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< | How Fear Creates Law Firm Associates |
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> | Fear and Big Law |
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> | -- By JohnsonD - 13 Jun 2016 |
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< | -- By JohnsonD - 24 Apr 2016 |
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> | 1L Fear |
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< | A bad trade
As law students, we often hear stories from our classmates about how they plan on spending two or three years at a law firm and then moving on to what they really want to do. While for an exceedingly small number of young lawyers this plan might work out, for most, however, going to a big law firm is a bad tradeoff of precious time and life energy for money. Fear and anxiety of the legal industry and American economy in general impels young lawyers to make this trade. The fear of not being able to pay back debt and possible unemployment makes it easy to rationalize the choice. |
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> | Every year Columbia 1Ls arrive to campus with dreams of becoming justice producing lawyers. By 1L summer, many have succumbed to the big law machine. What changes between the time we first cross the threshold of Jerome Greene Hall until the Conclusion of 1L year? We become gripped by fear. The fear is based on our own risk adverse inclinations and pressure applied by the administration to push students into big law jobs. At some point in the first semester, the fear that we could end up like Jonathan Wang, a 2010 Columbia Law School graduate profiled in the New York Times who was unable to obtain a job requiring bar passage, overcomes many of us. For others, the loans that seemed like an abstraction before we signed the promissory note, become real to us (according to law school transparency, nearly 85% of law students have taken out loans with an an average of $112,000 for private school students). |
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< | Fear and anxiety in law school
This fear and anxiety is not imagined. Law students who came of age during the recession understand the tenuous position of the legal market and the US economy in general. |
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> | Big Law thinking |
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< | Do they? Let's check the factual groundwork of our understanding.
Are lawyers' incomes falling as a fraction of GDP, let alone
absolutely, or are lawyers doing relatively better than the society
as a whole, as usual? Is there a sudden shortage of meaningful,
valuable work for us to do? Have we overproduced justice around
here, such that we're going to need to sell off our piled-up
inventory before we need any new hands? By what measurement of the
value of our activity, whether in doing well or in doing good, have
we reached understanding that would render fear and anxiety about
our tenuous position not imaginary? I believe it's the usual one
around here: the decline of jobs in one sector of this broad and
necessary human activity, a sector in which high wages for
meaningless work have been available to some few people, many of
whom went to this law school, in the past four decades. But the
correct next question, against any realistic estimate of the larger
background, is: So effing what? |
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> | If we accept the premise that completing a stint in Big Law is the only way to both be a successful practicing lawyer and ensure that we can pay off our debt, then the conclusion that we must follow the path most likely to get a firm job (taking black letter courses that look good to hiring managers, writing on to law review, getting a 1L summer internship in a position that looks good to hiring managers, participating in EIP), naturally follows. Despite a recent increase, big law summer associate hiring numbers remain down from the pre-recession levels (NALP), which means we must work harder than our predecessors for the same rewards, the thinking goes. |
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> | Essentially, students become obsessed with pedigree and prestige because big lawyers are obsessed with pedigree and prestige. In a 2011 study by Northwestern University, researchers found that big law hiring managers “often drew sharp distinctions between graduates of four elite schools (Yale, Harvard, Stanford and to a lesser extent Columbia) and the rest,” and further distinguished students based on factors that often had nothing to do with aptitude like climbing Mount Everest, or being an Olympic champion. But studies like this should set off alarm bells in the minds of students. Do we really want to work for organizations with such arbitrary hiring practices, especially ones whose work we often find in opposition to our own beliefs, in an industry experiencing the slowest growth since the Great Recession? (American Lawyer) |
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< | The restructuring of many sectors of the economy makes it difficult for people without experience to get a start in any field. Rapid technological change portends a massive reorganization of human society on a large scale. |
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> | A way forward |
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< | The two statements
are in unreconciled tension. With respect to the first, the
second is actually a banal but effective rejoinder. No, there is
no difficulty "getting a start" in lawyering now, because if you
have a license and an understanding of how to build both your
license and your network in new social patterns made possible by
the transformational technologies, you have an
advantage. |
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> | Only when we step out of this narrow, big law focused mindset can we truly start to understand the meaningful lawyering opportunities afforded to us as Columbia Law students. Just because one part of the profession is going through a period of turmoil, doesn’t mean that the entire profession is broken.
After the realization that there are meaningful lawyering opportunities open to us if we choose to do the work required to seize them, we can then we begin to think creatively about what kind of lawyers we want to be. Part of thinking creatively means remembering what it was that brought us here initially. |
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> | The majority of us wanted to be lawyers because there was some injustice in society that we wanted to help correct. That did not change when we sat down for our first Legal Methods class. Courses like Law in Contemporary Society help orient us back towards a justice producing direction by pointing out that in order to be a lawyer, you only need two things: a license and a book of business. |
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< | Students choose to get on board the law firm train because it seems like the option with the best chance of ensuring what many in society see as success. Those who have taken a closer look at the long term prospects of law firms from a structural standpoint recognize the unworkability of the business model yet hope that the destruction comes after they have already extracted their share of the profits. |
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> | Do well by doing good. |
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< | It’s all part of the plan
Top law schools perpetuate an unintuitive and unsustainable system by which students graduate law school without having learned much, if any, real lawyering skills, and are then lured into firms with the promise of learning the skills that should have been taught before they graduated. The system is highly efficient at turning idealistic students into corporate drones. Once at a firm, young lawyers are assigned work they find unfulfilling and antithetical to their beliefs. The law school gets to keep its employment numbers high, and the firms get a new batch of associates. |
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> | We can do well by doing good. 1L summer provides an opportunity to begin to set up our own legal practices. During that summer you can begin to plan and make lists: lists regarding who it is at Columbia and in New York City that can help you learn the skills necessary to do the justice producing work you want to do after after graduation, lists of organizations and individuals that will help you build your book of business and learn the skills necessary to be successful in your practice, and lists of courses and learning opportunities that will give you a solid foundation as you move forward. By graduation time, we can have all the skills necessary to set up our own practices, but by doing that, we must first let go of of our fear. I believe I have. |
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< | DO NOT TAKE THIS DEAL.
Remember why you’re here
The majority of law students came to law school because we saw an injustice in society that we wanted to correct. Once here, many of us lost sight of our initial reasons for attending and instead adopted a more practical posture. Before we give into our fear, we should at least make an attempt at doing the kind of work we initially set out to do, the kind of work that adds positive value to the world. There are still important battles that need to be fought and issues that need to be addressed. The social, economic, and political rights of people are being infringed upon in ways that lawyers are uniquely qualified to address. To use the profession solely to enrich oneself before addressing those issues is irresponsible.
Use your powers
I say this as someone who has been in the position where I had to do alienating, soul destroying work in order to survive. I still know many people whose life circumstances make it all but impossible for them to break away from the system. As students at Columbia Law School, we possess the privilege, ability, and opportunity to bypass this system and instead work directly on advancing the cause of justice in society. Before meekly acquiescing to the system as it is, we should at the very least make an attempt at doing the type of work that enriches ourselves and others. I believe that law school is a good place to learn how to do that, if we utilize our resources and skill sets correctly.
The draft wanders
through an odd route to a conclusion it less supports than adopts
apparently by accident. FDR said (or rather, Judge Sam Rosenman
wrote for him) that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Which
kind of fear? "Unreasoning." That was the point, and it is the
point here too. The best route to improvement of the draft is to
proceed in a factual direction that leave unreasoning fear behind.
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> | http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/why_annulkah_cant_get_a_biglaw_job_super-elite_grads_mount_everest_climbers/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/business/dealbook/burdened-with-debt-law-school-graduates-struggle-in-job-market.html
http://employmentsummary.abaquestionnaire.org/
http://www.nalp.org/feb16_perspectives_pressrel
http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202489912232/The-2016-Am-Law-100-Growth-Slows-for-Big-Law-- |
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