-- By JessicaWirth - 16 Apr 2012

I've Seen the Other (White) Shoe Drop

In December, 2008, my brother, then in his 3L year at another New York law school, got a terse email from a partner for whom he had worked the previous summer. The email doesn’t require an “in a nutshell” summary because the email was itself a nutshell: the partners were defecting; the firm was dissolving; his offer of full-time employment had been revoked.

He was caught in the crosshairs of the disintegration of a system promulgated by law schools and the firms they fed into. The system promised with a wink and a nudge that if one played by the rules – took the loans to go to the top school, got the grades, summered in the rights places –one would be just fine at graduation. When the other (white) shoe dropped because the subprime mortgage bubble burst and the economy retracted, young lawyers like my brother found themselves adrift, struggling to define what their law licenses were for. They soon learned that the rules to which they had adhered faithfully were about prestige, not building the skills necessary to sustain a legal practice. Indeed, at the time the firm rescinded his job offer, my brother had only ever represented two clients and he had only done so to meet his pro bono graduation requirement. More troublingly, he had never questioned, and his law school had never asked him to question, whether “just fine” was worth aspiring to.

I saw from watching my brother twist in the wind what every person in this law school ought to know: the associate cogs in the big law machine are expendable. Especially as corporate clients become unwilling to pay billable hours (particularly for associates, who, it turns out, don’t know how to do much of value,) big firms are struggling to maintain profits per partner. They have proven all too willing to turn to cheaper workers, rather than assess the sustainability of their financial models. Those squeamish about India can easily hire contract attorneys in West Virginia for $12 an hour and no benefits. I lived through the ramifications of the changing legal sector with my brother, who is still angry about what happened. That I am considering pursing a position in a law firm for next summer and potentially for after I graduate, knowing what I know, is causing me significant psychological tension and pain.

No More Excuses

Previously, I was able to justify this choice with excuses that seemed viable. Generally, I would say that I need to earn a salary reflective of the effort and expense I’ve incurred attending law school; that I hope to do interesting, intellectual work; that a prestigious firm would provide a platform to do the work I ultimately seek to do. Upon closer examination of the functional significance of these rationales, however, I discovered their weaknesses. For example, that I will graduate with hundreds of thousands of student loan debt tells me only that I will need to pay this money back on some time table. Thus, one purpose to which I must put my license will be to generate revenue. It doesn’t tell me that mortgaging my license at a law firm is the preferable way to generate revenue, the faster way, or, as discussed above, the more certain way.

Without these rationales to rely on, I sought to understand why I was remaining on a path that I understood would be harmful. I posited that when “rational” people make irrational choices, such as the one I am on the verge of making, this internal inconsistency causes cognitive dissonance: the discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. Dissonance can be eliminated by changing one’s behavior, changing one’s moral judgments of one’s behavior, or, most importantly and most typically, by repressing the portion of the cognitive stream that causes dissonance and creating a psychic split. I concluded that if I were somehow stronger, I would eliminate dissonance by choosing to skip EIP. If I had more confidence, I would get off the prestige hamster wheel and instead spend the rest of my time here investing in learning skills I need to represent clients and grow a practice, to coordinate with other attorneys engaged in similar work, and to drive a career that I can be proud of.

Moving Beyond Self-Judgment

What I am starting to see is that this self- judgment assumes a degree of control over my subconscious motivations that it is difficult to admit I simply don’t have. I have been told my entire life that I have the final say in how my life goes, so I found it easier to excoriate myself for a choice I deemed irrational than to recognize that facets of my desires, dreams, and fears operate beyond my cognitive awareness. Admitting the latter was acutely stressful until I considered the proposition that control is something we sell as a society so that we are justified in failing to help the poor. After all, the corollary to the American Dream is that it’s your fault if you’re not rich; if anyone can make it and you didn’t, then you must have made bad choices. Another example is the centuries in which homosexuals were openly ostracized, which was ostensibly justified on the grounds that sexuality is a choice and people should be shamed for failing to suppress any non-mainstream sexual desires.

Admitting that there is much beyond my power doesn’t remove my responsibility to go forward mindfully, but it does suggest that I must do so with compassion for myself. Recognizing the limits of my awareness, I can work “unsparingly but lovingly” to come into greater consciousness of the life, not just the career, that I want to lead. Then, the power is truly mine to make it happen.

(Words: 964)