The Contrived Path to Lawyering

-- By EllisaKim - 23 Feb 2024

How can you commit before you know

The path to the legal profession appears contrived and inorganic when compared. Use the language of romance to describe how jaded 3Ls become first-year associates at law firms with their minted licenses, and the contrivance is thrown into sharp relief.

A vast majority of folks who once described themselves as aspiring lawyers in their law school personal statements, leave school with a big law job. I wager that the authors of these personal statements didn’t know what lawyering meant or felt like but for the fact that they were a paralegal, had a lawyer in the family, loved language (and lawyers fight with words apparently), or perceived some sort of injustice in the world and was purportedly inspired to singlehandedly fix it with a piece of paper that authorizes you to practice law in certain states. But the process from applying to law school to graduating and to entering the legal profession feels like a masquerade—an awkward social dance.

Imagine you had to know for certain that you wanted to marry someone before deciding to date them, that you had to know you wanted to date them seriously before asking for their number. You might’ve formed preconceived notions of what dating or marrying this person would look like based on anecdotes, but you haven’t yet talked to this person. This is practically a stranger. You muster up your courage and walk up to this person, in the hopes of initiating a conversation. They are surrounded by potential suitors and mostly ignore you, but when you finally grab their attention for a fleeting moment, they ask: Are you certain you want to marry me? Do you know what your life with me will look like? You have to know what you’re getting yourself into before asking me out.

This is what law school demands: that you know before taking out a six-figure loan to pay tuition. Are you certain you want to be a lawyer? Do you know what kind of lawyer you want to be? You have no idea how to answer these questions since you’ve never been a lawyer or gone to law school. Another catch is that law school may teach you what the law is but puts much less emphasis on how to lawyer, and the two are apparently very different.

The drama around a candidate’s commitment to law school and the legal profession is due to the inordinate amount of cost to pay upfront to even start on the path of becoming a lawyer. The horror story used to scare off rookies entering or attempting to enter the world of the legal profession is that you go to law school only to realize five years later glaring into the monitor that you never wanted to do this and that you still have student loans to pay off. Get your foot in the door; but if the cost of getting your foot in the door is three years of your life, hefty student loans, plus heightened insecurity from being a straight-B student, is it worth it? Law school admissions demands you know your answer to these questions before applying since the years to come after your foot is in the door are more grueling. But how can you commit to law school and lawyering if you’ve never done either and have to decide based on your far-fetched notions about what they are?

We are complicated animals

Another troubling assumption deeply ingrained in the law school application and hiring process is that most of us have a clear motive for starting on this path and that there was an identifiable moment that gave rise to the reason we applied. Law schools and employers alike ask students to convince them of how dedicated they are and for what reason as if there could ever be a coherent narrative about why people are drawn to things they are. Answers to the “why law” question are often deceptively simple, although applicants and interviewers alike find comfort in the sweet simplicity.

As complicated animals, we are pulled in many directions and drawn to things for reasons that are difficult to recognize, identify, or articulate. The supposed moment of clarity when the light bulb should’ve gone off in my head and when I should’ve realized I wanted to go to law school to become a lawyer never happened to me—the decision was rather a culmination of feelings and thoughts over a long time.

The bread-and-butter argument

For the most part, I don’t have a lofty reason for coming to law school—there wasn’t a great cause to fight for that led me down this path. Perhaps our culture takes the dreamy notion of ambition and career slightly too far. Not to dismiss the importance of enjoying what one does for a living and feeling the sense of contributing to the lives of others, for me, and for many others, the primary function of lawyering is a job that provides financial stability and, freedom (if you’re lucky). If I sound jaded, I am very excited about my internship this upcoming summer which will give me the opportunity to work in a Juvenile Right’s Practice trial office. But let’s be clear: although I screamed in excitement when I got the offer, thinking I would be able to gain litigation experience and work for a cause I deeply care about, protecting children’s rights in court was not the reason I decided to come to law school. The reason is too amorphous, broad, and centered around livelihood that it’s not captured by one exciting summer opportunity.

This does well what a first draft needs to do: it gets the topic defined and offers the material from which the essay can be shaped.

Extended metaphors are dangerous: they take valuable space, and they render the thinking indirect, as everything must bounce off the comparison, which tends to reveal its weaknesses, like bubble gum, as it is stretched. Vocation is like marriage, for maybe six or eight dozen words. Then it isn't.

People go to law school for many reasons, not all of which can be captured in the net you've woven here. I thought law school was an ancillary discipline: intending to write legal history, I saw it as the language of the sources. Had it taken me less than five years, I probably would not have been a lawyer at all. Most of my colleagues had, as you say, hazy ideas on the way in that did not reflect the extraordinary variety of practices and disciplines they acquired in later life. The same is true of most of the thousands of students I have taught over the intervening decades. But the presence of growth, magnificent and unpredictable as it is, doesn't seem to me in and of itself any criticism whatever of a system of education, which literally brings out of people (or cultivates, if we can switch roots) that which at the beginning they didn't know was there.

I grant you the importance of debt, but writing about money by writing about marriage is a fraught business. People as smart as those around here can earn what they need to repay their debts, or not repay them, in a variety of ways. Although fear of their debts has harmed many of my students over the decades, those for whom the actual gravity of the debt turned out to be life-limiting are a much smaller cohort. The debt, like law school itself, is an imagination test; those who have failed it have, as I have said in class, mostly did so by not showing up for the exam. Thoreau is right that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but law school (even when it does not take, when people wisely walk away) tends to administer antidotes to both the quiet and the despair.

Of course a first-summer job is not the reason we went to law school. It shouldn't be. Despite all the bullshit broadcast at you, you'd be as good a law student, as great a lawyer, as happy and fulfilled as a professional, had you not taken one at all. Because I had a skilled trade whose wages were what paid my tuition, I did not take lawyer jobs the first two years I was in school. Working at what I loved while also studying law and earning my way was better for me: by the time I did start taking lawyer jobs I had a better idea of what I wanted to do and why. The actions of others in my cohort—what they did and didn't do, how it did or didn't work for them, what they learned or forgot along the way—also helped me, while following my own road helped me to ignore the pressures of conformity that are tugging at you. In the end, the practices I built and the social changes that I sought through them owed at least as much to my life in software as to my life in law.

I think the best route to improvement here is to open the box, both around law school and around yourself. Rather than trying to build a critique of law school after a few weeks in it (which you do perceptively, but with an inevitable paucity of information gained through experience) you could ask instead how your learning—an ongoing process, not a completed one—is helping you change, and towards what still uncertain goals. Rereading that next draft, five or ten years hence, will be an invaluable inexperience for you, helping you to see how you became who you then are. I look forward to reading that draft very much.

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