But learning to think of yourself as running your own practice doesn't necessarily mean practicing by yourself, and it certainly doesn't mean having no ways to share or diversify your risk. The law firm imposes risks too, in case you hadn't noticed. And you're not allowed to diversify those at all. Maybe a risk-averse person who wasn't also a conformist would be more worried about the risk of borrowing a great deal of money in order to become utterly financially dependent on a job provided by some lawyers who themselves work in a large law firm whose business model is being disrupted not so much by "the bad economy" as by the twenty-first century. Maybe that means accepting a whole lot of risk that you can't lay off anywhere. And firm jobs don't suit you to run your own practice in any sense at all: they're more learned helplessness.

You think that lawyers who are entrepreneurial about how they build their practices are therefore also risk-loving people who don't practice carefully? That's wrong, for one thing. But it also exemplifies the problem with this sort of unifactorial explanation based on some (I guess) immutable character trait that people either have or don't have. Judging human beings in practice this way (either they have goodness or badness, smartness or stupidness, honesty or dishonesty, timidity or rashness, etc.) works very poorly in real life, and it's probably not going to pay off in a context like this.

So what does this anecdote demonstrate? People who don't do one particular thing, namely go to work at a firm and stay there, are "risk-takers with regard to career decisions"? Nothing here supports that inference. It's the proposition you're supposed to be testing dematerialized into an implicit assumption, where it rules your thought without you're being able to know it's there.

This brings us to the real heart of the problem, which isn't something called "risk-aversion." It's fear. Fear is an emotion we learn to regulate, cope with, and use. "Risk-aversion" is some sort of property, like left-handedness or the ability to roll your tongue lengthwise, that I'm supposed to believe you got issued in your genome, and are merely going to act out for the rest of your life from one unchosen situation to another. Being afraid of the future, being afraid you can't make your practice support you, being afraid of mistakes and bad choices are all part of the process of learning to be a lawyer. We recognize our fears, we talk about them with the people who help us learn, we do things in the world that allow us to measure ourselves against the demands of the real world, and we grow. But if we allowed our fears to prevent us from growing, how would that be "safe"?

This would be some kind of problem if learning were linear, which it isn't. You've done what every lawyer who has been educated in this society for the past hundred thirty years has done. It may well be imperfect, or even becoming more outmoded by the day. But your problem isn't the exterior system of education; it's your fear.

The next step, then, is to figure out a better system of preparing lawyers.

No. It isn't the next step in your education to change the system of education. It's your next step in your education to change yourself. This, like "risk-aversion" is a defensive digression, unconsciously designed to avoid the internal conflict that comes from internal change.

This again seems pretty self-evident. We have had a number of class discussions about it. People have thrown out a variety of ideas. We need better professors who know how to teach us. We need better classes which will actually prepare us to be lawyers. Law school should be less expensive, so the vast majority of us don't graduate with huge amounts of debt hanging over our heads. There are a lot of changes that need to be made.

Endeavored to do but failed to do because of your inherent "risk-aversion," you mean? Perhaps you haven't yet fully applied yourself to the lesson.