Palpatine makes some good points…
November 30, 2007
This article about law students’ choice between public service and private practice made me feel very sad. It’s about a student at Georgetown Law, who had to decide between a high-paid job at a Chicago law firm and the pursuit of a job in the public interest sector.
(Spoiler alert!) Ultimately, the woman in the article chose private practice, and this is the cute way the article describes it:
In mid-November, over beer with friends at a bar near the law campus, just off Capitol Hill, Roose-Snyder announces she has been scanning the Internet for condominiums in Chicago. Nothing too fancy. She’s looking for a two-bedroom place, near public transportation—maybe something with exposed brick walls? Besides, she says, not all the firm’s clients are profit-pumping corporations.
“My firm represents tons and tons of hospitals,” she says, explaining her leaning. “I consider that helping the public good.”
Her friend Shai Kalansky, 26, also a third-year, explains why he took a job at the corporate law firm where he worked during the summer. “I think about the people I met. I reflect on the experience. It’s about the people,” says Kalansky, clad in a dark hooded sweat shirt that bore the firm’s name.
“I really like that hoodie,” Roose-Snyder says.
Is anyone else getting a hint of Anakin Skywalker in that passage?
Now here’s the thing. I and my classmates face the same choice this year, and for those who are interested in non-profit or government work it can be a pretty frustrating situation.
Many firms make offers in September, expecting an answer by November; meanwhile, the low-paying public service jobs don’t get meted out until the spring. So unless you’re a seriously awesome candidate, you can’t really afford to hope that firm job offer will still be on the table in March or April. And, of course, you can’t know for sure that you’ll get a public service job, either. Meanwhile, half of your classmates have already accepted their offers and are spending all of their time drinking, relaxing, playing World of Warcraft, or whatever they want to do. How do you turn down a huge salary and an easy academic year when the alternative is so nebulous, risky, and (let’s not forget) un-lucrative?
On paper, it looks like a tough choice, weighted heavily toward the firms. But in practice, from what I’ve seen, for most people it’s not a choice at all. And I don’t mean that in a cynical, “lawyers have no souls” kind of way.
I think the article (and many others like it) are a little bit too judgmental of law students. While I understand the temptation to portray law students as money-hungry mercenaries who don’t care about anything but themselves, it’s not really fair (or at least not universally fair). When you graduate with $100k or more of debt, salary is important. When 90% of the job opportunities you hear about are big firm jobs, and applying for them is as easy as checking a box on a website, and you’re so busy with classwork that you don’t have time to think about filling out a form listing everywhere you’ve lived and worked in the last ten years, you end up applying for a lot of firm jobs. When you’re dead broke, and you know that a firm will pay for your bar exam fees and your moving costs at the end of the year, it starts to look like a much better alternative to going even deeper into debt.
The Post’s Andrew Cohen, a columnist who writes about legal issues (and a BU alum!), put up a blog post about it as well, in which he makes the very welcome point that blaming law students for this is pretty myopic. As he notes, the circumstances that lead to this result are in the hands of law school administrators, law firms, big firm customers, and others. The whole damn system’s out of order! As a step toward ameliorating that, Cohen recommends that all law students be required to do 2 years of public interest work before being unleashed upon the big firm ecosystem. While I think that’s a bit unrealistic, I do think he’s on the right track.
It would be one thing if these low-paying government jobs were easy to get, but most of them are highly competitive—probably more competitive than the firm jobs are. When you’re trying to make the decision, everything is stacked against opting for a public interest job.
The entire system, from signing up for the LSAT on, is built to channel law students into the big firm world. When you’re deeply in debt, and every email you get from your career development office is about big firm jobs, and everyone you know is pushing themselves to get the best grades and the best summer jobs so they can get the best firm jobs, and accepting an offer means your last year of law school is a cakewalk, and you have to give up on a sure thing just to take the chance at getting a public interest job, and everything else… it’s not a choice at all. It’s an inevitability.
I’m not sure how to fix this—there’s so much money in the business of law that it seems inevitable. And despite Cohen’s assertion that law schools are graduating too many students, there don’t seem to be enough to go around: witness the ridiculous increase in starting salaries at firms, a response to a seller’s market. The biggest problem as I see it, though, is that the public interest job market is the opposite. There are too few jobs for too many interested candidates, so the employers offer less money and introduce additional hurdles (like the later decision time for offers) to weed out all but the most passionate applicants. So people like the subject of the article end up pushed toward a job they are, at best, ambivalent about.
That being said, it doesn’t make much sense to me that firms are so hard-up for good applicants, while public interest jobs seem so hard to get. Maybe it’s just a problem of perception—if a law student put the same amount of time and effort in pursuing a public interest job, it might be no more difficult to get. But the fact that my perception is otherwise suggests that, if nothing else, there’s a problem of communication somewhere in the pipeline.
Ultimately, I’m not even sure this is a problem. While a crapload of young lawyers start out taking firm jobs, many of them move on to something else fairly quickly (partly because law firms more or less kick them out after a few years). And although Cohen makes a lot of good points in his column, the fact remains that law firms need somebody to do the drudgery—document review, routine research, and other basic legal tasks—and that work would be a waste of an experienced associate’s time (not to mention the fact that it would be billed for more money if an experienced lawyer were doing it). It may well be that a few years’ “indentured servitude” to a big firm is a good thing for everyone involved.
In a perfect world, everyone would get paid big firm money to do public interest work. But, for many reasons, this isn’t a perfect world. If it were, we wouldn’t have lawyers at all.
Posted in Economics and Advertising, Politics/Law
Creative Commons
November 30th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I suspect my law school experience was pretty weird—I chose to attend a cheap, low-ranked law school that actually focused on getting people into public interest positions. I clerked after graduation and was the only one who went from there to public interest instead of a big firm. I didn’t even consider big firms because, well, ew.
I think it’s too bad that more people don’t realize that if you go to a cheap no-name school and get awesome grades, you’ll have almost as many options as someone who gets average grades at an expensive but awesome school, but much less debt and, as a result, more freedom to do what you want, such as leave the practice of law entirely and become an editor who writes run-on sentences about law school.
December 1st, 2007 at 1:14 am
You might as well have called this entry “So I Accepted A Position With Tobacco Lobbyists…”
December 1st, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I’m really interested by the idea that there could be a shortage of lawyers anywhere in the U.S. I’ve seen stats in a few places that the US has something insane like 70% of the world’s lawyers for 5% of the world’s population?
If it’s the case that there are too many lawyers applying for public interest positions then it seems to me to be utterly crazy to blame the kids for going into private practice. It’s not like they are making the choice of “private practice or public service”. It’s “private practice or not a lawyer”.
This is different from, say, teachers where there is generally thought to be a significant shortage of qualified teachers and wages are still tiny.
So I guess the real question of interest is: why can the private law industry sustain such enormous growth?
December 1st, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Tim: I think the issue is not necessarily that there aren’t enough lawyers, as there aren’t enough recent graduates from the schools that big firms recruit from. What they need is lawyers who will do the work at the bottom of the pyramid.
And, to a degree, I think the legal profession is perpetually entrenching itself deeper and deeper into the business world. Because it’s often an adversarial process, once one side hires another lawyer the other side may feel pressure to do so as well.
But I don’t know exactly why things are the way they are.
Ian: Everybody has the right to legal representation, even sinister corporations.
Tracy: That’s a good perspective to have. It is definitely nice to have the luxury of making job decisions without having to take money into account (at least as much).
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I think you are looking at this the wrong way. yes, by the time you are in between 2 and 3L, firm jobs are irresistable. but you knew this coming in. everyone knew it coming in.
it is like putting ham, beans, and a bay leaf into a pot and then being pissed at that moment that the contents of your pot can’t become a cake.
lawyering is, by and large, about a stable career that will always pay well. isn’t that the primary reason most people go into it?
I fear that I am just being a hater, and I don’t want to be that. I am sympathetic to the desires for stability and money to raise families. but as an outside observer to this process, I think these questions about whether it was really feasible to be a public interest lawyer should have been asked before applying to law school rather than between 2 and 3L.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Britt: I think you’re right about some of that—it would be best if students figure this stuff out before applying to law school—but it’s also a bit difficult to make happen. And even when it does happen, that doesn’t mean it works. I came to law school sure I wouldn’t work at a law firm. In my case, the decision didn’t end up coming down to money—it came down to a) the options that were made available to me, b) my realistic chances of getting a good public interest job, and c) being offered what turned out to be a great opportunity in private practice.
And I’m not saying the system’s awful, or that I wish I were working in public practice—as I said above, I’m not even convinced there’s a problem here. My main point in writing this is just that the dilemma described in the article I linked to is typically characterized as a choice between one’s ideals and one’s bank account. And I don’t think that characterization is 100% accurate.
My only other thought on what you said in your comment is that although it may be easy to see the conclusion coming (that by the time of graduating, a law student is almost compelled to go into private practice), there’s still no way to become a public interest lawyer but by going to law school. And because public interest is so competitive, you more or less have to go to a top school (or maybe not, but that is certainly how it seems from my perspective)—meaning you end up heavily in debt upon graduation.
So yeah, it may be foreseeable, but if you want to be a public interest lawyer and you’re not lucky enough to have the money for school, you’re probably going to have to spend a few years paying off debt before you can afford to save the world.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
good comments this time, for your little indie blog here.
December 14th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
Hiya Jake, between what you and Tracy are saying it sounds like maybe there is some kind of halfway-plan. Like starting out at a big firm, since you will land a job easier and sooner than at a public place, and putting in your few years of drudge work (if that is the time in your career that they really need lots of young whippersnappers anyway) to pay down your loans. Then when you start to tire of that you can be applying to public jobs at your leisure, knowing that it might take a while for one of them to actually come through but you are being paid in the meantime. You could sort of have the best of both worlds.
(Your post is making me think I should have gone to law school after all. If you get a big fancy job, will you hire me to draw some illustrations for you? Like, for your business cards or something? I am kidding. OR AM I?)
December 14th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Supine:
That is a good plan, one that many people follow. Or, rather, say they’ll follow. Because once you start at a firm, it can be pretty hard to leave. If you start living at your means while your means are high, you can find it difficult to move to a lower-paying gig.
It can be done, though, primarily by being good about saving money and not getting locked into expensive mortgages, car payments, etc.
And getting paid too much money to quit isn’t exactly the worst problem in the world, either.
Unfortunately, getting a job at a big firm isn’t as easy as it is always portrayed in these newspaper stories—I don’t know the exact numbers, but I’m sure that the majority of law school grads don’t get offers at the high-paying fancy law firms I’ve been talking about. But that’s definitely a topic for another day.