A Letter To My Fellow 1L's

Like it or not, the vast majority of us will end up working for a BIG LAW firm right out of school. As much as we have heard about the horrors of the firm, we are still inexorably drawn toward it like a mosquito to those purple zapper thingies. I am not advocating a massive boycott of EIP or anything of the sort. I just want to make sure that we all go in with our priorities properly aligned.

Internal Conflict

There are intrinsic tendencies within us that are constantly at odds with one another. To some extent we all have a fear of the unknown. Newton’s law of inertia is easily applied to human psychology as well. People long for security and therefore remain in jobs and other relationships which are unsatisfying, simply because they fear the uncertainty of change. Conversely, we all possess an inner drive to explore the unknown, and perhaps even take a risk here and there for the sake of adventure. Human progress through the ages stems from this drive – the urge to shake off the old and try something new.

Currently, our legal careers are in a stage of infancy. But what is an infant? An infant is simply an unlearned and uninhibited adult human being.

• This is provably false. The brain of an infant is still substantially undeveloped at birth, and is still growing rapidly and making an immense number of neural connections, in the eighth order of magnitude, during the first year. Brains continue to change all through childhood and then are profoundly altered in their operation by the immense flood of hormones that commences at puberty. The de-biologizing of human beings, as I have pointed out before, is a major source of error in social theory.

The infant reaches for anything on the floor, tirelessly examines its environment, and wails and complains when well-meaning adults thwart its attempts at discovery and change. Infancy is the unadulterated, natural state of human beings - inquisitive, adventurous, never at rest, always looking to tinker and improve. (Perhaps the etymology of ‘unadulterated’ has something to do with infants becoming adults? Hmmmm.)

• No doubt there is, as one recent book on infant behavior your rabbi hasn't read puts it, a scientist in the crib. But that doesn't mean an infant thinks like an adult, much less that an adult is an infant who has done more studying and acquired more inhibitions. That's an absurd view of human psychological development.

All I want Is Security

In our always uncertain world it is natural to crave security and stability. Financial planners, estate planners, insurance experts and Career Services will attempt to convince us that the way it is now is how it will be in the future as well. However, all of us know that the only thing certain about the future is that it will not be the same as the present. The once powerful Bear Stearns reduced to (almost) nothingness; the housing market is in shambles. There is no shortage of examples. We must be prepared for new circumstances in a constantly changing world. We are a gifted group. We long for greatness. That greatness is achieved by a willingness to change, improve and try something new.

• More bromides. Your reader is not a consumer of pabulum, but a realist living in a world that contains phenomena that cognitively appear as threats and opportunities. If this is the best that can be said in favor of the value of change, it's no wonder that the guys who pay the rabbi to ramble this way are sticking to the tax partnerships they got when they were young that enabled them to buy all those dishwashers.

Yeah, But I Wanna Hit it BIG!

How do we want to be remembered? If you’d like to be remembered as the thrice-divorced, chain-smoking, gray-haired PARTNER, then be my guest; go ahead and jump into the firm and don’t look back. The rest of us, though, should approach the firm with caution.

Obviously we will all have invested three years of our lives and a truckload of money to obtain our JD’s. We all want to wipe out the debt which we will have in 2010. We want some significant financial return on that investment. Is it unethical for us to search out the best paying job right out of school? I would argue that it is perfectly logical and ethical. However, what about the infant inside each of us? Will we let it die by becoming a glorified office boy? What about those of us who have, or will have, families? Are our children going to recognize us by the time they're out of diapers? If you see the firm as a ‘means’ and not as an ‘end’, then working at a firm doesn't necessarily have to be antithetical to anything we hold dear.

• Wonderful advice, if only you could control the "means," which you can't. The firm is not a means to your ends, it's a means to the ends of those who pay you a fixed sum for all your time, and then resell that time by the hour at a multiple. Because their incentives are directly opposed to yours, in order for this "means" to serve you, you must find a way to make it not serve the partners. And that's hard to do, because they have total power in a totalizing institution. So the advice, like most of the rest of the smoke your source was blowing out his tukhus, is fine in fairy tales, but has nothing to do with real life.

So What Do You Propose?

My take on the matter is as follows: Go get a firm job, but keep one foot out the door. See the firm simply as a stepping stone toward eventual greatness. Promise yourself that the slave labor imposed upon you will not be something you will eventually come to cherish. Always be on the lookout for new possibilities. Maybe you’ll stumble across something that genuinely interests you. Perhaps you’ll come across some uncharted territory where you feel that you’ll be able to exhibit some of your talents. Go in to the firm with the intention of making money so that you can pay back your debt and get your professional and financial legs under you. Then, move along, regardless of how sweet the deal is at that point. Go make a difference. It might be spending time with your family and opening a small private practice. Maybe it's helping the less fortunate. That's simply up to you. Difference can be defined however you'd like it to be defined. What I can say for certain, is that 'difference' is the result of subtraction. We can all be more effective using our creativity and tenacity independent of the firm. Tenacity of will is worth a battery of artillery, and thankfully, we are endowed with a great deal of it.

• Promises, promises. Why should people merely promise themselves that they will magically possess the ability to do that which most people never succeed in losing their fear enough to undertake? We should, surely, have counsel for people that doesn't ask them simply to ignore the odds, rather than change them.

Granted, there will probably be a significant pay cut at first, but the leap of faith you take when releasing the firm’s hand is the infant taking its first steps. Although wobbly at first, be persistent. Perhaps you’ll even fall once or twice. So what? It is this persistence in dealing with life’s problems, and a refusal to be a quitter which is the hallmark and harbinger of all human achievement and success.

• Here's the fulfillment of the inadequacy of the infant metaphor. It's just more mush, not an analysis that would give someone making complex life choices a way to think effectively about the real alternatives.

I Haven't Thought For Myself Since The 8th Grade!

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. An amateur built the Ark; professionals built the Titanic. We all know how that turned out.

• There was no Ark; that's a folktale from the prehistoric inundation of the Euxine. The Titanic was built by professionals, as were its sisters Olympic and Britannic, both of which were great successes. We now know that the Titanic suffered from inadequate iron rivets delivered to the builders, who used them in the knowledge that steel rivets would have been better, but there were not enough available to use over the entire hull. So what does the comparison between a boat that did not exist and one built by professionals making the best they could of available materials prove?

Don’t fear starting a ‘second’ career, even one that begins in midlife. Obviously, impetuous and ill thought out behavior can be disastrous. But in our ever changing society and economy it is becoming clear that many - if not most of us - will complete our working career doing something far different than what we were doing when we first entered the workplace.

Best of luck with interviews, and think long term.

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Adapted from a lecture heard from Berel Wein

-- DavidM - 03 Apr 2008

• This essay seems to me not to succeed either in the task of providing useful realistic advice about career, or in responding to the assignment, which was to write an essay on an idea of your own. You have reproduced some choice cliches from an inspirational homily offered by a seventy-four year old rabbi who is grossly ignorant of the world in which we live. What he doesn't know about the problems faced by your colleagues, and how one might go about using a contemporary mind to deal with them, would fill a book: the book of our readings, for example, or indeed any other attempt to demonstrate how to combine many forms of modern learning in the social and natural sciences to create a view of social action that lawyers can use on their own and the clients' behalf. The very idea of our undertaking is denied by the kind of "modernity" that is in his Modern Orthodoxy, let alone his not-so-modern facets. You can pass the Bar exam without knowing much about the world, as he did, and you can decide what constitutes a kosher hot dog without much understanding of chemistry, as he purported to do, but writing plywood-and-formica popular history with lavish illustrations for frummy coffee tables is enough to disqualify anyone from too great a reputation for wisdom. He's a historian pour rire.

• The solution is to leave Berel Wein to the kind consideration of the Litvak Hall of Fame Admissions Committee, and write about an idea of yours subjected to the most stringent self-criticism of which you are capable.