussion on how this is not about how law school acculturates us to the Law, but instead how it acculturates us to Law Firm Culture. | | | | |
<
< | Subsection A | | | | |
>
> | The Application Process | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 1 | | | | |
<
< | Subsection B | >
> | Thinking in Numbers
The fact that law schools are ranked, and that decisions about which law school to attend are in large part based on those rankings, introduce us to a way of thinking will become more and more dominant in both law school and law firms. When others assign a number to everything, you don't have to do the thinking - someone else has already done it for you. | | | | |
>
> | Numbers as Identity to Selves
Numbers will also come to reflect how we think of ourselves. First it is identification with the ranking of the school we attend. Then it is our GPA. Finally, it is how much money we make. | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 1 | >
> | Numbers as Identity to Others
Law school begins the make us think of us as numbers. The two most important things to a law school is our GPA and our LSAT -- all the rest is fluff. Firms reinforce our identification with numbers. All those factors that used to be important (hobbies, interests, etc) don't matter to firms. They don't want to know whether we play the oboe; they want to know what our GPA is. | | | | |
>
> | Decision in Numbers
Law firms, like law schools, are ranked. Again, we can make our decision based on someone else's arbitrary numerical assignment. The fact that we make a life decision (where to work) based on numbers reinforces their value in our own lives: they aren't arbitrary, they are meaningful. And if they are meaningful when describing a firm, they must be meaningful when describing me, too. | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 2 | | | | |
>
> | The Curve | | | | |
<
< | Section II | >
> | We Can't All Be Winners
The curve is our first indication that we aren't in college anymore, Toto. We won't just be measured on our own merits, but also on the merits of others. (We got our first taste of this with the application process. The LSAT is designed to be a bell curve. And it's a curve that can't be beaten; no one will care if I get a 175 if by some freak accident everyone else that year gets a 176).
The Sociology of the Curve
In subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways the curve affects our interactions with others. In the back of our minds, helping others seems more risky, since if Classmate X gets an A, my odds of getting an A decrease. The same will be true when we get to a law firm, since only a fraction of people can make partner.
Side Thoughts
Why would law firms want to discourage collaboration in this way? Is any of this how firms "want" us to behave? Or is it just a self-perpetuating cycle, that doesn't help/hurt the firm?
Sacrificing Relationships
Unnecessary Pace
Law school doesn't need to be so time-consuming. Do we really need to read that many cases on personal jurisdiction? But having so little free time in law school gets us used to having little free time when we go to firms. By that time, sacrificing personal relationships for The Law will be standard.
I'll Do It Tomorrow
The sacrifice is always framed as a temporary one: it'll just be like this until IL is over; then, it'll just be like this until law school is over; then, it will just be like this until I make partner. By framing it thus we lose sight of how big a sacrifice we are actually making.
Forced Bonding
The pace forces us to spend time with our law students, inside and outside of the classroom. Because of the large workload, even when we're not in class, we're often thinking about law school. Because most of our experiences involve law school, the people we relate best to are other law students. We hang out more and more with law students, and then really only relate to other law students. We forget there are other lifestyles out there, and that it doesn't have to be this crazy.
Culture of Spending
Cycle of Spending
We go through the drudgery of every week looking forward to the debauchery of the weekend. We put up with boredom and tedium, and then reward ourselves by spending lots of money and getting drunk (thus forcefully forgetting how much our lives suck).
The Law School Helps
Bar Review encourages this cycle absolutely
Working for the Weekend
This practice is just short-term delayed gratification. And is it even that gratifying? It must be; everyone else is doing it. Besides, it's better than thinking about Con Law. This gets us ready for our post-CLS life, where we will do boring, intensive work every week, and then spend lots of money and get drunk every weekend to avoid thinking about it.
Firm Receptions
Firm receptions also prepare us for this cycle. They're boring, but we go to them anyway because:
- There's free stuff (food, booze, toys)
- Everyone else is doing it | | | | |
<
< | Subsection A | | | | |
<
< | Subsection B | | |
Help me, Classmates! |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 4 - 11 Feb 2008 - Main.AdamCarlis
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| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | |
- I thought about writing on a similar topic. One consideration is how the schedule and pace of law school force students to sacrifice relatioships with friends and family, acclimating them to continued sacrifices while working for firms. -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
- This is an excellent point. If I do this topic, do you mind if I incorporate this idea into my paper? Eben, is that ethical (I would cite Adam if I did so)?
| |
>
> |
-
-
- No one has ever had a completely original idea. Anyone is free to appropriate anything I say (not that it is always a good idea). -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
| | | So... thoughts, anyone? |
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 3 - 11 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | From the Class Room to the Firm -- The second topic I had in mind was a more straight-up sociological analysis of the way the law school structure socializes students to firm life. Potential subsections I was thinking about include the curve, the socratic method, and the culture of spending.
- I thought about writing on a similar topic. One consideration is how the schedule and pace of law school force students to sacrifice relatioships with friends and family, acclimating them to continued sacrifices while working for firms. -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
| |
>
> |
-
- This is an excellent point. If I do this topic, do you mind if I incorporate this idea into my paper? Eben, is that ethical (I would cite Adam if I did so)?
| | | So... thoughts, anyone? |
|
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 2 - 11 Feb 2008 - Main.AdamCarlis
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| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Paper Topic 2
From the Class Room to the Firm -- The second topic I had in mind was a more straight-up sociological analysis of the way the law school structure socializes students to firm life. Potential subsections I was thinking about include the curve, the socratic method, and the culture of spending. | |
>
> |
- I thought about writing on a similar topic. One consideration is how the schedule and pace of law school force students to sacrifice relatioships with friends and family, acclimating them to continued sacrifices while working for firms. -- AdamCarlis 11 February 2008
| | | So... thoughts, anyone?
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AmandaHungerford-FirstPaper 1 - 11 Feb 2008 - Main.AmandaHungerford
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>
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By AmandaHungerford - 11 Feb 2008
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
Help me, Classmates!
I'm trying to decide between two potential paper topics, and if anyone has an opinion, it would be much appreciated.
Paper Topic 1
Transcendental Nonsense and Creeds -- While I was reading last week's assignment, it occurred to me that many (all?) of the times the law breaks down into the most egregious transcendental nonsense correlates with those times when the law as an organization needs a creed of its own. I was thinking about writing a paper that analyzed a few of those moments, and ended with a brief discussion of how the law uses transcendental nonsense to create a creed that means nothing, and thus allows most everyone to identify with it. A potential variation on that form would be a paper that discusses how law and crime reinforce each other (in the same way the reading talked about prostitution).
Paper Topic 2
From the Class Room to the Firm -- The second topic I had in mind was a more straight-up sociological analysis of the way the law school structure socializes students to firm life. Potential subsections I was thinking about include the curve, the socratic method, and the culture of spending.
So... thoughts, anyone?
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" on the next line:
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