Why Not Choosing Big Law Is a Hard Pill to Swallow for Minorities

My Introduction to Big Law

Ever since I was a child, I've wanted to be a lawyer. The idea was enchanting to me, as I wanted to help people. Unfortunately however, my idea of what that looked like changed once I realized that my law school education would not be paid for, as my undergraduate experience was. And so, the conversations about big law began. I became a member of the SEO Law program, where I experienced for myself what “Big Law” was and what it could mean for my future. In eight weeks, I made more money than ever before and I was not even making the full amount other Summer Associates were making.

You left this last sentence incomplete. One of the basic lawyers' rules for writing: Always proofread everything.

The Salary Game

Through SEO, I learned that making $205,000 out of law school was not only possible, but it was possible for me as a Black woman. As of this week, making $215,000 within my first year of law school is the new reality. Over the last month, these top firms have been playing the matching game as law students who are in debt like me watch from the sidelines, with their eyes peeled on the constantly increasing salary raises. Why am I constantly checking the raises? When I graduate from law school I will be in debt, as will be the case for most of my classmates. But the difference between me and some of my classmates is that some of their parents are partners at the very law firms I want to work at, and some of them even have trust funds. The difference between me and them is that they grew up with a path into this Big Law world, a world they may not have to enter as a result of their generational wealth. Now as for me and my Black classmates, we have to work harder from the beginning. We have to make these connections to even learn about these spaces, then we go through the application process with everyone else. Why? Because our lives quite literally depend on it .

That's actually an extraordinary conclusion, so it should be supported by sufficient evidence. Whatever kind of practice we have, it must meet our intellectual, material, moral, political and social needs. It's fine to put material needs first, too. But a claim that only one mode of practice can meet any of those needs, including material needs, should be verified before it is believed.

The Numbers

The National Center for Education Statistics states

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that African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates.Four years after graduation, 48% of Black students owe an average of 12.5% more than they borrowed and 29% face monthly student loan payments of $350 or more. The Brookings Institution further estimates that on average, Black college graduates owe $52,726 in student debt while white college grads owe closer to $28,006.]][] And what happens if these students, already crippled with thousands of dollars of debt, now want to go to law school or another profession school? They go, because it is their dream, and their parent's dream, and their grandparents’ dream. And while they are there, at these institutions that couldn’t care less about their dreams and only their money, they rack up even more debt.

These numbers are about debt, but those are not the only numbers to consider; income numbers might be more important, and not necessarily broad average numbers, but your numbers; that is, what different modes of employing your license might earn you. First however, given the prominence it has in your analysis, we might want to take another look at the significance of the debt. We are about to enter into years of high inflation: for the first time in more than a generation, the real interest rates on student loans will likely be negative. Inflation is about to do more to relieve student loan debt than Congress and the Biden Administration. While you are in school, not making interest payments, it is likely that inflation will pay back 10-20% of the principal, while—if we do have half a decade of significant inflation—the real interest rate on fixed-rate loans like these will remain negative, that is, the lender (most often federal government) will be paying you to keep the money. It would not be economically favorable to repay loans at negative rates, and not psychologically beneficial to take a job you didn't want in order to repay early those loans that are working in your favor. Like all other elements in the economic analysis of your practice, these assumptions need to be constantly reviewed in the economic context around you.

The Importance of "Prestige"

I have to acknowledge that I come from a place of privilege. I graduated debt free from my undergraduate institution, as a result of a full tuition merit scholarship. Had I not received that scholarship, I would not have attended Howard University. However, I did and now I am a 2021 graduate of the Mecca. When it was time to choose a law school, I used a different line of reasoning as I was told time and time again that the ranking of the school mattered in starting my legal career. I was constantly told that lower ranked schools would make it more difficult for me as a young attorney, especially because I am a Black woman. So I picked the higher ranked school, because I wanted to make sure I could have all the resources possible available to me.

What Those Numbers Mean for Me

Unfortunately choosing a higher ranked school places me in an interesting situation. Luckily, I am excited to be doing the work I will be doing this summer at a law firm. I will get the training needed to leave big law and go do what I really want to do. While I am unsure what that looks like as of right now, I am sure of the fact that the “average Black household has about 1/13th the wealth of the average white household. And if you view student loan debt as negative wealth, as money that could have been used to save for wealth or to purchase a home or to invest in the stock market to accumulate wealth, that potential wealth is now used to repay loans.” I will always be steps behind my white counterparts because of the way the system works, and to even try to get past them, I will have to take financial risks they may not need to.

Once again, this turns out to depend on the inflation rate. But that also suggests that the economic analysis of the practice (which is here made to depend entirely on the presence or absence of the student loan debt) is probably incomplete. "Prestige" is here being used not as a proxy for the value of the practice, but only as a measure of the ability to get a job. That's another place where analysis might be improved, both as to content and purpose. How should we value practices at graduation, economically? We know that large firms will pay $215k/year for licenses, so that is indeed one good measure. But firms are profit-making and they know what the hours they are buying are worth to sell, so we can be sure that the average value of your practice at graduation is more than they are paying for it. How much more? And if you, rather than they, were managing the practice, how much could you make?

You might begin by asking whether this money is really so much. It's not particularly high for skilled professionals. Both the conditions of labor and the contractual terms of employment preclude any other form of law practice or money-making: it's an exclusive deal. In which case, here's a good way to calculate. Do a little rough and ready income tax planning: what does a high-salary single person pay in federal, state and local income taxes if she works in, say, NYC? Subtract that from the $215k. Now divide the after-tax wage by the number of hours worked to get the after-tax hourly rate, which is a really good measure of the worth of the lawyer''s practice.

You will find at the end of that calculation, I suspect, that your after-tax hourly rate in the law firm job is not particularly impressive. So we can begin to ask whether there are other ways to use a Columbia degree that capture more of the worth of the practice for yourself, while controlling for yourself—as you never can as a salaried associate—what you work on and for whom. Conducting that analysis is part of what we're going to try to learn about in the second half of this course.

The Bottom Line

After four or five years at a firm, perhaps I will have paid my student loans off with the help of scholarships and strict budgeting. Unfortunately, I will have wasted time just so I can pay back the government for an education I am not even enjoying. Now, whether or not I believe I am getting a better education here at Columbia Law School for thousands of dollars than that of the education I would have gotten at Howard University School of Law for free, is a topic for another day. Furthermore, it does not matter what I think, only what those interviewing me think. As a result, I am afraid I have been convinced that if an applicant's name does not mention the "T14", the application may not get a second glance. That is why for minorities, not choosing a Big Law firm may not be as easy of an option to make, as life changing money to offset debt for the prestige of an institution is more than appealing.

I think this is very good at the primary task of a first draft: it gets the issues out clearly so you can think further about them.

It seems to me there are two different routes that would each lead to a better essay. First, you could make the economic considerations clearer and more relevant to the current circumstances in which you are evaluating your future practice. I've tried to suggest in the comments above how that might be done, and we'll be talking more about these precise questions after the break.

The second road seems to me by way of more values analysis. You indicate that there is work you want to do, "after the loans are paid off," let us say. But you don't go further to talk about what that work would be, and what values it would embody; nor do you talk about what work you expect to do in the firm practice, and what values that will further for you.

Down either pathway of writing, you come to a spot, beyond where a 1,000-word essay can take either you or the reader, where the two roads converge again. That's what often happens with law school's tendency to create false dichotomies. It turns out that when you forego the dichotomy, and find more complexity, lines of thinking and doing come back together.

Law school, and this one no less than any other, falsely dichotomizes practices into those doing well and those doing good: "private practice" and "public interest," where—around here—private practice is aspirationally equivalent to "Big Law." This dichotomy makes it appear that Big Law is where you make money, and "public interest" is where you go if you don't have to make money, which implies clearly enough—but never states—that if one didn't have to make money one wouldn't be in Big Law.

Being a salaried lawyer in someone else's practice is one way to practice law. Whether one practices that way or in a job in a hierarchical organization public or private, or as a small businessperson in a solo practice or a partnership, is a choice. It isn't a choice forever; lawyers' careers turn out to be more various than they can possibly know at the beginning. Each time the choice is made, including the first one, there should be careful weighing of the options within the context of one's personal practice plan. How to make those plans and inform the career choices that are the lifetime of your practice is a skill that should be taught in law school. That's why I made the course called "Planning Your Practice," because otherwise we don't teach it here and never will.

Every practice we plan has to meet our intellectual, material, moral, political and social needs. Otherwise our practice will not make us happy or fulfilled. That means it has to make enough money, but also that it must address itself to our values. No matter where we begin, in other words, we're going to take both our values and economic analyses of our possible practices into account. Doing that is a skill we can begin to learn in this course. Those who want to pursue it further can do so with me next time PYP is offered, in fall '23.

Because what we're going to do in the next couple weeks is directly relevant to what you've written, I think I would wait to start your revisions. Let's talk in early April to see where your thoughts are.

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