An Ending and a Beginning

-- By DavidGoldin - 14 Apr 2010

The World is Changing

Everything is different now. We've discussed a multitude of issues in this class, but for better or worse, the one that has resonated most strongly with me is that the big law firm model of selling hours is no longer viable and that employment structure of a part of the legal field has changed dramatically. Even if we want to, we can no longer count on pawning our licenses for $160,000 per year. Coming into this semester, my plan was to stick my head in the sand. Before law school, I spent two years working at a big Wall Street law firm that fired a number of people. I knew that things were changing. But this wasn't going to deter me. I was going to go to EIP and snag that one last position at X & Y LLP, where I would serendipitously not be furloughed or laid off and would end up making partner and getting paid $3 million a year. And I would do this all without hurting anyone. Now, I realize that if I want to achieve what I came to law school for, as I discussed in my introduction 3 months ago, I need to give up this fantasy.

It is easy for me to pity myself and to bemoan the plight of us lawyers-to-be in the Columbia Law School Class of 2012. But it is important to take a step back and realize that the world isn't just changing for us - it's changing for non-lawyers as well. One of the main industries of coastal Maine was canning. The industry "employed thousands of workers at more than 50 canneries". Now, the last one is about to go out of business. As the sardine canning factories that used to dot the coast of Maine disappear, so do the $18 an hour jobs that came with them. People who have worked at the factories for over 40 years are losing their jobs. Unemployment will soon get even higher, and this already impoverished part of Maine will become even poorer.

I have trouble seeing how this is relevant. You seem to be using a very specific example, described in detail, to establish that it’s easier to make a good plan now than it is to change a bad plan later. I’m not sure this point is really necessary, and if it is, I’m pretty sure it could be captured in a sentence rather than a paragraph.

A New Path

Unlike the sardine packer of 40 years, however, I am just beginning on my career path. Following the road that many Columbia Law students have taken before me may no longer be a viable option, but I now understand this is a good thing. It is far easier to develop a realistic plan now than it would be to start anew after being laid off by a law firm, or a sardine cannery, for that matter.

In addition to accepting that the big law firm model no longer works, I have also come to realize that there are two issues that are particularly important to consider in developing my legal career - the effect that my actions as a lawyer will have on others and how I can separate myself from the masses. In a most basic sense, I don’t want to do more harm than good and I need to develop a niche. I did not need a semester long class to teach me this. These are seemingly simple points, and can be communicated easily. This class has impressed upon me that my real work for the rest of law school is going to be figuring out how to incorporate these into a career plan.

Starting Out

So, how am I going to go about this? As Eben has pointed out, it isn't something that I can learn in Torts, or by having my resume reviewed by a career counselor in Jerome Green Annex, or even by attending a touchy feely workshop from 12:10 to 1:10 about the changing legal market. My plan is a simple one: first, to pick something that interests me, and then to figure out a way that I can do work in the field that will allow me to be the type of lawyer that I want to be. Perhaps this is a naïve approach. Perhaps I will fail. Perhaps I won't be able to find meaningful legal work in the areas that interest me most. But I have two more years of law school to test the waters, and as I stated earlier, I now have an idea of what not to do, and an idea of what I'd like to learn.

You just slammed the specific opportunities that law school offers, and then turned around and said law school would broadly give you the meaningful opportunity to “test the waters." Elaborate more on what opportunities you’re going to be able to take advantage of now that you wouldn’t have before, or cut one of the two contradicting statements -- otherwise the whole paragraph comes across as disingenuous.

The Immediate Future

I've already started thinking about this. I know what interests me - prescription drug policy. Prescription drugs have helped shape the world that we live in - penicillin, for example, has turned strep throat from a life threatening disease into a minor ailment, and has extended the life spans of millions. But there are a huge number of problems with the way that these drugs are patented, marketed and priced. We need to figure out a way to fund research and development of the new drugs that will help people in the future without making drugs today so expensive that those who need them the most are unable to afford them. This is what interests me, and this is a field that I believe needs good lawyers.

Because of that, I will be working in the legal department of a drug company this summer. I want to gain more experience in the industry and learn about how drug companies operate. Ideally, this will actually happen. It may not. But this is just a first step. Hopefully, I will eventually gain the knowledge necessary to contribute meaningfully to the discourse on the issue and access to those who make the decisions that matter.

If anything, this class has forced me to pull my head out of the sand and think meaningfully about the ways I can use my license to fight for change where I believe it is needed most. I am looking forward to using the next two years to try and do this.

If not, focus on clarifying what that arc is. There are other potential stories in here – you need to pick the one that is the real story, and move it to the forefront.

Paul,

Thank you for the specific comments/feedback. It seems as though the paper didn't achieve it's intended goal, so I'll start by stating it in a few sentences, then will work on figuring out the best way to get across what I need to.

Basically, I thought that this paper assignment was a good opportunity to reflect upon a few of the ways in which I've changed this year. Every year that I've been in school (since 10th grade), I have started the school year by writing down 3 goals which I want to achieve by the end of the school year. My goals for my senior year of college were to raise my GPA, get a full time job and to read four books purely for pleasure over the course of the year. These were pretty basic, unexciting goals and I achieved all three. I still have a copy of the goals (handwritten) in my desk with check marks next to each.

This year, my goals in September were to get a high-paying job for the summer, get good grades and to help my parents out more. Two of them are relatively similar to those from senior year of college (grades, job). By the end of the year, however, the first two were no longer my driving goals. I'd still like to do well in school and could use some money, but these aren't shaping my decisions in the way that past goals of mine did.

This has never happened to me before. I've never experienced such a significant shift in one year. My goal with this paper was to reflect a bit upon some of the factors that caused this shift (changing economy, people I've met, Eben's class) and the ways in which I'm coping with it. I've changed, and these are some of the steps I'm taking to deal with it. This is meant to be a reflective piece - my argument isn't that I've picked the perfect path (because I probably haven't), hence the somewhat non-linear structure. I'm not trying to prove a specific point (i.e. oranges are better than apples) but instead to look at myself and express my findings in written form.

I hope this clarifies things a bit and that the changes I've made to the paper get this across a bit better.

-David

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