I like Esther's comparison to criminal defense lawyers, which is counter-intuitive because at first glance there's a huge difference between a (probably impoverished) non-white-collar criminal and a big corporation. But I think it works nonetheless because it lets us see the problem of working for a big firm as a special subset of the broader ethical problem: the lawyer's ethical identification with his/her client. A lawyer is supposed to do what's best for the individual client even if that may not comport with a more general vision of what is just or otherwise good for society.

So no matter who you're working for, you're in an ethically risky area. Working for a large law firm can exponentially add to that risk because of how much autonomy you're surrendering. After all, if you're promising to put a client's interests above almost all else, you should think long and hard about who that client is and what its interests are. But at a large corporate law firm, people often can't do that. This makes such work morally risky. Not necessarily immoral--that probably depends on what kind of law you're doing, and at what kind of firm, and with what kind of client, and other such details. But the risk that it's immoral goes up.

I would hesitate to say that corporate law work is inherently immoral because of the details I mentioned, but more importantly because I think it feeds into a binary mindset where corporate=bad and public interest/government=good, which isn't entirely accurate. To state the obvious, the government has blood on its hands and is known to falsely imprison and torture and otherwise violate people. And not all self-declared do-gooders actually do good, even if they think they do. Moral risk exists in varying degrees across a spectrum, it's not something that's only there in large corporate law firms. Again, this is an obvious point, but it's easy to overlook in all the focus on not selling your soul for a firm job.

-- AnjaliBhat - 26 Feb 2009