The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L

7. Options for Young Lawyers

chapter seven: Options for Young Lawyers I n this book I have tried to account for a basic, incontrovertible fact: young lawyers are morosely unhappy. This is the verdict of countless surveys by bar associations and dozens of academic studies on young lawyers. Too many young lawyers find their lives alienating, their work demeaning, and their own behavior immoral. This is a terrible tragedy. The current system of legal education and practice is breeding a class of disaffected and cynical people who hate their profession. There is no inherent reason why the legal profession should be so devastating . Law is a profession that should offer tremendous rewards and intellectual excitement. Law is a necessary part of any society that values freedom, democracy, due process, and social order. And lawyers are vitally necessary in a modern society governed by complicated laws that regulate every aspect of our lives, from citizenship to marriage, work, property, crime, business, and politics. We need smart and dedicated lawyers who love their work, who are willing to serve their clients without subverting justice, and who can earn a comfortable living without sacrificing their personal life.There is room in the legal profession for a diversity of interests, for corporate lawyers as well as public-interest lawyers, for maverick litigators and big-firm types, for giant law firms and solo practitioners. But a pluralistic, happy profession is possible only when young lawyers are free to shape their future from a range of options, as opposed to being thrown into a competitive sink-or-swim market after being saddled with crippling debts. In order to discover what is wrong with the legal profession, I have painstakingly analyzed every step in the making of a young lawyer, in line with Ralph Nader’s suggestion that “[a]nyone who wishes to understand the legal crises that envelop the contemporary scene—in the cities, in the environment , in the courts, in the marketplace, in public services, in the corporategovernment arenas and in Washington—should come to grips with the flow chart that begins with the law schools and ends with the law firms, particularly the large corporate law firms of New York and Washington.”1 This is what I have tried to do in this book. I have traced the flow chart from law school to the big firms (as Nader suggests), and I have found a system that churns out amoral technocrats who are heavily in debt, desperate, easily manipulated , and dissociated from their own emotions and instincts. The legal profession now resembles a minefield stretching from law school to partnership , and even when a lawyer has made partner there is a constant specter of being “disequitized” (losing one’s status as equity partner) for not attracting enough clients. If one makes it to the other end of this killing field, one looks around and thinks, “Could I have worked so hard for this?” They say that the worst experience is to get what one wants and to find it hollow. When I speak to my friends who finally make partner at prestigious law firms, or finally become lead counsel at top corporations, I am always surprised at their tentative demeanor and their inability to celebrate. They tell me that they feel like a contestant in a pie-eating contest for which first prize is a pie. All young lawyers face a fundamental question of whether to stay in the profession or walk away. That is a question that you will have to answer for yourself, because I am not in the business of telling people how to live their lives. In my own case, I can only say that leaving the law was more difficult than I expected, in large part because my personal identity had become entwined with the profession. Although I felt that I was losing a piece of myself by staying in the profession, I also felt that an important part of myself was lost when I left the profession. In this chapter I would like to talk about the various factors that a young lawyer must weigh in deciding whether to stay in the profession or walk away, and I will suggest that for those of us who decide to stay, the best solution is to adopt a critical but hopeful posture toward the profession. Reforming the Profession or Walking Away A telling phenomenon occurs when a lawyer announces that she is leaving...