Paper Title

-- By AilsaChau -

Introduction

I am currently a law student. I am going to become a lawyer.

But what do I plan to do as a lawyer? I’m not sure what I can add beyond that second sentence, because I don’t know yet. Before coming to law school and even throughout the law school application process (when one is presumably ponders such a subject), simply just being a lawyer was the projected end-point of both my studies and career.

By now I’ve come to realize otherwise, that deciding to become a lawyer is merely one point along the road that opens up many other roads. Based on our class discussions, I think I’m slightly further along the road to knowing what kind of lawyer I want to be. While reading the first chapter of Lawyerland, the part that resonated with me the most was Robinson’s explanation of why he didn’t stay with the S.E.C: “I don’t like being beholden to anyone.” All my life I’ve been beholden to someone or something—parents, for example—and one of the reasons why I chose to attend Columbia in the first place was because I assumed that becoming a lawyer at a firm would allow me to experience financial and thus general independence.

As I’ve come to realize through our class discussions, however, taking the Wall Street path would most likely amount to exchanging one set of chains for another. Moreover, the legal profession is not immune to the vast changes—globalization, Internet, economic recession, etc.—that have fundamentally transformed the societal playing field, by now it is neither a secret nor a surprise to anyone that there is strong downward pressure on legal fees and hiring patterns. Yet many in the legal field seem to have taken the heads-in-the-sand approach to such changes, not least among them law schools. The current law school business model is premised on charging extremely high tuition in exchange for lucrative jobs for their graduates, an exchange that seems increasingly less viable or even desirable. As I am currently paying for an extremely expensive legal education, what can I do to make my law school experience help me achieve my goals and be truly worth the price I’m paying for?

Limitations of law school

After approximately seven months of law school, it’s become increasingly clear that what we law students learn in law school does not fully prepare us for law practice. The law we encounter in the classroom—mostly in the form of appellate judicial decisions—is largely formal, normative and often presented as the inexorable conclusions of the judges’ rational weighing of things like precedent and interpretative canons. However, as one professor once reminded me, the cases we read in our casebooks are essentially “freaks”—that is, a tiny, unrepresentative percentage of legal problems that manage to batter their way up to appellate court. Moreover, justice does not always come from the courts or even a lawyer’s knowledge of the law. Robinson, for instance, is able to secure a shorter sentence for his Serbian-Fujianese client because he knew how to manipulate others and use extralegal methods to achieve his objectives. Reading about how Robinson dealt with his client starkly drove home the point that the actual practice of law shapes and is shaped by the attendant peculiarities of human behavior, whether they be clients, third parties, judges, or lawyers. Unfortunately this is a fact that I find myself overlooking when dealing with doctrine and abstract legal theories in class.

Practical experience

Given that there are more things in law than those dreamt of in the casebook, a truly effective legal education cannot simply be contained within the classroom. One way to gain practical experience outside of the classroom while still attending law school is through participating in clinics and externships after first year. The practice-oriented nature of clinics and externships provides the opportunity to gain practical lawyering skills such as dealing with clients, solving actual legal problems and learning how to effectively work with other lawyers in a team context.

People

Another reason why I think that participating in a clinic or externship would be beneficial for my legal education is that participating in a clinic or externship would provide me with the valuable opportunity to meet and interact with clients with real legal problems. I feel this is important because (as someone who has specifically moved to America for law school) the staggering majority of Americans I currently meet and know are law students, law professors, or lawyers. This is not only an extremely limited sample of people, but I’ve noticed that for the most part many people involved in the legal profession (whether they be lawyers or law students) are a relatively homogenous group when compared to the population at large. Common characteristics include attending a private college as an undergraduate (mostly east coast or the slightly more exotic locale of California), upper middle class, liberal arts background, etc. However, there is a world outside of the legal profession, and a sizeable amount of clients will be from that external world with very different experiences, needs and expectations than the average law student. We have discussed in class how the true medium in which lawyers work in is power, the ability to influence and shape and behavior of people. Consequently, if I want to become an effective lawyer, I will need to better understand the needs and desires of people beyond the narrow strata of people I currently interact with.

However, as a lawyer, I will not only have to work with clients, but also others like fellow lawyers and judges, all of whom are former law students. My current classmates especially are important in this regard, because they will be my future colleagues. We have discussed the importance of building a good network in law school, and this is something I need to focus on more rather than devoting the majority of my time to schoolwork and fretting over grades.

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