Palpatine makes some good points…

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.