How Fear Creates Law Firm Associates

-- By JohnsonD - 24 Apr 2016

A bad trade

As law students, we often hear stories from our classmates about how they plan on spending two or three years at a law firm and then moving on to what they really want to do. While for an exceedingly small number of young lawyers this plan might work out, for most, however, going to a big law firm is a bad tradeoff of precious time and life energy for money. Fear and anxiety of the legal industry and American economy in general impels young lawyers to make this trade. The fear of not being able to pay back debt and possible unemployment makes it easy to rationalize the choice.

Fear and anxiety in law school

This fear and anxiety is not imagined. Law students who came of age during the recession understand the tenuous position of the legal market and the US economy in general.

Do they? Let's check the factual groundwork of our understanding. Are lawyers' incomes falling as a fraction of GDP, let alone absolutely, or are lawyers doing relatively better than the society as a whole, as usual? Is there a sudden shortage of meaningful, valuable work for us to do? Have we overproduced justice around here, such that we're going to need to sell off our piled-up inventory before we need any new hands? By what measurement of the value of our activity, whether in doing well or in doing good, have we reached understanding that would render fear and anxiety about our tenuous position not imaginary? I believe it's the usual one around here: the decline of jobs in one sector of this broad and necessary human activity, a sector in which high wages for meaningless work have been available to some few people, many of whom went to this law school, in the past four decades. But the correct next question, against any realistic estimate of the larger background, is: So effing what?

The restructuring of many sectors of the economy makes it difficult for people without experience to get a start in any field. Rapid technological change portends a massive reorganization of human society on a large scale.

The two statements are in unreconciled tension. With respect to the first, the second is actually a banal but effective rejoinder. No, there is no difficulty "getting a start" in lawyering now, because if you have a license and an understanding of how to build both your license and your network in new social patterns made possible by the transformational technologies, you have an advantage.

Students choose to get on board the law firm train because it seems like the option with the best chance of ensuring what many in society see as success. Those who have taken a closer look at the long term prospects of law firms from a structural standpoint recognize the unworkability of the business model yet hope that the destruction comes after they have already extracted their share of the profits.

It’s all part of the plan

Top law schools perpetuate an unintuitive and unsustainable system by which students graduate law school without having learned much, if any, real lawyering skills, and are then lured into firms with the promise of learning the skills that should have been taught before they graduated. The system is highly efficient at turning idealistic students into corporate drones. Once at a firm, young lawyers are assigned work they find unfulfilling and antithetical to their beliefs. The law school gets to keep its employment numbers high, and the firms get a new batch of associates.

DO NOT TAKE THIS DEAL.

Remember why you’re here

The majority of law students came to law school because we saw an injustice in society that we wanted to correct. Once here, many of us lost sight of our initial reasons for attending and instead adopted a more practical posture. Before we give into our fear, we should at least make an attempt at doing the kind of work we initially set out to do, the kind of work that adds positive value to the world. There are still important battles that need to be fought and issues that need to be addressed. The social, economic, and political rights of people are being infringed upon in ways that lawyers are uniquely qualified to address. To use the profession solely to enrich oneself before addressing those issues is irresponsible.

Use your powers

I say this as someone who has been in the position where I had to do alienating, soul destroying work in order to survive. I still know many people whose life circumstances make it all but impossible for them to break away from the system. As students at Columbia Law School, we possess the privilege, ability, and opportunity to bypass this system and instead work directly on advancing the cause of justice in society. Before meekly acquiescing to the system as it is, we should at the very least make an attempt at doing the type of work that enriches ourselves and others. I believe that law school is a good place to learn how to do that, if we utilize our resources and skill sets correctly.

The draft wanders through an odd route to a conclusion it less supports than adopts apparently by accident. FDR said (or rather, Judge Sam Rosenman wrote for him) that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Which kind of fear? "Unreasoning." That was the point, and it is the point here too. The best route to improvement of the draft is to proceed in a factual direction that leave unreasoning fear behind.

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