The Path Much Traveled

-- By JonathanBrice - 16 Feb 2012

Introduction

This paper is based on a recent conversation I had with Eben while walking to school last Tuesday night.

Why is that the introduction? It may be relevant context for you, but it doesn't help to communicate your idea to a reader who wants to know what you think, not who you were walking with when you thought it.

Problem: There’s no substitute for time

At some point in my conversation with Eben, we turned to the fact that I was perfectly content with working at a firm and “putting in my time”. I was (still am?) under the belief that in order to learn what I needed to learn, so I could do what I wanted to do, I needed to put in my time at a big firm. In the midst of hearing the many reasons why working at a firm was bad for me, Eben made one comment that stuck, “you can never get back time”. Right then, it struck me that THIS is the key problem with the law school to firm system, we never get back the time we put in doing things we don’t necessarily “want” to do; moreover, this time we put in doesn’t necessarily make us better lawyers, or even better prepare us for what we "want" to do. In the end of the day, we could end up spending our 20s and 30s working hundreds of hours a week, and learning very little beyond what the firm wants us to learn. Under the firm system, we merely learn how to be a lawyer at firm X doing specific thing Y.

Not merely. Mostly. As a consequence of the predictable incentives created by pawning your license to an organization in return for a fixed annuity.

Solution: Find your inner child

Eben’s solution to this problem was to start one’s own practice.

No. My "solution" (actually merely an observation) is that from the moment you get your license you have a practice, which you can decide to foster and encourage, or destroy. Deciding how to develop the value of your license involves choices. Choosing to eliminate your autonomy in the development of the practice in return for a fixed payment from someone else who will entirely control it raises questions about the compatibility of your incentives which, in the case of large-firm employment, will rarely stand scrutiny.

As far as I understood it, the positives of this course of action would be that we would be able to dictate the terms of our learning. By taking this path, we wouldn’t be firm X lawyers who know how to do thing Y, we would be “true” lawyers who could do whatever our clients needed us to do, or at least whatever we wanted to do.

That's hardly a full summary of the advantages. (Why call them "positives," which is an ugly back-formation, when good words already exist?) Surely you can see some other advantages in controlling your workflow, so that the proportion of your life taken up by your job is under your management, rather than that of someone who has an overriding incentive to use up as much of your energy and brain-power as possible, because he buys it all at a fixed price, prohibits you from using it professionally in any other context, and sells it retail, by the hour if possible? Surely there is an advantage in deciding how to balance current employment of past learning with investments in new learning? Surely there is an advantage in not being subject to instant firing?

Despite the many positives of this course of action, there are also several major negatives (at least for me). The key negative is the uncertainty that comes with getting off the path so "perfectly" laid out for us. While hearing stories of people who found success by making their own paths always fills us with a sense of pleasure and admiration, actually mustering up the strength and accepting the uncertainty and going against the grain is extremely difficult. At least for me, the key point of uncertainty is “success”--Will I succeed? But instead of attempting to answer that question, we should also recognize the fact that following the path doesn’t guarantee us success, it merely provides us a path.

And, depending on what constitutes "success," may lead towards or away from it, depending on circumstances not under your control? Hadn't you better consider what constitutes success for yourself? Deciding on paths without deciding on destinations means putting tactics before strategy, which is not a good idea in any social situation.

So in the end, how do we muster up the strength to go against the grain? Find your inner child. At some point (around 6 years old), we stopped thinking about “me” and we started "sharing" and thinking about others. This transition is what essentially makes us do thing like come to/stay in law school when we really don't want to, or follow a path that is clearly bad for us. If we can somehow rekindle our youthful selfishness, and just do what we feel/know is probably best for us, we would be able to easily disregard the path.

Do you really think that the way to make more adult choices is to regress to less adult thinking? Even supposing this particular version of "the inner child" story were correct, why would regressive development be the answer to the accumulation of adult experience in a more mature mind?

Conclusion: We don’t know what we don’t know

In the end, that fact that we truly don’t know what we don’t know will probably keep us at bay. If 80% of the students in this class dont end up working at a firm, I would be shocked. At least for me, if I knew the true ramifications of not following the path, I probably wouldn’t mind at least entertaining the thought.

But the thing about not following a path is that you never truly know. As it stands, while the path does seem likely to lead to disaster, we (I) at least know what that disaster is. As with stories, knowing the ending (or at least the possibility of endings) seems far better than not.

Why is this metaphor appropriate here? This should be the conclusion of an idea's explication, not the opportunity to quote a piece of back-of-the-book fluff from an obsolete weekly newsmagazine.

See JessicaWirthFirstPaper, and my comments thereon, which may be helpful in improving this draft.

Given your comments, and what you wrote on Jess' paper, it seems that the proper approach to this paper (and one that I'm willing to take) is to start from defining "success", and then working my way back to my current location. If the goal of this class is to help us be the type of lawyer we want to be, it makes sense that I first define what type of lawyer that is. Does that seem appropriate?